Interlude the second

I'm not finished with Israel yet, there is at least one more post in the works. In the meantime, I've been re-reading Evelyn Waugh's marvellous Brideshead Revisited. This book has gone through a complete cycle of affections with me: when I first discovered this novel as a student in England, I loved it and re-read it many times. For some reason, probably a slowly arising general discomfort over Waugh's often caustic wit, it drifted out of favour for a few years. I tried again in the early Eighties, and disliked it: it seemed dated and contrived, full of unloveable characters and improbable incidents. I put the book down after about fifty pages and left it for two decades.

Then I moved to Germany, and it was out of reach and forgotten until a friend brought me a box of my books (one of many from an attic in East London, where the rest hopefully still remain), which proved to contain my copy of Brideshead. I remembered my vague distaste and didn't pick it up for years, until I returned from Israel last week. I'm enjoying it again, and I think I know why.

When I first read the book, I associated with Charles Ryder, the narrator and not-exactly-hero as we met him in the initial pages: I too was freshly arrived at University, feeling exhilarated and also vaguely out of place, excited by the people I was meeting and the unknown worlds opening up to me. When I read it again in the mid-Eighties, there was no character of my then-current age and station to identify with, except perhaps the prig and bigot Brideshead himself. Reading it again now, thirty years on, I can again associate myself with Ryder, this time with the older, wiser and sadder narrator. Or perhaps I was just unfair to it the second time around.

Anyway, here's where I am right now, at a paragraph that brought a lump to my throat and a certain moisture to my eyes. (WARNING: This is a pretty serious spoiler. Those who have not yet read the book should stop reading now.)

"Poor Sebastian!" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half-in, half-out of the community, a familiar figure pottering around with his broom and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite of the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he'll disappear every month or so for two or three days, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, "Old Sebastian's on the bottle again," and then he'll come back, dishevelled and shamefaced, and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as a guide whenever they have an English-speaking visitor, and he will be completely charming so that before they go, they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connexions at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Home in their student days, and remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

Indeed.

For certain values of "fine"

I'm here, still, and much better than I was a fortnight ago. The week after that last post was pretty tough, I had no energy and less appetite, but I am now back in gear. Working, reading, playing about in Second Life: the usual.

Talking with a friend in SL recently brought back a knot of memories of schooldays.

Me: I had no idea. I was clumsy as an ox, and shy, and afraid of everything that I didn't know.
She nods.
Me: I don't think I really believed in learning then.
She nods. "In learning by trial and error, you mean?"
Me: In being able to learn at all, at least about things in the physical world.
She: Oh, I see.
Me: My belief was that everyone but me already knew everything about sports and activity.
She snorts lightly. "Yeah"
Me: And so I was not at all surprised when phys ed class did not teach football but simply sent us out to practice it, because of course everyone already knew! I took that for granted.
She nods. "I hated playing it..cause everyone else knew how."
Me: You too?
She: And..I couldn't catch or throw. I could tackle far better than my little body should've been able too...but we always played touch! Oh yes. I was pretty hopeless at "sports" despite being a died in the wool tomboy.
Me: Huh. I remember what as called "swimming lessons" one winter, maybe that was still in primary school...
She nods.
Me: I was terrified of the lessons (as soon as they were announced) because it was obvious to me that I was going to drown, because I knew that they would not actually teach swimming. I knew that they would just throw us all into the pool and everyone else would swim while I drowned.
She nods.
Me: I was so scared of this, so miserable, that I finally broke down and told my mother. Begged her to write a note excusing me from the lessons. Oh I know, that was during grade 3, before I got my glasses.
She nods.
Me: She did write a note, not excusing me but explaining my fears and my not knowing how to swim. And so I went to the lessons, and walked across the pool bottom with my hands above my head in diving posture, but bent over parallel to the water (if you see what I mean). I never did get comfortable enough to take my feet off the bottom.
She nods, smiling.
Me: But somehow during the summer after that, I did learn. Probably my mother taught me in the local pool. I remember meeting Annie Something in the pool that summer, I was doing a very splashy and inefficient dogpaddle, bent nearly into a ring, back of my head nearly touching my arse, to keep my mouth and nose out of the water -- but nonetheless in the water and moving more or less under control.
She smiles at the picture.
Me: And Annie, who had been in the so-called "lessons" with me, said "Udge, you learned to swim!"
She grins.
Udge smiles and chokes back a tear.
She strokes your head, feeling the silky fineness of your very short hair. Smiles at you, bent over the keyboard.
Me: That was my approach to everything and anything physical. I knew that I was the only one who didn't already know how. I knew that I would be mocked and humiliated for my inability.
She nods, listening.
Me: I remember Barb Realname sitting on the bench in gym one day, watching someone and myself stumbling about trying to hit a badminton bird to each other, she said "It's not Shakespeare, is it Udge?" And it suddenly occurs to me just now to wonder whether that was not meant kindly, meant to wake me up.
She sucks in a breath.
Me: Perhaps she wanted to tell me that we were all only human, that we all had a weak spot or two.
She hugs you tight.
Me: Perhaps I had been overcompensating by being obnoxious in English class.
She: You were NOT obnoxious..you were engaged.
Me: Oh no, I know that I was pretty obnoxious! I was so unsure of myself that I pretended to be totally sure of myself.
She listens. "Were you? or were you interested in Shakespeare? You might have also felt pretty proud of yourself for being interested in something esoteric..."
Me: I am afraid that I would have mocked the kids who couldn't parse a play, as harshly as they mocked those who couldn't catch a thrown ball.
She nods, thinking...mmm.
She kisses the top of your head and grins.
She: Love you anyway, Udge.
Me: Awww, thank you.

