Blood, sweat and gazpacho

The Art of Being Different: Part Two

2012-01-15T20:53:00.001+01:00

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

England. School and teachers in Southern England in the 1970s. Where to start? I arrived in Bray, in South East England with four years of primary school still to go, those years stretching out (and up) in front of me like a slippery ladder to be climbed a rung at a time, with Mr Bennett and his Top Class hovering way above me. Most of the things I learned in the first two years were not on the syllabus, and began with the discovery that nearly all my classmates either sounded remarkably like the gentleman who announced the football results before tea on Saturdays, or as if they had a mouthful of gobstopper-like vowels crashing together and pulverising the consonants. Even my name was no longer familiar, becoming something akin to the noise emitted by a cat yowling in the night.

Say my name, go on, say my name... Image by @cerirhiannon at eltpics

Braywick, my new house of learning, was a red-brick building which had presumably been home to the village school since the early Victorian era, and so was a clutter of overspill huts and bicycle sheds by the early 1970s, with one of the original classrooms doubling as the two-sitting dinner-hall with “food” delivered by the Council in large stainless steel tins, pails and urns which was consumed with noses held to aid swallowing. I'm still unsure as to whether school lunches or school toilets were the worst aspect of the day-to-day at Braywick...

The playground was small and hampered by its makeshift classrooms, but it was on the edge of Braywick Park, with the forbidden 'Dell', and expanses of grass that doubled as the rounders pitch (God-forsaken game that could only have been invented by the English to torture poor wee, waif-like lassies like myself). The park was full of fairies, elves, witches, trolls, vikings and unicorns; there were monkeys in the monkey-puzzle trees, galloping around on the stallions that lived amongst the leaves of the horse-chestnut trees. The fairies rode on sycamore propellers and wore magnolia flowers edged with the seed fluff that came from the plane trees. You could lie in the long grass under the willow and weep, while catkins jumped down from the pussy-willow to spit at the bullies and Chipper-riders and keep them at bay.

The Chipper. A Chopper for midgets. In Scotland we'd had sensible bikes and trikes sporting the Raleigh coat of arms – a blue trike had cast me as Lieutenant Blue in neighbourhood games, and had been succeeded by a red bike (with just one stabiliser), crowning me Captain Scarlet just too late to enjoy my reign back in Mosshead Road. But here, the children had Chippers and Choppers, bright yellow or orange, with streamers on the handlebars, and they seemed to be for showing off, making ruts in the park grass or spraying gravel at rivals, rather than for playing. It didn't look promising.

It was in the park that I learned to shut up, and my awareness of being different suddenly took on Gargantuan dimensions. To this day I spend most of my time silent, then overwhelming people with incessant blah when the valve on the pressure cooker pops. I learned to be silent thanks to technology, just for the record. Our teacher, Mrs. Weatherall, was a fine teacher in true 70s style - and believe me, the 70s were far more educationally sound than the present day, as creative writing, projects and art seemed to dominate the curriculum, or at least in Mrs. W's classes (though as I write I wonder if this was her way of dealing with me, bird of a different plumage, who could already read and write well, unlike most of her charges).

Mrs. W. decided we were going to do a class project on trees, possibly inspired by an educational radio programme we listened to weekly, so she took us to the park with drawing paper, pencils and a new fangled, battery-operated box which was fitted with a handle at one end, a spring-loaded lid and a microphone, and as we walked through the park in a group, each child was invited to describe a tree to this box. My turn came as we stood under a mighty lime tree. “It looks like a spook dancing.”

Image by Diarmuid Fogarty at eltpics

Back in our hut-class, the tape was played back to eager ears and most of our delight – none of us had ever heard our own voices before – and...well. Imagine plummeting off a cliff. I can still hear it, so utterly different from my classmates' voices, starting high and rolling downhill to the inevitable bounce on “dance-sing”, every vowel foreign, every syllable drawn out. I disappeared.

Shortly afterwards, it was decided that I was in the wrong class, as my years in Scotland had armed me with literacy skills and a general knowledge that were sinking me into the mulch of boredom as I waited for my new chums to plough through their Ladybird books and sums. Consequently, I was moved up a rung, across the playground and into Hell. Or at least Purgatory. Most of my new classmates were not at all amused by my arrival, young upstart who obviously didn't know my place, hardly spoke, seriously needed to grow to be on their level and wore bobbles, rather than the more mature 'Alice band'. I was a tadpole, they were frogs – how could I possibly be as clever as them? I sat in the back corner, by the window, which quickly became my escape route from tedium and harshness, and I did manage to make a friend or two, but then there was the matter of Miss Robertson* (*name changed).

Beware..... Image by @amandalanguage at eltpics

I had been lucky with my teachers until then, starting with my own mother and Miss Campbell and leading up to Mrs Weatherall. They had all been kind but firm, no-nonsense, wholesome, creative, supportive and calm figures. Even the colours they had worn were indicative of a professional togetherness, through pale blues and warm rusts to gentle greens and heather tones. Women who had spent Friday afternoons in the hairdresser under a heated space helmet and Sunday evenings watching The Onedin Line. Women who probably ate boiled potatoes during the week but experimented with Robert Carrier at weekends. Miss Robertson was a different kind of fish. She was young, with long, dark hair scraped back into a ponytail, large dark eyes and would have been attractive I imagine, had she not been so intensely angry. All the time. At something only she could see. Dressed in black, white and a bitter shade of green, she shrieked, she shouted, she threw pencils and chalk, and she scared the living daylights out of me. I had been moved from my new class with my new friends, including the wonderful, beautiful Ally, an American who had introduced me to the word ketchup, maple syrup, strawberry-flavoured chewing gum, Sesame Street and Catholics, to a room with bigger, disdainful children (the boys particularly scary and huge) and a screaming, almost-pretty harpy at the front. One day, while attempting to stick the peeling sticky-back plastic back onto a story card, I was lifted from my seat by my fringe and told I would spend lunch-time wiping and repairing all the story cards. I was aghast. No questions, just yank the hair and punish. My trust in teachers began to disintegrate, despite an apology after several classmates waylaid Miss R at playtime and explained to her that I had been mending not destroying. From then on, I felt on edge, in the same room as a wildcat; you never knew when it would strike. My silence deepened along with my distrust, I rarely answered questions and became accustomed to the sharpness of her tongue. When we did fun activities, interesting topics, when she tried to be friendly – which she did, particularly after a second eye operation saw me sporting an adhesive fabric eye patch on my 'good eye' once again, a patch which my classmates begged turns to rip off at 12 o'clock every day, making me instantly popular for as long as the patches lasted, at least as a play-thing – when Miss R tried to smile and show me she was indeed human, I raised an unpatched eyebrow and burrowed further into myself. Still waters.

That summer, after a year at Braywick, the council sold our school to a prep school for wealthy Chaps in grey blazers and caps, and we upped and moved, lock, stock and two smoking etcs to Oldfield County Primary, about two miles down the road on the furthest edge of Bray. Oldfield was a brand spanking new place (though spanking was not allowed) with not a hut or mature tree in sight, but kitted with an outdoor swimming-pool, a separate playground for infants, a kiln, a proper art-room, an assembly hall and kitchens. The windows were big, the reading areas book-lined and carpeted and the tables semi-hexagons to allow for a variety of groupings. There were big open-plan areas and quiet rooms, 'seed-tray racks' instead of desks, and the toilets were for humans. In this open, see-all layout, although we had class teachers – me with the dreaded Miss Robertson again – hair-pulling was eliminated from our day and shrieking was limited to lessons in the quiet room... (pause for the irony to catch). We also had lessons with the other teachers in our area, so the much-loved Mrs Weatherall came back into my life. I fell in love with art, pottery and reading, we could sit on the floor or lie on our tummies during reading time, a time for hiding in stories uninterrupted, and story-time at the end of the day with a teacher reading to us was a delight.

A happy place to be. Image by @mkofab at eltpics

Only a few lessons were of the teacher-and-blackboard-fronted sort – generally those showing us how to do something, as information came from cards or books and was read and copied or drawn – and creativity, experiments, stories and hands-on learning dominated. We progressed at our own pace, ticking off work on a chart as we completed it, and the teachers were free to monitor and help. As I moved into Upper Juniors a year later, things changed again. All the children in the two year groups were mixed and divided between three classes, so that each had a mix of ages, instantly eliminating my 'difference' on that front. Oh joy. I spent a year with Mrs Chown, who was nice but often ill, so we had several supply teachers and teacher trainees, most of whom were either wonderfully arty, sciency, musical and innovative, or someone's mum. We drew, we wrote poems, we painted, we made things from coloured crepe and tissue paper, we wrote stories and plays, we sang, we read, and our work turned the school walls into a myriad splurge of rainbow. In assembly on Mondays, every child with a birthday that week was called to the front and the entire school sang to them; exceptionally good poems or stories were read out from time to time and to date one of my only moments of literary glory was having an exceedingly long story I'd written and illustrated read out by the Headmaster, the appropriately named Mr Bray.

School lunches were edible and cooked on site, engraving the smell of boiled cabbage and gravy on my memory forever, and on special days we had lime milkshake and shortbread as an extra. There were dinner dances, cheese and wine dos and jumble-sales for the grown-ups, and we jiggled and jumped to The Kenny, Mud, The Sweet, Showaddywaddy, Suzy Quattro, Slade and Slik at school discos and made hats and masks for competitions.

