Write erase write revise

Cloudy Monday morning and I’m hard at work in front of the new shiny monitor, doing what I seem to be spending my life doing, trying to write and getting nowhere fast.

 

Woke early and finished the biography of Bruce Chatwin, his slide towards death amidst the mania and then dementia of AIDS, suffering from a white fungus in his mouth, bones aching, the equivalent of dysentery: the denial still maintained to the last. Began Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence while sitting next to open French windows in weak sun, at once enraptured with that knack she has of writing from the inside, completely convincing and absorbing, masterly. Watered plants, admiring the pink flower with its golden centre still blooming away on my new dwarf cistus. Then a breakfast of muesli and coffee — S tired and withdrawn from his mountain hike yesterday, 14 miles up very steep slopes in dank mist, hardest coming down through slippery shale, mud, boulders.

 

The effort of writing  and getting nowhere. Lay awake last night and thought about a satire on the last decade, that decor world insanity. But I can’t get the tone. Or the distance. The mad love of objets does fascinate and amuse me though and I wish I could write something on the obsessive frenzy of decorating, collecting, curating, gentrifying, beautifying, the tyranny of good taste, the excesses and extravagance, the despair — one day I will get there.

 

But for now it is a trawling through topics and plots just trying to find out what works. Write a paragraph, erase it, write another and revise — this back and forth all day. The house very quiet, not much energy around.

 

But looking forward to the meeting later, giving shape and purpose to the day. Sober living, whatever happens. And a meeting spells companionship, listening, sharing, laughter and ease. Then back for supper and an early night. Perhaps an hour or so of writing before I go off to bed. Followed by an hour of reading, the lamp tilted next to my side of the bed, glass of water and moleskine notebook at hand.

 

Dream last night of being amongst turbanned Indian businessmen in a foreign city, taking  lifts (elevators) carpeted and plushy with paisley red and green carpeting on the walls and ceilings. Squared-off wombs and coming out of the lifts into foyers with hothouse flowers, tinted mirrors and anxious men worrying about cabs and taxis and airport schedules, the street outside grey and noisy, sun shining  through layers of brown cloud, an orange and veiled grey light as if a fire was burning at the heart of the dream. There was somebody I had to meet and whom I could not find, I was lost in a strange city and surrounded by frantic but equally disoriented men.

 

The dream reflects something of the urgency and panic within me about finding my way in this society  — I think of being in the Indian restaurant the other evening and listening to others at the table, present but not belonging. An outsider. No foothold here, nobody who knows me from before.

 

My heart squeezes shut with fear at times. Nothing I can name, and nothing to do but endure this inner estrangement. I am in exile from my former self, in exile from the continent on which I grew up, in exile from all I thought I knew. There is sunlight and then the clouds blow over and I find myself in the dark. Unable to see my way forward.

 

I need time to adjust, time to ground myself. But there is not enough time and I am at sea in so many respects. So I keep writing and revising and starting over, alone here at a computer in a small study. Wrestling with demons that appear and vanish and come back again to torment me.

Blessed and ordinary

When I wake up these days I am awake almost immediately. I stretch, feeling a little achey because I am getting old and creaky with a sore back and middle-aged stiffness. But I look up at the summer light coming in through the curtains and I listen to the beloved sleeper snoring beside me and I say thank you. It’s a moot point Who I am saying thank you to, but that is a whole other journey of discovery. I have a life free of shame and misery and alcoholic menace, that terror of the life under threat, the missing gaps and elipses, the  memories of chaos and unintended outbursts, the emotional seesaw, the blinding headaches and nausea.

 

So I wake up and know I am not going to drink for 24 hours, not even if the world is about to end. Well, especially if the world is about to end because I would like to say good bye to a few people I love very much and spend time giving thanks for what has gone before. Conscious living is light years away from obliviousness. I don’t want to miss the party.

 

Then I get out of bed and go into the bathroom full of lavender-scented soaps and neatly hung towels and I wash my face, brush my teeth, look at myself in the mirror and there is always a small voice that keeps reminding me that I can look myself in the eyes again, can look at that recognisable me-ness, just an ordinary woman of a certain age, clear-eyed, fresh-faced, ageing with crowsfeet and a few more lines,  a few more grey hairs, but nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear.

