I Buy A New Washer: I Quote Charles Dickens

I Buy A New Washer: I Quote Charles Dickens:  As I've gone about my Christmas busyness, I've been listening to David Copperfield  by Charles Dickens. One of the things I've ...

I Quote Charles Dickens

 As I've gone about my Christmas busyness, I've been listening to David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. One of the things I've done in 2022 is subscribe to what, in the 1980s, my granny (her vision deteriorating) would have called a talking book service. Subscribing has been one of the small, but significant, things I've done in 2022. 

Other small things I've done have included my 80th parkrun, decorating a pottery bowl, growing potatoes, onions and sage, drinking wine in a summer house after dark, buying curtains, and making my first nut roast.

There have been bigger things too - of course there have been.  I held my great-nephew, 3rd newcomer to his generation, for the first time; I followed in the steps of Leopold Bloom around Dublin; I became a part-time employee; I scattered ashes of one of my dearest friends; I attended the first graduation ceremony for a while. 

I was drawn to listening to David Copperfield because I first listened to Demon Copperhead  (Barbara Kingsolver) - her book's plot follows that of Dickens'. Even with extra time to myself these days, I would not have finished reading either book in print, but have enjoyed having them read to me while I go for walks, do housework, dig. I will forever associate my attic with Moby Dick, the book that accompanied my DIY insulation improvements in the spring. The timbers have something of the ship about them.

Like this blog, Dickens writes David Copperfield in the first person. The comparison goes no further than that, except, perhaps, in one respect. Today, when I heard David Copperfield musing that "trifles make the sum of life" I thought, Yes, that's right. The break ups, the bereavements, the awful news of wars and sorrows ... as well as the joys of new discoveries, the triumphs - all of these are huge monuments in our lives: the dates of birth and death which mark out years as unique. But in-between, every day of every year, it's the small stuff --  what seems trifling at the time --  that holds us (that holds me) together.

Tomorrow is new year's day and I'm lucky enough to be spending it with family, including the very youngest ones. I was reminded, thirty-one and a bit hours into David Copperfield, of one small event that tends to happen each new year in our family. Thus it is, dear reader, that I go into 2023 hopeful that, among the contributions to the spread of food on 1st January 2023, there'll be trifle. 

I Snap A Picture

I find Christmas more enjoyable, whatever its shape, whoever I'm with, however the food turns out, if it's accompanied by Handel's Messiah. It's often sung at this time of year because of its distillation of the Christmas story into quotations from the bible, the first part focusing on Unto us a child is born.

I listened to the first section yesterday as I ran round the Quarry Park in Shrewsbury for my 80th parkrun, sporting my Santa hat. I was somewhere behind Mr Yule Log, and amid 700 or so other Santas, Elves, Christmas Trees and even, I think, a Christmas Pudding. 

Here's a photo I snapped at the start. See if you can spot Mr Yule Log - he's well-camouflaged against the tress. 

And here's the first photo I've ever taken while running up hill and not wearing glasses. The first few hundred runners are a blur in front of me, cresting the hill underneath St Chad's church.

As I ran, I listened to the words of the Messiah.  Comfort ye my people, all flesh shall see it together, yet once a little while, but who may abide the day of his coming, and shall call his name Emmanuel, lift up thy voice with strength, be not afraid ... and later ... why do the nations so furiously rage together?

I love the poetry and cadence. I love the way that human experience is present and ancient in the texts. Yet once, a little while. It's so beautiful: rhythm, harmony, melody. 

This work of Handel's has survived its own popularity. This is song that can be sung in any season, even this one with its ugly-beautiful mix of religion, commerce, greed, altruism, cynicism, hope, loneliness and partying. I do not experience this work as a sermon, but as a poem. Similarly, parkrun with its accommodation of logs, fast runners, walkers, dogs, puddings and all - I don't experience it as a race, but as a temporary community with volunteer marshals encouraging us on every step of the way. 

Christmas. It's a whole mix of things, and we've not failed if it's not merry, bright, happy or joyful. We can't buy our way out of the human condition, but maybe we can sing it, maybe we can write about it. This is not a message from on high, but one from on low, from our daily experiences which includes grief and loss, hunger and cold, as well as birth and mysterious gifts. 

