Party games

And last night was lovely despite a sudden chilly wind that came up as we sat out in the small garden festooned with Mexican blood trumpets and mounds of ribbon bush and crisp white agapanthus. A big bad syringa that throws down heady lilac each spring, a wavy green and black pittosporum with glossy leaves, pools  of shadow deep and soft. I sat in a deep old chair of ornate and singularly uncomfortable wrought iron with a bush of ripe blueberries next to me from which I nibbled throughout the evening. My artist friend Sheila has an old and cumbersome wheelchair whch hampers her getting around, but she loves her garden. There was a new metallic blue-grey crane sculpture perched on one leg alongside  the raphiolepsis, a graceful bird feathered in beaten bronze.

 

Sheila is losing her sight and has to paint with a magnifying glass, working on botanical art now rather than portraits. She looks up at everyone with a blue opaque glance that seems utterly trusting. No self-pity. She listens to Glenn Gould and Maria Callas ( hopefully not together!) instead of watching television. And her students still come along and listen to her teach while she peers at their artistic efforts through the magnifying glass. Her little Jack Russell, Pippa, helps her find the bathroom when there is no electricity in the evenings.

And as we ate salmon mousse and sipped elderflower cordial, we talked about her designs for a new pottery kiln and her exquisite lettered ‘calligraphy plates’, hand-drawn in black ink with a porcupine quill.

 

Sheila’s partner W, a gifted wood carver and carpenter, has been dead for more than a year now. He was alcoholic for many years, falling asleep or passing out on the floor and burning holes in drapes and pillows with his cigarettes. Then he got leukaemia and sobered up, was just beginning to enjoy life when he died. Sheila remains resolutely grateful that they had a belated four-month honeymoon period together after decades of heartache and conflict.

‘Some people never get that little breathing space together at all,’ she says.

 

And when we arrived home the puppies were wild with abandonment feelings and naughtiness, had torn up part of the skirting board in the kitchen with their sharp little teeth. We calmed them down and then I went off to bed after taking out chickens and the gammon to defrost.

Today there are carpets to beat and fresh flowers to be arranged and  jugs of homemade lemonade to be set out. The skies are clear and blue  right now but that may change, so the living room is full of borrowed armchairs. D is bringing along his Hogmanay music CDs for dancing and Jackie has arrive with towering trifles concocted of cherries, rich custard and blackcurrant jellies that fill most of my old fridge.

 

What is the difference between a gammon and a ham? I ask myself as I dust and polish and check on simmering sauces on the gas hob. Should I hint to the amorous lesbians that they can retire to my study for frolics? Will the retired Presbterian minister fight with the herb witch? Who is going to sit with Terry’s golfing friend, the 19th-hole bore? Will anyone tread on my small puppies or feed them brandy snaps and ruin their digestion?

 

What will the diabetics and lactovegetarians eat? Is there enough loo paper and how I can prevent the sulky reborn Christian plumber from locking himself in the bathroom with his cellphone? Does it matter if Una uses four-letter words in front of Marie’s small children?

 

 Will there be enough food for country appetites?

 

And it will be fine on the night, tonight at the witching hour. The local chef is coming to help me with the glaze of apricot jam for the gammon. Pyramids of cos lettuce, radishes, cherry tomatoes, ripe avocados and spring onions are pristine and ready for saladmaking.  Freinds come in laden with artisan cheeses and bottles of grape juice and fragrant Tarte tatin and almond biscotti.

 

The puppies are lying outside in a clump of erigeron and wild strawberries, eating the ripe red fruit. The kitchen floor is scrubbed and Una is pulverising pecan nuts with her father’s old brass nutcracker. The Christmas tree has fallen over again. My neighbour H has called to say that seven extra guests are arriving from Port Elizabeth, but bringing a goose with them. A large uncooked goose.

 

Life, friends! And not exactly on our terms, but irresistible and worth the plunge into uncharted waters.

 

I wish all of you a joyous and riotous, or peaceful and reflective sober New Year’s Eve and all the best for 2009. Take care, you are precious to me.

Calm bright morning

The preparations for tomorrow’s party are going well and the work is progressing slowly. My puppies are unlearning their house-training and the kitchen floor is awash with puddles.

