Victoria BC

Starting a new year in a new place. Sis and BIL have moved from Regina and are now living and working in Victoria, on the Pacific coast. As I write I can see the sun glinting off the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Olympic Mountains behind that. I think I'll miss Regina, but this seems a very pleasant place to live.

I wasn't intending to be here, actually, I should have been back home in Germany a week ago. But there's no work that particularly needs doing, and my mother asked me to accompany them on their annual pilgrimage away from the depths of the Torontonian winter. By the time I leave on Thursday I will have been here a full month, 19th to 18th. I will be so very happy to get home and be able to close a door behind myself. I love my family, but my gods I really need some time alone.

My father continues his slow decline. There are some days when his hands shake so badly he can hardly feed himself. His handwriting, once elegant, is as scratchy and wobbly as a four-year-old's. Some days he can walk without his cane, others he wobbles even with the cane and needs to take a rest after walking from bathroom to sofa. He needs help getting dressed — hell, he needs to be reminded where his clothes are kept.

Probably most distressing to him is that he's losing the ability to converse: his memory is so bad that he forgets what he was saying before he reaches the end of a sentence. This is in part because he tries to speak elegantly and properly but is losing his vocabulary, so he spends all his attention on recovering the right word and loses the thread of his thought.

Mom cannot face his condition, she flips between supportive sympathy and harsh cruel-to-be-kind determination. She will not consider any alternatives to staying home to take care of him, even as she bemoans that she has no life of her own because she is compelled to stay home and take care of him.

London, day six

Hot and humid despite cloud cover and occasional drizzling rain. Miserable weather, too cool for just a t-shirt but so muggy that I sweat like a pig. I'm not sorry to have left this weather behind, not that summers in Stuttgart are that much more comfortable. Debating whether to shower again or just go out dirty this evening; tending to "dirty."

Walked around town by myself today, bought five books and spent a few hours in the British Museum's marvellous Greek collection. The Parthenon Marbles (formerly the Duveen Elgin Marbles) are thought-provoking in a way that was never intended because never envisaged. On the one hand, they are clearly the relics of a magnificent work of art, one of the masterpieces of human creativity; on the other hand, what one actually sees is a handful of garbage: scraps and shards and broken pieces. I remember reading somewhere that the ancient Greeks would have been appalled by our reverence for the Venus de Milo (and by extension these remnants), because they abhorred incompleteness and imperfection and decay. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful sight, and the Duveen gallery is a quite exquisite work of architecture; I encourage any visitors to London to see the marbles (admission is free, by the way).

Dinner this evening with Oscar and BB from my trip in March. My parents are still out in the countryside with my father's cousin; we will meet on Thursday evening, then split up again Friday morning early.

We all went yesterday to the village where AH had his post office, to speak with "the girls" (his former staff, the new owners, who took over the shop) and see the tree and bench placed in the local park in his memory. A kind of closure was had, I think, which is good. My father did not get AH's wartime flight logs, of course, but he did at least get the book of condolence that was set out in the post office and signed by pretty well the whole community after AH died; and the girls gave my parents a box of silver plate items that were found in his attic. I'd never seen any of these things before, and I was often in his apartment while Pat was alive and they were still entertaining. Will any of us ever use these things? probably no more than AH and Pat did. Anyway. I have a teapot and cream-and-sugar set, and am wondering how to get them through customs — and more seriously, how to get them to Germany at all. Other things will go to Sis, and our parents have a second teapot and other stuff. The cash value is next to nothing, I would guess, being after all silver plate not sterling, but it is a kind of reminder.

The question of AH's expenses, and with it the settlement of his will, has finally been laid to rest. Between the sale of the goodwill and stock to "the girls," and calling in some debts that AH never got around to billing, the estate has finished up with a clean "black zero," i.e. nothing left to disburse, but no debts either. Given the way things looked at first sight, this has to be counted a good outcome. (The girls were scathing about NJ's handling of the settlement, by the way, so perhaps Dad's cousin was right. Ach, who knows, and who cares, and what would it matter? It's over.) Vale, AH.