I think that's what I'm trying to say in this poem, which I'm grateful to Ink, Sweat and Tears for publishing today. 

28th July, 2021

Mist blankets the beach, blending

the horizon to something of a mystery. 

The air whitens to peace,

the sun, our star, glows a yellow lamp-bulb.

Gulls call the sad, glad news,

trace holy ghosts in simple pilgrimages

above the seal-grey sea, calling

holy, holy, holy are the days.

We've brought gifts from the Christmas

none of us could spend together,

sit to open them on sand warm enough

for a camel's footprint. 

Later, there'll be room at the inn.

Twelve will sit at the next table, and we'll witness

a father reach to take his silent daughter's hand.

We'll eat together at last, drink water, drink wine. 

I Decorate A Bowl

I've been meaning to get my paints out for months. Passers-by may have got the impression that I have, may have noticed that I recently applied a coat of grey eggshell to my front door, and I touched up the external frames with white gloss. But I did these things in adult mode, thinking about weathering and rot. Getting my paints out means something else. It's what I do when I want to take my inner child out to play (I Paint A Canvas). 

Last week, I met my goddaughter at the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke. She'd booked us into the painting studio so we had a table for two and a couple of hours. There was a choice of ready-made pots to paint, a wheel of colours, sponges, brushes, pencils and a sander for rubbing out mistakes.

I was choosing from the ready-cut sponge shapes when I let myself be drawn to the dinosaurs. I chose the one that looks like a brontosaurus: the one I grew up with but now have found out never existed. 

Dinosaurs weren't in my plan, nor was green, not that I had a plan. Somewhere in the back of my mind was lodged the thought that I'm not the target market for dinosaurs. Being in the easy company of Ruth, an early years teacher, made all the difference. She was encouraging about dinosaurs - no shape out of bounds - and her enthusiasm released my inner green thunder lizard.

Having started with the dino, representative for me of my elder son, the next choices were easy: musical notes, flowers, a swallow, bees and three cakes; symbols of our family sponged onto a French bowl.

All the while we were chatting, and Ruth was painting her pottery too. It looks amazing and I can't wait to see it once it's been fired. I can't tell you more, though, as it may become a present for someone. Mine's a present to myself: reminder of my children, myself as a child, the child I am still becoming. 

I Know My Onions ...

... which, according to the saying, means I am very knowledgeable about something, but what, exactly? Not onions, that's for sure. Growing onions is not in the curriculum of subjects I teach, although I do know that they are an essential ingredient in onion soup and risotto. 

I planted a clutch of seed onions back in May during the time I was looking after my cousins' garden. To do this I followed onion-planting instructions I'd been given. After that initial digging and setting the onions with their tips just above the soil's surface, they grew of their own accord. 

I watched over them on my daily turns around the garden, was pleased not to lose any to onion predators, but did little else. Even in the long summer heat and drought, I watered them only occasionally. I was too busy focussing on the thirsty hydrangeas. That they flourished makes me think there isn't that much to know about growing onions.

I had finished my garden-sitting before the onions matured. It was my cousin who watched over their last growth spurt and harvested them. Last weekend, she kindly presented them to me in a long braid. I didn't recognise them at first.

I think this onion story may be a metaphor of some sort about knowledge: about how it is part of the fabric - the soil and air, the rain and sunshine - of our environments and communities. About how it is held in common. My teaching (though it doesn't always) has felt like that this week. I've been able to set up the contexts in which learning can happen - I've gathered groups of students in communities, set them, gently as I can, with some patting of the soil, into place: watched as they went about their own growth potential. I've tended and encouraged when I've noticed a root reaching down, or a shoot heading up. 

It's not always like this. There are times when knowledge within education institutions seems to get stuck in thick books, or choked by bureaucracies, by power and personality, and, recently, by the tension and challenge of enforced social isolation, and by the sterilisation of communication in technology. But then again, when the natural inclination towards growth is enabled, it feels great: it feels like I know these onions. 

And look, here they are grown, and full of potential. 