 

Making coffee downstairs, waiting for the kettle to boil and looking out at blackbirds in the young trees in the backyard. There is a bottle of Scotch for visitors in the back of a cupboard and it will stay there untouched. There is a packet of analgesics in a drawer, not needed any more. A bowl of fruit, bread made with stoneground flour, a large bunch of fresh coriander in water standing on the windowsill above the sink, green and pungent. A kitchen flooded with dawn light and warmth, a safe place.

 

From my study upstairs I look out over the Cusop hill, green and lovely. Great expanse of cloudy sky, with treetops and birds flying back and forth. The beauty of the Welsh Border all here on my doorstep. Seated at my computer, I go into a cyber  site for recovering alcoholics and encourage others to hang in there until the dependence lessens, to trust in the possibility of life getting better. I read the blogs and online journals of those trudging the road of happy destiny along with me, the hamfisted cliches around AA that I have come to love because of the community I know so well.

 

Sleeping in the next room is a friend, a pugnacious man who sobered up in Glasgow more than 30 years ago when he was nearly dead and sleeping in a hostel for homeless men and chronic alcoholics, down and out,  filthy and broken, dying at the age of 23 and all alone in the world. Now he has grandchildren, a loving and fierce-spirited wife, a garden crammed with his broad beans and cherry tomatoes and herbs. He himself likes greasy fish and chips and won’t touch salad. He is still as outspoken and unsociable as ever, a raw Scot with a temper. He has no time for the respectability of 21st-century AA, no time for godtalk about abstract spirituality, no time for therapizing sponsors or moneymaking rehab centres. He goes to AA each week to stay sober and help others achieve sobriety, always looking out for the hopeless cases, the hardened and homeless drinkers. The one person in a meeting whom only he can help. The person with the most to lose and nowhere else to go. He know what it is like to stand on death’s doorstep and hear the voice of someone with no bullshit in him talking about making the long journey back to life.

 

Alcoholism is a killer. We need more AA battlers without airs and graces, those who will fight for sobriety right to the last day alive without a drink, the courageous and uncompromising alcoholics who have seen and recognised the Enemy and know how bloody the battle can be. And how sweet the reprieve, to wake sober and know life is good.

Not the person I used to be

Not an easy day, the writing tough and getting nowhere fast.

 

Sometimes I think a new realtionship is beyond me. I stumble so and can’t work out what to do when. I feel ridiculously hurt and ridiculously vulnerable for no reason at all. Although I don’t react very much and manage to move on, there is a constant edginess in me, as if I was waiting for the axe to fall.

 

But I’m so much better than I was a year and a half ago. In fact I’m another person altogether. Listening, caring, trusting, hoping. Full of faults and unsure about everything but hanging in there.

 

Listening to Bonnie Tyler sing Holding Out for  Hero and even able to ad mire myself. I took the greatest risk of my life and whatever happens I followed my heart all the way home.

 

So I keep changing and growing in between the stuck places. Alcohol seems less and less of a solution for anything. Anaesthetising myself is not what I want to do — even when the feelings are rough, I’d rather be around to feel the rough stuff.

 

Listening to other members this evening, sitting in a restaurant eating vindaloo curry, thinking that I hope I never feel smart enough to give advice. God knows I don’t take it. But here I am grateful and sober and trudging.  with a different attitude and a whole new way of looking at life. As prince hal says to his old boozing friend Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part II: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was.’ That’s me too.

That God-shaped hole

Yesterday I went through to the old cathedral city of Hereford for a lunchtime meeting. Riding on the bus I noticed that I could glance right through the passing woodland up into a sunny meadow beyond. It looked as if there were deer moving across the meadow and brilliant blue flowers. A dream landscape, the dark woods of alder, rowan, ash and oak, the bracken and dark shadowy places — and then the glimpses of sunlight and a golden meadow beyond that.