On saving money, and matters arising

I phoned Lufthansa tonight to book my flights for my father's 80th birthday celebrations, and had to wait and wait and wait and wait (as one does). While waiting I idly surfed over to Lufthansa's website and started researching flights and prices there. The sales rep came on the phone as I was about halfway through the online process, so I carried on with that while talking to her. She and the computer both ended up with the same flights on the same days — but a 300 Euro price difference! Booking online was only 2/3 of the price she quoted me. So I explained the situation, thanked her politely for her efforts, and booked online. I can think of much better ways of spending the money than by giving it to Lufthansa. For instance, it's almost exactly the price of a 16Gb iPhone.

But anyway. That's the state of play. I am now booked for Toronto for early May. According to my mother, it'll be the first time that Sis and I have been in the house together with them since 1988.

I phoned my parents to let them know, and we talked of family and friends (as one does). Mom asked whether I had heard from Physically Distant Cousin's daughter lately? No, should I have done? Apparently yes: there are plans* in the brewing. As Mom tells the tale, PDC'sD's grandparents asked her at Christmas what she was planning to do after graduating from high school this coming summer, whether she had thought about university? "No way," she replied, "I'm going to go and live with Udge in Europe for a year, learn German and maybe French."

Ah. Okaaay.

Mom expected me to be contrite and apologetic at having lead her astray**, and also to be concerned about looking after this poor delicate flower (snorts) for a year, but I'm afraid I laughed delightedly. I think it's a marvellous idea and I support her fully. No idea how it'll work out, or even where I'll be living come September, but it will work out somehow. Good on yez, PDC'sD, more power to your elbow.

* Or at least: ideas and big talk.
** Educationally speaking, I hasten to clarify.

Tired meets Godzilla

Parents and their travelling companions, friends of twenty-seven years' standing, arrived yesterday. After tea with Sis, I settled the friends in to their hotel (only the finest will do!) and walked home. Spent today catching up on news and having a portrait photo made with Sis; soon dinner.

Sentences you wish you hadn't heard, part 37: "Mom, the cat just walked across the pie." True, alas; photos will be posted on Flickr when I get home. We covered over the footprints with whipped cream and ate it anyway.

But young Conan is adored and indulged nonetheless, to the extent that one finds oneself whispering because he's asleep on a nearby chair. There is a certain quantity of sibling rivalry between the dog, who was here first, and him; but on the whole they get on well. They play together, i.e. fight without drawing blood; despite the difference in size and weight it's nearly an even battle.

I've been considering my speech for a week, and shall now have to settle down and write the damned thing. It'll be short and bittersweet and hopefully win approval on both counts. We shall see.

Reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and enjoying it greatly. No spoilers about the new one please, it will be arriving with Niece tomorrow evening for me to read on Sunday.

In other news I love being here. I love the flat, empty landscape and the enormous so-pale-it's-nearly-white sky. I love speaking English. I love the small houses and colourful trees and quiet streets. I am considering the possibility of moving back to Canada.

In other, other news an amusing cartoon from xkcd which will appeal to SQL-geek moms everywhere.

Depressing

As I arrived at my apartment door this evening, Mrs. Neighbour opened her son's door (beside mine) and said, "Oh, Mr. Udge, I'm so worried about my son, he's in bed and he won't get up, I can't wake him up." Well, she's been wrong before, but the man has attempted suicide twice so I wasn't about to brush off her concerns. I put my coat and bags down in my hallway and followed her into his reeking apartment, where we found him asleep in bed. He seemed somewhat confused to see me in his bedroom, understandable really; I explained that his mother asked me to look in: Was he all right? No, he's caught a cold. Ah, well it's the weather isn't it, dangerous time of year; does he have vitamins and cold pills? Yes. OK, sorry to disturb, do say if I can be of assistance.

So we left him to go back to sleep, and returned to his dining room where the table had been set for Vespers (the German name for a late, light meal: bread and cheese and such). Mrs. N was still flustered and very uneasy, hadn't grasped what he had said about being sick and sleeping it off; she was still worried that he wouldn't come out to have dinner, and couldn't find the coffee pot: why wasn't it on the table? I got her to sit down and poured us both a glass of Fanta from the bottle that had been set out, and let her tell me several times how worried she was about him. Three times in a quarter-hour she expressed surprise that N wasn't at the table with us and started up to look for him; each time I reminded her gently that we'd just seen him, that he was sleeping off his cold.