Of course, as a thin, freckly, funny-sounding kid with a squint and a tendency to silent dreaming, whose Mum cut her fringe and made her clothes despite living in Bray with neighbours such as Gerry Anderson, the Boughs, Parkinsons and Wogans, life was not all roses. Particularly as I played with brainy boys rather than any variety of girl, wrote plays rather than learn the mind-boggling complexity of French skipping, and just wasn't interested in being like the rest. But life beside the Thames had its charm and cycling home at top speed through the Fisheries, no homework, birthday parties, and playing like wild children with the few co-oddball friends I did have made up for everything else.

My last year at primary was ruled over by the stern but fair Mrs Everton (quick to point out that if anything, she was a West Ham fan), a slightly anachronistic, angular, beige-haired lady who smelled of soap and maiden aunts, and was charged with revealing to us the secrets of joined-up handwriting, cartridge pens and long division, the intricacies of the five senses and the capital cities of European countries – Paris, Rome, Bonn... Mrs Everton was not too tolerant of my tendency to live in a dream world and seemed to treat me with extra sharpness. However, it turned out there was a reason for this, and one that was going to change my whole world big-time. She had decided that I was Intelligent and that a privileged brain like mine should not go to waste at the local comprehensive, well-known only for its poor academic standards and for being all girls.

So it was decided. I was to have private classes at Mrs Everton's house to train me for the 11-Plus and the entrance exam I was destined to take, in the hope that I would attend THAT secondary school which was deemed more appropriate to my intellect. Private classes in Mrs Everton's home! With tea and biscuits and endless IQ tests, comprehension exercises and arithmetic problems. Suddenly I was a hero, brave enough to enter the dragon's lair and still turn up for school the next day! And popularity tasted good.

The winter before I left Oldfield and the care of Mrs Everton, who I'd actually grown to like and who had turned my love of stories into an addiction, taking me from The Magic Flowerpot and The Kingdom of Carbonell to the more mature The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor, Stig of the Dump and others, I took the entrance exam to a school in Reading – a promising name for a town, I thought at the time, haha. A school without boys, male teachers or freedom. A school with a green uniform, as many rules for teachers as for students, a reputation for academic excellence (as well as for lesser gifted girls whose parents could donate library buildings and assembly halls) and a Headmistress called Hardcastle.
Oh boy.

Bird of a different plumage (tho more duckling than swan, perhaps?) Image by @naomishema at eltpics

The Art of Being Different

2011-12-18T07:54:00.000+01:00

How did I become ateacher? I was asked this a few weeks ago and have been scratching myhead while losing sleep to thought and notebooks ever since. Thestraight answer is: by accident. But there are those who don'tbelieve in accidents or coincidence and, besides, a two-word storydoesn't achieve much, doesn't require me to exorcise (or indeedexercise) any demons. So rather than stop at those two words, I'vebeen wandering around the grooves in the walnut that is my mind,looking for the answer to another question: Why had I always been soadamant that I'd never EVER be a teacher?

Life is a garden, and thepath we take to arrive at the present, to find our vocation, is notonly sinuous and forking like some Borgesian labyrinth, but it isoverhung with heavy, gnarled, lichen-covered branches waiting to whopyou on the head as your ducking skills fail you. And you never knowif you're going to be lucky; sometimes those bumps loosen fruit orblossom which land conveniently in your outstretched hand, but, atleast in my case, more often than pears and pomegranates, I was leftwith big, blue bruises and bugs in my hair. Schools and teachers.Good grief.

Still. Standing up herelooking down from the height of decades, I see a constant themeovershadowing the path, marking it out as the route I followed. Fromearly on, I was given a role by those around me in cahoots withcircumstances, and then went on to insist on playing that role,turning it into an art: the Art of Being Different.

(Photo by Chiew Pang for eltpics)

Part one: Oh flower ofScotland

My time at nursery schoolwas brief but it introduced me to Topsy and Tim, attempting to colourinside the lines, pom-pom making, the fact that not all twins areidentical, and a sector of Glasgow society that watched fillums anddrank milluk. Whilst my accent and I were from the West End /University areas of Glasgow, this was Drumchapel. If you were to makea film (or fillum) set in Drumchapel in the late 1960s, you'd needleaden skies and balls of tumble-weed blowing across the barren greynothingness between dreary blocks with their colour-coded front doorsand probable abandoned shopping trolleys. You'd also need a burst ofEnnio Morricone at his whistling best and maybe Gene Hunt couldscreech through in a Hillman Hunter. Yes.

No. The truth of it isthat what Drumchapel also introduced me to was dysentery, so mymilluk-drinking nursery school experience was curtailed, to bereplaced by a long period of quarantine and home-schooling.

Primary school was,initially, as primary school should be. Thanks to having been shutaway from other children and from most adults apart from my teachermother for five or six months, I already knew how to write passably,read well and work out how many Smarties I'd have left in my hand ifI ate three orange ones. I also knew who the Beatles were (and Hermanand his Hermits, for that matter), how to make collages, chocolatecrispies and meatballs, the names of all the flowers and birds to beseen in our garden, I knew hundreds of stories from around the world,the few French lyrics to 'Michelle' and all the words to Lilly thePink. Life was sweet, the future looked bright and my new schooluniform was exciting in its novelty.

In fact, life was not onlysweet; it was safe and normal, and centred on a large, grey stonebuilding, a soaring island set in the middle of a seemingly vastplayground, an ark which the long-dead architect had wisely thoughtto equip with two main entrances, the words BOYS and GIRLS infoot-high chiselled stone letters above the doorways, in order topre-empt chaos in the cloakrooms. Thus we stood in two straight linesbetween the first whistle and the second, girls separated from boysand ne'er the twain should meet ’twixt playground and classroom –apart from the day we joined forces to chant We want Scooby-Dooover and over again, to the chagrin of all adults from headmaster tojanitor, in protest at the announcement by the BBC that our favouriteepisode-long cartoon (a brand new concept then) was coming to the endof its first season.

School life consisted ofmittens on elastic that ran up one coat sleeve and down the other,black slip-on gym-shoes smelling of canvas and rubber, punishment bymeans of the belt (never experienced but witnessed once), wobblyteeth that appeared embedded in playtime apples, and teachers wholooked like teachers should and knew where sugar came from and how toweave bookmarks. The very first thing I learned at primary school washow to knot my tie, and then that the cat sat on the mat, and you dosums and timeses with rods (which are not for putting in your mouth,Janet, pet), and this is how you tie shoelaces and bows, and o'clockhalf past o'clock half past, and you need a short piece of string foryour handmade sugar mouse (but you don't eat the string, Janet, pet)and you can mix red, blue and yellow with each other to make othercolours. Oh, and squeezy bottle paint smells funny and gets stuck inhair, and play-doh tastes better than plasticine.

Fancy a taste? (Photo by Ian James for eltpics)

Other early achievementsincluded building an Apollo moonshot from Ski yoghurt pots,washing-up liquid bottles and toilet rolls, Santa's snow-topped logcabin from corrugated paper and cottonwool, and a whole town fromvariety pack cereal boxes. Parents were less impressed by this lastproject as variety packs were more than a bit above most people'sbudget. Dumbartonshire in the late sixties was mince and tattiescountry with a bit of fish on Fridays, and a small packet of jellytots or dolly mixtures when your maiden aunts took you to the cinema.Vietnam was – via a circuitous route – affecting the shipyardsand homes were not flush. Besides, we were Presbyterian.

The second year atBearsden Primary, the names of my classmates rang strong and true,like granite and ice: Gregor, Kenneth, Graham, Donald, Andrew, Neil,Heather, Hazel, Gail, and Lindsay, with Nicola and Charles providingan exotic, 'foreign' touch, not to mention the translucidly blondGerman boy whose name escapes me for now. There was change in theair; no more big doors, or even big classrooms, as, as children ofthe Baby Boom (the now-termed Generation X), our classroom was anoverspill hut. We sat in table teams of six, each named after aspecies of Scottish fauna: ospreys, Golden eagles, pine martens... Ihave no recollection of what my animal was, but the midge would nothave been inappropriate, as, thanks to my illness, I was still small,very thin and pale – 'wan' – and, oh boy, I had wonky eyes. Atsome point, surgery and eye-drops left me virtually blind for part ofeach day, so mornings in school passed in a blurry fog of badhandwriting and torment. My retreat into myself began, I was becoming'different'. I spent what I remember of the year relieved that I wasstill top in reading, and utterly desperate (and desolate) to earn acoveted Ship Stamp, the maximum accolade for achievement inhandwriting above even a red star, as my impaired vision reduced myhandwriting to a scribble dependent on pot luck more than on anythingelse. In fact, as I write, the memories come creeping back, and Irecall needing my stern friend Heather to put my hand on the page sothe chubby black pencil coincided with the start of each printedline. Rather than that feeling of 'joining in' that my earliermemories bring to me, 'striving' seems to tint this second year.Striving to write like the others, to see like the others. I wasshrinking.

And then. In the summerholidays. We moved. To England.

Part two: Your wee bit hill and glen

Immortality for a boy

2010-06-27T15:54:00.001+02:00

I met a boy. A refugee. He said to me "Take a picture of our kite!"

His black kite made of rubbish, defiance and imagination flew higher and higher until it shared the cornflower heights with the evening moon.

