By a Whisker

I should have known it wasn’t going to be the best of journeys.  Even getting to the car was a struggle.  Our garage is on the other side of our street, and to cross the street required an ankle length raincoat tightly zipped and buckled and a hat rammed so tightly over my head that I swear brain matter was oozing out of my ears.  Of course, the full length gabardine acted like a sail and I fair floated across the road, which was probably just as well as the surface was more like a river than a road.  As if that wasn’t warning enough, once I was in the car and driving back down this river-like road I stopped at the pedestrian crossing to allow a diminutive old woman holding a blown-inside-out umbrella like a sword in front of her, to creak oh-so-slowly across the crossing and looking for all the world as if she had walked straight out of Pieter Breughel’s The Witch of Malleghem.  The warning signs continued as I got onto the inner circular road around the city and crossed the Arrábida Bridge, seventy metres above the river.  I do believe I was at seventy metres plus a centimetre or two because I’m not sure the car was actually touching the road surface at that point, and the steering wheel had become little more than an ornamental display.  In an extraordinarily reckless display of stupidity I carried on driving towards Coimbra, some 110 kilometres away, where I had promised to give a plenary talk followed by a workshop to a group of trainee teachers.

Normally the journey time is 75 minutes; it’s a journey I know well.  Because of the weather – the warning had been increased from Yellow Alert to Orange Alert overnight (number 3 in a scale of 4 levels of danger) – I was going to double the time needed, and I motored along at an uncharacteristically sedate pace along the inner lane of the motorway.  Of course, there were cars being driven as if it were a bright, dry, windless day, roaring at 150 kph on the outside lane in a fury of spray.  These vehicles are driven by those who sit behind the wheeel in the firm belief that injury and death are what happens to other people. I, meanwhile, wasn’t happy about sharing a lane with trucks, but there wasn’t really that much choice.  Except I could have gone by train, so why hadn’t I?  Earlier, the time I would save by driving had seemed well worth it.  Now I wasn’t so sure.

The rain reached that particular intensity when double speed wipers simply won’t handle the amount of water hitting the windscreen, which is usually the point when I consider pulling off the road to let the worst pass.  Just as I had that thought it was as if the car had read my mind and I found myself going sideways onto the hard-shoulder in a strange, crab-like movement.  I was vaguely aware of something not quite right behind me, such as headlights very close and at a curious angle and a distinct feeling that the back end of the car was going to reach the hard-shoulder before the front end.  Which it did just as the curious headlights behind spun away in a graceful dance and came to a sudden stop some ten or fifteen metres behind.  I stopped gingerly in the middle of a roadside lake just as a second car appeared in a splash in front of me, facing the wrong way, the white face and black, terrified eyes of the driver staring towards me unseeing flick flick flick through wipers as they tracked across the windscreen.  The noises then seemed to catch up with the visuals, as if the sound track wasn’t synchronised with the action, thumps and wet squeals apologetically arriving late.

I’ve been in accidents before and a familiar calmness, surrounding a slight detachment from reality, descended on me.  With a clarity of mind that I lost later I realised that the car behind and the car in front had collided and as they spun out of control had involved me, without so much as a by-your-leave, the cheek of it.  I had stalled my engine, and I simply turned off the ignition, turned off the headlights and put on the hazard lights and vaguely wondered if the reflective waistcoat that is obligatory wear at such ignoble functions was in the pocket behind the driver’s seat or in the boot.  That was the most important thing that I thought about for thirty seconds.  The subsequent thirty seconds were spent contemplating the fact that I was going to have to go wading through the temporary lake to get to the boot where other obligatory things like warning triangles would be found.  Leaving the warmth and comfort of the car didn’t seem like a good idea and it occurred to me, just for a fleeting moment, that I should simply drive away and pretend that it had never happened.  After all, the driver of the car in front was still staring his petrified look and surely wouldn’t notice if I quietly slipped away, but my reverie was broken by a thump on the window.  The driver of the car behind was somewhat hysterical.