After half an hour, as she was beginning to settle down, Mr. N came down to see them, expecting to eat dinner together as I infer that they usually do. He joined us in a round of Fanta and talked quite plainly about their lives and the minor Hell they inhabit. He's unable to walk any great distance; she's unable to be let out on her own, cannot navigate from their apartment on the third floor to N's on the second; N is a depressive alcoholic and is weakening physically, he too walks slowly and unsurely.

What will happen to them all? Who will care for whom? It's none of my business, except that it does affect me to see them in this way. I cannot just watch through the keyhole of my front door and pretend I'm not home. When I look at them (meaning Mr and Mrs N) I think of my parents, and hope that somebody would not turn away from them.

On self-censorship

Anyone who happened to stop by a few minutes ago will have seen a different post in this position, which I've taken down for the time being.

Although I post here pseudonymously, my identity is known to several friends—and to my sister and niece. As I re-read the now missing post, it occurred to me that what I wrote about was not my business alone but the story of our family, and that I might be spilling beans that were not mine to be spilled.

My mother (who happens to be my sister's mother, too, to avoid confusing anybody) has the habit of keeping things to herself, of suppressing news that she thinks might disturb us, e.g. the three-week delay between my father's stroke and her informing us that it had happened. My sister jokes that she always insists on speaking to him when she phones home, in case he'd died and Mom was keeping it quiet.

Moving rapidly along as I think we should, I've been in Second Life with M2 a few times now, and am beginning to see the point of it: it's like online chat with pictures. We tend to meet up in favourite places, and just stand around and "talk" for an hour or two. As we were discussing architecture last time, she took me to one of her favourites: a tree-house on the scale of a baobab, with hot tub and balconies and a dance floor. The latter are fairly common in 2L: you both click on the "let's dance" buttons, and the sim takes over your avatars to make them dance together. I found it quite amusing to watch us (note the pronoun).

And finally: L'shanah tovah tikateivu to my Jewish readers. Bless you, and the rest of us too.

On loss

I was thinking about memory and feelings after writing in yesterday's post about my father not reading the dictionary after it broke. Many of the images of my early childhood are dubious to me, because I'm not certain whether they are true memories or internalizations of stories that my parents told or of photos that I saw. The earliest mental-image-that-might-be-a-memory is of myself lying on a bedspread in pale sunlight with a stuffed toy dog, life-sized, as large as myself, beside me; my mother is near the bed, between the light and myself. If this were a genuine memory, it would be from when I was not yet one year old. Can this be true?

[The penny drops: in those years we lived in a basement apartment. Does that explain why I always felt comfortable in the guest bedroom in my parents' house, which was in the basement and had pale light?]

The earliest MITMBAM that I know to be a true memory, is of loss. Paradoxically, this is a memory that I myself had always believed to be an internalized story.

My father told the tale of losing his penknife (in his day there were no pencil-sharpeners in classrooms, every schoolboy carried his own little pocketknife to sharpen his pencil, which is why it was called a "penknife." Don't ask). One fateful day, as he was industriously carving his name into the wooden railing of the Woolwich ferry (across the Thames), somebody nudged his elbow. He dropped the knife which went overboard, and he watched helplessly as it fell into the river and was lost forever. He was nine years old.

I was talking about memories with my parents in September, and described how I remembered him telling this tale and how intensely it moved me, how vividly I shared his pain. My parents furrowed their brows and looked at each other, and my mother gently said, "Udge, that happened to you." And then she told the tale:

When Sis was born, we lived in a city divided by a river: downtown on the west, university (and hence university residences, and hence our home) on the east; we would cross the river fairly regularly to go shopping and suchlike. The bridge's railings were in concrete worked with lozenge-shaped vertical holes (like very large, clumsily thick wrought-iron railings). I had a stick, a particular stick, which for weeks had accompanied us on all our excursions; with this stick I would whack the posts of the railing as we walked past them. One fateful day, as we were crossing the river and I was whacking the railings, the stick somehow got caught between the posts or rebounded from a post. I lost hold of the stick which went through the gap, and I watched helplessly as it fell into the river and was lost forever. I was three years old.

