meish dot org: life, unfolding

Back from sunny Cyprus (it was) with a suitcase full of laundry and pebbles.

This long weekend included, variously:

• Lots of swimming
• My brother’s wedding
• All the tzatziki a woman could ever dream of, and then some
• A taxi driver with a battered old stretch merc and a thirst for speed, who stopped on the way to drop us off at the airport to pick up an injured grouse by the roadside, which he then deposited at P’s feet, in the passenger footwell
• Cheesy music
• A bagpiper, in a taverna on top of a hill
• Plenty of sleep

And loads of other stuff which I’m simply too sleepy to write about now.

I also watched Bruce Almighty on the way over and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on the way back, though it should actually have been entitled The League of Extraordinary Murkiness because it mostly seemed to take place at night or in shadowy places, which made it very difficult to tell what was going on, when played on a 5″ back of the seat monitor.

Plus, please excuse me if I’m a bit distracted – since Thursday night I’ve slept (as in, more than napped) six times, gone forward two hours, back one, then back two. I’m not entirely sure where I’m meant to be or what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m fairly sure it’s not here, and spodding though. Laundry, probably.
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You forget that blood has this special, distinct metallic smell to it. You get so used to seeing it in movies and on bad hospital dramas that you forget that its essential characteristics are not just red wetness but also a faint warm metallic scent, which clings to your nostrils, like onions.

After all that grumbling yesterday, I was about to go to bed when P came in and slipped over and bashed his head and all of a sudden there was a crisis to deal with: blood everywhere and an ambulance and Kingston A&E and stitches and all sorts. We got in at some ungodly hour, had a cup of sweet tea (the cure for everything) and fell into deep, dreamless slumber.

It’s all ok now. But I can’t quite shake the scent of blood, the faint metallic whiff.

I know it’s not pirate chatter day any more. I know. I know. I got distracted.

See, I’ve been visiting with family and scanning old family pictures for a collaborative family project somewhere down the line.

In the process of doing this, I found digital photos of a letter my grandad, stationed in the Shetlands during the second world war, had written to my grandmother, waiting for him a few hundred miles south.

The letter was tucked into the back of a frame containing a snapshot of him and his billet buddies standing on a vessel in a harbour somewhere. They wear peaked caps, and heavy duffle coats, on top of neat uniforms. My grandad, looming and tall and white haired, even then, is holding a pipe and beaming broadly.

The funny thing is, that’s just as I remember him, forty years after that photo was taken – tall and white haired and wielding a pipe, waving us off on the ferry, or strolling along the beach to where we were building sandcastles, bringing sandy icecreams, and shoulder rides, and love.

The letter is one of the most moving and romantic things I can imagine. Tender and familiar and funny and more. I was going to post an excerpt of it here, or a photo, but some things are not for sharing.

I feel as if, by reading it, I’ve intruded into something pure and private and special, compeltely them, even though they both passed away nearly two decades ago.

I wish they were still alive. I loved being with them when I was a child, but I’m convinced I would love being with them now, even more.

I’ve never had Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Actuallly, I’ve never had any fast food fried chicken, even though London is peppered with red-and-white liveried rip-off outlets – Tenessee Fried Chicken, Cottage Fried Chicken, Kansas Fried Chicken, you know the kind of thing.

This possibly all stems from an occasion when I was about seven, and asked my mum if we could have a bucket of fried chicken for tea one night, and she referred to it as Kentucky Fried Rat. While I’m not casting doubt on the provenance of the meat in the aforementioned restaurants, I haven’t quite managed to shake the picture since.

When I was about seventeen, and at college on the west coast of Canada, I wrote letters home. Email wasn’t an option (I think there was one computer at the college for students’ use, but it was a glorified typewriter, really, with no connectivity – and besides, even if we’d managed to dial up, in 1991 there wasn’t really anything to connect to). So I wrote home to my mum and sister – long missives on ruled paper stolen from my class notes folder, continuing in pages ripped from diaries and the back of photos and brochures – little snippets of everyday life, bundled up periodically – rather than being written in one sitting (I wasn’t organised enough for that) – and then sent home.