I Hang Curtains

My living room curtain adventure began in lockdown no. 1. Sure that I'd have time to spare on sewing as a moderate act of independence, I ordered some fabric samples, held them up to my imagination, then plumped for powder blue velvet. 

When the parcel arrived from the textile shop, I psyched myself up into curtain-making mode. I measured the drop needed, and then again, unpacked the fabric. I found that the length I'd been sent was one metre shorter than the length I'd ordered. You could know even less about curtain making than I do and still appreciate that this presented a problem. I contacted the seller, who was apologetic and sent a two metre length the following week.

With diminished enthusiasm, I embarked on take 2, measuring the windows again then, very, very carefully, cut the first drop. Too short, it turned out. 

If I were still in therapy, my psychotherapist might identify this mistake as self-sabotage. I identified it as enough to stop me in my [curtain] tracks for a couple of years. I bundled the fabric into a bag, and in a move the same therapist might've described as a defence mechanism, or possibly repression, stuffed the bag in a corner of the attic. 

Looking at the bag of velvet from time to time, I noticed my enthusiasm for blue curtains waning but my dislike of waste and unfinished projects nagged at me. I sought advice from my eldest son who is, after all, an expert sewer and measurer. He delivered the message I wasn't prepared to hear: You need to buy more fabric, Mum. I promptly set about going into denial.

This June, under the influence of my longest-serving friend, I attempted to buy my way out of this fix, purchasing curtains when we were on our camping holiday in Norfolk. This is what friends are for: to point out, at the right moment, that it's okay to buy curtains someone else has made. Even better, doing this, reminded my longest-serving friend that she needed curtains too. We broke together our long-standing tradition of not buying curtains while on holiday, each returning from Norfolk laden with velvet and the happiness of a week spent outside in good weather.

Once home, I realised that the curtains were not quite right for my living room, but would look perfect in my bedroom. And so, last weekend, while under the influence of my longest-serving friend again, this time in London, I bought a second pair of curtains for my living room. I hung them up when I got home, and they look just right. They are not blue, and they are not made from velvet. 

The new curtain happiness gave me the prompt I needed to hang the Norfolk set (which have been in a plastic bag since June). Luckily, this gave me the opportunity for a moderate act of independence: putting up a curtain pole, and putting it up straight, unlike that long ago shelf, at the first attempt [See I Put Up a Shelf]. 

As for the blue velvet? My eldest son has offered to make it into a coat for me - a perfect, a congruent resolution. 

I Appear In Australia

I appeared in Australia last Friday. Having reduced my university teaching hours so that I have more time for creativity, I said 'Yes' when invited to read my poetry at 9am here, 6pm there, on screens in and around Castlemaine, near to Melbourne. I appeared in Australia last Friday at Ross Donlon's online event, marking my first poetry touchdown Down Under. 

My preparation for this reading was admirably early. I refer you to my geography project, compiled in LIV26 (when I was twelve and there was no national curriculum). Given a free hand by Miss Smith, I made the most of having cousins in Western Australia. These cousins, never having met me (not then, not now) posted samples of Australia over to London (postcards, tourist brochures, leaves, pressed flowers, merino sheep's wool). I included them in my Australia project. This photo of the 40-something-year-old leaves demonstrates why professional conservators don't use Sellotape:

I also did my research about audience far in advance: I worked out (due to my laptop screen having an area of approximately one square foot) that, in order to read to read to at least one person, it was important to appear in one of Australia's more densely populated areas. Here's my 1976 illustration of population distribution which I used as a guide:

I'd also liaised with my friend Darren Mason in the matter of making sure I was ready for this important debut. During the first 2020 lockdown, I wrote a poem about my bicycle and the freedom she gave me in those first strange days, which Darren went on to animate beautifully. The advantage of the reading being online was that I was able to share it with my audience 10,577 miles away. See the film here: Shrewsbury, Friday Morning 27th March 2020 

All-in-all I was well-prepared for my appearance in Australia. I am grateful to Miss Smith, a kind and generous teacher, for enabling me to find out about the world by starting to explore and write about a place to which I already felt something of a connection. I'm grateful to my cousins for giving me that help, packaging up what could be sent across all those miles, and to Friday's audience for receiving my poems: letting me (in some small way) return the favours. 