I took the photograph. The boy laughed and shouted "Now I am immortal!"

He spoke English. I replied. He spoke Arabic. I felt small, locked in my ignorance. Paul translated and the heavy doors opened again. Three people. Football and Spain and where Scotland is. We shared the freedom of words and time, new experience and old.

And far above all prophets and men, the kite flew higher and higher.

2010-02-24T00:41:00.000+01:00

Hoping for a sunrise, rather than sunset, a truly breath-taking sunrise.

The sea - in fact, the ocean, is La Mar... she couldn't possibly be El Mar....................

2009-11-19T22:07:00.000+01:00

Wee Me
probably around 1968 or 69

Hot pants on high (or A bit more of Wee Me)

2009-09-24T03:14:00.000+02:00

Buying our outfits for our first plane journey was a major event. These were the days of Vietnam, and the heady, hippy hangover after the Swinging Sixties (I was certainly into swings in the Sixties. And climbing frames and shutes aka slides. Roundabouts made me dizzy and there was always a risk of getting spun off and skinning your knees). The Beatles had not long gone their separate, long and winding ways, and Engerland swung like a pendulum do. Or did...Apparently.
My mother had decided that the situation called for The In Thing. Mini skirts were passé by now, and anyway, as we were growing girls on a budget, mini skirts were both a question of thrift and inevitability anyway. Besides, by this time, The In Thing was hot pants. Which should probably be hotpants, not hot pants, as the latter would suggest that a spell sitting on a sun-warmed pavement would have done the trick. And I guess The In Thing was actually hotpants or kaftans, but my beautiful, fashion-loving Mummy was adventurous where clothes were concerned, and besides, she didn't have to make the outfits this time, so hotpants it was.
In case you missed out on that particular stage in sartorial history, hotpants were shorts, or perhaps they dreamt of being shorts when they grew up, as they were very, oh but very very short. Glorified knickers, in fact. Not for the saggy-bottomed, that's for sure. And my mother was adamant (and not at all saggy-bottomed): we were going to England, world capital of hip gear and trendiness, encased in The In Thing.

The shop was more psychodelic than a yellow submarine or even a velvet underground, with half-dressed girls trying on fabric wisps and fringes which they pulled from shiny, white-and-gold boxes lined with coloured tissue paper. We had never in our short lives seen anything like it, and my sister and I hid behind a changing-room curtain, mortified with embarrassment and transfixed with fascination at the same time. I wanted a box. My two-year-old sister was happy to blow on the tissue paper and turn it into home-made confetti.
A lady not dissimilar to a triumphant opera-singer deposited a tower of shiny, white-and-gold, multi-coloured tissue-paper-lined boxes on a counter in front of our mother. She swooned. No, she didn't; I made that bit up. We raised the lids and the layers of floaty paper one by one as if a cloud of fairies might escape from within, and peeked inside, somehow terrified. Our mirror-plated hiding place in the changing-room was suddenly filled with glowing chrysanthemums, sugar-bright butterflies, vertiginous spirals, swirling paisleys, and exotic feathers. The fashion show began....

The great day finally came. Mummy had gone south some ten days earlier, to make sure that everything was ready for us in our new home in that scary place with the even scarier, English-foreign name of Maidenhead - good grief, what a name! - and we had been staying at her parents' home. My Magic-Puddings Granny had decked us out following her daughter's instructions to the letter: my sister wore a white, broderie anglaise blouse with short, puffed sleeves, and purple, paisley-patterned hotpants of the type with matching braces that crossed over in the middle of her back. Lederhosen without the front panel -and without the Leder, thankfully. I was truly ahead of my time, kitted out like a premature ABBA girl (the iconic Swedish group would leap sequin-clad onto the scene perhaps two years later), in blue, purple and white hotpants with a peacock-feather print. Over said pants, I wore a matching long dress with hundreds of tiny, fabric-covered buttons reaching halfway down the front, then open, rather like a coat, so that the hotpants were on display underneath. Totally vanguard, darling, totally 'in'. The It Sisters were ready to roll!

Daddy, modestly dressed in suit, tie and raincoat, came to fetch us in a taxi. "A taxi! Wow! Can I sit the wrong way round?" "Me, me!" - my sister was still a woman of few words at this point. Our grandparents, brave and proud, waving us off. "You both look very nice, dears. You will write to us, won't you?" Of course I would! There were still a few things I could do that my oh-so-cute sister couldn't; HA! But I was scared. This was it.
We slid past houses, gardens, shops, with their sad stonework and sadder, faded, grey window displays, a landscape of aging shooting stars whizzing past my nose pressed up against the window of the taxi, ghostly visions distorted by - by what? rain? tears?
Bye bye city, bye bye people, bye bye family, bye bye country. I'm going where the people talk funny. I'm going where nobody knows me.

This had been my world for eight years. A world of snowmen, lochs and Hallowe'en, smir and Santa, mashed neeps and Sunday School, rhododendrons and botanic gardens, great-aunts and fish on Fridays. My school, where we had built an Apollo moonshot from Ski yoghurt pots in July 1969; the dance academy where I had surpassed myself as an unconditionally inept tapdancer; the churches we had gone to to listen to my Reverend Grandpas; my cousins' house with the garden where the Easter Bunny lived; the West Kilbride sweet shop with its two counters, one normal height, one kiddy height for those of us with ha'pennies clutched in our fists and eyes only for chocolate spanners and spongy yellow and pink prawns, sherbet flying saucers and red licorice bootlaces; the Italian ice cream shops which were an integral part of Glasgow life. All this and a myriad of whirling, perfumed, stained-glass memories and emotions prior to that fateful day in the summer of '71, when they dressed me up as a gogo dancer and took me to live in England.

Letter to Mum

2009-09-23T10:48:00.000+02:00

The other day I found this letter, which I wrote to my mother in June 2005 after she had suffered a stroke that caused her memory to dissolve. Mum died in hospital of a so-called super-bug of the type that has numbers for a name, on 20th June 2005. I never finished the letter.

Tomorrow, 24th September 2009, is Mum's 77th birthday, so this is for her. Happy Birthday, Mom.

Isn't memory a curious asset? We have it from birth, but the early part, the part when we're still displaying L-plates, all but disappears under the weight of subsequent memories. Perhaps it's because, as a baby, we can't really make sense of stuff - of weather-vanes and zebra crossings, hairnets and nests of tables, mangles and window-sills, souvenirs from Sant Pol de Mar and slide-viewers. It's only later that we can sort and code and label. And, of course, that automatically means we muddle our memories, as we superimpose later images onto baby stills so we can actually claim to own them.
For example, I'm almost sure I remember Papa Lawson as being the man who lived in the flat opposite ours. I remember his presence in my earliest days, but apart from a vague recollection of sitting on his knee in a 'parlour'-type room with dark, perhaps green, curtains, the strongest memory I have of him is knowing who he was and of loving him to bits. I think he had a son, an adult son, and either Papa or both he and his son worked in a shirt shop down the hill and round the corner. There is a vague suggestion of a chocolate Santa Claus, or a chocolate Easter egg, a gift from Papa, apart from the book of poems.

I can sit here in the dead of night, with a dog making its presence felt a few houses away, and let one memory take me to another, backwards, forwards, who knows which. It's fun. It's as rich as an intricate, peacock-threaded embroidery, unpredictable. It's like eating dark chocolate and floating away. Stories, clouds of pictures, faces, colours, smells, voices, all bursting to ping out into the open.
That's what memory is. And it just takes a quick short-circuit, a neurological firecracker, to wipe it all or suspend it out of reach. I can shuffle or tint my stories as I fancy, so they look better on the paper, turn my life into a glorious Technicolor saga of yellow curtains and wooden clothes-horses sharing the buttercup morning sunlight with a spinach-green carpet, of shelling fresh peas while sitting on a small lawn, surrounded by blue-purple grape hyacinths, hollyhocks and lupins, lobelia and alyssum.

Another curious thing is Glasgow itself. Rundown, boarded-up, extravagant, decadent, industrial. Staunchly Presbyterian, radically Catholic, wildly Buddhist, Calvinist and Bohemian, haggis and tofu. Famous for shipbuilding, Orange marches, Ian Brady, St Mungo, Taggart, Sauchiehall Street, Kelvin Hall, the Barrowlands, hard humour, head-bashing, alcoholics, the University, Charles Rennie MacKintosh, toughness, tenement buildings, Celtic and Rangers, solid, serious, significant architecture, rainmates, and Glaswegians. Genghis McCann and ice cream. I nearly forgot the ice cream and the fact that a Glaswegian is just as likely to be called Angelo as Alistair. Until relatively recently, "I'm from Glasgow" was a fairly threatening claim which might include the tag "so watch yersel'". On a curriculum vitae, it was almost a liability. No. Strike the 'almost'.
Even the Glasgow names tell a story; they seem to be in harmony with the Glaswegian accents, which range from guttural, rasping thug to gently abrasive, crystal streamwater. Cowcaddens, the Gorbals, Kirkintilloch, Pollockshields all share city boundaries with districts that could easily have been christened by Stevenson or Scott: Drumchapel, Kelvinside, Broomhill, Anniesland, Rutherglen.

