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riverside grave

A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once was.

The graveyard is peaceful and small. It’s by the river. Big gates are closed but not locked. I asked did she want to be alone but no, this was a maintenance visit. Side by side we crouched down and plucked all the dead heads off the hyacinths growing over him. In another part of the graveyard an elderly man was drifting, carrying a candle in his hands. My friend looked surprised when he greeted her and told me afterwards, he had grown so thin she wouldn’t have known him.

May 3, 2013
Master Georgie

To turn the tide of a rainy & dismal afternoon I started reading. Beryl Bainbridge’s elegant eloquence has cheered me up no end… as her characters in this novel might say. This is from Master Georgie:

“It began to rain before I reached the Washington Hotel. I hadn’t my shawl, but a spot of damp was nothing to me. In winter, when the wind howled up from the river, I huddled in the doorway of the Star Theatre. Once, an actor came by and said I was pretty and why didn’t I come inside to get warm by the Green Room fire. I didn’t go because the rouge on his cheeks made him look more angry than kindly. Besides, I knew he was buttering me, the line of my mouth being too determined for prettiness and my eyes too deeply set, which lends me a melancholy look. Another time, in December, my feet turned quite blue and Mrs O’Gorman had to rub them with goose-fat to restore the circulation. What did I care! I’d freeze stiff for Master Georgie.

“In summer, my favourite place was on the granite steps at the entrance to the railway station in Lime Street. From there I could see down the slope to where the hotel stood within its square of garden, the red roses bobbing tall in the wind. On clear days, beneath high blue heavens, the humps of the Welsh hills rode the horizon. Now, the grey river met the grey sky, and a low white sun, sliced by the masts of ships, sailed through a splash of scarlet petals.”

May 3, 2013
a jeans under it

An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.

Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.

Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.

They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.

But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.

May 2, 2013
all that love

Robert Peston’s preface to Sian Busby’s posthumously published last novel, as quoted in The Guardian. He transcribed the novel from her notes after his non-smoking wife had died of lung cancer. “My motive was selfish: I wanted to keep talking to her. I still do.”

He writes: “Life became punctuated by terrible shocks and emergencies. Yet those who met her at pretty much any point in this ordeal encountered the Sian they had always known: solicitous, supportive, witty, insightful, unselfish. The cancer did not haunt us. If anything, it helped us understand what matters in life: family, first and foremost; work that fulfils; friends, beauty and fun.”

As I read his words it occurs to me everything he values most highly in the face of bereavement is love. Even beauty is a form of love: isn’t it? A mechanism for our appreciation? “Work that fulfils” is our service to the world, as well as to our own character, daily life, and development. Love is all.

May 2, 2013
a nighttime walk

It’s 11pm. Went for a bedtime walk around the road with my friend and host. Most of the houses are dark and in one or two windows are lights. Don’t other people’s houses entice when it is late and one longs for one’s bed.

A tree along the highway has burst into bloom. “I like the apples from that tree,” she says. In the next street three raw apartment blocks rest on torn earth, now rained in. A dark tree yields the faint squeak of some almost-sleeping bird. I tell her how I crouched by the river and watched a pair of ducks, colourful male & dun female, surf past with lolling expressions on their faces (or so it seemed); the current is rapid and swollen with snowmelt after the spring freeze. Five minutes later they passed again: looked like the same couple, still skating pleasurably. I thought they must have flown up to have another go. Yes, she says: they do that. I would too, I think, if I were feathered.