It took a little while, and a lot of rain to run down my neck, before I was able to persuade the overwrought fellow road-user that I was an innocent pawn in this game of fate.  In his mind everyone on the road was to blame for his woe, except himself of course, and on hearing my thick, foreign accent he jumped to the usual conclusion that as it is always the foreigners fault, he was talking to the main culprit.  By this time the other driver had snapped out of his journey to Hades and was also standing forlornly in the rain, though seemingly oblivious to it.  We were joined by others who had either seen what had happened or were simply responding to the aftermath and seeing if help was needed. One by one they were all rounded on by our overexcited friend who accused them each of causing the accident.  Someone, it seemed, had already called the police.  No one was hurt so we didn’t need ambulances or fire engines or mountain rescue teams, but I thought that a life boat would have been useful at this stage.  It occurred to me only then to look around my car and survey the damage, but when I looked I could see nothing except the merest whisper of a scrape on the rear bumper where Mr Hysterical had gently steered me onto the hard shoulder.  Another millimetre or so and he would have missed me entirely and I would have probably motored on, oblivious to all that was happening.  Or else I would have driven straight into the car that was now facing the wrong way in front of  me.

There was nothing to do but wait for the police.  I sat in the car and tried to start the engine so I could put the demister on.  The motor turned but didn’t catch.  I put my head on the steering wheel – which suddenly had a use again – and rued my decision to delay having that sticky valve in the fuel injector seen to.

The rest rolled out over another hour or more.  Phone calls were made, plans were cancelled and the police came with their clipboards and breathalysers and I gave my version of events, such as it was, and they told me I could go.  If only.  The engine eventually cooled enough to start and get hot all over again, and I proceeded in the most cautious way possible to the next exit, where I looped the loop and headed back home where I poured the water out of my shoes, changed my clothes and had a very strong cup of tea.

The lesson is beware of old ladies crossing the street with inside-out umbrellas – they are a sign that one should go no further.

Autumn Flavours

Two ways to know it is autumn:  I’ve spent more time than I had anticipated making jam in the kitchen – that’s one sure sign; the other is that it is raining outside in a manner that Noah would have recognised.  Perhaps I should have been busy with hammer and nails and planks of wood instead of chopping up quinces with a large, heavy Sabatier knife.  Perhaps.

I’ve commented recently in a Stateside magazine about the word ‘quince’ and how it seems to grab the attention of a lot of people.  Some, like Stephen Fry, like it for the sound, and Mr Fry puts it amongst his favourite English words.  Others, like Melvin Burgess, obviously find there is an essential social-fabric requirement to have quinces around (in the garden, hanging from trees, for example) and to talk about them rather more than is common.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Burgess has a quince app on his phone.  Perhaps he’ll tell us.  A brief survey of students at the British Council recently brought the word ‘marmelo’ – the Portuguese for quince – quite high on the list of their favourite words.  Obviously this curious fruit is more important to us than some have given it credit for.

Brother-in-law brought us kilos of quince from his in-law’s farm and, as usual when you get over 20 kilos of any fruit, you start to look at ways of turning it into jam.  The standard Portuguese way to use quince is by making marmelada (which is where the English word marmalade comes from, by the way, but has nothing to do with oranges) and which means that there is a surfeit of the stuff around at the moment, so I wanted to do something different.  By happenchance the box of quinces got put down next to a pile of vegetable marrows – our kitchen looks a little like Harvest Festival at an Anglican village church at the moment – and so it seemed obvious to try and match the two.  The marrows were an accident in as much as we threw down some seeds from last year’s bumper crop, expecting little as we didn’t plant them, rather than cast them in an old fashioned sort of way.  Up they sprung. We never quite make the courgette stage – one week they are too small to pick and then the following Saturday when we return to the farm they have taken over the field and have to be manhandled by six burly men and an ox to get them out of the ground.  My mum reckons we should plant the seeds on a Wednesday so we could catch them midway.