Nothing compares 2 U

If people still know the-artist-once-again-known-as Prince in a hundred years, this song will be among the reasons why. The cover version by Sinéad O'Connor shuffled up from the depths onto my iPod today and reminded me in a rush of emotion of the first time I heard it.

In the winter of 1990 I was working at a Great Big Computer Company in Sprawlville, commuting to and from London every day — except when train strikes or boozing with the lads prohibited this. On one such occasion, I camped at Smiler's house after a particularly intense beer-and-curry session. It had been a very late night and I had had far too much to drink, so I was dog-tired and still half-drunk as we got into his car to drive to work the next day. Smiler pulled up at a tobacconist and went inside to get his fix. As he closed the car door, this song came on the radio.

It was the first time I'd heard it, and in my weakened condition the song — and Sinéad's delivery — just devastated me. By the time he returned the tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was literally struck dumb. I could not have spoken a word to save my life.

Smiler earned big karma points and my undying respect and gratitude for what happened next: He saw nothing, heard nothing and said nothing, neither then nor ever after. He even stopped for gas on the way to the office (though the tank was three-quarters full) to give me a few more minutes to pull myself together.

This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but seen within the yobbish cultural ideal of The Lad which reigned in England at the time it was an act of singular generosity and kindness, a demonstration of true greatness of spirit. English humour has always been based on cruelty and insult, and within that culture reputation and popularity were held to be zero-sum games: I can only improve my standing with the Lads by damaging yours. He could have shot up in the pecking order by cutting me off at the knees that day, and others of my so-called friends would have done so without hesitation. "Well, it's jus' a larf, innit? Can't you take a joke?"

Shabbat shalom, my dears; and wherever you are, Smiler: thank you.

Not synaesthesia

Being a rumination on memory, human nature and the collecting of junk

Acting on a strange impulse I bought a incense-stick-holder-falling-ash-tray thingy and some sticks of Frankincense in the Weihnachtsmarkt here last Christmas, and incensing the apartment has become something of a weekend almost-ritual. (I was possibly inspired by seeing and smelling Sis do it in her home in October.)

It's very difficult to judge how something will smell while burning from the way it smells in a closed packet, and frankincense is not quite the smell I was after. But how to describe a smell so that someone else, for instance the friendly neighbourhood hippie-goods emporium, might point me in the right direction? It occurred to me to try to identify what frankincense smells like to me, as a step to defining what the as-yet-unknown other smell I had in mind might be.

Frankincense has a somewhat chilly smell; it smells of grey and still and quiet, of soft voices in large rooms, of ancient wood stained dark by many hands, of great age.

I was somewhat surprised to come up with this description and immediately thought of synaesthesia, where impulses in one sense trigger other senses, but realized recently that it is actually just the surfacing of a complex of memories. These associations are my impressions of the churches we visited in England and Europe when I was a child, where frankincense was burned, and which actually were chilly, grey, still, quiet and very large.

I don't know whether I shall bother to find a different kind of incense now; having identified the source of my associations I like the smell much better.

Lioness called me today after leaving a comment on the last post, to say that I should see this as a positive event: the chance to make a new start. I think she's right, this is the ideal impulse and situation for a complete change. I have to admit that working at home has not worked for me, I don't have the discipline to maintain a clean and efficient environment when only I ever see it, and the quality and quantity of my work both decreased as the squalor of my surroundings increased. I will move my office out to Rose Street, and I will get a smaller apartment, and I will keep that one clean and well-lighted. And I will get the post regularly, and I will actually open letters and bills promptly, and read them, and pay them.

I realize that I have been living a deeply strange life for the last year or so, behaving quite bizarrely in certain regards. This behaviour is what has caused all of my current problems opportunities. It's time to change, and life has presented me with the chance to do so.

As a first step, I have already been cleaning up and throwing away boxes of trash, mostly paper: three wine-bottle cartons full of paper from the surface of my desk alone! Lioness asked at one point how it would feel to have a perfectly clean and orderly apartment at my fiftieth birthday, and I nearly cried. It would be the best present anyone could give me. And just think: it is within my power to give.

(And as a second step, I spent only one hour in SL this morning, and shall go to bed after posting this without logging in there again.)

I did indeed buy a KVM adaptor (a kind of Y-switch, it lets you connect two computers to the same keyboard, monitor and mouse rather than filling your desk with duplicated items) as I mentioned yesterday. Took it back to the office, and discovered a serious problem, a show-stopper: The KVM adaptor and my Mac Mini both have DVI connectors, whereas the older monitor in question has an ADC connector. Can't attach it to the KVM! What to do, what to do? Went online and discovered that I could buy an ADC-to-DVI converter for 100 Euros—or a brand-new 22 inch widescreen TFT monitor for 250 Euros. I looked at the older computer (i.e. G and U's office computer that sits in my space) and discovered that it has both DVI and ADC ports. Aha!