 

I got to the meeting a few minutes late because I was browaing in an Oxfam bookshop and found a collection of Lorrie Moore’s stories as well as a travel book by Patrick Leigh Fermor for just a little more than a pound. Very pleased — dashed to the meeting and found we were talking about loneliness. One member recalled seeing a documentary on alcoholism that featured an elderly woman climbing a dim stairwell and saying aloud to herself: ‘Lonely, lonely, lonely’. Another man spoke about his dislike of being with younger people who made him feel a failure and reminded him of how he had wasted his life. Another person spoke about the false self, that pretence of being happy and respectable and socially adjusted, while inwardly dying of isolation. Then  an older woman spoke about the crucifying loneliness that comes from the ‘God-shaped hole’ in us. My heart squeezed like a bruised muscle as she spoke.  If I could have left that meeting, run down the road and flung myself into the Roman Catholic Church, I would have done it on the spot.

 

Such a powerful and irrational impulse, the quest for the divine in a faith community both ancient and new. Much of the time I don’t have much truck with Christianity, the cant and hypocrisies, the sexism and philistine approach to life. But the lure of the Catholic mysticism I fisrt discovered as a young woman has always held me fast, and I always return to the Catholic litrurgies and traditions as if starved away from the Church.

 

Right now I am living with an atheist whose early life was blighted with ignorant Irish Catholicism. He has a penetrating and forthright critique of the oppressive aspects of religion and it echoes many of my own reservations. He is someone whose beliefs demand respect, a man of great integrity who dislikes the piosity and wishful thinking of many Christians and deplores the power-to-suppress found in most religious institutions, the anti-sexiual, anti-body, anti-life tendencies of many puritantical religious.

 

And so I continue in ambivalence, restraining myself from hurtling off to Mass at the local Catholic church because there will be awkward questions about my living with a man in an unorthodox relationship, because I cannot face that misogyny again, because I dread the godlessness and joylessness of most parish churches. But I hunger for a transforming power experienced elsewhere in my life, in the beauty around me here in Wales, in new-found intimacy, in the thirst for justice, in the mystery of healing from addiction — and I want communal celebration, I want rituals of confession and forgiveness, shared grieving over loss and deprivation, a place to enter into the heart of worship. A place where it is possible to serve and give thanks. But where?

 

And the god-shaped hole in me gapes like the grave, like an abyss, like a void that encompasses my whole life. I need to encounter more of the transcendent in the here and now, in the body and the earth. 

Awake in the small hours

The pattern of my life now. All day  I am busy and in love, cooking, shopping, gardening, going for walks in the Welsh countryside, emailing off CVs and newsy letters. There are bright orange lilies in a glass vase in the living room. Pots of flowering pelargoniums and mauve-headed thyme outdoors. I read and watch news on television, listen to Brahms, chat to S and go to bed early.

 

Once the house is very still I wake and lie in the darkness filled with dread. Thinking of South Africa and the violence in Zimababwe, the future drifting and uncertain, waiting for the axe to drop. My father not living and not dying in a hospital on Maui. My youngest brother drinking like a maniac and losing himself on another island out in the Pacific. The horror stories of the South Sea islands that we read as children come back to me. Beautiful festering jungles. Life threatened by violence and always that danger in the beauty and bright sunshone, always death lurking too close.

 

The clockface shows the hours passing and the hook of a bedside lamp is like a noose. Light glitters faintly at the bathroom window, glimpsed through an open door. I replay echoes of John Ireland compositions over and over to myself. The intriguing details of Arthur Machen’s life come back to me. Born into an enchanted land, the poverty and the loveliness of Wales at the end of the 19th century. Carved stone faces and runes, the hillsides haunted with strains of sweet pipe music. The boy at Hereford cathedral school with no money for further study so that he could not join his father in the ministry. The white figures of children dancing on Sussex Downs nears a leper colony, laughing small children in white who vanish without warning. The meetings with Great God Pan in the woodlands, the Gentleman with his implacable Otherness. Strange fey women glimpsed beside springs and wells, the riverbanks. The shades of Bride. Machen’s fisrt wife, Amelia, deep-voiced and 18 years his senior. She dies in 1897 and London becomes a hellish inferno for him, a place of dark lamplit streets leading to pits, faces staring from windows above him in deserted houses, the supernatural become the demonic.