And of course having heard that, the strange details of my image of the scene (when I thought it my father's story) now make sense: ships don't have concrete railings; a nine year old is tall enough to see over the handrail, he does not stand below it; the railing on a river ferry is not a hundred feet above the waterline. (Not that I had previously considered these details to be in any way odd, I knew that they were there but didn't think about what they meant.)

And that in turn makes sense of some of my habits of thought and feeling: better not to have something than to risk that it might one day be lost.

Reading list for February 2007

Currently reading
St. Augustine, Confessions
Joseph Roth, Hiob

Recently read
Paul Auster, The New York trilogy
Alan Bennett, Vater, Vater, lichterloh
  ditto, Die Lady im Lieferwagen
  ditto, Cosi fan tutti

Much to do with Mr. Bennett this month, three very short novels bundled together with assorted essays and short stories. Wonderful stuff about life and learning to live with disappointment. One laughs a lot when reading Bennett, but he does not write comedy.

I'm uncertain where to put Paul Auster, other than in the category of "overrated." He spends so much time being clever that he forgets to tell a proper tale. I conclude that "Timbuktoo" and "Auggie March's Christmas Story" (both of which I loved) were flukes.

Reading St. Augustine is an odd experience. He writes well and with insight about himself and his times, and then jumps to page-length hymns of praise to the goodness of God which are nearly as vapid as the mock-sermon in Monty Python's The meaning of life. Frankly, after reading the first few of these I've started skipping them. It's odd that one who writes so well could be so dismissive of reading and writing, which he refers to as "meretricious" and "trivial" and "worthless." I am aware of a growing unease as I read into the book, I do not trust him. This reminds me of a character from my student days, the husband of the manageress of the catering service who was a lay preacher. We had many interesting discussions of life and the search for meaning while he was behind the bar. I remember once finding him in a foul mood: angry, betrayed, disillusioned. He had been reading the Confessions and didn't believe them: "He lied! That cannot be how it happened. St. Augustine lied!" I can see what he meant.

While writing that paragraph I had a start: the thesaurus fell off the shelf and landed with a loud BANG on the floor. The crash transported me back nearly forty years in an instant, to the day that the dictionary broke. This was a big, thick, heavy single-volume dictionary, a foot tall and nearly as broad and too thick to be held by the spine. It was a professional word-wrangler's tool, a treat for word-lovers that included the words' etymologies and in many cases an extensive "see also" section of related or opposite words. My father was very fond of this book, he would look up a word and then spend half an hour following the connections (it's odd that he hasn't taken to the Internet, which is nothing but words and connections; perhaps he has the professional's disdain for amateur writing). On that fateful day, my mother distractedly, unattentively put the book down on the edge of the dining-room table, half supported and half in thin air; and of course somebody then nudged the table; and of course the dictionary fell. When a book that big falls, damage is done: the spine broke and the cover was wrenched away from the threaded backing. Dad was furious, I honestly thought that he was going to hit her. He patched the book together with duct tape. It was perfectly serviceable, but clearly the joy was gone because he seldom spent half-hours reading it after that. I'd forgotten the episode. Memories carry the full emotional load of the instant of their creation, when my thesaurus fell I experienced again the fear, surprise and confusion of that moment.

Next month's list
Last month's list

Awake, and other matters

Bah.

I could say "and that's all I have to say about that" because the first word sums up the experience, but on the other hand what else have I to do until the hot chocolate is ready? I'd been dreaming about my parents, being on holiday with them in a Manhattan turned third-world village; the dream's turning sour woke me.

One of these days I must gather my courage and tell you about my father. Why not now, you ask? All right, I will. I can always just delete this post.

(The regular reader from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon should please stop reading now! Talk to the regular reader in Regina before continuing.)

My father is losing his memory (that's what that series of posts in the Autumn was about). He tells the same tale several times; asks a question twice within an hour; comes into the kitchen to read us an unusual name out of the obituaries, wondering where he's heard it before, not remembering that he read the same obituary to us that morning. If he gets separated from my mother downtown, he will start walking off in a random direction. Mom chases breathlessly after him, when she catches up he blithely says "I'd have come back"—but neither she nor I believe that he would then know from whence he started.