So I bought the 22 inch etc, and installed it in the office this afternoon. It works perfectly, of course: plug it in—at one remove, through the KVM—and the Mac just automatically throws the right signal at it. No drivers to install or update, no settings to configure: genuine real-world plug-and-play compatibility. I am saddened to say that it's not even that much uglier than the Apple monitors—from the front; the rear view is a miserably bodged disaster, but the user never sees that.

On the loveliness of brown-eyed blondes

Being a barely-disguised "trivia" post.

Aren't they just, though? And that from a lifelong admirer of brunettes and redheads. There was something in the air today that made everyone look about 37% more beautiful than on an average day, or perhaps it just warped my judgement.

Today was wonderfully springlike, with bright sun and blue skies and sparkly-clean air in the city; it felt like Spring already even though the temperature had taken a sharp drop to just-above-freezing. I walked downtown marvelling at how many beautiful women were on the streets and in the parks and squares and gardens, then went to the new office to do some system-manager stuff.

Because finally, after (checks back in the blog, all the way to September for gods' sake) twenty-two weeks' delay—yes, 22 weeks—and gods know how many bitter and twisted and furious and raging and tearful and ultimately resigned letters and phone calls; finally, I say, the office has a connection to the Internets. I can recommend German readers to have nothing to do with either T-Online or Strato, the one is as incompetent and mendacious as the other. Bah and humbug.

The Münstermeister was in town on Wednesday evening, on his way to the airport after a series of meetings in the vicinity, so we met at the airport bar to discuss the state of the world over a beer, and I stayed on for another after his flight.

I do like airports at night, once the crowds have thinned out; there is something very pleasing to me in the atmosphere of places built for bustling crowds when there's nobody around. Hospitals and train stations and grand hotels late at night have something of the same spirit, a sense that a great deal of haste and hustle and activity has withdrawn like the tide, leaving us stragglers the run—nay: the stroll—of a suddenly larger and calmer space. There is a strange feeling of peace and community at such times, I find; an serendipitous incursion of dolce far niente into places dedicated to busy-ness.

My love of riding the Greyhound bus through small towns in the dead of night is related to this somehow, to the feeling of being in the eye of a hurricane, a bubble of calm and peace, looking out at a few little lights marking the spots where someone else is still awake. As a student in London, I would often fly last-minute or standby to New York at Christmas-time, arriving in the afternoon and spending the day in Mannahatta, and then taking the midnight 'Hound to Toronto. There were two routes that the bus might follow, either north through Albany or west through Scranton, and I could never figure out why one was taken instead of the other. I preferred the Scranton route because it went through Ithaca NY, surely one of the world's nicest small towns. We would get to the bus station there at around 3 a.m., where two or three cars would be waiting in the snow with their lights on and their motors running, and two or three passengers would get out to be hugged and kissed and thumped on the back. I would be one of the few passengers still awake at that time, delighting in the crisp, cold air that came in through the open door as we waited, watching the reunions and imaging their relationships and conversations. The cars would drive away, the bus driver would climb back on board and close the door, and we would roll on towards the morning.

I shall write about this again, methinks.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. I hope you enjoy the weekend.

Dull

Frost on the grass in the shadows this morning as I walked into town under a clear blue sky for my cappuccino; looking uphill towards the southern rim of the valley, there was snow on the shady side of the taller roofs. Winter is here. Still no snow, though.

Headache developed in the course of the afternoon, heralding a change in the weather. Perhaps it will snow tonight.

Dropped in on G and U for a post-mortem on the competitions, and gave young Ralph his midafternoon bottle. U was quite surprised that he calmed down instantly in my arms and went to sleep there after eating. Not a surprise to me: that's how it has always been: large dogs and small children always love me. I asked U: when children duck down to wave under the frosted-glass panel of the office's streetfront window, which of us are they waving at? She had to agree.

Washing up the mountain of dirty dishes that had accumulated in my kitchen (after washing up a similar mountain that had accumulated in the office), I discovered that an enamelled iron saucepan that I'd left in the sink had begun to rust on its un-enamelled bottom. Wet, rusting iron has a particular, distinctive smell which took me back to my grandmother's house when I was a child. Such pots and pans were common then, the smell and taste of iron were every-day sensations.

Other than that not much is new. Talk amongst yourselves, smoke 'em if you've got 'em. Heard any good (or really bad) jokes lately?

Twenty-nine down, one to go.

Progress, and unrelated matters

The first competition (as we now must call it) has reached a very interesting point. After much debate and many failed attempts, we discovered a form last night (an urban design, a shape in the landscape) which is just brilliant. Very simple: a long, low rectangle along the eastern boundary of the site; but it's just somehow exactly right. Everyone who sees it is impressed. I'm really pleased with the project now, after a week of fending off despair when it just wouldn't come together. This will be at least a third prize unless we really screw up the disposition of the rooms (and that is always possible, since the people who wrote the briefing documents are not judging the competition).