 

Then he goes onto the stage and joins a travelling company of players under FB Benson, meets the lively and gifted Purefoy Huddlestone and  befriends her relative Sylvia Townsend Warner. This last goes on to write the greatest story of modern witchcraft to dazzle and delight a sceptical but not-quite-disbelieving public. Her novel is all charm and sanity but there is the seed, the hidden life given over to the Gentleman.

 

Briefly famous as a man of letters and creator of the legend of the Angel of Mons in which heavenly visitors fill the skies above the battlefield, Machen falls back into poveryty and leaves London’s St John for the countryside. Genteel poverty and happiness, a visionary seeing beyond the occult to the abiding spirit of place, the loveliness deep down. With him there is a flowering of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn betrayed by Crowley and Mathers, the sleazy chasers after dark phenomena. Machen and Purefoy, who dies in 1947, survive the Second World War. Machen’s daughter Janet, so beloved by her aunt Sylvia Townsend Warner is still alive.

 

So I lie and the glimpsings and terrors come and go. The island in the lake with a doorway that is not always open and cannot be found easily. The dark birds flying around the gaping windows of the castle, the motte near the river, once palisaded and muddy, the river deeper then and men calling out from longboats. Horses in a field bright with wildflowers, the black line of treetops beyond. Rowan and ash trees bowed with glittering foliage. The hawthron in spring, that eerie white. Women in dark clothes coming in single file to the spring in the woodland, staring into the dark underground cavities, the shining cold water running free. All this combining with memories of the African mountains, the morning mist we called guti, the dogs barking on the lawn all silver with dew, the sweet smell of wattle in fuzzy yellow flower, hawks on telegraph poles, waterfalls seen briefly, just for an instant, against granite rock faces on Zimbabwean mountains. The clock frozen: the faces of my sisters when young, sisters I will not see again in this life, the abandoned friend left in South Africa, a betrayal for which I will suffer until the day I die, the phrases of recrimination and regret and bitterness running through my head, the village silent, clouds moving through the night skies, the Black Mountain somewhere to the west. Lying there and thinking of lamplit London so long ago, the pits and fields and canals, the stench and glowing fires lit in a wasteland. Eventually the blackbirds rouse and there is that wicked lively music and dawn grey at the window. Then I sleep and wake groggy and aching to have tea and read the newspaper. Dreamless but still haunted.

 

What cannot be changed must be endured. And there is always a price to pay for exploring the deeper places.

Mid-summer rain

Mid-summer’s night dream it wasn’t. Up beyond the village there was a celebration in a field with Scottish folk dancing and stalls selling delicacies, but the rain kept falling and we didn’t go anywhere except to huddle under the duvet. I was sleepy and reading a biography of Bruce Chatwin, there was football on the television, the night was very dark. A pity and I thought of Wild Huntsmen riding along the ridges of the Black Mountain and springs suddenly gushing in the moonlight, wells echoing in damp groves — but off I went to sleep and woke to more rain and wind.

These days I find that there are some things that I find easier to understand, including the Internet, global politics, paganism, recovery from alcoholism etc. But some things seem unnecessarily cloaked in obfuscation. Choices around purchasing a cell phone, for example. How much definition do I need for the camera accompanying my cellphone? Do I need Bluetooth?

And then there is the mystification and complexity surrounding food politics. The food here in the supermarkets looks gorgeous, plump and polished and colourful, fresh, immaculately packaged and cheap enough. It tastes of nothing. I dread shopping for food. Markets are expensive and the choice is limited but at least what I am eating is local and sometimes grown outside polytunnels. In South Africa, with our hot sunshine, meneral-rich soils and rampant insect life, vegetables can emerge scarred and misshapen but they taste delicious. At least cabbages and pumpkins taste like cabbages and pumpkins. The bread I buy in the Cape, no matter where I shop, is local bread and excellent. It doesn’t have to be enriched. Our poorer communities eat much tastier and more nutritional food than the Englsih middle class. That has shocked me. I come back from a supermarket with fruit from Broazil, Spain, Kenya, Holland or Asia and it tastes like aerated plastic. Real food costs a fortune. I don’t know why this is the case. Pale egg yolks, flabby lemons, watery tomatoes, cardboard apples. Great hygiene and packaging but no content.