So quince and marrow jam it was to be.  Happenchance of food stuff has become a way with me, ever since the chickens got out and laid eggs under the lemon tree and I suddenly remembered lemon curd.  I have a wonderful, long-out-of-print book by Beryl Wood called ‘Let’s Preserve It’ and it contains a most eclectic collection of weird and wonderful recipes for bottling fruit and vegetables which go beyond the normal imagination. Beetroot and ginger jelly, anyone?  The page with the quince and marrow jam recipe fell open when I took the book from the shelf, and since then a pan large enough to make soup for every hungry person in the city of hungry people has been filled with fruit and vegetable and sugar and now, following  a higher than expected use of calorific energy, is two thirds full and the colour changed from pale white and uncertain green to rich yellow and finally to a warm, sumptuous orangey-red.

Proper autumn colours.  Pity about the rain.

Patience is not a virtue, more a way of life

I’m not getting my hopes up too much, but the builders say they’ll start on the renovation of our house in the country on Wednesday.  Normally, you might think, that would be a fairly positive piece of news, but the problem we have with this information is that it has been six years since we started this project and we aren’t any further forward with it than we were then.  First it was the architects, who listened carefully to everything we wanted done, and everything we didn’t want done.  Then they went and produced a beautifully made model of precisely the opposite of what we wanted done, and consequently had designed exactly the kind of house that we would never dream of living in.  Of course, like all architects here, the design of a house is based entirely on what would look good as photos in the trade magazine, regardless of what it would be like to live in.  Some friends of ours have a house that ought to have great views of the ocean but doesn’t because the architect eschewed traditional windows for narrow slits – like on a castle battlements – claiming this would give tantalising cinema-like glimpses of the ocean rather than boring views of dull old Atlantic sunsets.  Naturally it got a good spread in the trade magazine.  Our architect was therefore most disappointed when I offered to crush the cardboard and balsa wood model under my heel.  So literally back to the drawing board, and eventually – three attempts later – we got something approaching what we wanted.  Eighteen months had now passed.

Time to get permission from the council to do the work.  One of the treasures of the relatively remote town of Celorico de Basto, where the council offices are located, is their ability to hang onto every last scrap of red tape left over from the old days, when Salazar ruled with an iron fist and rubber stamps, and incorporate it seamlessly into the modern state’s byzantine system.  It was a matter of who you know rather than what, and we knew no one, so we had to rely on Tricky Trickster, the architect, to help us.  Another year slips by.

Getting builders quotes ought to be a fairly simple job.  I’d have thought so, especially in the current economic climate.  The architect’s own pet builders had quoted us an extraordinary amount, so we sought some quotes from other builders.  This involved numerous on-site discussions, and visits to the various trade suppliers that would provide the kind of stone we wanted for the walls, the kind of iron we wanted for the railings, the kind of wood we wanted for the floors.  A full year after asking for a quotation we were still waiting to be sent one, from any of the three builders.  Another reminder.  ‘What was it you wanted us to do again?’  More on site meetings with (by now) seriously amended architects drawings because, in the interim, we’d refined our own ideas.  The plans submitted to the council and approved by them were beginning to look less and less like the plans we were discussing – again – with the builders.  Should we resubmit?  I still wake in terror in the night at the thought of doing that again.  We plodded on without the added weight of even more soul-sucking bureaucracy.

Eventually, six months after that, we got a quote we had asked for only eighteen months previously, and from only one of the three builders we had contacted.  It was half the price of the original quote from Slick Alec’s, the architect’s buddies.  Perhaps it had been worth the wait.