Like you, Mum, I find exressing some memories difficult; the words are not always there, nor the mental glass-eye to make sense of the images. Glasgow. Glasgow is a feeling. It is colours, moments of light and darkness, the sounds of Beetle windscreen wipers and cars in the rain, the taste of coal-fires in the mouth, the smells of adhesive fabric eye-patches and leaded petrol on puddles. The yellow of daffodils and the sullen black of the leafless, naked, winter trees near the university.
It is the height and protection of tall, dirty buildings carved from Industrial Revolution rock. It is the stark, terrifying concrete slabs built in curves that make up the mad, urban motorway system that took us to visit Granny and Grandpa Munn on alternate Sundays. It is lemon chiffon pudding eaten in a treasure-trove house by a depot of rotting green and sunflower bus carcasses. It is the lion, the cage, the lion, the cage, now put the lion into the cage. It is the New Seekers and Ken Dodd without the Diddymen. Sleeping Beauty at the ballet and dominoes with Aunt Madge in her image-perfect flat of a thousand textures. It is Papa Lawson.

The Ends of Two

2009-02-26T01:50:00.000+01:00

Two very very short tales....

With my eyes tightly closed
With my eyes tightly closed, I can feel the irregular bumping of the wooden wheels of the cart on the cobbled streets. I have not left the confines of my cell since I entered it two and a half months ago, but I died months before. With my husband dead, my son taken, my best friend Princesse Lamballe vilely murdered, I no longer live. I have not exercised and barely eaten since Louis went to the guillotine in January. The pain in my heart is too great, too cold, too intense to want to remain on this earth gone mad. My only wish is that my daughter, Marie-Therese, will not be harmed, although tearing a child from her mother or a mother from her child is more harm than a soul should bear. But now I have been tried and found guilty. Guilty of crimes I could not even have imagined, yet they say I committed. It is all over now; it is a moment of peace, as I sit here, in this cart with my hair cut short, my hands tied behind my back, my dress the simple white peasant dress I dreamt of wearing but not of the circumstances.
With my eyes tightly closed, I can smell the crowds. Paris. Great perfumed city where all those who could afford perfume have been murdered or have fled to England or Austria. My Austria, home of my adored brother, home that I will never see again as France has elected to kill me. France with its smells of death, bloodshed, hunger, bad bread, onions, of a desperation to see my head fall. The smells of confusion yet hope, children born into a new regime. I can smell sweat, leather, wool, autumn, the river rising. The last smells my nose will read. I love them all. They are the smells of a city and a country that will live.
With my eyes tightly closed, I can hear the cheering, the insults, the spitting, the cries for mercy from the same women who wanted my blood just four years ago. I can hear it all. I can hear them as they throw rotten vegetables, and lift their children high to see the Widow Capet’s last ride through Paris, in a cart rather than a carriage. I can hear the fear mixed with the celebration. The fear that times will change like the wind and they will ride in this same cart, that others will come, take revenge, rescue my son from his cell and proclaim him king.
With my eyes tightly closed, I can hear beyond the crowd and my executioner placing the basket against the guillotine. I can hear beyond this square to the sky with its birds playing, diving, singing, oblivious to my life and my death, the same birds that will still be playing, diving and singing tomorrow when I am just a memory. I can hear the wind, the fields and flowers outside Paris, the pages of books savoured, the rustle of silk dresses past, the last sounds I will hear.
With my eyes wide open, I climb the stairs with dignity, at peace, as I have died to meet those I love, I have died to join my husband the king.
Adieu.

Henry Blythe's last laugh
Henry Blythe looked at the screen with its luminous yellow line like a mountain landscape as it monitored his heartbeat, and watched the flashing green light that told the world he was still alive. He contemplated the photograph sitting on his bedside table. Lorna had left twelve years ago now; she had ‘gone to a better place’, according to the vicar, but it occurred to Henry now that that might not be strictly true. She might, in fact, be somewhere quite similar. Lorna’s life had been comfortable in their home in the country, a large converted farm that Henry himself had designed and then had built by his team. There were some advantages to being an architect of international renown. But Lorna had been bored with her comfortable, safe life. They had travelled widely, met princes and presidents, yet had hardly spoken to each other for the last twenty-five years of their marriage, as they felt they had run out of words. Curiously, though, he missed her now and would have given anything to feel her head on his shoulder as they chatted late into the night. And he told her the news. Perhaps soon.
He could feel the slight discomfort of the plastic tube in his nose, unfamiliar pyjamas and the room temperature, set one or two degrees colder than he would have liked. He wanted to go home. His 98th birthday had been the day before and had provided his family with an excuse to fill his room with flowers that the nurses had then taken away ‘in case the pollen affected his breathing’ – at 98, did he really care about pollen and breathing? – and to eat cake he couldn’t share. They had brought him presents he couldn’t open and didn’t need anyway, they had lit candles he couldn’t blow out. Fortunately, they had limited themselves to a bright red 9 and a bright red 8; to attempt to put ninety-eight candles on the cake would have constituted a fire risk. Yes, all in all, he had had a good day yesterday, even if it had had its absurd moments.
And this morning, this feeling of contentment had increased. Henry had been buying a weekly lottery ticket for as long as he could remember. Even now in hospital, he had been almost religious in his weekly purchase, sending his 85 year-old hospital neighbour, one of the few who could not only walk but was allowed to, to pick up his ticket. And at 98 years and 1 day, he had won. He had had everything he could ever need in life, houses, cars, paintings, his own beach; he had been everywhere from Iceland to Tasmania; his bridges and airports were familiar on five continents. He had donated to charities and museums, adopted whole villages in Guatemala, and provided the government with enough tax to build several schools. He had spent it all.
And now he had won the lottery! A young journalist had come to see him this morning and had asked him ‘How are you going to spend the millions?’ and the question had seemed surreal in its innocence. ‘Who are you going to leave it to?’ was the question on many people’s lips: the nurses and carers were treating him like a cute newborn baby, the hospital priest had been to visit, and the relatives were already stuffed into their cars and on their way ‘to celebrate’.
Henry reached out to the bedside table with his shaking hand and picked up the lighter his son-in-law had left there. He smiled and flicked the flame into action. His smile grew into a grin as the flame touched the ticket and ate it greedily. Henry didn’t see the flame go out. He had gone.

A beautiful sight, we're happy tonight

2008-12-03T18:57:00.000+01:00

Colder days in Seville are settling down inside the flaky walls of our house. Banisters are clammy to the touch in the middle of the night (I go walking in my sleep...oh, that song!). The windows that never quite fit their aluminium frames are forbidding places to sit near, unless armed and legged with chunky blankets bought from large multinational Scandinavian furniture companies, where the cold is part of the natural order of things. The occasional drizzle is welcome, here, as it seems to release a touch of warmth, and loitering on the street is marginally more attractive than huddling by whirring electric radiators in the confines of our white tiled home. The Big Chill.

Actually, it’s not big at all, and who am I to whinge, coming from that great lump of sleety granite, Glasgow. Childhood memories of snowmen and jingle bells are more than a touch disneyfied if compared with the reality of having to slide about in the ruts left by the traffic, ruts tinted a dark, evil shade of lead grey by the dirt and grime. To hear sleighbells in the sleet was a line we never sang but was part of reality, and Jack Frost was the chap - probably English, the cad - who breathed icy doilies on our uninsulated windows, double glazing being a thing of the future. Heavy, lined velvet curtains kept the four-month long night out. Or was it five months?

So. Seville. The halls here are truly decked with oranges, it not being just a romantic rumour, and holly being a myth lurking in them thar hills. The chill can be partially dispelled by some of the roast chestnuts on sale in the streets, with the remaining vestiges banished by a glass of sweet, syrupy wine from a barrel with La Gitana smiling on the front. In a bar, of course; we don't do barrels in the house. Shops trawl for Christmas custom here, just as they do in Britain, but somehow the hysteria in the shopping centre is slightly more bearable without frozen toes and frost bitten fingers thrust into soggy mittens. I haven’t had to scrape frost off my windscreen since I left Catalunya.

My blog has been abandoned since, oh, July perhaps? Life sped up and is still gallivanting at a wild pace. Work, for the most part. A large amount of work, which I thoroughly enjoy, although it takes far too much time away from my children and from my life-in-general. This week, I intend to sweep the computer aside with a heave and a huff, and take the boys into the centre to see 'Rodin in the street'. 'En la calle', that is. The Thinker is currently contemplating the over-filigreed work on the Town Hall in Plaza Nueva. “Bugger me backwards; they obviously started to run out of puff – look at them windows!” he probably muses. Windows which got gradually more austere as they went along. Or perhaps they got gradually more ornate? Boredom set in, as 18th century masons’ labourers dangled on the façade, and, with a flourish of whatever instrument masons’ labourers use, they added ‘one of them, three of they, half a dozen thingummies and a great big wotsit. How does that look? Oops. Never mind, no-one'll notice this side of the next millennium'. So we’re going to go and see the Thinker thinking, though I’m not sure one can actually see thinking. You can hear it when people talk to themselves, but sculptures rarely talk.

Mm. Seville in winter. My neighbourhood with its ladies on greased zimmers speeding to get home to the warmth of the coals under the table. The greengrocers calling out the joys of mandarins and grapes, chestnuts and mushrooms; the warmth of the crowded bakery as people shove into the queue to move away from the open shop-front. The festive lights, as yet unlit, suspended over the main avenue like old diamond necklaces in need of a polish. The toyshop and the delicatessen tarted up like panto dames. The stallholders deeply embedded in their sheepskin jackets, like exotic Del Boys, while their corresponding Rodneys unload plants, football shirts, pomegranates and belts from the backs of double-parked vans. Business as usual here in the barrio. Oh yes. Who needs sleet?