I am horrified by his condition, what it implies for him and for my mother who must cope with this. He has turned very pedantic and exacting, querying every statement and challenging every statistic. Nobody is allowed to say "nobody is allowed"—"what, not anyone at all? who does the forbidding?" I thought at first that he was just getting vicious in his old age, as dogs do, but I think that it's related to the memory loss. He really doesn't know, he really is uncertain whether what we are saying is factual truth or poetic license, and his challenge is meant to reassure himself that he has interpreted it correctly.

Now fast-forward to Monday morning (this is the "more, very different" that I teased you with then). Lying in bed I heard a key scratching at my door and thought, "Mrs. Neighbour is on the wrong floor again," she has mistaken my door for her own at least once a year for the last twelve years; since I was still in bed, I ignored it. A half-hour later, dressed but not yet breakfasted, I heard tears and lamentations coming from the staircase: Mrs. N was standing at the elevator crying—wailing—as a new neighbour from upstairs tried to discover what was wrong. I went out and spoke to them, she explained: "I can't find my son's apartment! I don't know where he is, my keys won't open any of these doors. I want to go home but I don't know where it is." She had been up and down the whole building, trying every door, but (I infer) had got muddled with the keyring and had tried her key in Neighbour's door and then his key in her own.

I took her up to her own apartment, and opened the door with her key. She got excited and barged past me into her own apartment, calling "N, are you here?" She went into her own bedroom, waking her husband of nearly sixty years, and asked him "Are you N?" (In fairness, it was quite dark and she did think that she was in N's apartment.) Mr. N got up, I explained the situation to him with some difficulty (he thought that I wanted to get into N's apartment), then he explained to me that Mrs. N has senile dementia and is going rapidly downhill. Poor Mrs. N, what a terrible illness; I can't get the image of her standing before her son's door and not knowing where he lives out of my mind. Mr. N can hardly walk and N is a depressive alcoholic; Mrs. N has taken care of them both. Which of them will now take care of whom?

Fast-forward again to this evening (Thursday) and an e-mail from my mother, saying that Dad had a small stroke three weeks ago (!) Full results of the tests are due in two weeks, but he is apparently in good shape other than being blind in one eye having some pain and difficulty reading (my hysterical over-interpretation, sorry).

This turns me into a six-year-old: I don't want any of this to be true, I want all of these problems just to go away.

You work hard all your life...

My cousin NJ, son of the late BJ, is executor of AH's will and has reported on its contents. Twenty percent of the estate goes to NJ, and the rest to the late BJ—in other words, to the greedy, grasping, manipulative bitch who is BJ's widow. There was no mention of my father nor even of BJ's other child in the will. And with that the story ends, goodbye flight logs. (It would have been hard enough to take possession of them had we been there.)

Except that the story doesn't end there.

My father wrote an eulogy which will be read by his cousin (who, by the way, tried to get my parents to engage a lawyer to challenge NJ's handling of the estate. Pah) at the funeral on Thursday, and he sent me a copy. He mentions playing in the street with friends when AH came home one day from work, and gave them a few pennies—a fortune then, of course, in a child's eyes—to buy sweets, and said that this was typical of the man. True enough, that is how I knew him: generous to a fault.

Well, that happened in 1936. AH was born in 1922. We count on our fingers and discover that AH was a "working man" at age fourteen if not earlier. (Given the methods of the English school system at the time, he probably left at age twelve.)

AH worked at least six days a week for at least seventy years.

Where did it get him? How large was the fortune that AH accumulated in those seventy years of daily toil?

In all probability he has left a bankrupt estate. Certain is that he owned no property, the shops and their residence were rented (which I never knew); that his bank accounts were practically empty (he borrowed £2,000 from my parents a few months back); and that he owed £10,000 in back rent. He left two businesses (small local shops) which in theory could be sold, if one could find a buyer, and an enormous collection of jazz LP's in near-mint condition. The accountant is still working on the details, but the general picture is clear and grim.