Each article I read on food miles or rising prices or the meat industry tells me something different. It is as if the average Brit consumer is so used to thinking of herself/himself as having a privileged and luxurious lifestyle replete with choices that she or he can’t begin to realise they are badly off. Last week I had some Fairtrade coffee and it tasted like soap. The blurb on the packaging read like a copywriter’s dream. So noble, so altruistic, so well-intended. But the coffee was awful. Good intentions don’t make up for inedible produce.

This week less meat and more lentils, pulses and roughage. And more looking into the elusive economics of where my food is coming from, what Waitrose/Tesco, Sainsbury’s is doing wrong, along with the organic farmers’ markets. There has to be a solution buried in here somewhere.

London in June sunshine

It was overcast and dark driving up on the motorway towards London on Friday afternoon, dense traffic moving slowly but no accidents or hold-ups. The fisrt set of traffic lights we hit after Hay was at Hammersmith and then  we were into the stop/start traffic of a major city on the verge of weekending. By the time we left the garden flat to walk to Khan’s in Westbourne, the skies were clear and the evening cool but notdamp or windy.

 

Khan’s is an institution, a converted Lyons tearoom, airy and pillared with palm tree mouldings in dark green and murals of idealised Raj landscapes. Pale green and cream, a railway station atmosphere as Pakistani and Indian families come in together for meals, mustered and herded by efficient waitors. A plasma screen showing the football finals the only discordant note. We ordered pasandra, chicken with almonds and cream, a miscellany of sag, raita, bhjali brinjals and pilau rice accompaniments and a bottle of refreshing elderflower cordial. Excellent but I wished I had been bolder and tried hotter dishes. Spooned  up an ice cream flavoured  with pitachio and saffron — then we were out in the dark noisy streets, people relaxed and windowshopping, walking dogs, hanging out with friends.

 

And we woke to clear skies, brilliant sunshine. Sat and had cappucino and read the Guardian in Holland Park — I didn’t altogether admire the Dutch garden with its boxed borders of bedding red and blue salvias and centrepieces of cardoons. Rambled around the orangery and ice house — a friend of S from Earl’s Court talked to him about a campaign to get housing for single fathers.

 

And off we went again, past housing trsut and council housing streets, neglected or poshed-up, renovated and rose-bedecked terrace houses, on to a meeting in Pimlico, my first experience of AA in London. The familiar rhythm of the meetings, the semi-liturgies of readings and sharing, the opinons heard without comment, the crowded group in a small room right at the back of a Catholic church hall. Very happy to be there. Afterwards out for a Mexican cantina lunch with Jan, chatting like old friends, the pleasure of meeting another cyber friend in the flesh. Strolling  along the South Bank, a festival atmosphere, hazy golden light on the river.

 

Brief shower of warm spring rain in Portobello Road and the performativity and street theatre unhindered by a down pour. Looking at cheap crockery tagine in mustard-brown, passing Moroccan, Lebanese and Portuguese shops and delis, Somali stalls, hearing the shouts and joking, the snatch of revved up Porgy  & Bess from Gershwin, Nina Simone singing perhaps, Rap and global music pouring out over the rails of secondhand clothing, scraps of velvet and toile, trilby hats, oxhorn bracelets, enamelled turqouise and amber pendants. Transgendered and proud of it, the beauty and flaunting, the perfumed cleavages of West African women carrying baskets of mangos, talking on cell phones while fingering pashminas and copper/bronze bangles. Off to a long intimate and amusing supper at Galacia’s, served by old Spanish waiters with hauteur. A restaurant where Lucien Freud pops in from time to time, locals standing around the bar eating chunks of bread with serrano ham, or sitting down to tortillas and pork dishes with paprika and olives. Delicious food and an exceptional  starter of squid in ink, pungent and delectable.

 

Waking again to sunlight and empty streets around Notting Hill on Sunday morning — walked from Ladbroke Grove down to Portobello Road, across to Goldburne Road and Cafe Oporto, where there was strong European coffee and bread rolls, hot, with bacon. Caramelised custard tarts afterwards which Roger insisted we try. Talk about Frelimo and Mozambique, the drak days of Portuguese East Africa, the upcoming June 16 celebrations in South Africa, Franco’s fascism in Spain in the 1930s. Sunshine hot and the smell of espresso from tables of older Portuguese men sitting around with rolled-up shirtsleeves nearby.