Praise the dawning

2008-07-25T18:55:00.000+02:00

“Come on! Quickly! Hurry up! Your coat or your cape?” Decisions. If I wore my cape, I could pretend I was a superhero, but the cape had a stupid cap to match; the coat was pink, a colour both loathsome and loathed, but it had big buttons that I could do up myself, and the hat was a fuzzy white beret with two pompoms. “Coat.” “Right. Pop it on then. Daddy’s getting the car out. Gloves? Pop your penny inside your glove so you don’t lose it. Ready? Oops. Lipstick. Don’t tell your grandmother.”

Sunday. Phew. There were so many Sundays in life! “Quick. Hop in. Mind the gear stick. Sitting down? Right. We're off then.” The Beetle juddered and jiggled to life instantly. What was it Woody Allen said in Sleeper? Wow, they really built those things. And with my father at the wheel, a perfect driving combination I deeply resented on Sunday mornings. “I’m cooooold!” “Have you not got your buttons done up? Don’t suck your fingers, now, you’ll ruin your glove…” The Sunday odyssey. The other church was nearer, but my mother’s parents-in-law would be there, my grandfather taking the service with his quasi-apocalyptic sermons, all fire and thunder, his voice expanding to fill the cavernous nave and rattling the bells before dropping to a mere coaxing, beady-eyed whisper. He thorough enjoyed making people squirm, watching them start to feel uncomfortable in their skin, particularly my mother. And my grandmother was….my grandmother. Turban, brooch, black Sunday coat. My mother and my grandmother together, “Hello, good morning, good morning my dear, it’s terribly cold, isn’t it, yes, yes, but of course it is February, yes, yes, goodness look at all the fallen leaves, you would think someone would…yes yes you would wouldn’t you terrible isn’t it…” Thin smiles on the lips only, words muttered as quickly as possible then look away, dig for something in handbags, spot a neighbour.
So we went to the other church, the one across the road from the Big School. A strange thing happened at that church, though, every Sunday: as soon as you set foot through the door, families, the veritable pillar of the community, were separated. Children this way, gentlemen to the left, ladies to the right. For me, trustingly herded off with the children, the greatest excitement of the morning was seeing who was leading Sunday School that day.

“Good morr ning, chill dren” the short hiatus of well-spoken Glasgow. “GOOD MORRRNING” “Have you all left your coats on the coat pegs?” “YES, MISS CAMPBELL”. The slowly drawn out chorus of twenty or thirty freshly washed, shiny scrubbed faces and necks, and comb-slicked heads. “Lettuce spray.” A unison soprano mumble, slow, monotonous “Forgive us our debts and we’ll forgive our daughters” “Well done, children. Sit down please.” Thwump. Splatch. Twenty or thirty Sunday-clothed bottoms hit the floor, twenty or thirty moon-pale faces look expectantly at Scotland’s answer to a young bespectacled Nana Mouskouri in a short tartan skirt and white leatherette knee boots with zips up the side.

It was the job of this school boys’ dream to share with us stories of the tribes of Israel, loaves of bread and fishes (and a Mummy fishy too), lame men who picked up their beds and walked, tombs with huge stones that could move by themselves, and affable young men with multicoloured coats. “..and his brothers were really very jealous of him – do you know what jealous means Kenneth?” “Aye, Muss Cambull” “…and so they stole his….” I wonder what we’re having for lunch today. I wonder if they’ll make me go with Grandpa to pick up Aunt Mabel. “…. And does anyone remember what his Daddy was called?” “Jacob! It wuz Jacob!” “Aye, it was, dear, well done…”. Aunt Mabel is scary, she’s older than the Bible and the multicoloured coat and Jacob all put together. Even older than Miss Campbell. Her voice is made of greaseproof paper and she shakes and her cup rattles and her cutlery clatters and her soup goes ssssssslpsssst as she extracts it from the spoon and she holds her bowl the wrong way round so it tilts away from her and if she ever falls over she'll snap. Oh I hope we’re not going to get Aunt Mabel today. “Halleluyah. Amen!” AMEN. LET’S COLOUR!

It was also Miss Campbell’s job to take us single file – in a crocodile, as we called it – into the church, where we occupied the front pews, dangling feet swinging wildly, and answered a question or two cast our way from the pulpit during the “family” service. Then a hymn or two, and home, after the weekly up-date on the life of the parish and its nephews, outside on the crunchy church driveway. To keep myself awake during the sermon and, later, to stop myself from dozing off while vertical as I stood behind my parents’ legs during the ‘after-chat’, I resorted to my white hat. The one that meant the wearing of the pink coat. This hat, essentially a beret, had two small holes in the centre of the crown, and a white cord had been thoughtfully threaded through these holes before having a fluffy white pompom-ball attached to each end. If I pulled on one ball slowly, it slid downwards causing the other pompom to glide upwards. And if I did it fast enough, I could disconcert the minister. “ ..AND JUST THEN….mmm…I think I just saw…no…umm….so…what?... as I was saying… AND AN ANGEL…”. Once outside, while my parents discussed the progress of the pregnancy, a recipe heard on the Jimmy Young show, or the bleak outlook for the Scottish shipyards dependant on US investment given the precarious situation in Vietnam, I played at helicopters, moving my head in ever faster circles so that my pompoms whizzed around and around with glee, completely oblivious to my sister’s pending arrival, Charlotte pudding or mass unemployment and My Lai.

CUT. Next scene.

El Amor Brujo

2008-07-15T04:16:00.000+02:00

What does the world think of Seville? Narrow, winding, cobbled streets with cast-iron gates, geraniums and studded wooden doors the height of horse and rider offering shutter-fast views of tiled, jungle-like patios with their rough pillars and ancient Al-Andalus fountains; picturesque pocket-sized plazas enclosed between blinding white-washed houses, with gazebos, jasmine-trellises, wrought iron crosses and, as dusk begins to ponder its arrival, the sound of the flamenco guitar breaking the early-evening silence, accompanied by the agony contained and modulated in the voice of the singer; no other sounds, not even street dogs, apart from the rasping quiver of the heat. Proud, raven-haired women hanging out washing, with baskets balanced on their swinging hips, haughty chins thrust upwards, breasts imitating their chins. Deep, throaty, consonant-free voices as they shout to each other and pass on the news of Rocío’s pending wedding to Jacinto, speculating as to how she knows he’s such a man. Horses pulling shiny traps along the walkways and orange tree-lined avenues, hooves slipping on the cobbles, passing the cigarette factory as the girls pour out onto the street, eying the greased-back-haired, wiry, tanned young men. Sweat, cigarettes, horse dung and orange blossom, the Guadalquivir and Triana, the Torre del Oro and the Giralda, cathedral bells and Christmas carols played out on anis bottles, the echo of high heels, the whisper of nuns.
Oh it’s all here – apart from Carmen and her sassy friends. But it’s a tiny part. Seville sprawls lazily without so much as a heave or a sigh from the Guadalquivir River to Alcala, where it changes name and encounters the Guadaira. It is penned in by the six-laned ringroad and outlying once-independent-now-swallowed-up townships. The outskirts of the city are the Badlands, the seemingly half-built, green-free, low-ceiling state housing where the undesirables, the less-than-pretty were sent to keep them from the sensitive eyes of the People with Surnames. Many people were re-housed here after parts of the centre were flooded in the early 1960s, yet the inner ringroad which separates these downbeat ‘barriadas’ from ‘civilisation’ is built on top of a river which floods into these housing complexes, filling the washing-adorned, pokey homes with water and sludge, yellow sand and rubbish. Out of sight. Here, the young people are heavily laden with local bling, chains enslaving the backs of hands, gold medals honouring saints and virgins, the boys bowing to the altar of Reebok and Nike, the girls to the goddesses Lycra and Thong. Pierced eyebrows, peroxide bleached crests, the girls competing for the longest locks in town, mane scraped back into a ponytail, ears decorated with yet more gold and coral. Voices abused, worn out at 15, the sandpapered, bellowing tones of youth. Mopeds and step-throughs, pushbikes or quads, neither pilot not pillion wanting to spoil their hair.
Los Remedios, faceless, red-brick, four-storeys-hiding-shared-swimming-pool-and-gardens-district nestling next to the river between Triana and the Feria, the area reserved for the annual April Fair. The women gym-toned, nipped and tucked, bejewelled, blonde. The Audis and BMWs, family-sized Peugeots or sleek, sporty Volvos either housed in garages or preening in the street. Tomy Hilfiger, Purificación García, shoe collections, leather and fabric bracelets proud with the Spanish colours, the children slouching elegantly in the Wealthy Surfer look with pearls in their ears or polo shirt in pastel shades. These sun-bleached straw-haired enfants entirely unterribles are the paunchy, caseta-owning, cufflink-wearing, flop-haired lawyers, company directors and civil engineers of tomorrow. The voices rasp but more quietly, the laughter is more guttural, less ear-splitting. The struggle to make it to the end of the month the same.
The area around the Alfalfa and the Alameda is the area where foreigners are gradually edging out the artists, intellectuals and bohemians. The poets, performance artists, dance-teachers, architects, painters and character actors are being swamped by a deluge of overseas students, English (American, Australian, Scottish, Irish, Welsh….), French and German teachers, the occasional foreign journalist, and editorial staff from colder climes. The families who have been there for seven generations still hold their ground, though, and can be seen in the evenings, standing with glass of wine held aloft, over plates of shrimp fritters or ‘hortiguillas’, deep-fried sea anemones (oh, sheer, utter, gastronomic ecstasy!), in the Barbiana or the bottle-festooned half of the Morales. Ham, white prawns, the wines brought up from Sanlúcar and down from La Rioja, the men dressed down for the evening in shirts, pale beige jeans, webbing or plaited belts, sockless loafers, the hair stuck back with large amounts of gel, the sideburns clipped to exactly the right length just below the mid-point of the ear. The women are somewhere else, where is not clear, perhaps still shoe-shopping, perhaps enjoying similar fare at a chic pavement café. Elsewhere.
And there are barrios like mine, inhabited by cousins, uncles, aunts, sisters-in-law, everyone is related to at least half the barrio, by marriage and by blood, but any outsiders willing to do The Local Thing will be welcomed, adopted, invited to share the family table on Christmas Eve. People say Hello on the streets, the children play together outside and annoy the snootier neighbours not originally from around here. Everyone joins in at Easter and in May, everyone is on first-name terms, Mr and Mrs Surname are banished to other parts, along with ambition. Life hasn’t changed much in several generations, they have more food than fifty years ago, the mobile phones are – oh- twentieth generation and the plasma TVs are as a big as a pool table, but essentially they eat the same, they run the business their grandparents set up, they married a neighbour, a childhood sweetheart, they go to Church, they have pictures of Cristo de la Sed and the Virgen del Amor Hermoso on their walls and they train as – well - Virgin-bearers from one year to the next.
What is a costalero in English? The function is similar (though the attire is totally different) to that of a pall-bearer, but the coffin is replaced by a sea of candles and flowers topping a wobbling, four-poster-bed-like structure carrying figure of a Christ or a Virgin. I say ‘a’ because far from there being only one, there are lots! Oh, the paucity of being a Protestant………
This is a city of many types, all typical of here, all sharing the same lack of subtlety, the love of their religious ritual and bling or kitsch ( I mean no disrespect, it does somehow grow on even a Renegade Celt like me, though not to the extent of wanting to don a black comb the size of a sheet of A4 paper, an intricate black lace veil, and walk the streets at dirge pace holding a candle in the wind, following the beat of the funereal drums every Easter) – and their worship of the Feria, when all the women are beautiful, all the men dashing, suits and ties replace Reebok and company, tight-bodiced, swirling, tiered dresses with plunging backs, fringed shawls, floral hair decoration, garish earrings and perfect skin oust the Goddess Lycra. A whole city alive and celebrating its identity.
It may not have the melancholy, the poetry, the utter enchantment, depth and beauty of Granada, or be as compact and cute as Córdoba, it isn’t as elegantly decadent and full of laughter as Cadiz or as cosmopolitan as Malaga, but it’s where I live. I like it, pretty much, and for all its love of kitsch and it sense of Self, its various tribal uniforms, its three religions – Catholicism, Sevilla FC and Betis – and its infinite number of velvet, gold and seed-pearl clad Virgins – it is, for now, home.