The sun was nearly setting as I walked home today at 7 p.m. Winter is just around the corner! This is probably my most favourite of favourite seasons (i.e. they're all good, each in its own way). The new year begins in Autumn for me, not in January (but then, I've written about that before).

In other news it was thirty years ago tomorrow that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "Köln Concert", at around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was during the introduction week of my first year at university, when various famous and exciting professor-types would spend an hour each telling us how lucky we were to attend that particular college. The most famous of them all, so egregiously famous that even I had heard of him, broke the mould—as he had made a career of doing—by saying nothing at all. He just put on Part II of "Köln" and started a slide-show of student work from previous years. Marvellous. His presentation is the only event in that week which I still remember.

In other, other news Dale is on a roll, his last two posts are quite brilliant. There are times when I can hardly bear to read Dale's blog, his writing is so wonderful and his insights so ... insightful that they make my own little bloggeries seem quite inadequate.

In otherest news courtesy of Joe in Vegas, a trio of videos for your pleasure and/or annoyance. The first takes on the burning, unaddressed social issue of porn for nerds. The video itself is quite funny and harmless, despite the title, but the rest of the site and in particular the ads in the right column are definitely not things you want the boss to see on your monitor. Go to Joe's and try to view it on his blog, i.e. without the unsafe ads; but it wouldn't run for me there. (It starts by asking your birthday, to prove that you're over twenty-one; just pick a year before 1996 and you're rolling. Call me paranoid, but I would never tell my birthday or any other real information to such a website.) The second video tries a bit too hard, but the third is the funniest of them all—assuming (as I do) that it's faked, otherwise one would have to think it quite horrific. Your mileage may vary.

Sigh.

There was a scene in Dances with wolves that's stayed in my memory (many, actually, but this in particular): after the great big celebration which followed the buffalo hunt, Dunbar goes back to his station and is so damned sad and lonely that he builds a huge fire and dances around it on his own, trying to relive the feeling of being amongst his friends. Do you remember that?

Well, I bought myself a packet of Ingrid's favourite cookies this afternoon.

(No, it's not as bad as that sounds. I am settling in and am moderately content, happy even, to be home again. It just came as something of a melancholy surprise to realize why I had been moved to purchase these particular cookies, which I've never bought before.)

Autumn is approaching: the chestnuts are big and brown, the first leaves turning colours, the air crisp and cool. I slept with the window ajar last night, which I've never done before because I always expected that the traffic noise would keep me awake. Nonsense: I slept as well as ever, and enjoyed the cool night air to boot. I wonder: how many other unexamined "expecteds" are there cluttering up my life?

In other news I really really want one of these. Courtesy of the Sloth.

Missed it

Damn and blast. Twice today I have failed to notice 7:07:07 07.07.07 as it flashed past. The first time was excusable, I was still in bed after having had difficulty falling asleep last night; but seventeen minutes ago I was right here faffing about, with a clock staring me in the face. Bah.

I did take note of 12:34 5.6.78, although not by my own efforts. I was a first-year student, drowsing lightly in a seminar with a half-dozen others, when the door flew open and the senior tutor rushed in to tell us the time.

1:23:45 6.7.89 passed me by completely, I cannot even work out where I would have been on that day, the summer before the Berlin Wall fell. 12:34:56 7.8.90 is as much of a mystery to me now. Only young children—and the very lucky—alive today will see 1:23 4.5.67

I wish now that I'd kept a diary in earlier years, because much of my life is now somehow unavailable to me. I cannot remember, I simply have not the vaguest idea, what I was doing, where I was working and living, at those times; and there are also many vivid images, memories of strange isolated instants, that I cannot place in time. Why would I have been sitting in a little red bus on a midday in early summer, in a traffic jam on the King's Road, opposite a pub where a young woman was setting out a chalkboard with the lunch menu on the pavement; which summer was that, and why on earth do I remember that scene?

I have kept diaries at various stages of my life, for more or less short periods of time, usually when I was deeply unhappy and (felt that I) had nobody to talk to; which is odd because one thing I am now sure of is that my life has been full of friends, or people who would gladly have become friends if I had let them get close to me. But I didn't trust them, because I didn't like myself enough to be confident of their motives: surely they were only trying to get within stiletto-striking range?

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

Memories part four

There isn't much that I regret after these 48 years, and the regrets I do have are almost without exception things that I didn't do (youngsters who might be reading: take heed). One such case came to mind last night while listening to Ravi Shankar on the radio.

In the last few years that I was in England, I lived in London and worked in Sprawlville (a city a hundred miles away), and commuted there and back by train every day. Some Friday evenings, I would stay in Sprawlville and go boozing with my mates from work, then take the train back on Saturday morning. There would sometimes be half a dozen of us sleeping in odd corners of Smiler's home. (Even then I was the early riser, I'd let myself out and buy bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and a loaf of fresh bread from the market, then cook breakfast for everyone.)

On one such occasion, there was something happening in Sprawlville old town (a fair perhaps) and so I stayed the whole of Saturday and boarded a late afternoon train. It was midsummer and the train was hot, stuffy and quite empty; I sat in the restaurant car and treated myself to a beer. There was only one other passenger, an elegantly-dressed man in his fifties, by appearance an Indian. The train rattled on towards London, and the day wore on towards evening. As the sun was approaching the horizon, I heard the man speak to the waiter:

"May I ask your help? I'm blind, could you please tell me when the sun touches the horizon?"