For the next couple of years we wait hopefully for the builders to turn up.  We wondered if we should abandon the whole project, but we’d already sunk a few thousand into it so we’d better hang on and make a bit of noise.  Though that won’t do.  These are local builders and known to all the community, including the family.  Can’t have them being upset by us making too much of a noise.  Besides once they’ve done that house over there down the hill, and the one further up the hill, see – the one with orange roof? – then they will come to us.  No panic.  I was telling all this to an acquaintance, also an ex-patriot Brit, and he nodded his head.  He’d ordered a new immersion heater to be put into the farmhouse he owned, and had been surprised when the item had been delivered in its box within a week.  Six months later he was still waiting for the plumber to plumb it in.  He complained about the amount of time he had been waiting.  The plumber, it seems, had looked at him with baleful eyes and said ‘You city folk.  Always in a hurry.’ and shambled off for another two months before connecting it, a  job that took less than a morning.

Of course, other jobs have come in since, between the houses up and down the hill, and they seem to get these jobs done reasonably quickly.  An emergency arises, as they do, and ‘We’ll do that first’ is heard against our protestations.  ‘It’ll only take three days’ and a month later they finish the three day job.  This caused us to ask a few questions.  It seemed that most people were paying by the day for the work to be done: no one else had asked for quotes for the whole job.  We, it seemed, were the exception.  The people who had the three day job had paid for a month’s work.  Clearly we were at the bottom of the pile and would have to wait for more lucrative jobs to be cleared first.  Meanwhile we suspect that the good weather is running out.  The first job is the roof.  No doubt they will use the turning of the weather as an excuse not to do the work until the weather clears.  Perhaps next year or, with global warming being what it is, possibly the year after?

Which is why I don’t actually believe the builders will arrive on Wednesday.  And even if they do, I don’t expect them to stay longer than it takes for a cigarette and a beer.

Odd numbers

There are some journeys which, in themselves, are pleasant and uneventful and yet memorable for curious reasons.  Last week I had to go to Segovia in Spain for a spot of literary hobnobbing, tied in with some work, and because I had to take quite a lot of gear (most of it ‘just in case’ stuff) I decided to drive.  The round trip is a little over a thousand kilometres – six hours in each direction – and the missus jumped at the chance of half a week in a mediaeval city on the sistema central rather than in the office.  She’s funny like that.  It also meant we could take turns with the driving, making the whole trip little more than a pleasant jaunt.

The outward journey was easy enough, crossing the eerily deserted border at Vilar Formoso/Fuentes de Oñoro and then via Cuidad Rodrigo onto the hot, dusty northern meseta under peerless blue skies.  I love this country, though I suspect I would hate to live there: empty, endless brown and yellow plains with excellent and empty roads connecting the sudden, gloriously amazing sight of Salamanca with the rugged walled city of Ávila.  We’d stopped off in some fly-blown village, Peñeranda de Bracamonte, for petrol and to be stared at by a population of aged beings who had clearly never seen a foreign plated car before – unabashed, hard staring.  In all, nothing to talk about at all, until we arrived, five hours and forty minutes after setting off, at the city limits of Segovia where we were greeted by a flash of lightening and a sudden roar of thunder and rain so heavy it rivalled a lake for density.  For those who don’t know Segovia then what you need to know is that it is built on a steep hill, of course, with a Disney-like castle at one end (Disney, in fact, modelled their trademark castle on Segovia’s El Alacazar), a wedding-cake of a cathedral in the middle and a magnificent Roman aqueduct at the other end.  The roads leading steeply up to this little marvel are all cobbled with granite setts which, when wet, become treacherously slippery, especially when wet after a long dry spell.  In other words in precisely the conditions we found ourselves in on arrival.  Now I wasn’t concerned about our car – it had four spankingly new tyres and had just been serviced and would have leapt up the greasy roads like an impala being chased by a lion.  What did concern us was the bus in front of us which was clearly not at all happy with the state of roads.  The back end of the bus, if you’ll pardon the expression, was sliding about sideways like a hippo in mud, clearing a swathe through the traffic.  I’ll give the driver his due: he wasn’t put off by the alarming antics of his bus and didn’t seem too concerned for the emotional well being of his few passengers either.  Up he went, slippedy-slidey all over the place, fighting for traction at every bend and occasionally sliding backwards.  And in case you haven’t got the picture quite clear in your mind, we were directly behind it.  Less and less directly so, I have to admit, as I allowed more and more slippage room between us and the beast, though ignoring the missus’s increasingly shrill calls to pull in and let it disappear out of sight.  All was well.  The bus made one final slide against the old city gate as it waddled through, the road flattened out, and off it sped.  The rain stopped and we found our hotel – actually a palace, but enough of that.  There was no more rain for the next five days.  It had simply been arranged for us to have this elaborate and faintly absurd entrance into town, I’m sure, and I spent the next few days looking forward to meeting the Mayor of Segovia so I could thank him.