And it’s certainly a contrast to where I came from.

More of Little Me

2008-07-11T11:05:00.000+02:00

Our house was the typical Scottish home, with curtains, carpets, rugs, cushions; a veritable orgy of upholstery and shiny satiny remnants. There were three rooms on the ground floor: the kitchen, the dining-living-room - these two rooms being the centre of my universe from October to April - and the Sitting-Room.

The Sitting-Room was sacred. Bright, floral tones on an immaculate white background. The tiled fireplace with the fire permanently set, in waiting, ready to burst into flame when those unexpected, spontaneous callers dropped in for a cup of tea. Cushions embroidered by grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The deepest cherry carpet that swallowed bare feet in the most glorious of unimaginable caresses. Heavy curtains befitting a grand theatre, in an ocean shade of blue-grey. An Aladdin’s cave of smooth, dancing porcelain ladies, spit-and-polished tennis and rugby cups declaring this the home of a many-times junior champion, a bone china boy frying a bone china fish on a bone china frying-pan, and heady, perfumed flowers languishing in voguish, coloured glass vases. Tasteful clutter. The Sitting-Room was sacred. And Out of Bounds.

I played out my life quite happily against the friendly backdrop of reds, browns and autumnal shades in the dining-living-room, where I painted, ate, learned to read, watch sport with my father on rainy Saturdays, survived five bouts of German measles, and had tea and biscuits – one plain, one fancy – lying comfortably at my progenitors’ feet on the singed carpet in front of the fire. And my sister? Where was my sister? I don’t remember. An insignificant baby who entered my world when I had already been savouring life for 4 and a half years. Perhaps we’ll talk about her later on. Yes. I do remember her later on.

That day, my Daddy was away on business. My Beautiful Mummy and I were quietly safe and snug in the dining-living-room, lost amongst stories and pictures and darning. It was still too early to light the fire.

A tremendous, sudden, frantic crashing sound came from the Sitting-Room. Inhuman screams, banging on the walls, the sound of broken glass. A pause. A moment of silence. A woman of thirty-something with a skinny, freckly girl of four, alone, holding their breath. The silence continued, then

FWAP FWAP
More glass, crashing about and guttural screams. A bad witch. Evil was a grown-ups’ word. This one was bad. Obviously. “Mummy! There’s a bad witch in the Sitting-Room! I can hear her flying!” Her cape was lashing against the walls like a silk whip. An ugly, bad witch, black from head to toes and from toes to head, flying round and round on her broomstick. Destroying. Our. Sitting-Room.

Suddenly, my mother vanished, and in her place Superman’s big sister appeared; braver even than Scooby Doo and his intrepid companions, she brandished a mop in one hand and a frying-pan in the other. “Stay behind me!” ordered this Viking Goddess, and we headed for the Sitting-Room door.

As swift as lightning, my mother pushed the door open hard and fast, splattering any witch that might have been hiding behind it. Another scream, this time coming from the throat, chest and diaphragm of my Superman Mummy. I could neither close my mouth nor utter a sound, so stood peeping out from behind my mother like a silent carp. For the first few moments, I thought my theory was correct: from the doorway, I watched as a witch covered our sanctuary in black ash, coal, black footprints, splinters and skelfs, filling the room with hoarse, wicked cackling. But then my mother leapt forward, and, like a Valkyrie, flew into the Sitting-Room waving her weapons and bellowing “OUT! GET OUT WITH YOU!”. Tippi Hedren at her best moment; Tippi Hedren combined with Mary Poppins as she danced on the rooftops of London.

The crow had flown or fallen down the chimney, and, finding itself filthy and trapped, it had turned into a blinded Fury, terror-stricken with panic and the urgent need to escape, to be free again. I don’t know how it left that room, whether dead or alive, but it was the only time I ever saw my adored Mummy cry; hot tears of powerlessness and frustration rolling down, in the face of so much soot and dirt, so much destruction in the Sitting-Room for Guests, for Sundays and for Christmas Day. The Forbidden Sitting-Room. Out Of Bounds.

CUT! Next clip.

Playing at my grandparents’ house was quite a challenge; to keep myself entertained, alone, while staying silent and invisible. My maternal grandparents could tolerate a certain level of childish play-noise, but not so my paternal grandparents, so my activities were fairly well-defined in each household. “Ssssht! Grandpa’s working. Come into the kitchen.” The turban-Granny, now dressed in household attire, with a sensible brown tartan pinafore dress, even more sensible brown lace-up shoes, a green jersey and a brooch set with Welsh stones pinned over her heart. “You help me set the table, pet, and then, if you like, you can take Grandpa his cup of tea.”

Exactly eleven on the button. On the very dot. Knock, knock. “Come in.” The voice like distant thunder, the dark-grey-perhaps-black suit, the waistcoat (or ‘wesskit’), the tie. “Ah. Tea. Thank you.” If I was in luck, he would be sitting in his reading chair, and would smile at me and offer me a pastille of foreign chocolate, “Sssht. Don’t tell the women.”, and he would read to me from the National Geographic.
“The chimpanzees……..please!” I have soft spot for chimpanzees even to this day; thanks to them, I was the only one of the grandchildren who ever managed to have some sort of relationship with that imposingly scary professor-gentleman, with his mane of snowy hair and his dagger-like fingers. Thanks to the chimpanzees and the tea.

But at my maternal grandparents’ house, there was a flying carpet. And there was magic, and porcelain-headed dolls, miniature sailors who had survived my mother’s entire childhood intact, but who, in the hands of my sister and me, well, you know how it goes. There was a Steinway piano and a whole stage-set of treasures brought from far off places with exotic, aromatic, romantic names like China, Egypt, India, Burma, and England. A whole mine of glowing coals to stoke my smoking imagination and keep it burning. And there was a bed - a sailing ship, a circus, a bubble-bath, an ocean – a mahogany box-bed with four posts and an eiderdown quilt like a silky, Damask-rose dream, a warm marshmallow that cuddled you to sleep. What a quilt! We jumped, we bounced, we laughed, we sang happy modern hymns and we danced on that quilt. My pretty blond sister with her rainy-day eyes, my Beautiful Mummy and me. And sometimes I simply wrapped myself up in the cloak of warm, pink luxury and lay, perfectly still, looking at the portrait of my mother, a child like me, arms draped around the neck and shoulders of my utterly serene grandmother, the portrait of a lady. Of a Woman.