 

Tonight I am cooking supper for a friend who is wheel-chair bound. She is a talented artist and runs courses teaching others calligraphy and how to do landscapes in oils and portraits, how to capture the shades of skin colour with an underlying green base. Her home is an art gallery, framed oils and sketches everywhere, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. There are soapstone carvings she brought down from Zimbabwe and small figurines in polished wood. In her patio garden, serpentine basalt sculptures gleam among the begonias and ferns.

 

I love being around artists and sculptors and writers, those who have taken the risk to commit their working lives to art. They are practical and resourceful as well as vulnerable. Commercial success is never the point because their real critics are their peers, their fellow-artists, and their challenges and demands are not defined by awards or financial remuneration. Many artists do not want to part with their work, would rather keep the sculpture in a studio or attic than have to see it disappear into the soulless environs of a private collecor’s home. For some each work is part of a greater whole, the interconnected and developing vision that shapes the artist’s life. They long to be understood but reconcile themselvs to being misunderstood for the most part.

 

It is a privilege to spend time with such friends and I like to sit looking at the paintings or sculptures and slowly come to understand them, be able to ‘place’ them alongside other contrasting works or in a genre or movement. From time to time I feel confident enough to write about the art itself. An artist I resisted for a long time because her images of children and girls disturbed me with its implicit sense of violation is now one of the top-selling artists in the United States: Marlene Dumas from the shabby little dorp of Kuils River. Her work is troubling and edgy but compelling. It took me eight or nine years to truly appreciate her artworks.

 

Creativity is mostly hard work and the odd stroke of luck. I am something of a plodder myself, especially now I am sober. I do the same things every day, with predictable results, but they are healthy sustaining habits that anchor me in a new way of being with myself and others.

 

Outside there is the fullness of summer, the garden bursting with colour and green after the rains. Next week I must cut back origanum and lavender and rosemary again, plant more coriander seeds, take cuttings for the shade areas. Although I am very fond of rue, that greeny-blue pungency, it makes my hands blister from even the most tangential contact so I shall not plant any more of it. And later today the lawn must be mowed in readiness for the party tomorrow.

 

Small practicalities that add up to the art of living well in togetherness with others. Time and attention. Once my life spilled away in wasted afternoons and forgotten evenings, great vacant and sterile blocks of time gone without trace. That was then. Now I want to make each moment count and watch everything becoming.

Strengthening resolve

On a happily ordinary Monday with laundry and housework and editing deadlines, I am thinking through my New Year’s resolutions in the light of the Steps.

 

‘A continuous look at our assets and liabilities, and a real desire to learn and grow by this means are necessities for us. We alcoholics have learned this the hard way. More experienced people, of course, in all times and places have practiced unsparing self-survey and criticism.’ [As Bill Sees It pg 151]

 

So this is more about reflecting than resolve, and more about trust than determination. Bringing the dusty old baggage of the attic or lumber room into the penetrating clear daylight and just getting up the courage to look at what is there.

 

The desire to change can itself move mountains, I have learned that in my short space of sobriety. Just wanting to stay sober more than I want to drink helps me each day. And staying receptive to the Power within AA and my fellow recovering alcoholics keeps me open and willing to grow.

 

It’s all about relationship. That is the crux of living sober for me right now – learning to relate more honestly to myself and others, learning to stay in relationship when my instinct is to run, learning through service the ethics and value of a more selfless relationship, learning to risk and play and trust others .

 

And I’ve accepted this changing  is an incremental and invisible growth. For all the willingness, I just go on being inept and impulsive and grasping at whims and passing desires, filled with fury and passion and good intentions. But little by little with each week and month of sobriety and service, change is taking place. Others see it long before I do. For me it feels like sitting it out sober, just keeping on keeping on, just not drinking day after day — and getting on with the daily demands and frustrations and setbacks without self-medicating or trying to shift that troubled consciousness.

 

Every now and again I realise things are getting easier and that I hardly ever think about alcohol except when I give myself a daily reminder each morning and express gratitude each evening. I don’t miss drinking most of the time and I don’t miss the years of dread and muddle.

 

Those lost years. Once in a while I look back and shudder at what my life was like then. A non-existence, a head stuffed with illusions and excuses and unacknowledged desperation.

 

My way of thinking and feeling has altered slowly and almost  imperceptibly.

 

There is a scene in Shakespeare’s King Henvy IV Part 11 that often comes back to me. Fat-bellied, ribald and drunken Falstaff is delighted to hear his old drinking buddy the prince is about to become king and rushes to greet him, only to be rebuffed. The prince looks at him coldly and spurns the outstretched hand.