The waiter agreed (naturally), and we three sat as if spellbound, two of us watching the sun. The waiter spoke: "A couple of minutes yet... about another minute... soon... now."

The man sat up straight and folded his hands, and he began to sing.

It was obviously a prayer.

I couldn't tell you what language it was in, nor any details of the melody or style other than "not English" and "not Western."

He sang for the exact length of time it took the disc of the sun to sink below the horizon, then relaxed and thanked the waiter. I sat entranced and curious, I wanted to know more but didn't ask (the English disease of hyperpoliteness).

To this day, I regret not having approached him. He wouldn't have been offended at my questions, I'm sure; he would have been glad of the contact and happy to tell me about the prayer.

Memories part three

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

Returning to Toronto after a month in England or Saskatchewan had a defining moment: a wave of heat that rolled into the airplane as the door was opened, the temperature rose by fifteen degrees (celcius!) and the humidity by sixty percent in one second. This was so intense that I often believed that I could see a flicker in the air as the wave rolled towards us. It was a social moment: the passengers would all gasp and cough, then look at each other and smile wryly: ah yes, we're home.

Toronto meant oppressive heat and humidity: temperatures that remained in the mid-thirties (over 90°F) for weeks on end, with humidity so high that you wondered why steel didn't rust in the air. My commonest memory of those days is of feeling the sweat literally flowing down my arms and chest as I sat indoors.

Toronto meant being outdoors every for possible minute of the day, because the house was just intolerably hot. (Our house has so-called cathedral ceilings, meaning that there's no attic: the upstairs rooms go right up to the inclined plane of the roof. The sun was therefore beating down directly onto the tops of the rooms, which would be baking hot by mid-morning.) We set up lawn chairs and a portable table in the shade of the sunburst locust tree, and ate every meal outside. We ate a lot of salads in the summer, to avoid having to cook in the heat. (I'm pretty sure that we didn't have takeaways, though, which would have been another solution. I only remember them during school times.)

Toronto meant early mornings, to make the most of the overnight cooling. If the night had been clear (no clouds) the temperature at daybreak might be as low as 18°, so you would be in the odd position of needing to wear a jacket at dawn but being too hot for a t-shirt at midday. The dew would be as thick as rainfall on the lawn, your shoes would be soaked through walking from the back door to the garden fence. Within three hours, the dew would have burned off and the temperature would be nudging into the eighties.

Toronto meant late and long evenings, to make the most of the (however slight) cooling-off from midday. We often went for walks in the hour before sunset, returning home through the park at dusk. We would stop at the crest of the hill and look out across the city or up at the stars. After sunset we would open up all windows and doors, to attempt to flush the hot sticky air of daytime out of the upstairs rooms. Another common memory is of sitting at night in my father's chair, feeling the gentle breeze through the screen door and listening to the hiss and rustle of lawn sprinklers from further down the street.

After a few years we discovered a two-part solution to the oppressive heat: we got a dehumidifier and put it into the basement, where we then spent all our time when not outside. The combination of reduced humidity and shelter from the sun made an enormous difference: it was actually comfortable down there even on the hottest days. (Mom used the water that the dehumidifier extracted from the air - up to two gallons a day! - to water the garden and indoor flowers.)

Toronto meant day-long trips downtown, leaving early in the morning and returning towards sunset to avoid being on the road under the sun. Neither buses nor the subway were airconditioned in those far-off days, dear reader; being stuck in traffic in 30° weather in the blazing sun was not pleasant. We went to the AGO or the ROM or in later years to the Science Centre, where we could spend a whole day in airconditioned comfort (but not feel guilty because it was educational).

We would also sometimes go to the Islands or the Scarborough Beaches for the day, or to Edwards Gardens and then walk along the long, thin park of the Don River valley, a narrow steep-sided ravine that runs the width of the city down to the lake. I loved going to the Islands, partly because getting there was so adventurously complicated. We took a bus to the subway junction, then rode the subway down to the lakeshore, then took a twenty-minute ferry ride across to Centre Island. It was always much cooler out on the lake, because of the constant breeze. We would walk the length of the outer boardwalk, have lunch (hot dogs! a rare treat) then walk among the moored boats and little wooden houses of the smaller islands until it was time to return.

Toronto meant spending the day at the local swimming pool (in the same park where we would walk in the evenings), but the pool was too small and too shallow for big kids to be comfortable in so that didn't last long. ("We" in this case means my mother and us kids, because my father would be at work.) Nobody wore hats, nobody used sunscreen. It was a given that you'd just tan and/or burn all summer long. I would be as brown as mahogany when the first day of school came around.

Toronto meant power failures, brownouts and blackouts. In my memory there would be one a week during the hottest month, in the early evening, when the office workers returned home and turned on their airconditioners. This too was a social moment, people would gather on the street to enjoy the dark and the quiet. I was intrigued that the telephone would still work although the lights were out. (This stopped after the nuclear power station was built at Pickering.)