The journey back was on even quieter, even hotter roads.  At 33C in the shade, it was considerably warmer on the burnt plains as we retraced our steps.  We had got back onto the autovia between Salamanca and Cuidad Rodrigo, where elaborately painted cows grace the side of the road, when we saw the first sign to Portugal. 111 kms to the border, it said, and we thought that a very neat number.  The next sign said 77 kms and the one after that 55 kms.  Interesting coincidence of numbers, we thought, and I mentioned that we ought to have one that said 11 kms and another that said 1 km, just for good measure.  And we did.  Was that deliberate? we mused.  As we crossed the border the overhead auto-estrada signs in Portugal said that the time was 13.31, another oddity, while the temperature was 31.  It was beginning to feel a bit creepy.  I then remembered that the only bit of toll road we’d used, a tiny stretch on the A6 before Ávila, had cost the weird sum of 1 euro and 11 cents: €1.11.  There’s more.  We arrived back home five hours and twenty seven minutes after starting the engine in Segovia – I know that because I looked at the clock on the dashboard precisely at the moments of departure and arrival.  That’s 333 minutes, in case you haven’t worked it out.  And the total distance travelled since we’d left home? 1, 111 kms.

Creepy, I tell you.  Damned creepy.

Elegy for a goldfish

Why is it that pets always seem to die on Sundays?  It’s been over ten years since the finest mutt in all the world, ever, died, and that was on a Sunday night.  The second best dog in the world died about fifteen years before that, also on a Sunday.  In between all that, two cats died on a Sunday, though another one – always a cantankerous old puss – chose a Wednesday at the vet’s to shuffle off the feline coil.  Even the Bassett Hound that belonged to friends of friends, a huge, sulky hound that I’d promised to look after while aforementioned friends of friends went on holiday, morosely made it until 15 minutes into Sunday before expiring in a series of tremors that must have registered on the Richter scale while in the back of my car while I was waiting at traffic lights in Fazakerley, Liverpool.  The police car drawn up beside me had in it two uniformed policemen who observed the midnight spasms of the giant pooch, but they wisely decided against intervening, and sped away before the lights had even changed.  Possibly they remembered they’d left the kettle on.

This Sunday it was the turn of the little goldfish.  I know it’s not usual to mourn the loss of individual fish (we usually wait until we’ve wiped out a whole species before we do that) and, let me be honest, I eat enough fish in a week to be considered a mass murderer, but let not the passing of this small creature go unrecorded.

Until two years ago I gave no more thought to goldfish than most other people.  Little orangey things they were, that swam around in circles in bowls and who were well known for their short memories and for being prizes at fairgrounds.  So what?  It’s not as if we can bond with fish like we do with other pets – it would be counterproductive, for example, to take the fish for a walk, or to sit in front of the winter fire and stroke it upon one’s lap.  No fishy purring to be gained that way.  No finny sprints after sticks in the wood.

The missus had been given a goldfish by some weird company she did business with who thought that giving people live fish for Christmas was an acceptable thing to do.  She hid the wee beastie at work for some weeks before bringing it home.  She knows I take animals seriously. My position on this is that if you are going to take care of animals – whatever they are – then you should either do it properly or not at all.  Predictably, then, I was outraged at the cartoon-like round bowl the poor thing was trapped in, did my research and bought a proper tank with pumps and filters and lights and things.  And a kit to test the pH of the water, and another to test the nitrates and another to test the ammonia levels.  Doesn’t come cheap.  The fish looked awfully lonely in this big tank, so we went and bought it a companion.  It was the companion fish who has just died.