Have you ever travelled on a flying carpet? I have. It’s not too difficult to handle, even in turbulence, and the technique is easy to learn. Stretched out, face down, propped up on my forearms in the upstairs sitting-room, the room with the piano, I flew over seas streaming with blue dolphins that played with silver-tailed mermaids, their hair held back with flame-coloured starfish. I glided over mysterious countries where pounding, pouncing tigers chased each other around trees so fast that they melted into puddles of butter. I went in search of Babar, the king of the elephants, and an Eskimo called Mo, and the castle of Camelot. I dipped past camels and brushed against peacocks’ crests raised in surprise, I frightened unsuspecting walruses as they chatted to carpenters down on the beach, and I was always accompanied on each and every trip by Big Teddy, Pink Teddy, Black Pussy, and Tessie. Big Teddy got left behind in France when we went on holiday one year; I imagine that eventually he learned to speak French but I was crushed by his loss and it took years to recover.

“Table!” The happy sounds of doors, chairs, running feet. The table a rainbow of flowery china, the teapot with its bobble-hat cosy, embroidered table mats, coloured Irish linen napkins, soup tureens brimming with brilliant tomato soup sprinkled with fresh parsley and cream. What colours! What smells! Mmmm.
“First one finished helps his neighbour” my Grandpa’s laughing perfunctory warning. The eternal war-cry of the most generous, warm-hearted, spiritually sane and healthy man I have ever met. Oh no! I have to sit next to him, and he’ll finish before I do, and he’ll eat my meatloaf and my vegetables and then I won’t get any pudding! Oh! My pudding! The fabulous puddings my Granny-Magic-Puddings conjured up from her book of child-enchanting spells in that tiny kitchen – ohhhh – lemon, apple or rhubarb meringue pies, clouds of lemon chiffon, fruit fools; fruit pies that were hot-hot-hot-be-careful-you’ll-burn-your-tongue. Bramble, cherry or apricot pies with plain ice cream from the Italian shop at the corner. Oh no! He’ll beat me! Mummy, help!

Colours, smells, sounds, flavours, sensations and feelings, but it was all beginning to fade………….

CUT! Next clip.

Grammaire, not Glamour

2008-07-11T07:38:00.000+02:00

Well, sitting here at after 7am, having spent the night awake, finishing a work project then quietly quaffing a glass of cava to celebrate. Just the one glass, mind, though quite a large one to offset any loss through evaporation in the stifling heat. At this time of year, if your profession is like mine, turning your life on its head is the sensible thing to do, although somewhat antisocial and expensive on electricity. The heat in the day makes writing a miserable occupation, and the nodding bonce bouncing on and off the keyboard does cause some strange typos, and even the odd email that you have no recollection of having sent, and definitely wish you’d dreamt – “People will say……she’s been drinking”. Punch drunk, though, isn’t as much fun. Punch drunk from heat and lack of sleep. So, over the last few days, I have found a solution of sorts, though I need to work on eliminating the aspects that a vampire might enjoy and build fresh air and daylight into it. And exercise. I’m pondering whether to cycle to a friend’s bar for breakfast. I suspect that’s a 20-minute cycle, though traffic lights and 20 years away from the pedals might lengthen the jaunt. I’m also slightly worried about sartorial aspects, as, what is essentially an unfit, middle-aged female in an orange sleeveless T-shirt and cropped black sports trousies could be enough to cause massive congestion and put more than one off their morning coffee. I should also go out before the sunlight reflecting off my legs becomes a traffic hazard causing temporary blindness in drivers.
This unhealthiness, or rather unfitness is the sad consequence of my career decision last year when I decided to leave the classrooms and running around like the proverbial decapitated fowl, and take up the profession I had always dreamt of. Though the novelty wore off before I’d even started. Bear in mind that if my profession were equated with a symbolic hierarchy of animals, I would be level with the gnat, whilst Shakespeare, Cervantes and Iain Banks, why not, would be somewhere up there with the genetically improved lion. I might, one day, crawl up to panda status ie a breed in danger of extinction, cute but limited, but for now I am a flea in the mane of a work-horse. And I don’t write fiction. I write ‘educational materials’, so the Glamour is replaced by Grammaire, mon vieux.
I don’t usually confess to what I do; as a name, Writer conjures up a whole different kettle of jelly babies. I made the mistake of going to a different hairdresser prior to a wedding, last summer – actually, that wasn’t the mistake, the mistake was the conversation we had. The person I saw as I walked in, and assumed was the hairdresser, was a large, young, jolly girl from Tenerife, with a decent haircut and a dress sense that spared me a view of her knicker elastic, so frequently on display in hairdresser’s nowadays. We chatted pleasantly – or rather she did – while she washed and conditioned my hair and diagnosed me as either being under too much stress or eating too much animal fat (I don’t eat any – it didn’t take much working out), and I felt I had deposited myself in safe hands. Then Jolly Tinerfeña stepped back to let Il Maestro take over. An Italian, from Rome, with more than a passing resemblance to Benicio del Toro and a comb that was brandished like a cut-throat razor. He started to pull and tug and I explained I was going to a wedding, so he pushed and pulled and tutted, and off he went. His Spanish was fast and furious, and not very Spanish so not easy to follow. He was – believe it or not – an ex-priest, who had hung up his rosary and cassock for rinses and curling tongs. He felt that the Church did not give him space to express himself and his free interpretation of the words of Our Lord and of the meaning of Love and Beauty. And so on and so forth. I wondered if I was going to look like Mary Magdalen at the wedding. Better than a tonsure, mind you.
And then it happened. How I didn’t see it coming, I do not know; I think it was the whirlwind of Italian surrealist expressionism that did it. He asked me what I do for a living, and foolishly I said (for the first and last time in a public place) “I write”. Perhaps unsurprisingly so did my free-love priest-hairdresser. Poetry. And two hours of recital later, I staggered out with a miraculously wonderful hairdo (but then miracles were in order, I suppose), a spinning head, a sense of panic as I was now late, and I managed to leave my necklace and earrings for the wedding behind in my haste to escape. Of course, I had to go back. And he was standing, clutching my small, chic shopping bag, inviting me to a private poetry reading session the next day, in case I knew of any agents… Well, I don’t. Just for the record. Not a single one.
So. That’s what I do, here in Seville. I sit in the dark because I work at night, and I unjumble grammar (badly?) and ponder the delights of phonology (better?). And from time to time I write short texts which take me and those two dozen people who may one day read my bits of books to corners of my mind which are actually not that bad places to be. Once in a while.

Back to Little Me.

Little Me. Part One.

2008-07-09T03:23:00.000+02:00

“Be a good girl, pet, and bring a chair for the gentleman” (lilting stress on the gen). My Granny sporting a green turban-like hat as if she were an exotic Queen with an emerald peach-skin crown, and a long-dead animal with shiny black beads for eyes wrapped around her neck, head dangling menacingly. Her only jewel, the ubiquitous brooch, possibly shaped like a golden sprig of leaves or a Celtic cross. The Gentleman, an eminent octogenarian whose name – like so many others in my early childhood years – began with ‘Reverend’, dropped with a sharp sigh and a strange squishy sound and landed almost demurely on the chair I had strategically placed in his projected line of descent.

The rattle of delicate bone china teacups filled with an aromatic, scalding brew from Ceylon, a deafening echo filling the room.

Another coffee morning; the typical parish social event bringing together all those careful to maintain their social standing with the neighbours and a chance to show off garishly tasteful brooches brought from far-off climes with strange, romantic-sounding names like Aberystwyth and Rangoon by adoring male offspring. Such a good boy.
My grandmother was in her element, an element I was expected to share, nay, splash about in with veritable gusto, although always maintaining respectable levels of decorum and discretion; one must never bubble over or enthuse, simply not done, my dear. I had been ‘a very good girl, pet, very good indeed’ that week, thus earning the honour of being the one to thrust porcelain plates of coloured sponge cakes and chocolate caramel shortbread squares – principal element of the Scottish diet – along with small white triangles of bread and butter under the discerning noses of the parishioners. I was also allowed to place the tiny china vases of tissue paper carnations one by one in the centre of each table, and, even more delightful, inevitably disappear under the piles of damp, steaming, warm fur and camel hair coats handed to me to be hung up in the cloakroom, as these people too tall to see clearly entered the hall. And then, I might even receive, as a special treat, a few words of Biblical wisdom from the very mouth of the Famous BBC Actor, also an Eminent Reverend Gentleman and friend of my Reverend Professor Grandpa, the special guest at the coffee morning today.

CUT! Next clip.

“Mummy, Mummy, come and play! Come on, pleeeeeeease!” My Mummy-I-Love-You-So-Much, absolutely gorgeous, beautiful creature in her magenta turtle-neck and straight-legged black and white dog-tooth trousers. My Mummy, as beautiful as the ladies in the films my Granny watched on a Sunday afternoon with a tear-sodden handkerchief by her side. My Mummy, like a dark-haired Hitchcock fetish, with skin of alabaster and forget-me-not blue eyes. Those eyes that, to the end of her days, retained their captivating watercolour depth and mood, accompanying her sparkling, glittery smile.
“Mummy-y! Plea-yease! Come on!” “I can’t, darling; it wouldn’t be good for the baby.” Ah. Of course. That bump that had started to stretch Mummy’s angora jersey making it – and Mummy - lose their shape. Ava Garder in a fairground mirror. Hm. Not much fun, this baby brother of mine. Or sister. Who knows.