It wasn't all family events, of course, we had friends in the neighbourhood with whom we would play. Nobody had airconditioning in those days, so we were united in suffering (so to speak). In later years, one of my friends' parents had a proper in-ground heated pool put into the back yard; I spent a lot of time there either in the pool or throwing a frisbee around or playing cards in the cool of the basement. Z was a jazz fan at a time when the rest of us were into hard (harsh) rock, the soundtrack to these summers was Chicago, Deodato, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream - or Z himself who was and is a fine pianist. I find it good and fitting that Z's sons now play in that pool.

It also wasn't all fun, of course. Grass grows fast and thick under such conditions, one of us (usually me) had to mow the lawn once a week, which I complained about but secretly quite enjoyed. We planted and replanted trees and bushes, moved flowerbeds, and laid and relaid paths and sitting areas at my mother's whims. Every Spring she would order a truckload of manure (perhaps less often, but in my memory it was frequent and regular) which would be dumped on our driveway, and over the following afternoons we would transport this by wheelbarrow into the various flower beds to be distributed and worked into the soil. The gardens were a constant project for Mom; it wasn't that she was dissatisfied with the way they looked, but they would change as the plants grew and one day she'd decide that they were no longer pretty. So all the bushes and shrubs would be dug out and given away to friends and neighbours, the bulbs and perennials would be dug up and put aside for replanting, the holes would be filled with manure and the whole mess dug over and redesigned. The flowerbeds shifted around in our garden from year to year like sandbars in a fast-flowing river.

Toronto meant bicycles. I had a sequence of bikes over the years, and rode routes that expanded to suit the machine. On my first bike I would ride the length of the street we lived on and back. With my second bike, a three-speeder, I graduated to riding as far as the school I walked to, and the streets that branched off of that way. I got a ten-speed racing bike for my birthday when I was fourteen or so, and from then on my summer days were spent in the saddle far from home. I would cycle down to the lake and back (around 22 miles) at least once a week, either on my own or with the cardplaying crew. One memorable time, we rode all the way to the Humber River on the western border of the city, rode the valley park down to the lakeshore, then back through the city: around 35 miles. That was really hard work, though, because most of it was along busy city streets, so we didn't do it again.

Memories part two

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

[I'm updating this piece by piece, adding links.]

England meant air travel, obviously: how else to get there? One could go by ship, of course, and many people still did even in the early Sixties; but we always flew. We travelled at first in propeller-driven Vickers Viscount airplanes, I remember seeing sparks shooting from the exhaust pipes at night. The planes had to refuel twice on the way to London: in Gander, on the coast of Labrador, and again in Paisley, outside Glasgow. The trip took a whole day, 23 hours door-to-door if I remember correctly. It must have been horrifically dull as there were of course no films or headsets in those days, but I cannot remember being bored (nor can I remember not being bored: Tout c'est vrai, mais rien c'est la verité to quote Albert Camus (from memory, feel free to correct me)).

England meant train travel. We were based in London with my grandmother in her three-storey six-room house (now long gone of course; the very street is gone, ploughed under and resown to use a metaphor from Saskatchewan) but we travelled far and often during the month we were there. We visited the great cathedrals (Winchester, Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, York, Wells, Lincoln) and the sites of monasteries (Ripon, Rievaulx, Fountains Abbey), the university cities (Cambridge, Oxford and for that matter London itself), castles and palaces (Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, Hardwick Hall, Tintagel); all of them centuries old as Columbus set sail.

England meant being immersed in history, both formal antiquity and the lesser histories of family and "what happened next," being constantly in the presence of the past (to coin a phrase). History is a strange and intoxicating thing to a young and thoughtful North American, moving from the factory-fresh pastlessness of the West to an England that sometimes seemed to be nothing but past was akin to suddenly discovering a seventh sense or a previously unnoticed fifth limb; as when someone who grew up beside a small lake sees the Atlantic for the first time, it changes one's understanding of something (what water is like, how change happens) that had seemed so simple as to be not worth thinking on.

England meant smells, primarily the smells of combustion: coal fires, peat fires, wood fires, roasting chestnuts, diesel exhaust, jet fuel, incense. (A particular memory: walking down the hill from Auntie Maud's house to town to buy her groceries, we would pass a factory of some kind, where I would always stoop to look through a tiny barred window into a basement room where a man shovelled coal into the mouth of a glowing furnace. At the time (and in my defence I was about five years old) I found it fascinating to watch, but I was utterly detached from the scene: I watched him like an animal in the zoo, it didn't occur to me that the shoveller was a man just like my father, much less that with worse luck my father might have been that man. I was excited by the roar of the flames and the rattle of the coal flying off his shovel, and probably thought it a romantic and adventurous job.)

England meant fish, so many fish of so many kinds: sole, skate, plaice, flounder, zander, cod, eel, salmon, rock cod (aka dogfish), haddock, herring, sardines, whelks, winkles, mussels, cockles, crabs, trout, shrimp, crayfish; and of course the original takeaway fast food: fish and chips, wrapped in newspaper and dosed with salt and vinegar, best eaten with your fingers on the way home; the horror of gourmets and dieticians alike. We ate fish and chips in every city and town in England, and kept notes. Fish and chips is one of the few things I miss about England.