The fish – which was only ever known as ‘little fish’ (you may now easily guess the name of the other fish) was, of course, the one that got bullied by the other but also the one which displayed innate cunning and a distinct sense of humour.  Oh yes, this was a fish who knew a good practical joke when it saw one lining up.  Like it’s bigger companion it quickly got to recognise our voices and developed a set of endearing party tricks when it thought that a feed might be on the way.  Being a goldfish it thought that a feed might be on its way in almost any daylight hour.  That’s how they are.

The pair made a fairly decent comedy routine, with the little fish playing the straight man, leaving the showing off and the antics to his bigger companion.  I could swear that, at times, the little fish would glance at me after his mate had done something foolish, like dislodge all the aquarium plants, with a look that clearly said ‘Tch!  You can’t take him anywhere.’  You might say he was the quiet thoughtful one.

A couple of days ago he got sick and started to ignore food and slouched near the bottom of the tank.  His bigger, flashy companion took to pushing it up to the surface to eat – or at least, that’s what it looked like.  He certainly carried his ailing companion on his back for a bit. Googling for all known complaints for stressed goldfish didn’t help.  It wasn’t Ick and it wasn’t ammonia, nitrite or nitrate poisoning (we checked). We discovered an extraordinary and almost surreal website called, I kid you not, Goldfish Emergency 911, and we asked the young man at the pet shop.

I rummaged around in the garage for the older, smaller aquarium to convert into an emergency hospital room.  Little Fish seemed to revive for a while in the special solution we had prepared and floated in the last rays of the sun as they shone through the window into his hospital tank.  Then, as the sun sank, so did he and then followed a rapid decline.

So, goodbye Little Fish, and thank you for your winning ways.

In or Out? Just where is the foot?

‘Ha,’ said the son recently, responding to something I had said, ‘there speaks someone with one foot out of the door.’  And dammit, he was right.  The son is pulling me up and re-orientating me more and more frequently these days.  Clearly the onset of my dementia is further advanced than I had thought.

He was, of course, referring to my almost imminent departure from the British Council, which will happen in ten weeks, three days and twenty hours at the time of writing (not that I am counting, of course).  It has made me think about other departures and other times, of course, because I’m of an age when there is a great deal more time behind me than in front of me and so, like everyone else, I tend to dwell on where time is more generous.  In my youth, time was what we all had in front of us and we looked to the future with a mixture of courage and fear (which are actually the same thing in different packages anyway) but mainly anticipation.  Now, though, I’m at that point when decrepitude starts to wave its gnarled stick and when the future has a shorter attraction (though attraction there is) and the past seems lovingly enticing, golden and warm.  Yes, I know it’s an illusion.  Don’t spoil the story with facts.

Being positive (for a change) it is possible to see each departure as an arrival.  When you leave something you obviously move onto something else, which ought to be an encouraging way of seeing how you’ve grown and developed and moved on from where you were to where you are, or where you’re going to be.  Here I’m thinking about moving on from one job to another – there are lots of other departures and arrivals that I shall leave for a grisly autobiography which will be written only when I’m terribly old, bitter and cynical (clearly a long way away yet).  Yet looking back on ‘jobs I have left’ the most fun ones were the temporary ones – as a student or filling-in time – but that is probably because I knew they were temporary at the time.  For example, being a bus conductor and then a bus driver with Eastern Counties in Cambridge was one great hoot, and I particularly like the Thursday afternoon run on the 102 from somewhere in Chesterton into town when a large gaggle of old ladies would get on the bus and I employed my professional role as a conductor to lead them in community singing.  This was not approved of by the Inspector who once got on the bus during one of these riotous occasions, but he was harangued off the bus – a mighty double-decker full of singing septaganians – by the old dears in sensible shoes and don’t -mess-with-me hats.  It didn’t do my job prospects much good, that incident, and that Inspector then took it upon himself to track me down in all my misdeeds from then on (though my last memory of him was him stepping backwards off the rear, open platform of the 1960′s bus – as we all did in shows of bravado and stupidity – while the bus was still moving, only to descend into a lake-like puddle that had formed in the road, just as the back wheels of the bus splooshed out a rather large quantity of muddy rain water, soaking him from head to foot.)