Except we were 10km from the nearest post office, and I could never remember to get a stamp. So I just kept writing and writing and writing until I would eventually get around to sourcing one.

Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, my mum would periodically get increasingly worried. She hadn’t heard from me in months. She hoped everything was ok. Then, sporadically, out of the blue, she’d receive a bundle of scribbled paper – a twenty nine page missive written over six weeks or so. That would keep her busy for a while, and then weeks would pass and the worry would start again.

I think the thing was that I was in the habit of writing to her regularly – it just wasn’t getting through, because it wasn’t being posted. But the very act of writing felt as if it should have been enough. By writing pretty much every day, I was keeping in contact, mentally – telling them both all about what I’d been doing, and how it felt. The rest – the delivery – was just a matter of logistics.

The problem wasn’t in the regularity of writing, but in how often it was posted. I needed to remember that once I’d written it, it wasn’t yet *out there* – that required an extra step, too. And *that* was the problem. So when she complained that I wasn’t writing regularly, I was able to say “I am – you’re just not receiving it regularly”

Is there a difference?

The other day, I asked what this might be a detail from:

The answer? It’s a drum.

Specifically, a Yoruba Oba drum – a talking drum.

My parents brought it (and us) back from Nigeria in the late seventies, and throughout my childhood it lived in the front room, to be squeezed and tapped experimentally once in a while by small hands.

The point of a talking drum is to make noises which sound like words spoken in a tonal language – like Yoruba. The drum is played with a curved stick, while the drum is held under one arm and the drum is squeezed. The leather cords tighten, and the skin on either end of the drum is pulled taught, causing the tone to rise. It does sound eerily like talking, when played properly.

This drum has a past, though. This drum stopped me running away from home.

In the very early eighties, my mum, who was working as a journalist, had to go to Sri Lanka for over a month in the summer for a conference. My dad was busy as ever with work, so the family drafted in a distant cousin to help look after me, my brother and my sister during the summer holidays. Helga was from Switzerland, and had curly hair, which I liked, and a huge mustachioed boyfriend called Georg, which I didn’t.

In the finest fairy tale tradition, H & G were nice as pie when parental units were around, but wicked when they weren’t. Well, I say wicked…they were in London and in love, and not particularly interested in looking after three smallish children during a hot summer when they could have been rowing hired boats in Regents Park or checking out the buskers at Covent Garden.

One afternoon, after a screaming match with Helga (in which, to be fair, I did the majority of the screaming), I resolved to run away. That’d show her.

I packed a small backpack with clothes and books (always a priority) and left through the back door, down the ginnel, through the gate and out onto the road. I struck off in the direction of the shops around the corner. I turned right. I walked past the shops and then turned right again. I walked the whole way along the road and then turned right again. At the corner, I started to worry about the Oba drum. I didn’t want Helga to have it. I didn’t want to leave it behind, because it was precious and it belonged to our family, and I didn’t want Helga and her smelly boyfriend to touch it, steal it, have it.

I walked the length of the street, and turned right again, back onto our tree-lined street. I picked up speed, worried at the thought that H & G would have the drum. Ten houses later, I was home, sliding in through the back gate, up the ginnel and in through the kitchen door.

I hurried into the front room, where it smelled of warm dust from the carpet and overstuffed formal furniture, and wood polish, from the huge table in the middle of the room, never used (except for sliding along on our bottoms when we knew we wouldn’t be caught). By the fireplace stood the drum.

I hauled it up onto one shoulder. It was too heavy, big and awkward to carry along with my bag. I had to choose, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave without it, but I couldn’t take it with me.

So I stayed. I hid the drum behind an armchair, unpacked my bag, put the backpack back in the bottom of the airing cupboard, and stayed.

I’d managed to run away for all of fifteen minutes, never got further away than the other side of the block, and ended up back home because I was worried about the safety of a treasured family posession. Running away seemed like a good idea in theory – it was just a quetion of logistics – but not nearly so simple in practice – when emotions were involved. It seldom is.

Have you ever run away?

Well, that was about as complicated and stressful as anticipated.