I Step Through The Gate

I remember some key things from psychotherapy. It was a revelation to me when my therapist said: 

It's okay to change your mind. 

He didn't, in that moment, mean about what I was having for dinner, but that's included in the permission to understand that our words are not always our bond, but our process - a way of getting to grips with thought, emotion, woundedness, intent, desire, the bewilderment of being unsure of what we want because of, well, because of (for one thing) our unique interaction with the world not being taken seriously enough as children. Being squashed down. 

The poems: they don't come out fully formed, you know. It's usually a bit messy. 

So here I am, back in my blog which, I have learned since I announced its demise in June, is a friend I don't want to live without. Not right now, anyway, when I'm in grief and times are so troubled. 

I've swapped my mind. I've re-embraced, in doing this, the thinking I was given space for in therapy - a place of compassion, acceptance, acknowledgement, experimentation, and a lot of laughter. In cognitive-behavioural therapy terms (if you prefer this approach, dear readers) I am reframing the thought, I said I wouldn't so I can't, to, I've changed my mind, and it feels good to be back. 

So here I am. In front of me is the same, remembered gate of writing about what I've noticed in the day, and what I can capture in a first person simple present phrase. 

I step through. 

I Sense An Ending

My friend, John Rae, husband of my godmother Anne, has died. John collaborated with me on the book of this blog, sending me line drawings through the post during 2020 when we were in lockdown. The drawings were, and are, a source of joy. 

It occurs to me, as I write, that today in the UK is Father's Day. I've checked the apostrophe, and yes, correctly, it comes before the s, but my inclination is to shift it after the s to honour the several father-figures in my life. 

The part of fatherliness that John Rae showed me was twinkle and fun, with serious giggles. If you need evidence for this, just look at his interpretation of life through drawing. Here's a sample of what he drew to accompany the edited blog entries that appear in I Buy A New Washer:

 I Find A Garden:

Just from reading my words, John was able to capture the spirit of my rooftop sanctuary. This felt, and feels, like a connection, a 'being heard' - something I crave, the thing that motivates me to write.

I Pitch My Tent

I thought often of John as I was holidaying last week with my longest-serving friend. We were camping in Norfolk this time, and one day, we arrived in Norwich:

I thought of other friendships that have come to an end, whether through death or separation. I felt sad. Nearly 50 years after first setting off for Norwich (see, I Arrive In Norwich) I finally went into the cathedral, experienced evensong. The music, the company of other Lizes, the stained glass - all these became a still point in my turning world. 

John was a skillful artist, architect and teacher. A humane man - much loved. After our book was published, I received notes through the post from many people asking to buy a copy. The majority of these were friends of John and Anne's. All spoke of long friendships, with affection and admiration. 

With death comes ending, as well as a continuation of thought and feelings. My thoughts and feelings have, this past few months, been circling around ideas for next poems. I've written little down, but I must get onto this in order to grow a little more. I also need to work out how to put up a curtain pole so that the curtains I bought in Norwich hang straight. 

So without either a bang or a whimper, I end this blog here. 

I Am Read.

I Thank You.

Fin 

All drawings by John Rae

I recommend trying to get hold of his Sketchbook of the World - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sketch-Book-World-John-Rae/dp/0952455706  

I Read Jung (With Dog)

Having finished Ulysses, I've gained the confidence to read other books that have been tapping me on the shoulder for years. One such is Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections, recommended to me by  Anne. It's as if, having climbed Everest, I can consider K2 (though I'd like to make clear this is a metaphor - I have attempted neither, and if I did, I would need to be carried or air-lifted down at some point).

I'm currently dog-sitting a beautiful lurcher, and she and I take long walks together. Sometimes, on these walks, I listen to the birdsong in the woods, or the lambs bleating in the fields, and sometimes, I plug myself into my phone and listen to a book. And this is how I've read Jung. 

It's not an easy read - though parts of it are. That would be my review if asked for a line for the back cover. 

As Jaffa was trotting about, this is what I heard the other morning, and it illustrates my summary: 

"I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do." Carl Jung - Memories, Dreams and Reflections. 