“Come on. I’ll play” Wow! My Daddy! My Daddy’s going to play with me! Of course! It was Saturday, the day that that ghost-like figure clad in suit and tie that I just managed to make out through fast-closing eyelashes as I tottered on the threshold of dreams from Monday to Friday – ‘Night night...nipe nipe, nipe nyuff… Kissssszzzzz’ - the day he appeared tall, dark and handsome in his Aran pullover, oh so masculine and clean-smelling, and wanted to play! With me! Goodness me, we’ll have to make up something new, something to impress my Daddy, something FOR my Daddy.
“Let’s play pirates!” Pure inspiration. “Yes, yes, pirates. We can wear hankies on our heads” “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell alright, though me, a hanky, um…” “Alright. No hankies. But you wait here while I hide the treasure.”

I little later I saluted Captain Daddy and handed him a perfectly drawn treasure map of Back Garden Island. “Right. Let’s go and dig”. A radio voice. A Man’s voice.
My own little patch of garden was near the area my mother hung out the washing so she could keep an eye on my excavations. Just there by the raspberry canes and the enormous jungle-like leaves of the rhubarb plants. There were no plants, weeds, rocks, palm trees, waterfalls, or skeletons whatsoever in my patch of garden, which made the map, with its large red cross indicating the whereabouts of the treasure, somewhat difficult to interpret through lack of landmarks. But my father, in a rare moment of parent-offspring bonding, began to hunt, dig, and scrabble in the earth. After a while, zip. Not a bean. Not even a bit of cress. “Alright. What shall we play now?” “Nooo! You’ve got to find the treasure!” “But, what treasure?” “Ohhh, Daddy!” Poor man. Didn’t seem to know anything about pirates, which was strange coming, as he did, from the same country as the creator of Captain Hook. “We’re pirates. And we have treasures. And we hide the treasures. And then you have to look for them.” Clearer than that…..? “Wait a moment. What are th……what is this treasure?” “You know Mummy’s necklace? The one with the pretty blue glass beads and things……..?”

The garden, my garden. Nowadays there’s a bijou piano room with a coffee table and two wicker chairs – or similar – plonked on top of it. Who could ever want so many raspberry canes and things that need pruning and looking after? Let’s be practical! Cement, steel, glass – so much easier to look after.

Ah, but they don’t know about the treasure.

CUT. Next clip.

How did I get here? (Letting the days go by)

2008-07-09T01:51:00.000+02:00

I should call my house The Magnet. The Magnet and Old Lace. Not quite halfway along the street, it seems to be the point at which the local elderly ladies (and there are quite a few, as this is a Born & Bred Barrio) bump into each other. Andalusian elderly ladies have a similar voice quality to British elderly ladies, a voice quality reminiscent of nesting homing pigeons, or wood pigeons invisible in the early summer, a gentle cooing which brings to mind that dangly flap of skin that connects the lady-like chin to the lady-like gap between the collar bones, similar to that of the turkey but, on the whole, with a higher IQ. It’s a pleasant enough sound which makes me think of bone china teacups rattling against the saucer, Battenburg cake and fondant fancies (not very Spanish, I know, but we all have our cultural baggage). However, in Seville there is an added characteristic: decibels. So, while I am trying to write this blog, I’d like you to imagine an amplifier in a dovecote….

How did I get here? Hm. How far back do we go? When I came to Seville in temperatures of 52ºC with no future and two small children? When I left Britain, sick of the struggle, the sexual harassment, the shame of ……certain events but with the blessing of everyone who loved me and trusted I’d be alright? Do I go back to the early hours of a Glasgow Monday when I was induced into the world punctually so my parents could go to a wedding the following weekend? (They didn’t, or at least my mother didn’t – I somehow changed the priorities) Or even before that? I calculate I began my existence coinciding with the summer solstice just months before JFK became the greatest temporal reference point in modern history, though it’s not the sort of information I’ve ever confirmed with my parents “Dad, did you and Mum………?”. No, I don’t think so. But it is curious in that my mother died on the day of the solstice 42 years later. A definitive date in my life for all time. And an emotional time of year.

How far back? Well, I think I’ll give you snippets of the Little Me and intersperse them with the Now and Life in Spain as Renegade Flower of Scotland. Build up a picture. This story doesn’t have an end, so we may as well jump around in time and space; it’s more fun. Hopscotch. Oh dear. That title’s been done too.
So. As Michael Stipe would say “Here we go!”

What's in a name? - a brief aside

2008-07-07T05:27:00.000+02:00

“What’s gazpacho?” a friend asked me, when I told him the name of the blog.
I saw it on a translated menu last week, skilfully renamed ‘Cold Typical Andalusian Vegetable Beverage’ in English. Yum. Bet they sell loads of that. Catchy name too.
It’s just a cold, summery tomato soup, but it’s also something that keeps you going in the sweltering Seville heat in summer, when even trying to stand up drenches you in sweat (or in ‘glow’ if you’re a lady), and venturing outside has you clinging to walls and sprinting from stick-thin lamp-post shadow to stick-thin lamp-post shadow like the Pink Panther on speed (you and the mad dogs and tourists). Gazpacho provides you with minerals, vitamins and relief; it re-hydrates you when you’re on your knees (beginning to twig the metaphor?). I think of it as so typical of this part of the world, and as something that really does give you what you need, a lift or boost to keep going. A horticultural shove. And believe me, since I moved here, keeping going has been hard at times. So maybe I should call my friends Human Gazpacho and my own stubborn “never fall down” determination The Gazpacho of Life……perhaps without the onion, though.

Here’s how you make it

Gazpacho
You need around a kilo of tasty tomatoes, scalded, peeled, and with the seeds out, a big chunk of dense, day-old bread, not the really open pugliese sort, about the size of a large bread roll or the size of your hand - if you've got big hands - without the crust (the bread, not your hand). 2 cloves of garlic, 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil (6 ‘glugs’!) and 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar. And cold water. What else? A chunk of cucumber (if you like it) and a smallish red pepper or half a green pepper, chopped and without the seeds are all optional ingredients, and maybe a small onion. Some people even add a few ground almonds.
The main recipe is this:
When you’ve removed the crust from the bread, soak it in cold water for a while then put it in a blender with the oil, vinegar, chopped garlic, tomatoes and a pinch of sea salt. Liquidise it all, then add in the cucumber, pepper, onion, almonds – whatever extras, if any, you’ve decided to add. Add cold water – around half a pint – so that it’s not too thick, and it’s actually soup rather than dip, and check the seasoning. Chill it in the fridge, and serve with croutons, chopped pepper, chopped cucumber, or simply drink it by the gallon straight from the jug!

Sex in the Southern City? I think not.

2008-07-06T07:20:00.000+02:00

The temptation to call this blog 'Sex in the Southern City' was great, but the title had two major drawbacks.
Firstly, it would be pure wishful thinking and every time I logged on, I'd be reminded of that, and consequently at risk of becoming obsessed, depressed or a fantastist. Of course 'Not a lot of Sex in the Southern City' doesn't have much of a ring to it and is a tad fatalistic; not heavy on the 'positive thinking' factor, either.
The other drawback is that, as a title, of course it's more or less been done already - damn! - and with my size of feet, a dainty size 44, comparisons would be odious, Manolo Bs impossible. (I always want to call him Manolo Sputnik - it's so much easier to spell!)

So. Blood, sweat and gazpacho it is. Though the odd tear may creep in and slide down the screen. Unobserved. Here's hoping they're tears of laughter, of emotion. Emotion is good. Do tears of passion exist? This blog is about life in Andalusia! If tears of passion don't officially exist, we shall just have to invent them!

Who am I? Well, I'm The Cool Mum, to my sons' friends, and The Tall Mum Who Speaks Weird to the rest of the kids at their school. To many of the adults in my 'barrio', I'm probably the Guiri (Spanish equivalent of Sassenach or Emmet, it refers to white - or rather, pink - North Europeans or North Americans and conjures up images of sandals with socks, burned-raw-red arms and necks, and freckled faces). I may even be That Foreign Woman with No Husband and Two Boys Who Look Suspiciously Like They Belong To Two Different Fathers to one or two of the more traditional ladies. No worries. Oh, and I'm The Renegade Celt. Which sounds good, conjuring up honey-sweet purple heather, watery grey-blue skies, silent lochs, vibrant gorse and melancholic glens in the midst of this brown, mustard and white cobbled cityscape with its blood-red soul and Al-Andalus ghosts, shimmering under the cloudless bluer than blue.

How did I come to be marooned in this city? I can't say 'Godforesaken' here, as it's anything but that. God is so ever present, at least in his ornate Spanish Catholic manifestation, that even the haberdashers sell jewel-like fabric for dressing Virgins (that's with a capital 'V'). The cathedral is huge and beautiful with its Moorish minaret, the Giralda.........ah, but we'll wax lyrical about the city another time. How I came to be marooned here is a medium to long story. Are you sitting comfortably?