Poor AH. First Pat died before they had taken even one of the retirement trips they planned, then ... well, we shall never really know what happened then. My presumption is that he discovered that selling the businesses would not cover his retirement costs, and so was trapped into continuing to get up at 4am seven days a week to sort newspapers.

Which is, of course, just my interpretation; and I haven't seen him since about 1998 so I can't really speak for his state of mind. I cannot believe that anyone who owes that amount of money, and lives with that amount of uncertainty, can be happy and content (though I readily believe that people who owe many millions sleep quite well at night). I think that I would be miserably unhappy were I in that position (which God forbid!), and it saddens me beyond words to remember him in his mid-fifties, throwing a stick for the dogs to chase in Bushey Park or shaking hands with the musicians in Ronnie Scott's, and then to consider how his life ended.

Late (updated)

It's nearly midnight, and I am still sitting at the computers (the plural is intentional, three of them are running). The Christmas holiday knocked me out of several routines that had been good, useful and enjoyable: blogging, meditating, getting up early and its corollary, going to bed early. I haven't been to bed before 2am since the 25th, and I am beginning to suspect that my state of general run-down-ness and unease is perhaps related to lack of sleep. Hey, there's a clever thought. Here's a first New Year's Resolution: I shall turn off the damned computers and go to bed no later than 10:30.

I feel like I've eaten nothing but cakes and fast food for weeks. Here's a second New Year's Resolution: I shall buy neither chocolates, cakes, cookies nor pastries for myself at home in 2007 (though I will eat same if offered to me, a good guest takes what is given), instead of this I shall eat healthy or at least less-unhealthy stuff: real food, yoghurt, fruit.

(The soundtrack to this post is a CD that I picked up purely because of its unusual packaging, Takk by Sigur Rós. It's very odd, hauntingly beautiful; although it clearly belongs in the general category of "intelligent pop songs," the best point of comparison that I can find is to Gorecki's Third Symphony which I blogged about in July. If you want a sample, click on the link above (the website gives a good indication of the graphic style of the CD) then click on "sirkus" to view the video of the second song "Glósóli." You should definitely not buy this on my recommendation, do listen to it first. If you click on the "eighteen seconds before sunrise" link at the bottom of their website, it takes you to an English-language band site with samples and several full-length MP3 tracks to download, or you can find them in the iTunes music shop.)

The year is nearly over, the neighbourhood kids are practicing setting off fireworks (by throwing them out of their X-th floor windows onto the sidewalk, which is every bit as dangerous and anti-social as it sounds). It's been a piss-poor year financially, but a great one in terms of satisfactions and happinesses experienced. The opera in Toronto is the only thing that comes to mind, oddly enough, but my general impression is that I was happy this year. Here's a third New Year's Resolution: to earn 50% more than in 2006, and to spend every penny of the increase on useful and worthwhile things like visiting friends old and new.

[Updated Another thing that made me very happy this year was giving people presents out of the blue, simply because I wanted to. Here's a fourth New Year's Resolution: to give more OutOfTheBlue presents.]

2007 is going to be busy in any case. I have three significant events confirmed or in planning: the opera in New York in July and my parents' 50th wedding anniversary in Saskatchewan in October, and the Venice Biennale between them (Art this time). The July trip will begin in mid-June with my nephew's high school graduation, then visiting friends in New England (any readers who wish to be visited are welcome to send me an e-mail giving details) in early July before the opera. I'll then return here, work for three months (minus a week in Venice) and then fly back for a week. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that that sounds somehow absurd and excessive? I just don't know what else to do about those three months, I can't just stay in Canada - or could I? What if I used that time to write an English-language version of the database and find the first few customers, that would be a useful and worthwhile way to spend my time.

Interesting, very interesting. It would mean missing the Biennale, of course.

And I do want to attend one of Savtadotty's famous Friday soup dinners and meet some blogging buddies (you know who you are). I had been seriously preparing to visit Israel this summer, before the war got in the way. I guess that will have to happen sometime in Spring, before the first trip to Canada.

In other news my mother recovers apace. They had walked for an hour the day that I called to talk about my uncle's funeral (which none of us will attend), and are planning a month in Arizona in late winter/early Spring.