Trains pretending to go from Brighton through to Bedford, but actually missing out (read: stopping short) the crucial middle bit of the journey, from Blackfriars (where I tried to get on – and let me assure you, a platform over the Thames is no place to be in a wind chill) to Moorgate.

I completed most of the circle line, finally joining the (stopping at every single station in the ‘burbs) train at Farringdon.

A few hours later, and I was eating homemade chocolate mousse and drinking a nice pinot grigio with my dad, sister and stepmother in front of Midsommer Bergerac.

Related tangent: why does anyone still live in those Midsommer villages? Honestly, with all the random stabbings, drownings, etc, it’s a wonder that
a) anyone would choose to continue living there and
b) there’s anyone left except Jim Bergerac and his smug wife.

Journey back was a piece of piss, though.

How do you take a picture of wind? I wandered about with my camera today, watching leaves waltz down the street and cower in doorways, seeing rooftop aerials wobble and bounce precariously and shop awnings billow and swell like sails.

But it’s all about the movement – no static shot would have captured the buffetting bluster and blow, just as you couldn’t capture the raw energy and movement of the wind in a jar held aloft.

My mum’s parents lived in a house next to a wild heathland golf course on a hill on the edge of Port Erin on the Isle of Man. The barely-used links were the starting point for many windswept adventures and expeditions, to Bradda Head, Fleshwick Bay, and the Stupid Cairn (remind me to tell you about that at some point).

Being on an exposed part of the island, at the southernmost tip, the course was constantly battered by strong winds from across the Irish Sea. We’d walk through the rough on the edges of the course and clamber through the gorse bushes to stand on small hilly mounds (which could have been fairy hills, or Viking burial mounds, depending on whether you believed my nana or grandad) with kites, or coats held open with arms outstretched, catching the full force of the wind. It really felt as if the wind could snatch you up and whisk you away, and we almost hoped it would.

One night, a winter wind whipped up from the sea and whisked off a washing line full of drying clothes from my grandparents’ garden – a nightie, some knickers, two t-shirts, a jumper, some socks and my prized red yellow and blue striped ski jacket (it was 1984: forgive the fashion faux pas). In the morning, we awoke to find an empty line and socks strewn across the gorse on the nearside of the hill, like a scene from a favourite children’s book, the name of which I’m struggling to remember (The Very Windy Day? Mrs Something’s Wash Day?)

I donned wellies and my father’s duffel coat, which came down to my ankles, and my mum, brother, grandad and I spent a chilly hour searching the fairway for a flash of red yellow and blue puffed polyester, snagged in the heather or perhaps wrapped around the flag on the fourteenth green. There was no sign of it; the jacket that got away.

I’m a completist. I like to see things through to the end. Once I’ve committed to something, I try to see it through.

I’ve seen some bad movies. I’ve seen some real doozies – Jade, Operation Dumbo Drop, Species to name but a few – but I’ve only ever walked out of one film: Roadhouse.

It was a sticky saturday afternoon in Cochabamba, and I headed for the only air-conditioned cinema in town to take in a double bill – Congo and Roadhouse. During the week and in the evenings, the cinema played porn, though at the weekends, it was family entertainment all the way. I got into the cinema and after twenty minutes of squinting at the slightly out of focus screen, realised that I didn’t want to be there any more.

Why? Well, one, because the cinema was as sticky inside as out, though for different reasons. Two, because the film was out of focus and it gave me a pounding headache. Three, because every man in the theatre was taking it in turns to sit in the row behind me and make moist flubbling noises. Four, and perhaps least influential in my decision, the film was dire.

One December, my sister was working at a box office in Manchester, and managed to swing a pair of free tickets to see Swan Lake at the Palace. My mum and I went along for a laugh – not great fans of ballet, but never keen to turn our noses up at a spot of free kulcha.

After an hour or so of boggling at the heffalumping thuds as the dancers’ stiff toes clomped about on stage, my mum and I turned to each other at the start of the interval and snuck out. Well, we tried to sneak out, but got lost in the labyrinth of corridors and foyers which make up the Palace theatre. At one point, we nearly ended up backstage, which could have been amusing – though mum and I could have been no less noisy than the performers. I thought ballet was supposed to be graceful and silent? Ballet is, I think, one of those things best experienced remotely. We finally made it out into the chilly air, and snuck home feeling terrible. Serves us right for deserting at half time.