I’m not sure, but I think I have had something like twenty temporary jobs, or jobs without proper contracts, but the job on the buses was amongst the best, topping the list along with being temporary ASM with Ballet Rambert and working at in Abbey Road recording studios in a variety of guises, including adjusting the sliders on the mixer desk during some of the recording of the Beatles ‘White’ album.

But none of that was engaging in departures and arrival: it was all about building experience or filling in time.  The big changes were the things that appear on my CV, which makes a jumbled reading.  My CV has caused me problems.  Too many changes, too many jobs. Until more recently, that is.  It used to be the case that you were expected to be more or less faithful to a career, or even a company, for very long periods of time, and redefining your career in your own image was not an acceptable way to carry on. Not unless you were some kind of hippie or, even worse, artist.  Well, I aspired to being an artist: I had the training, I had some talent, I had some of the temperament: I didn’t spend three years at the Royal College of Music for nothing. To me, the course of my ‘career’ has been a very connected process; it’s just that it doesn’t fit into the career path view of most industry managers (as all bosses seem to be these days).  It’s all a matter of perspective.  From a narrow point of view I have jumped all over the place – a state school teacher, an FE Lecturer, a Special Education teacher, an education project manager, a peripatetic music teacher, a children’s play organiser (when Adventure Playgrounds were THE thing), a materials writer, a community education worker, a voluntary community services manager, an ELT teacher and the rest.  But from a broader point of view, of course, it all fits neatly into two categories that help each other to grow: education and the arts.

In this respect, though I have worked my way through many farewell dinners, or drinks down the local pub, almost everything I have done has led to the next learning stage so I am in the odd situation of finding myself with more arrivals than departures.  It seems I keep arriving somewhere new, but I don’t really seem to have left the somewhere old.  It would appear, then, that although the son might well be accurate about his old man having one foot out of the door, from my point of view I suspect that what I really have is one step inside the (next) door.  Time will tell, as always, but in this case that is only, oh, let me see, ten weeks, three days and nineteen hours now.  Not that I’m counting, of course.

All mimsy were the borogroves

It’s been one of those curious weeks when fact and fiction have been so closely interwoven that it has been hard to sort one out from t’other.  For me, this  woven tapestry has had as its background the newly liberated city of Porto: in the middle of August the place is half deserted and the roads blessedly free of traffic.  Those of the population who have remained at home have made their way to one of the city’s many beaches, where they are cooking themselves under the broiler of a sun.  There have been many warnings on various media on the hazards of treating one’s body as a rasher of bacon on a hot plate, but do they listen?  No.  Hatless and sunblocker-less they fry in the midday sun, with hardly an Englishman or mad dog to be seen.  They’ll worry about the skin lesions at some other date, no doubt.

But this is merely the backdrop, a sizzling scene which doesn’t require much focus. In the foreground are bizarre happenings and tales of dark humour.  Some of them have happened on a day by day basis, and some I’ve been reading in books and manuscripts, though I’m not too sure which are which at times.  I mean, the riots in London and elsewhere in England (not Britain, note) have had an unreal edge to them, even though they were so predictable.  It would have been more of a fantasy to suppose that they would not have happened.  Let’s face facts – we build a culture which is based on the cult of material possession – ‘you are what you own’ – and then expect the dispossessed to look on with calm indifference.  No, I don’t think so.  Even those who already ‘possess’ are required to possess more – it’s part of the religion – so no wonder the already comfortably off have joined in the looting too. If you worship material consumerism and know that how you look and how much you have are signs of your progress up the celestial ladder to heaven, then it is only right and proper that you will thieve your way to paradise.  Stands to reason.