 

‘Presume not that I am the thing I was,’ he says and turns away.

 

When I first read this for O-level English at school, I felt terribly sorry for Falstaff. The prince seemed to me like a prig and disloyal to his old friend.

 

 But if I was out walking down the village street one afternoon and my former self, tipsy and with eyes a little too bright and tone a little too effusive came rushing up to greet me, I would turn away. And I’m not even sure my former self would recognise the person I am now. She would be too preoccupied with people-pleasing or scoring points or assuring me she was doing well and within moments she would be hurt and brimming with over-sensitive reactions and tense with self-inflicted misery and that awful kind of drunken woundedness and special pleading and certinty of being misunderstood  –arrgh, no,  just the memory makes me claustrophobic.

 

The compassion I could not feel for myself then comes to me now and I would want to tell her it is going to be all right. That there is hope. But first there has to be the kind of change she doesn’t really want and doesn’t believe possible. She has to stop drinking. For good. And she cannot do it alone, so she will have to swallow all that pride and doubt and ask for help.

 

Just one phone call. Whatever took me so long? Once I began telling the truth and could listen to others sharing their truths, it all changed. And keeps changing, hopefully.

 

I still struggle to ask for help. And then I struggle to accept the help. But little by little, like invisible mending, it is getting better.

O bacchanalia!

We are having long and heated discussions about New Year’s Eve a nd New Year’s Day, the meals, the guests, the preparations — such fun. Our neighbours join in with wacky notions of soaking the gammon in cider and playing Scottish reels.

 

It is very very hot and we have icy watermelon slices for breakfast along with freshly squeezed naartjie (clementine)  juice.

 

We might do the gammon in filtered sweet mountain water with star anise and bay leaves and cloves. That is my option. But then there is the question of a honied glaze, the surface studded with cloves and sweetness, perhaps plum compote. And whether to eat the gammon cold or not.

 

And the right kind of potato salad with homemade mayonnnaise and dill. Baby beetroot roasted with balsmic vinegar and black pepper. Fanned out creamy green avocado slices and a salsa. A green salad with spring onions and cucumber. Jugs of lemonade and ginger beer and orange juice, icy and fresh.

 

Midnight supper al fresco under the wild stars. Guarded by tiny puppies doing battle with lizards and field mice. Iced tea and mint  juleps with lime frappes, with champagne for those who want it. Raspberries and meringue with whipped cream, creme brulees, chilled, pistachio ice creams.

It all sounds madly extravagant and hedonistic. Letting the old year slip away and greeting the new promises and schemes for 2009. We check weather reports ( there are thunderclouds looming and so we make kitchen table plans with lit candles and fans). How many trestle tables might be necessary? Who else should be invited?

 

We will all share the costs and everything will be home-cooked and not bought. Friends will arrive with armfuls of sunflowers and stargazer lilies, there will be bowls of ripe tomatoes and dripping fresh mozzarella, we will time the sharing of ovens for roast vegetables topped with olives and red peppers. There is much squabbling over party music, and the pups will be kept away from the dancing in case they get trampled underfoot. The lttle dogs are in a whirl of passionate sociability.

 

Living sober is like throwing yourself into a deep river full of under-currents and upheavals and glittering foam. Coming up for air and breasting the turbualence, diving for the fun of it, taking all those fabulous scary  risks with eyes wide open.

Coming through

Feeling slightly relieved that Christmas is over and that my second sober Christmas passed without any disasters or dramas. I spoke to an AA member and friend on the phone this morning and she said that she went off to a Cape Town meeting last night and had a terrible fright. One rather louche 13th-Stepper type who relapses and bounces back with monotonous regularity had just finished talking about his latest ’slip’ when he had a seizure and fell writhing to the floor. An ambulance was called and the dazed and confused man was helped onto a stretcher, his tongue bleeding profusely. Everyone in the room was very subdued after he had been taken off to hospital.

 

Yesterday was glorious weather out in the university town of Stellenbosch surrounded by vineyards and with streets lined with mature oaks. We drove out over the Franschhoek Pass, where elephants once crossed each winter,  and into Franschhoek, one of the wealthiest villages in South Africa with restaurants that are international foodie destinations. People eating brunch at Le Quartier Francais and Reuben’s, cafe tables set out amongst tubs of lavender and lollipop trees in planters. Tourists browsing  the art galleries and delis and French-style patisseries. All very provencal, and not entirely incongruous because Franschhoek in the Cape  is where the Huguenot escapees took refuge in the 18th century after the Edict of Nantes.