England meant colours: the red of brick walls and buses and telephone booths and Guardsmen, the yellow of crumbling stones, the deep inky blue of local trains, the glossy black of taxis, the matte black and startling sparkling white of Portland stone under the generations of sooty filth when St. Paul's Cathedral was cleaned, the many different greens, so lush and vibrant and intense, and of course the sea. What colour is the sea? it is all colours, all at once. There is no colour that you will not see in the sea at some time, under some condition of light and weather. Nowhere in England are you more than two hours' easy drive from the ocean, so one is constantly surprised by glimpses of the sea between buildings or from the crest of a hill. From the landing of the second stair of my grandmother's house, we could see the ships in the docks at Greenwich.

England meant family, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts; there were cousins in England too, my father's middle brother's children, but somehow we never really clicked. I could write a long post on Nanny (my grandmother) alone, she is the centre of a knot, a maze, a spiderweb of memories and associations. Because I associated with the generation(s) above mine, my English relatives seemed older than my Canadian ones, there were many great-aunts and -uncles (my grandmother's generation, she was one of eleven children) and their offspring (my father's cousins) and their offspring to be visited or met unexpectedly in train stations. I became aware of time as flow (and the paradox of rivers) in England, through living with this multi-generational family of long and overlapping generations. Generations in Saskatchewan were simple and discreet (in the sense of clearly separate), it was a surprise to learn that my grandmother's youngest brother was hardly older than my father; that made me reassess my relationship to my Canadian relatives.

England meant people, masses of people, more strangers than I had thought the world contained. We went to markets to buy fruit and vegetables and books and clothes (our parents) and to look at the people buying and selling (us kids). The concept of a market, of an individual person putting twenty-five apples and thirty pears on a table and going home when they were sold, was almost incomprehensible to kids raised in supermarkets.

England meant the War, which in those times and that generation actually meant the Great War, 1914-18. Every village had a War Memorial listing the names of the dead and the campaigns where the local regiment had fought; the officers had plaques or statues in the local church to their honour. Our family was scarred by the loss of Nip and Jack (my grandmother's older brothers) who simply disappeared in northern France in late 1917, just two among the millions who died there. (My father researched the regiment and recently found "the boys," both of whom lie in marked graves near Amiens, unfortunately long after Nanny's death.)

England meant the ready availability and casual consumption of alcohol (though not by us, God forbid). There were pubs everywhere, and though they were in fact always closed when you wanted a drink, they were nonetheless a significant social and cultural marker. Neighbourhoods were defined by the kind of pub they supported, whether sawdust floors and wooden stools, or panelled walls and sofas by the open fire. We stayed in many post house-type pubs; most of them were delightful to a child, with small stone-framed lancet windows, low broad doorways, odd half-staircases and back wings, and fireplaces that in midsummer were still redolent of coal.

England meant culture, we saw at least one play and heard at least one concert on every trip. We visited every museum and art gallery and historical building that we could find. If Saskatchewan was a place without books, England was founded on books, built of books. What struck me most about Oxford was not the river or the beautiful architecture, but the notion that there were so many books in the world that one needed to create special buildings just to keep them in. So many books! My older uncle and aunt had a newsagents and a bookstore in a small town by the Thames near Hampton Court, we used to read all the magazines they had and take a dozen books each home with us. God bless Penguin paperbacks with their cheerful orange spines, just to look at them makes me happy now, forty years on.

Memories part one

Beth asked "what did YOU do in the summers, when you were, say ten?"

Growning up in Toronto, we divided our summers between home and visiting our distant relatives. In even-numbered years we would spend a month with my mother's family on various farms in Saskatchewan, and in odd-numbered years with my father's family in London (England); the other month we spent at home "relaxing" = working in the garden under Mom's direction, moving trees and relaying faux-cobblestoned walkways (you probably think I'm joking).

Saskatchewan meant early mornings, windy days, pulling weeds until our hands were green, four enormous meals a day, riding the tractor or the grain-hauling trucks (but never the combine, that was too dangerous), driving 25 miles to the nearest town for coffee and gossip at the Co-op (in later years, driving the same 25 miles to town for a beer), or a hundred miles north to "the lake" to swim for a day. After the harvest, both families would often drive together to Alberta to stay at Banff or Jasper and walk on the glaciers, or possibly even as far as Vancouver.

Saskatchewan meant being driven mad by mosquitos, being scared by the noises of unseen animals in the Bush (rabies!), being chased by chickens and geese if you went near them at their usual feeding time, chasing the calves out of the grain or the vegetable garden or the flower beds; the smell of motor oil and rubber and the rustle of mice in the cool, echoing Quonset-hut equipment sheds; separating compostable garbage from the rest, and burning the latter in a steel pail; not flushing the toilet if you'd only peed; being in a house without books - unthinkable! - then noticing that the whole community was essentially without books; the smell of the pulp mill which carried fifteen miles downwind; weddings, so many weddings, every year it seems now, with dances and self-catered receptions for up to three hundred close friends and family, when the Mounties would leave town and go sit out by the highway to avoid having to arrest every single citizen for DWI. (There was in fact very little drunkenness, Lutherans are big on self-control.)