Christmas in the Black Forest

foggyValley_detail
Originally uploaded by udge.

Imagine, dear Reader, that this were the view from your living-room this Christmas. Not bad, eh? G's parents are lucky to live in a very beautiful area. It's quite high, 720 metres above sea level, therefore colder than Stuttgart and often windy; this time there was a constant and slow wind, very humid, which built up ribbons of frost along the upwind sides of basically everything. The newest photos on Flickr were taken on a walk after Christmas lunch, it was about 3° below zero, but the humidity made it quite unpleasant to be out. There was no snow at all. Only G's brother and I were brave and/or foolish enough to go out, the others lay about tenderly prodding their full bellies and planning the next meal.

Eating too much and drinking far too much is a truly international aspect of the way Christmas is celebrated. We ate five times between Monday noon and Tuesday mid-morning, then went to U's parents and ate thrice more on Tuesday. Eight meals in thirty-four hours. Not to forget the snacks, of course: the bowls of cookies and biscuits and chocolatey things that appeared whenever we sat elsewhere than at the dining table. I feel absolutely ill from all the sugary confectionery, my nerves are jingling from the endless cups of strong coffee. G's and U's parents would fit right in with my uncles and aunts in Saskatchewan (leaving aside the language problem).

In other news my uncle AH, my father's elder and last remaining brother, has died. He was 84, and until this year was in fine health (considering his age, weight and habits). He was a good man, I liked him well. He was generous with his time and money, whenever we met (the family when we were kids, myself when I lived in London) he would always ensure that the bill came to him. I spent many weekends with them when I was a student, we would take the dogs to Bushey Park on Sunday mornings for a run, and talk about history and the meaning of life. He was a world-famous jazz fan, known in the clubs of New York and Paris, personally acquainted with Duke Ellington; when the Duke's sister visited London, she stayed with AH and his wife Pat (they had no children). Like many Englishmen, he would volunteer the most intimate information about himself, but would deflect or ignore a direct question; conversation was always on his terms and at his choice of topic.

AH worked every day until he went into hospital this Spring for a minor ailment, from which treatment he didn't recover; he was readmitted in the Autumn and died in hospital. I am dreading calling my parents this evening; both for fear of how this setback will affect my father's condition—which is a post that I've been putting off since this summer—and, quite selfishly, in case they should ask me to represent them at the funeral and the reading of the will.

There's a bitter episode of family history behind this. My father's middle brother's widow is a greedy, grasping, manipulative bitch (if I may speak freely) and always was. She's also a babbing idiot, chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter chatter and never a scrap more content than that. God knows how or why BJ, who was an educated and intelligent man, put up with her. Anyway. She got—took—all of our grandmother's furniture and photos, and has refused to let anyone in the family look at them since; my father is certain that the same will happen with AH's things. He (my father) has often said that he would like to have AH's wartime diaries and flight logs (he was in the Fleet Air Arm, flying Swordfish from aircraft carriers in the Atlantic); well, if Mrs. BJ knew that, she would claim them straight off—and probably throw them in the garbage.

I dread being asked to intervene in this grim and bloody business, one of the many pleasures of leaving London was the thought of never seeing Mrs. BJ again; but if I am asked I will of course go. We shall see.

Poor AH. Pat and the dogs will be waiting, she'll have just put the kettle on for tea.

Regina

The cold and rain have caught up with me, after a single day of relatively good weather. There will be very few photos taken during this holiday, I fear.

I had forgotten what clever, interesting people my sister and her family are: the speed of conversation, the balletic weave of jibe and retort, are like a Billy Wilder movie come to life. It's fascinating to observe, and dizzying to take part in, their conversations after such a long time away. I find myself to have slowed down, to have adopted the Germanic zeal for precision at the cost of the easy fluency that we once shared.

Their computer (one of those Windows things) died last week, so the first thing we discussed on my arrival was what kind of Mac they should buy. We phoned around yesterday morning, and after some difficulty found the only Mac Mini available in the city - which we promptly bought yesterday afternoon. I have been fine-tuning it and teaching them the basics of Macism since then. The question of salvaging their data from the wreckage of the Winbox is still open, of particular interest are the 4.5 gigabytes of music files that nobody remembers (or admits to) downloading.