Tonight, we had the best seats in the house. We booked the tickets months ago, and we’ve been looking forward to seeing the Necks live for ages. Our seats were front and centre, in prime position for the show. We sat through the first set, and at the interval, snuck out.

I felt bad about leaving half way through, especially with seats so good, so prominent, but I was too wound up to listen to improvised minimalist jazz. I couldn’t switch off my brain. My thoughts were drowning out the music. I couldn’t concentrate. I was too twitchy, too angry, too distracted by other stuff, other things.

We left the concert hall to walk along the Embankment in the November drizzle. By the time we got to County Hall, my face was dripping wet, and I couldn’t tell if I was crying any more.

There’s this series of carriage ads on the tube at the moment for BAE, which really bother me.

The one I first saw depicts a hummingbird, and explains how BAE developed the quite astounding technology which enables Harrier jump jets to land and take-off from a vertical position – no mean feat on an aircraft carrier in the middle of a tempestuous ocean. Which makes the world a safer place.

Woah. Back up a second. What?

Creating a massive weighty object that not only flies, but hovers and takes off vertically is an amazing innovation, a marvel of modern engineering and something to truly be chuffed about.

It does not, however, make the world a safer place.

What you’ve quite simply done there, you see, is make a political statement, not state a fact.

Creating a thing that will prevent the planet spinning off its axis makes the world a safer place. Inventing a device to predict earthquakes makes the world a safer place. Creating something which is meant to be used in conflict does not. It might make the country safer (depends on definition) and for the poor person flying the thing and trying to land on a platform in a stormy sea, it makes the experience of landing safer, but it doesn’t make the world safer, just like me waving a gun around doesn’t make my community safer. It makes my community more likely to get shot, because there’s some fool waving a gun around while she’s trying to type.

No war is safer. Not having the possibility of being killed is safer. Peace is safer, but it cannot be established on the basis of the bomb and the bullet. Creating weapons of war and vehicles which support mass destruction does not further peace and security for the world – it represents a political agenda, and I resent the implication that making another snazzy fighter plane makes the world – it’s enormous, what a generalisation! – my world any safer. I don’t feel safe knowing that billions of pounds are poured every year into funding research in how to kill people. I feel like there’s another fighter plane on one side – and then another, and another and another.

If I could figure out how to withhold the percentage of my income tax which goes to fund arms, I would.

On a related note, my mum’s in court next week on charges of creating a breach of the peace while sitting in the road outside Faslane nuclear (not nucular, thankyouverymuch) submarine base on the west coast of Scotland. She’s defending herself, and we talked about it quite a lot this weekend. Some suggestions for her line of defence were as follows:

1. Reference the speeches in which Bush and later, Blair spoke out against weapons of mass destruction. Point out that a trident submarine is a weapon of mass destruction, and if Bush and Blair condemn them, then it’s ok for her to do so too.
2. Point out that sitting in the road is somewhat less of a breach of the peace than, say, firing a nuclear missile from a submarine, and enquire (politely) when the MoD case will be coming up in court. Point out further that a peaceful, nonviolent protest doesn’t breach the peace whilst nuclear weapons threaten everybody’s peace and safety.
3. Remain silent when asked to make a statement, in recognition that it will be 11am on 11/11, and as a mark of respect of all those who have died in wars throughout history. Then make the point that nuclear submarines increase the likelihood of other people dying, because that’s what they’re designed to do: kill people.
4. Point out that the legal definition of a breach of the peace is:
   

   “whenever harm is actually done or is likely to be done to a person or in his presence his property or a person is in fear of being so harmed through an assault, an affray, a riot, unlawful assembly or other disturbance”

   …which is quite different to sitting peacefully in the road on a legal demonstration, which is an open, nonviolent obstruction of weapons of mass destruction, and which causes no alarm or distress to anyone.

5. If all else fails, point out that she had a conversation with HRH Liz, who said it was OK for her to sit on the queen’s highway. Well, it worked for Mr Burrell, sort of…

I wish I could be there to support her. I’m so proud of my mum.