May 1, 2013
no news is good

Watching television news for the first time in several years. Things have changed. The screen (huge!) is split into seven sections with different background footage, text, or video showing in each of them. A continuously changing crawl line along the bottom distracts attention from the main ‘story’, with unrelated headlines. There’s even a graphic indicating the state of the stock exchange at allegedly this very moment. (My investments! My fleet of investment advisors! My inflamed self-importance!) The ‘story’ is about the arrest of three more suspects in the Boston bombing and the reporter on the scene seems to be speculating & conducting her own investigation. Her storytelling is looping and diffuse. But it’s hard to notice that because of the intrusive text flashes & gripping minute-by-minute footage of a black van being backed very slowly, over and over again, into the garage of a large building. What the hell is going on? This show seems intended to make the viewer feel like they are the centre of operations in some big detective show. In fact the information given, before boredom and frustration drove me from the room, is minimal and almost meaningless. As though it were a gossip magazine the ‘news’ describes the appearance and apparent mood of the suspects. They talk to ‘neighbours’ who say I’m shocked, this sort of thing doesn’t happen here, etc. I have never looked to television news as a font of insight and wisdom but still: the level of stupidness seems to have risen markedly.

If you have a TV and if you feel that watching this stuff is helping you ‘keep up to date’: maybe think again.

May 1, 2013
you are fire

Walking home past an outdoor restaurant in town that provides rugs for its hardier patrons. Everyone else was huddled indoors, it’s barely ten degrees and the wind is icy. A woman wearing a piled confection of blonded whipped hair drew on her cigarette as I passed and said, drawlingly, “…but it’s ok. I paid him in shag rate.” She saw me listening and fixed me with her eye and blew out a long, expressionless stream of blue smoke. Dragon lady! You are fire. I adore you.

April 30, 2013
you are smoke

Lord, but I love giving advice to strangers. I bail them up in grocery stores to make suggestions about biodegradable washing powder. In boutiques and in op shops I say stuff like, Wow that looks good on you ~ you should buy it. Tonight I tore a strip off my napkin and wrote a note to the girl at the next table, having eavesdropped on her conversation with a slicked-back dude in a leather jacket. Snatches I’d overheard: “I find it gets messy when people get emotionally attached in a relationship.” (Him). “..to complicate a sexual feeling” (him). “So I’m supposed to just… ask if that’s ok?” (Her). My note said, “beautiful girl ~ this guy sounds like a selfish brute. You can do better. Don’t let him have you.” When I was pulling on my jacket I went over and said, Sorry to interrupt – this is for you. She gave me an shy, optimistic, luminous smile that made me so glad I had acted.

April 30, 2013
with tweezers

Last time I was in Switzerland I said to my host, It’s so pretty! It’s like an endless reel of picture postcards, seamlessly unrolling.

Yes, she said. And if I’m not on my knees in the garden on a Sunday morning, pulling up daisies with a pair of tweezers: my neighbours won’t speak to me.

April 30, 2013
just entwined

Found this unbelievable stationery store. It is vast and old-fashioned, everything neatly arranged. They had blocks of yellow writing paper, stacked in rows, some with no margin, some with a narrow margin, some with an extra-wide margin for some specialized purpose. They had gleaming jars of bulldog clips, silver ones, brass ones: pretty. They had all different kinds of string: hemp twine, sturdy and wrapped in a round ball the size of a baby’s head; and mean-looking black-and-white flecks, thin and strong; and a dreamy colourful cotton twine which came on a long tall spool and which I held in my hand for five minutes, warming it. Like an egg. They had a whole shelf of little cardboard boxes, the kind pastels and charcoal come in, held together on the corners by neatly folded staples. They had Moleskines designed by people who use Moleskines: the covers printed with one guy’s harbourside sketch of Hong Kong in pen and ink, another woman’s purling abstract with falling petals. They had slabs of plywood for balancing your painting on your easel and aisles thinly populated with drifters, holding up articles and musing on them, some of them wearing a kind of half-smile or fierce frown of concentration that seemed to me to indicate they were dreaming up what they would make with all these products.

This was in Copenhagen, which I visited at the age of 10 and again two months ago, and where if it didn’t cost twenty Kroner every second just to breathe, I would move tomorrow, and learn to play better piano and be a better jazz composer. In the teetering, cobbled old town I found five jazz clubs within a square kilometre; most of them filled to the gills; and the audiences ranged from age 20 to 70. What a lovely town. Cold and windy. But beautiful. And peaceful in the water.

April 30, 2013