 

Tricia and her husband Andre live in a townhouse complex overlooking a dam with white ducks and a view of vineyards and mountains. I was shocked when I saw her, so bloated from cortisone and steroids with eyes blackish and swollen from kidney failure. She forgets everyday words ( our names!) and keeps stumbling and falling. The lupus has found a neurological pathway to the brain and is wreaking havoc. She has had seizures and bouts of psychosis, and unless the massive intake of steroids can rein in the lupus there will be worse to come.

 

She thinks she is dying and that may well be the case. But she is still recognisably the thorny witty friend I first met nearly 20 years ago and she wanted to chat to me even if she had to point and mimic whatever she could not name. And despite a severe hand tremor, she had made a dreadful gazpacho and soggy lasagna in my honour. I ate it all up with extravagant praise and we laughed and talked as if it was the old days back again.

 

When I got back home I ran a hot bath and sat and wept in steamy privacy. The capacity for deepened and genuine feeling that comes with sobriety opens us to deeper grief and compassion and heartbreak. Another understanding of powerlessness.

 

One of Tricia’s consolations, though, is that a sleek bachelor of a black and white cat has moved in to keep her company. Mr Waffles has temporarily deserted his socialite owner and decided to spend his day with Tricia, grooming himself at the end of her bed and accompanying her to the shower. Unobtrusive and soothing and aware of her moods and need of him, as only an intelligent cat can be. Grace comes in curious forms.

The thing known and unspoken

Woke up early and had a breakfast of grilled bacon and peaches (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) with a mug of strong coffee while reading through the tributes to English playwright Harold Pinter who died yesterday of cancer. When we did modern drama at university, acting out the scenes in a large lecture hall, we would stumble through his taciturn scripts full of pauses and inflected non-responses. Plays of menace and subverted power relations.

Although we studied The Homecoming and The Caretaker in detail, the play that stays with me in most detail was the heartbreaking Mountain Language about Turkish oppression of the Kurds.  Speakers robbed of language and the power to communicate.

It took  a while for the penny to drop whenever I began reading through a Pinter script, at first puzzling and inaccessible, but then suddenly I would glimpse what was secretly going on somewhere just out of sight of the uttered dialogue and then the pathos would break through: “below the word spoken is the thing known and unspoken.”

So often when I hear speakers in AA meetings telling their stories of what happened to them during the drinking years, the cataloguing of disasters and near-misses and black-outs, I get the same heartwrenching feel for what is not mentioned: the real life that went on elsewhere alongside the alcoholic. The friends who moved away and went on to lead lives apart, the success stories of siblings, the unremarked births of children, the ageing parents down the road, the lovers who got on with finding someone else, the work that stayed unwritten, the dreams that went unfulfilled. All that Rip van Winkle stuff happening in another room.

 

But here we are, bright-eyed and sober at last and perhaps that is what matters. The reason I had such a substantial breakfast is because we are going off to Stellenbosch today to have lunch with my friend Tricia who is seriously ill with lupus. Another baffling and malevolent disease that can only be controlled and not healed. She is on steroids at the moment as the lupus rages through her joints and soft tissues.

 

And in honour of my presence, she is about to make gazpacho, which she describes as ‘cold tomato soup’. My feeling is that gazpacho is not for novices and my adorable Tricia is a frighteningly bad cook. She likes to hide slices of kiwi fruit in chicken dishes and serve savoury tart fillings with sweet pastry bases.

 

But even if I have to spoon my way through cold dishwater flavoured with bits of tomato, it will be a pleasure to be with her again. And we are taking along cold roast chicken and ripe Camembert and Brie cheeses with crispbreads, so there will be something edible on that table.

Her husband is afraid she may be dying and that is the unspoken that will stay with us. She has spent the past 10 months in hospital after the lupus caused her brain to swell and there are other complications.  She is severely depressed and frightened, but hates to admit it. So we shall all laugh and sit at table talking about good memmories and the thing known and unspoken will be there between us, but out of sight.

Happy, happy!

Happy sober holidays and Christmas festivities to everyone in the recovery blogging community and beyond! Thank you all so much for all the inspiring posts and encouraging comments that have helped me to stay sober this past year.