When I heard this, I stopped and typed it into my phone to remember the wisdom.  

I called Jaffa to me, and she came up, looking hopeful. I read out Jung's words to her and she looked at me with her deep, kind eyes, hoping for a more edible treat, or perhaps something on the interpretation of dreams, then trotted off, ears flopping gently with each step. She urinated on some bracken. 

Jaffa understands life as the stream passing by, as Jung describes it, into which she occasionally makes a contribution, or dips her paw, her tongue, her whole body. I have a tendency to try to make cherries grow on stalks. Jaffa doesn't. When she offers her contribution to the undergrowth, she does it because she is a dog, not because she hopes to make cherries grow in a pine forest. 

Hmmm. 

I finished Jung's book on that walk, and, as with Ulysses, I'll read it again one day, and perhaps understand a little more. In the meantime, I understood enough to know that my life is much richer for having read the book.

Jaffa is asleep as I write this, maybe dreaming of rabbits.  

I Say Yes

I've finished reading James Joyce's Ulysses in time for its centenary year. This wasn't my plan when I picked it up for the first time in, when was it? 2009 I think. It's taken me twelve years with many pauses, re-starts, pauses. 

The copy of the book I bought at the Keele University bookshop (I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the time, was open to influence) has travelled with me, sat on various shelves, its spine cracking, the edges of its pages yellowing. 

The book was recommended to me by Scott McCracken, by Miss Cooper, by Jeremy Fisher, by Pope Innocent III, by Sue the Librarian, and all of them in it for the literature. I took it with me to France, to Italy, to Wyle Cop, to Ceredigion, and even to Dublin itself. It weighed me down with its great reputational promises and its respectable unrespectability. I began to think it had defeated me.

What is it to be so famous and to represent a formidable pinnacle of literature, to become reading for the super-diligent? By degrees, Ulysses became a monument to a decline in concentration, to my perception that the pandemic and Facebook between them had done for my ability to read at length. What I could manage had been reduced to Guardian articles, or, on a good day, Billy Collins' poems.

In the process of finishing Ulysses I think I read the first Episode, Telemachus, five or six times. In consequence, this may be the section I'll remember second best of all. I'd go far as to say it's an Episode that I understand. 

What helped jumpstart my 2021 attempt was the way my son Jonty, now also reading the book, treated it as if it were, well, just another book. He looked Ulysses in the eye, as if he were equal to it, which he is. And in doing so, he showed me that I am too. "It's really funny," he said. 

What? Funny?

This was the tip I needed, and when I got far enough into the swing of it, I also laughed out loud, even guffawed at times. I skipped lightly over the parts I couldn't make head nor tail of, seeking out the plentiful, juicier moments. Soon I was halfway through, then three quarters. I could hardly believe that the end was so nearly in sight. It was as if I had started reading downhill.

What I hadn't expected, even so, was how I would be swept away at the end in a rush of supreme recognition. How is it possible that it took me so long to get to that place, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, with all its rampant recognisable humanity? 

As I had also unloaded my reading troubles on Carol on our long car journey to our performances in Devon last August, I gave her the good news in November. It's done. For my birthday, she gave me the apron of the book to mark my achievement - it felt as good as any prize-giving, and although I'm wearing it at every opportunity, the apron's still clean - it's a reading apron after all. 

The final reading was all done and dusted in less than a year among the bed sheets and pine cones and sometimes with the sea lapping at my feet at Fairbourne. Penelope is the most wonderful thing I've ever read because it's wonderful, and because it came like that cold beer, crisps and pie I ate all at once at the pub at the foot of Cader Idris after misreading the largescale OS map on the descent.

So yes to the book which sat on my shelf plump and teasing with its thousands upon thousands of tiny pawprint words yes the twelve years the eighteen episodes yes the rollicking kidney of Irish history fried up in memory yes the guffaws yes the blushes and the winding boredom with another mug of coffee yes the classical religious literary references assumed in hours of lying there propped up on one hand making no sense and then sense coming unravelling its freewheeling veracity all over the inside of my imagination and yes yes I will read it again Yes.