 

Then the day flashed past — down to Spitalfields market and my admiration for a Hawksmoor church. a drive through busy Brick Lane, less trendy these days despite Monica Ali’s book. Out to pick up S’s son in a terraced house in Peckham, lunch at Lordship Lane in Dulwich, French restaurant in a butcher’s shop serving up duck, salmon, steaks with sauces and a wild rocket salad, dressing too sweet.

 

And finally we were driving home through teh gilded countryside around Oxford, dipping through the Cotswalds, thatch and warm pinky-brown stone, gentle rolling fields and copses. On past the Forest of Dean, down into the twisty lanes of Wales, sun setting and flaring over the hedges, arriving home tired and just about enough time for cheese and a pear before bed. Birds loud and the buzz of London still with me, the squares of deep green, the flowering old roses, musky and full-blown, the punnets of ripe strawberries on sale, the Georgian and Victorian facades of London city, the glittering sun on the lazy curling loops of the Thames. All night flying through the city, recalling the streets and shopfronts and pavement cafes and ancient churches, the cherry trees in Roger’s street, the children playing crocket in Holland Park –

 

And so the love afair continues, tha passion I have had for  that city over so many years — always an outsider, often wrong, gleaning scraps of information, never able to think of London as a home — but it contin ues  to enchant me.

Visiting London

Still weak as a kitten from fever and the purging, but woke up to a grey Welsh dawn and thought with excitement that we are going to London today.

Since I first saw London, the looping Thames from an aircraft window and walked along the Embankment imagining Oscar Wilde standing near Westminster Bridge in a velvet-trimmed overcoat holding a posy of cold sweet-smelling violets, it has been the one city in the world that excites my imagination to constant wonder and amazement. It is in many ways the most opaque city I know, I cannot guess at the thoughts of many who pass me in the streets, Iraqi women with veiled glances, Asian businessmen, refugees with time on their hands, Eastern European hotel staff, blunt-faced Yorkshire women with small children — but paradoxically I have always felt I belong in London. There are fleeting moments of deja vu, the sense of having walked past Brompton Oratory before as bombs were falling more than half-a century ago, Georgian townhouses that I recall visiting sometime somewhere, a walk by the Serpentine on which I always hear a snatch of lyric from JohnIreland playing as a memory in my head. Years of reading about London streets and seeing films set in London and dreaming about London.

When ever I have come over on business trips, working trips with little time to spare, I have bought books, novels and travelogues set in London. Sarah Waters’ Nightwatch, Iain Sinclair’s Ludheat & White Chapel, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens. To immerse myself in London is all I want to do, to sit at pavement cafes and watch Londoners pass by, to walk through the green and watery parks, to catch a cruiseboat down the Thames to Hampton Court, to ride doubledecker buses through Picadilly and past Lambeth palace. To walk down Kings Road in Chelsea, to explore the East End.

And this time I will be seeing London through my companion’s eyes, meeting his London, the city in which he lived for 40 years and raised his son in Earl’s Court, worked for the anti-apartheid movement and volunteered with refugee assistance. And this will be another London far removed from literary tourism.

We eneter places through other voices, echoes and experiences; so often my fisrt impressions have been wrong. But I have never minded London correcting me.

Illness and some metaphor

Went into a nearby cathedral town, attended a meeting and walked around pedestrian malls in suddenly hot sunshine, early summer in Herefordshire. Sat in an isolated chapel of the cathedral weeping for my father, dying so far away. Coming back on the bus I wondered if I might be having some kind of emotional breakdown, giddiness and a storm of feelings within. The hedgerows alive with blackbirds and finches, the fields shimmering with heat. Such a wicked and sensuous time of year in the border countryside, wild roses blowing down from the branches of the rowans and hawthron, clusters of white elder along every lane.

And then I was ill, a blinding headache and temperature, vomiting and suffering one bout of diarrhoea after another. Unable to keep fluids down, my body flushed with heat in the cold night air. Opened windows, had mouthfuls of water, lay waiting for the gastric virus to pass.

