Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: house guests

  • frauenpower

    Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it loudly and clearly in front of her husband and all her grown children, but got mere glassy looks in exchange. “Cathoel is very industrious,” she noted, approvingly, later, to her son. Christmas morning I made the only grandchild thank her after she’d been brought a cup of cocoa when everyone else was drinking coffee. She decided she’d like some once her grandmother had already sat down, and without hesitation the grandmother left her own breakfast untouched and got up again.

    I couldn’t bear to see how everybody sat down at the long, laden table and started saying, “Some jam would be nice,” and then when she had already returned from fetching it, “Oh, you know what? Let’s have some dark bread as well.” Tonight my partner cooked and I washed up. Afterwards we played cards, just him and his mum and his dad and me. The father got up and got beers. As I got up to go to the kettle I announced, “And I’ll take a cup of tea… does anybody else want a cup of tea?” With slight embarrassment my partner corrected my German: “No, Cathoel, in this case you say ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll take a cup of tea’ is for when you’re expecting a waitress to bring it to you.” “Yes,” I said, primly, “I was making a joke. Because I’ve noticed in this household people just sit there and say, I’ll take a cup of tea, and then your mother instantly gets up and goes into the kitchen.” His mother began to laugh. I’ve never seen her laugh so heartily. She slapped herself across the knees. “Thank you! Thank you!” Her cards spilled and she picked them up and began tucking them back into a handful, wiping away tears. We played on and I drank my tea and they drank their giant beers, and in the end it turned out the two men had trailed behind and the winners, bringing home exactly the same number of points each, were the two of us. “Sieg der Frauen!” I said, victory of the women. “Frauenpower,” she said, and we shook hands diagonally across the table.

  • ice cream man

    ice cream man

    Something I dig about the guy I’m travelling with. We are staying with my folks and Mum, fielding a houseful of hungry guests, sent us down to the supermarket with her credit card, and her pin number written on my wrist. We did the shopping and then looked at one another. I said, “Hey! We’ve got Mum and Dad’s credit card! And access to everything they own! Mwahahah!” I was just about to make a joke like, “Wanna go buy a car?” when my Berlin companion opened his mouth. He said, “Wanna buy an ice cream?”

     

  • a hill of beings

    a hill of beings

    I feel tearful this morning and my chest is aching with grief. Luckily my housemate & host made us both laugh just now by describing, with infinite wryness, the ruthless player she is partnered with today (“I have to go all the way to Zurich & then it’s like the Olympics”) before leaving with her tennis racquet strapped to her back. She’s been playing tennis for sixty years and hasn’t tired of it yet.

    Sitting in the sun I think: how long will we be able to go on? There are big valuables at stake. Our generations have melodrama imposed on our lives. I’m not even counting the nuclear-fizzing bully boys chucking tantrums, the banker boys stealing from the public: there is no room in my heart for them, I am grappling with my grief about the slow death of everything.

    The tremendous, repetitive work involved, in keeping it human-sized, staying awake, conducting one’s own modest, moral, individual life; the effort of planning anything at all (‘get out of bed, revise the poem’), of keeping hope lit. A gigantic assembly line, you have to keep fitting a million tiny metal and plastic pieces meaninglessly into place, just in order to glimpse the holiday of a corner of blue sky from out of the window. We’re all bound to it together, but it is somehow the loneliest thing. I can’t describe it at all. What I wanted to say, to somebody – anybody! – when I woke up this morning and heard the bird heralds of Spring, is: there are the big griefs of mourning lost species, and the missing wild places, the shaven forests and the lopped-off hills; and the deterioration of our daily bread, air, soil, fruit, eggs, and water. There is the horrifying fear of the future, overwhelming, paralyzing: a fear we must put aside and act on at once if anything is to amount to anything at all. There is the frustration of having sung this song too long, the boredom with it, the continual assaults from hopelessness. I get on with it. I rinse the poisonous dishwasher gleam from my cup, and make tea. I look all the big questions in the eye and tell them, I’m not afraid of my fear of you, I know you, I know you are there. But today the worst thing is the tiniest thing: my resentment at the pollution of my own daily dreams and the way I try to plan my day, by the wailing of the world’s biggest questions in context of history’s biggest mess. The siren interruption of alarm, that is the call not of sodden & beautiful temptresses but of ever-growing emergency.

    Ambulance. Ruined police. Fire!

    Self-pity, so small and overwhelming, fades out as I type these words. The sun has settled on my neck. The traffic from across the hill hollers, the birds are exhorting, exhorting. “This is my tree,” they say: “fuck off!” Or, “Hey, wanna root?” Or so an ale-drinking friend once translated for me as we sat on my verandah and listened to the trees. He has since sunk into brain-damaged tremor for he could not stop loving his escapism. I have wrestled with that. I try to remain clear and whole. Love is impatience and patience mixed, love is a bicycle in an airplane, love is endurance.

    H2O HoL blaring tunnel

  • riverside grave

    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.

    H2O HoL soul explosion gutter girl

  • a nighttime walk

    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.

    H2O HoL bloom

  • quiet heart

    quiet heart

    When I walk between the quiet cottages and see people with their heads bowed, eating dinner… I can feel the wildness in my heart and I feel like a teenager, it feels like rage.

    H2O HoL brleave scrap stall

  • wedgwood sky

    wedgwood sky

    Afternoon cycle ride down to the shops. I say down, but I really mean up: this is Switzerland. We set off up the side of a steep quarry and my host, who is in her seventies, left me so far behind that I had some trouble once I reached the crest working out which side road she had darted down. She had a basket strapped to the back of her bike and rode upright in deep elegance.

    I would like to think this difference in speed was entirely down to our relative fitness but I suspect a small part of it was also blind tourism. It’s pretty here, pretty and industrial, and the blue and white sky this winter has been a long time coming. A Wedgwood sky, Monica Dickens called it. Or it may have been Agatha Christie.

    Yesterday evening I was prowling with my camera and heard a cheery “Hi!” from behind me as I was crossing the bridge. It was my host, bicycling to her tennis club. She waved and I waved back. Then I stood under the willows and watched her becoming a smaller and smaller pink speck between the green, seamed fields. The evening had just begun to gather and tiny insectivore bats were bombing above the water.

    H2O HoL briefe u zeitungen bouquet

  • switzerland

    My friend lives by a rapid, cold river in northern Switzerland; her little village is a lot more built-up than it was when I was last here. We walked by the river in silence and a kind of sadness for what has become of the landscape. You have to kind of relax your mind away from the glaring new terraces with ancient trees felled in front of them to afford the new tenants a view; and concentrate instead on the mountains behind, the green meadows, the velvet of moss in the crannies of birches. I was tired from the eleven-hour train journey from Berlin with too many suitcases full of books. We saw a tree felled by a beaver, its stump whittled to a pencil point, its inner flesh fresh and not yet yellowed. We saw a man turning handstands on a promontory, again and again, his feet falling in front of him and his white shirt dousing his head. We saw a lamb curled in the grass and chewing very slowly, its expression consumed with a kind of passionate ecstasy that made us laugh again over dinner, hours and hours later.

    On our walk my friend waved to a nearby hillside and said, You see: that’s Germany.