Three days until the opera starts! I'm very excited. There have been some last-minute changes in the cast due to illness (and politics, it is whispered) but should still be quite good indeed.

In other news during my nearly three-hour stopover in Frankfurt on the way here, I signed up for a pilot project run by the German Bundesgrenzschutz (border police), testing automatic passport control by iris recognition. It was impressively simple and efficient: sign the release forms, present my computer-readable passport, stand in front of the camera, stand in front of a test system to confirm that it could recognize me. Finding the ofice where this was done took twice as long as the actual sign-up. It worked well, too: I walked from there to the passport control, ignored the three hundred people waiting to be checked by a human and laid my passport on the checking console. The first set of doors opened, I stood in front of the camera which flashed and beeped, and the second set of doors opened. Took about twenty seconds. What's not to like?

Mind you, I would not have been so willling to stand in front of an American version of this system. I am willing to trust the German = European security apparatus and its political masters; I have serious doubts about the CIA/FBI/NSA and actively distrust their political masters.

On memory and truth

Another four-day weekend, the last of the year. Today is Fronleichnam aka Corpus Christi. I slept in this morning until after 10am, by which time it was already 28° and very humid, so I shall stay indoors until the cool of the evening. [Updated at 18:06] there might not be any cool this evening: it clouded over and is now raining, in that slow, sparse and very deliberate way of summer rains after a too-long spell of heat and humidity: big, fat, slowly-moving, somehow oily-feeling drops.

There is a smell of honey on the air today, very odd; until I worked out that it is probably the smell of clover blooming somewhere for the first time this year. Perhaps I shall go looking sniffing for it this evening.

Dale posted a moving story on Tuesday about ... well, read it and see (please); and read the comments too, they are also very interesting. I have three times now started to write a response to that post, about my childhood, which I believe to have been eventless and happy; but have three times been stopped by doubts and half-memories. What do I really remember, and what is a story that I've heard or invented?

More to the point: are my memories, these stories, "true" in the sense that others would acknowledge them to be correct? Each sibling grows up in a different household, my sister's account would be substantially different from mine.

My favourite cousin and I talk often about this, about the way her father was perceived within and without the family; and also about our grandfather. My mother says that our grandfather was a saint, calm and peaceful and gentle. FC's mother (his daughter-in-law) says that he beat our grandmother and terrorized his children. Whose version is true?*

FC's father is another case in point: I cannot remember him other than happy, optimistic, friendly; their house was always full of visitors, of laughter and music and good food. When he was buried, on a day so cold that the gravediggers needed to drill holes and plant explosives to open a grave, four hundred people stood in the Prairie wind for his funeral. Think about that for a moment, you dwellers in warm lands: how long would you stand for whom at -50°C? So we may infer that he was well-liked and respected in the community; and a farming community does not bestow its respect lightly.

Yet FC says the same of him that her mother said of our grandfather: he beat his kids and their mother, was vindictive and cruel and - worst of all, I feel - inconsistent: his favour was as fickle as Queen Elizabeth's, and what was laughed off on Tuesday might be punishable on the weekend.

Yet again, her brother, the youngest child, saw nothing of this. His description is closer to mine: he remembers a happy and gentle man who liked to sing. (In fairness I haven't spoken with him nearly as often or as openly as with FC.)

Can this be the same man?

Perhaps what we think of as "character" is just what we believe to be the motivation underlying the behaviour we observe.

Perhaps there is no such thing as a single, fixed, definite and stable identity, and psychology is barking up the wrong dead horse.

Perhaps we are all simultaneously Mother Theresa and Genghis Khan, always choosing to express just one part of ourselves and denying the others; not unlike a father picking favourites among his children.

(On the other hand, this is mostly harmless, we aren't talking about Belgium. How many things are wrong with that picture?)



* I know whom I most believe: my mother. FC's mother is a (familyname), they have been for generations a hissing and a byword in the community, and still are. If your plough goes missing overnight, you'll find it in (familyname)'s field; if there's a drunken brawl in the tavern, you'll find a (familyname) in the thick of it.