Saskatchewan meant realizing one day that the meat we were eating had answered to its name until quite recently; walking out behind the farmhouse and hearing absolutely no man-made sounds at all, not even aircraft; waving and nodding at oncoming cars on the road (typically not more than three during the ride to the Co-op) because we knew them all; a tiny one-room airport, where you walked through a screen door just like the one at home to get to the staircase-on-wheels up to the airplane; houses with two kinds of cold running water: drinking water from the well and "cistern water" that could be cooked with after boiling, or showered under (but don't get it in your eyes or mouth).

Saskatchewan meant being surrounded by animals, wild and domesticated and halfway between like the cat that simply arrived one Spring day and settled into the old garage, tacitly bartering rodent-control skills for a warm and dry place to stay; my uncle's enormous strong hands, his fingers each as thick as my young wrist; the smell of the Bush, an unmistakeable, inimitable compound of poplar, wolfwillow, aspen, pine, drying dust and various grasses going to seed.

Saskatchewan meant a hierarchy of roads, from two-lane paved to single-lane paved to pressed-and-oiled to gravelled to graded-earth to muddy tracks, and how you drove on each. A skilled driver could maintain a thirty-mile-per-hour four-wheel drift, proceeding steadily northwards although the car's nose pointed alternately east and west. Being in cars at all was something specific to the summer holidays, my parents didn't own a car until after we kids had left home.

Saskatchewan meant berries, so many berries of so many kinds, blueberries blackberries gooseberries cranberries strawberries raspberries and best of all the bittersweet bluered (not purple) saskatoons; driving out in the morning to pick saskatoons which we ate in a pie that evening with whipped cream from my aunt's own cows.

Saskatchewan meant our cousins, being constantly surrounded by masses of other children, and the dilemma of loving their company but wanting desperately some time alone by myself.

Saskatchewan still means most of those things to me.

This was my blog's second birthday, but I was too caught up in this Memories series to notice.

On seeing things

I had a spot of excitement yesterday morning. While sitting at the computer, I became aware that I couldn't focus clearly on what I was reading - because there was a point of intensely bright white light at the centre of my vision. This expanded slowly into a jagged circle in painfully bright neon colours, which flickered and continued to expand.

So I got out the yellow pages (by this time I could see clearly within the ring of light again) and found an ophthalmologist in the neighbourhood, and called them up. The secretary was professionally cool and distant, "appointment next week" and so on, until she asked me to describe my symptoms. When I did, her voice changed: "Come here now, right now."

Ten minutes later, at the doctor's office, I was having my retinas photographed; the circle was now larger than the frame of my glasses. Ten minutes after that, I was shaking hands with the doctor; the circle had reached the periphery of my vision and was effectively gone. We talked about my health and habits, and he asked whether I get migraines. "Yes, but not at the moment," which was true: no nausea, no blurry vision, no headache, no disturbed sense of balance.

He had a good look in each eye, then had me read from the chart, and then he relaxed and sat down. "Your eyes react normally to light and there is no immediately obvious organic damage, so it's probably not an emergency." Very comforting; but then what the hell is it? "An asymptomatic migraine, the pattern of light you described is absolutely typical of migraine attacks."

We left it at that, because he feared that the eye drops and the testing might trigger a proper migraine, and made an appointment for a complete examination next week.

He was right, it was a migraine without symptoms: I recognize the "day after" symptoms this morning.

One of the reasons that I am so visually orientated is my childhood experience of needing to get my glasses changed (new prescription) every eighteen months or so. (I'm not sure how many pairs of glasses I had during my youth; I have the impression that I had new lenses at least four times between 12 and 18. In the thirty years after that, I've had three pairs.)

One doesn't notice the slow deterioration in vision any more than one notices one's hair growing, until one day it crosses a threshold and you realize that you can't see clearly.

What you do notice, is the infinitely fine detail of the world on the day you get your new glasses. That shape on the horizon is an apartment building, it has windows, there is a woman standing at the window. That green blob in the garden? It's a tree, it has individual leaves, the leaves have serrated edges, there's an aphid on the tip of that leaf. Clouds aren't grey, they are a dozen colours; and they are moving, shifting from within, constantly changing shape. (This is the reason I always included the number on the license plate when I drew cars from life: because I could.)

Powers of Ten was a revelation to me, and a confirmation of my experience: the world is indeed infinite, there really is no limit to what you can see.

It still amazes me sometimes to walk on the Blauer Weg and look out across the valley and realize that I can see individual leaves on the trees on the other side; or watching pigeons land on the roof of a building half a mile away (silhouetted against the light). The difference between the way I see the moon (the seas, the bright spots of craters) and the way all of my cameras have seen the moon (a small white smudge) has been a lifelong disappointment.

However, the quality of vision isn't constant: I cannot see that clearly at under twenty feet. I realized this while looking at a model railway exhibition with E, she could read the writing on the side of the boxcars five feet away from us. I would have had to bring it to reading distance to do that.

I was reminded of this at the Espresso-Laden on Saturday. Thomas the baristo has just got glasses for the first time, and his delight and surprise at the world made me remember my childhood experience.

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.