 

My French classic of mussels, moules marinieres without the wine, was delicious and the group of friends lively and very good company.

 

I woke to birdsong and brilliant sunshine this morning, banished the shadows of other unhappier Christmasses and set out garden furniture under the trees. We shall eat luncheon in the garden, some grilled tiger prawns and a crab curry, with salads and perhaps a few cheeses to follow. Keeping it simple is how I get through the festive seasons these days!

 

And as I rinsed and patted dry the cos lettuce leaves and wild rocket, I thought about the vulnerability of a new-born child and his equally vulnerable mother, her homeless and in danger but trusting in the bigger picture. Trusting it would all make sense in the long run, half-suspecting her heart would be pieerced through one day in the future.

 

My housemate Una always scoffs at the sentiments implied in  the carol Silent Night, Holy Night.

 

‘It wouldn’t have been silent at all,’ she says with the hard-headed realism of a nursing sister.

 

‘That poor girl would have yelled her head off during labour and the baby would have come into the world bawling his precious lungs out, a good sign of healthy lungs.

‘And there must have been a mid-wife somewhere in amongst all those magis and shepherds and drummer boys. Men are useless at delivering babies. They have just forgotten to put the mid-wife in the story.’

 

The first time I saw a woman friend give birth, the pain and messiness and urgency and yes, noisiness of it all, I was horrified. But I also knew I was witnessing a miracle.

 

And that is how I feel about being here today with my blunted spiritual sensibilities and regrets and sadness, and the love of friends, and tiger prawns defrosting on the kitchen counter, and puppies playing with their Christmas gift of a rubber toy called Mr Blue, and the homeless out there on the hillsides needing  clean water and bread, and the sun shining in through the windows, and everything coming back to that tiny child gazing out on the strange new world all around him.

 

Gratitude. Sobriety and gratitude are my own personal miracles.

O clear-eyed serenity, you rare unicorn

Serenity comes when I least expect it and it goes away just as I get to like the feeling.

Right now in the midst of Christmas it is here and I have no idea why and it is probably to do with the Promises, very real but elusive. I have always preferred sensations and phenomena I can control ( well, I would, wouldn’t I?) and this white unicorn in a snowy forest clearing is hard to spot. I feel calm and filled with onder and as if I can handle everything that comes my way gracefully. Very unusual!

Thanks to all of you who posted yesterday and I hear you.

 

My first unexpected gift for this Christmas was opening my inbox and finding that my much loved friend and blogger Annie K was back on line on both her blogs! Thrilled to have you with us again!

And it is cold and rainy here in the mountains, wonderful for the garden and a rest from the fierce heat.

 

Yesterday I made 25 pizzas, bargain-basement mozzarella but homemade tomato sauce and fresh basil leaves from the garden and took them around to disabled children in a home here in the village. I also took along my excitable puppies who showed off like crazy and reduced the place to bedlam. More pizza topping on heads and laps and the walls than eaten. But the red and yellow and green colours made everyone happy.

 

A neighbour has just brought me a jade green bowl of dark sweet plums from his tree. I am so touched and happy. Tonight I shall be making a pot of moules marinieres ( sorry, can’t do accents) with fresh mussels and garlic and fish stock for supper, accompanied ( as they say in proper recipes) by crusty bread and a green salad. Perfect for this hemisphere. The house is filled with blue hydrangeas and white agapanthus which looks cool but festive. Handel’s Watermusic is playing.

 

I am not often filled with serenity, but I am sober. I once wrote in a journal about finding myself ’unpleasantly sober’ at a dinnerparty where there was no wine.  And it was an unpleasant feeling, as if I had had the limb for enjoyment amputated, limping through a meal drinkless and bored. Now sobriety is just a way of life and that other monotonous and dread-filled existence seems unreal and very far away.

 

Love to all and take care out there. Don’t be scared to ask for help if the unicorn is being stalked by a tiger.

Life on life’s terms

Last night’s supper turned out to be very difficult. I wasn’t expecting my old friend HF to be there and within a few minutes of our meeting, I knew there was something very wrong.

 

About seven years ago I entered into a complicated arrangement with him around co-ownership of the houe I live in. As a single woman I could not get a good enough bank loan and my job in media was insecure. As a ‘high-functioning’ alcoholic I was not good at taking care of my finances. I didn’t protect myself. His wife was a close friend of mine and I trusted her to help me ensure the arrangement worked. She died suddenly, and I found myself in a vulnerable position. When I went over to the UK earlier this year, HF decied to sell the house. He did not tell me what he was doing.