But, lest we think that this is the fantasy I was talking about, even more fantastical have been the blinkered views that so many people seem to have adopted about the whole sad business, and the wholesale ditching of pluralism along the way…. it seems that you can’t express empathy without being accused of sympathy.  Understanding what might have made something happen is treated as the same as approving of what happened.  I don’t think so.  Punish the little blighters, of course, but unless you want it to happen again (do you?) then we need to do something about the societal structural deficit of the West’s addiction to materialism.  There’s a fat lot of chance of that happening when the people in charge of the whole show (bankers, businessmen, politicians and others with hands on the levers of power) are the cause of it in the first place, and the ones who have repeatedly shown by their actions that lying, cheating and stealing is a perfectly acceptable way to proceed.  See what I mean about fantasy?

But really, my week has been occupied not by distant rioters, who have also been part of the scenery, but by a laughable absurdity at work, and by mountains of words.  The former is not something worth elaborating on except to say that I thought I had already witnessed enough levels of incompetence in my lifetime to have drawn a line in the sand, beyond which rational life cannot extend.  I was wrong.  New depths of unbelievable stupidity have been plumbed recently, and I have been repeatedly gobsmacked by crass ineptitude.  Well, not actually gobsmacked, perhaps, for I have bent the ear of everyone I have come into contact with about it – which is probably why people have been avoiding me in the latter part of the week.  Had it been the plot of one of Tom Sharpe’s insane books then I would not have been surprised, but we would all have know it was fiction, right? The point is, it adds to the level of unbelievableness – which just has to be this week’s new noun.

In contrast, the books and texts I’ve been ploughing through have been havens of tranquillity, sanity and logic, even if this land of tranquillity, sanity and logic has included multiple deaths (by devious means), contorted webs of deceit and convoluted scenarios, mad relatives in the attic, a place where Coney Island meets Cold Comfort Farm, a capitalist totalitarian society where a demi-god(dess?) escapes from an ersatz Macdonald’s, and where a fourteen year old boy from ten thousand years ago grabs some pearl-like objects from the bottom of a river and becomes blind.  Not all the same book, you understand.  I’ve been engaged in top secret project – which would involve me killing you if I told you about it – but involves me reading at least 3 detective novels a week, which has coincided with a pile of books appearing on my desk, required reading for the swathe of Hay Festivals coming my way in the autumn.  I am up to reading between ten and fifteen thousand words an hour at the moment (depending on whether I need to make notes, correct or gloss the contents) which makes my head spin after a while.

All that I can cope with.  It all makes sense in its own way.  It certainly makes a lot more sense than a) the plans to refurbish our office at work and b) the way that the economic and social systems of this (apparent) reality are run. The thing I find hardest to digest is the way that we swallow the corrupt system and the deceit thrust upon us : the downright lies, the half truths and the double speak.  And, to bring the whole thing full circle, while those who prefer their skin over-cooked lie unprotected on scorching beaches as their livelihoods are frittered away by Milton Friedman’s acolytes, the media delights in showing us the burning buildings, the fractured lives and the desperate wailings of a broken society, but we are not shown the heroes who turned up to clean and clear their neighbourhoods and protect them from another onslaught and we are rarely shown the single acts of courage that give others hope.  In any good story there is tension followed by resolution within a well set context.  Looking over the top of the book, I can see tension followed by …. more tension; a failure to resolve, but a welter of moralising without morals.  What’s missing?  Simple common sense, probably.  Open any good book and you’ll find it no matter how fantastical the plot.  Close the book and look around and common sense seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.

OK, back to the books.  Tiffany Murray – sodding good read ……….