And when it did I was purged, becalmed with not a feeling detectable. A blank. Not unlike the way I used to feel after a bout of drinking. Is there some need for this kind of purgative way? As if living with intensity and crises is too much for the psyche, that some kind of bloodletting is needed?

Watching a woodpecker in the garden and listening to him tapping away at netted peanuts. Staying in the moment and letting the future resolve itself.

Blogging from elsewhere

No chance to update during the Hay festicval which was crowded, muddy and rained out. Jimmy Carter flying in to share on his experience of peacemaking, Gore Vidal sardonic and scathing about the Bush regime, George Monbiot shouting about war crimes, talks on failed states by Ashraf Ghani and Joe Steiglitz compelling  on the cost of the five-year war in Iraq, $3-trillion and rising. The greater cost of course relates to the cost to Iraqi citizens with their horrific death count and displacement, devastation, trauma. The human cost that cannot ever be quantified.

 

Fresh strawberries and cherries on sale to munch in pouring rain. Poet and novelist Owen Sheers celebrating his love of lonely Welsh valleys. Listening to Dai Smith speak on the critic and thinker Raymond Williams, who came  from the Welsh borders, the son of a railway signalman at Pandy who never lost his passionate attachment to local community in the Black Mountain. Dai Smith, Williams’ biographer, was introduced by Eric Hobsbaum, 91 years old and with a mind as sharp as a blade, succinct and rapid. There was Diana Athill, also in her 90s and facing dying and death with equanimity. Not just eqaunimity but humour. Saying to an enthralled audience that it had been very difficult to stop leading an active sexual life in her 70s. The staid Brit audience agog.

 

The weather, an obsessive topic, clearing. I crave the sun and cannot get used to the grey skies and damp sweet air of the mountains, the chill and sudden downpours. Each week I travel through to Hereford in England by bus along twisty lanes past redstone cottages and ruined Norman castles to attend an AA meeting at lunchtime in the Quakers meeting house.  A crowd of regulars who bring along their sandwiches and angst. Cups of tea and shared experience, strength and hope. After the meeting I walk around magnificent Hereford cathedral with its restored chapel that now has stained glass windows dedicated to the Herefordshire poet Thomas Traherne. Near the Cloisters tearoom there is a walled garden bright with late irises, lupins, ageratum, acid-green euphorbias and snowy virburnums. Grey walls, flagstones cut to a hefty breadth, and pale marble tombstones.

 

 

 

And then there are drives through the countryside, the pasture meadows and hedged enclosures and copses of woodland dense on the green hillsides. It is a quiet beauty but not domesticated.

 

Near the churchyards, the tombstones with the same names seen so often, Gwynne, Davies, Hughes, Morgan, Thomas, Tryfford, Rhys, Jones — there are cursing wells, old sites of resisteance to the Christianising of Wales, the fierce and dour chapel culture. There are burial mounds and neolithic stone rings, Celtic lettering on slate and stone, the remnant of Offa’s Dyke, boundaries of an eigth-century Mercian kingdom. The gnarled hawthorn looking like an abandoned bride hear grey stone ruins. The ancient Chapel-y-Fynn, standing on an older pagan site, is circled by black yews, silent guardians of the Old Religion. Rooks cry from tall alders and beeches bear rectories, house martins flash from the eaves of tumbledown Jacobean homesteads. I saw a rare soaring raptor above Hay Bluff one evening, a red kite.

 

It is a time of transformation and new beginnings but I am mostly conscious of endings. My beloved ridgeback was put down by the vet last week and follows me about with devotion in dreams so that I wake sorrowing and unable to accept I will not see him again.

 

And my father suffered a massive strolke and is dying in Maui, far from the Scottish mountains of his youth and the granite mountains of Africa he loved so deeply. The distress around his dying compounded by family muddles, my sisters not speaking to one another. I heard for the first time that my younger brother was alcoholic, a bitter enraged man in his 40s, refusing help and blaming his wife and our father for everything that has gone wrong in his life. Grateful that I am sober and able to be of use to him should he decide to get sober.

 

Endings, the grief and loss associated with change and unfamiliarity. Uncertainty. But feeling the spaciousness and calm within, moving forward one day at a time. Welcoming strangeness and the beauty of new experience.