 

So far he has not found a buyer. I suspect he may have a plan to subdivide the large property and build another house on it, destroying my garden. And he is obdurate and sheepish at the same time. He knows that even if I could afford a lawyer, there is nothing on paper, no record of what I paid or of the arrangement. His face last night was closed and hostile.

Sober, I can deal with what has to be done. I have always dreaded homelessness because for so long I lived in rented places with tremendous insecurity, moving every other year. I was a student and a political activist in exile, unable to get regular employment. The alcoholism played a role in my drifting, but when I look back I would do the same again, albeit more self-protectively.

As I lay awake in the early hours of the morning I realised that the most painful aspect of this is the loss of trust and the old friendship. HF is elderly and his scheming and plotting will do him no good in the end.  But that is his choice. It will be very hard for me to leave the cottage I love so much and find another place to stay. But Una will be with me and we shall find somewhere safe for the puppies, even if there is no garden.

 

I don’t like the suggested approach from the BB to look at others as being ’sick’. Active alcoholics are seriously ill and deluded but others may sometimes be simply selfish or stubborn or greedy. I don’t feel inclined to make excuses for HF. He is what he is. And what is done is done. Sober, I am still flawed and less than competent at looking after myself in practical ways. It is a learning curve.

 

There is no panic and no blaming and that is a start. Feeling heartsore and dreading the inevitable is how I feel. I try to trust the bigger picture and just put one foot in front of another. That is the best I can do for now.

Social whirl

Sobriety has never interfered with my sociability. To compensate for the loneliness of writing and rural isolation, I invite friends around for meals and go out to suppers and picnics with alarming frequency.

Crawled out of my sick bed early yesterday evening and went off to have supper with a chef friend at a refurbished Cape Dutch restaurant managed by theatrical types who fancy themselves as restaurateurs. We were both underwhelmed by the food, dabs of smoked salmon with sour cream and a frond of dill, followed by dull pork neck casseroled and dryish chicken breasts with mushrooms. Unimaginative and not the right menu for a hot evening — we sat out overlooking the garden with new rosebushes ( a waste of water) and lanterns hung to attract moths rather than shed light. I hate trying to find food on my plate by forking around hopefully in the dark with my thumb as a marker. But the conversation with N was good, and we shared anecdotes about our travels, favourite restaurants, his getting over the death of his gay partner after 22 years together, going on in the world alone. People are often so much braver than they themselves suspect.

Came home and had my hot milk, read the 12×12 on Step 7, fell asleep as if charmed (sadly, conference-approved AA literature has that effect on me) and woke fully restored to rude health. Now I am off to eat shortbread with an elderly friend who staged Ionesco in Budapest in the 1960s, then have lunch under a pergola in the garden with an artist who designs her garden to resemble Monet’s Impressionist paintings, and out tonight to celebrate the 60th birthday of a farmer, kindhearted and deaf. His svelte blonde wife has taken to bellowing at everyone like a vexed fishwife. She does however cook like a angel: phyllo pastry baskets of asparagus souffle, bitter and refreshing mesclun salads, subtle beef rounds with pickled walnuts, desserts that are all syllabub and honeycomb. And another great deep verandah overlooking a starlit valley of vines and poplars.

And from now until New Year there will be parties in swept barns and huge  living rooms with high ceilings of yellowwood, under marquees on lawns, and around kitchen tables with nuts and fruit set out glowing in lamplight. I feel quite dizzy with pleasure. Una is even more sociable than I am and plans to attend several parties in the course of a single evening. She will also be working right through Christmas, nursing those unable to get into local hospitals or reach clinics on foot . Her co-workers and patients and visiting family fill our house and sit eating rusks and refilling endless pots of tea in the kitchen, with puppies passed around from lap to lap.

 

Sometimes I wake at night and hear neighbours singing around the piano or accordion, singing tunes that pre-date the First World War. Older people reliving their own childish memories when they played underfoot of the grown-ups making their own amusements in the days before television or even the radio. And the small toddlers  with them now will remember a long-vanished world when they themelves grow up and move to cities  and tire of the perils and pleasures of Internet technology. What endures is simple and human community, not readymade entertainment.