Rosie brings in the last dandelion, carrying it closed in a chalice of hands like
a sacrament. Stock still, she passes a slow thumb around its bright corolla.
It lifts its head. We are charged with its accommodation. It lolls loud, a solo voice
in a wine glass. By morning its royalty is spent. The crown is sweated hair, the stem a bled
vein. Rosie cups its scrap length, lifting it to me on a tear for aid or explanation.
But what can I tell you about time that I would have you know so soon?
May 14, 2013
It's not that age brings childhood back again. Age merely shows what children we remain. GOETHE
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age. SOPHIA LOREN
A woman tells her doctor, 'I've got a bad back.' The doctor says, 'It's old age.' The woman says, 'I want a second opinion.' The doctor says: 'Okay - you're ugly as well.' TOMMY COOPER
We have an excellent lunch with A at Père Michel in Bathurst
Street in Bayswater – G, R and my cousin L, all of us in our 60s, all of us
peering down that narrowing chronological corridor before us with a mixture of
resentment and trepidation. A has negotiated the greater part of the corridor
already: he’s 91 today and he sits beside me, never a tall man, shrunken now
and slow in his movements. But his light blue eyes are bright and the slow burr
of his voice is as clear and penetrating as ever. This meal is his treat and he
takes pleasure in the company of these his friends, who are his family in all
but blood. He lived with my mother, my father and I for most of my life, an
uncle, an older brother, a some-time surrogate parent, and now in great age he
remains my sole surviving older relative.
As
I ride the tube and the train back home, my thoughts keep returning to my own
ageing – to the prospects for one who has managed the first three-score and
then some without really touching the sides, but now has rather less territory
to cover for the remaining part of the journey. The breezy assumption that
mortality was a condition to which others were subject but which was likely to
pass me by was extinguished by cancer three years ago. For all my day-to-day
energy and in spite of a strong conviction that I’m more in command of my
creative faculties than at any other time in my life, I’m afflicted now by a
sense of fragility. I position myself in front of the morning mirror and see a
robust enough shape looking back. I can stand up straight and stretch sinews
that still seem to tie the bones together efficiently enough. Weight loss
following a diet has restored something of the triangular over the pear-shaped.
Defective distance glasses help to blur the lines and neutralise the signs of
wear and tear. Additionally I can breathe deep without feeling dizzy; I can
bend my knees without firing off a cartilage fusillade; I can lift my 16-kilo
weights 30 times without going cross-eyed and bloodshot. But in between these
demonstrations of continuing vitality the tinnitus hum of anxiety is constant.
As the triumphant Roman emperor had his appointed servant standing behind him
in the parading chariot to whisper through the roar of the mob, “Remember you
are mortal”, so a continuous voice provides me with the same reminder. Even as
my substance and strength lifts me out of this chair, through the door and into
the garden, that underlying frailty travels with me. I’m not, it seems, what
once I was and soon I shan’t be as I am now.
A
kind of everyday madness, this. At the very time when some degree of
existential stillness should be attainable, those moments within which a breath
or two of serenity might be found are spilling like water. What to do? The
answer to that question, like the free beer in the pub, will be provided
tomorrow. And tomorrow, and tomorrow…
<:>
In
the meantime, here are some reflections on ageing free of self-pity and despair.
[1.]
When interviewed on his 70th birthday by fellow oldie Michael
Parkinson, Michael Caine was asked whether any half-decent case could be made
for the ageing process. Without any
hesitation he declared that the very good thing about ageing is that it places
you in a territory where you are no longer presented with alternatives. In youth and middle age, he said (and
here I’m paraphrasing), there is a sense of an indeterminate future within
which you might, at some juncture, make those final, life enhancing
changes. In old age that option is
no longer available and you have only the opportunity to be cheerful or to give
up. Before the onset of old age
people treat life as a sort of rehearsal for something yet to come. Grinning, Caine said: “I tell them - this is it!”
Another point that he made was in
reference to some research that he did for a part at one time. He was reading some material on
abnormal psychology and he came across the assertion that when we falter in the
face of adversity then we are in most danger of becoming in the moment of
weakness that which we fear most. This simple truism – elusive maybe because of
the somewhat specialised context within which it would normally be found –
struck him forcibly and he made the decision to effect change within himself
accordingly. Being able to look
back on that moment of realisation and to recognise the benefits that accrued
from taking positive action from it was a function only possible in age.
[2.] A joke told to me by a Jewish friend:
An elderly couple had dinner
at another couple's house and, after the meal, the wives dutifully cleared the
table and withdrew to the kitchen. The two elderly gentlemen leaned back in
their chairs & lit cigars.
Blowing a plume of blue smoke towards the ceiling, the guest said to his
host: "Last night we went out to a new restaurant. It was absolutely splendid. Can’t
recommend it highly enough".
The host asked: "What's
the name of the restaurant?"
The first man opens his mouth
to reply, then knits his brow in obvious concentration, finally asking his
companion:
"Sammy, what’s the name
of that red flower you give to someone you love?"
"A carnation?" his
friend suggested.
"No, no. The other
one," the man responded testily.
"The poppy?"
"No, no, no,"
growled the man. "You know - the one that’s red and has thorns."
"Oh, you mean a
rose", his friend laughed.
"Yes, that’s it, that’s
it! Thank you!" the first man cried. He turned toward the kitchen and
yelled: "Rose, what's the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
[3.] A sobering truth:
There is more money being
spent on breast implants and Viagra than Alzheimer's research. This means that
by 2020, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge
erections and absolutely no recollection of how to utilise them.
At this time when the early light honeys the window’s edge, we all wear spring
in our own fashion. You dye the silver out of your hair, trim it so the curls
twist like rising ferns and pushing your fingers deep, you shake it into the morning.
The kids swing on the gate, riding its parabola like notes glued to a stave.
And heads thrown back they shout at the sky, a calling-on song to the life to come.
I hold spring like a candle by an open door, my hand cupped around the flame.
*For reasons unknown, the Mag pic won't upload so I've had to substitute another.
April 28, 2013
My original tagline for the Patteran Pages ran thus: A patteran is a coded configuration of leaves, sticks and stones left at the roadside by Gypsies to communicate with each other. This is my digital version, left for any passers-by... It was pretty much the first message that I launched into what was then a very sparsely populated blogosphere and it carried with it a sense of the tentative, the hesitant – an overture proffered more in hope than expectation. I couldn’t have anticipated the sheer speed and magnitude of the coalescence of bloggers around common interests and the mutual babble that came about during the following few years. Nor could I have imagined that ten years on I would count a number of those early pilgrims amongst my closer friends.
Circles turn; ends become beginnings. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill. I find that once again, in a sparsely populated corner of the blogosphere, I’m proffering that tagline tentatively, a little hesitantly. Who’s left? Is that an echo or another voice?
<:>
Sweeping rain after a tentative, almost embarrassed two-day spring episode. Rain and cold: default British weather all the year round.
<:>
In a day or two I shall announce to a breathlessly waiting public – well. a couple of faithful friends, a security guard, the barman and a cat that’s just sauntered in from a crowded street – a publishing venture that’s had my attention for several months now. So don’t touch that dial!
<:>
Here’s Maisie looking very pleased with herself in mid-‘cello practice at her grandparents’ house. She’s 7 in a couple of weeks. As a second-time-around parent, I’m so conscious of how swiftly the world moves to claim our children. We’re very fortunate to be able to send her (and Reuben and Rosie too) to a school that is as determined as ever to fight a rearguard action against those who would transform education from ongoing process to end-on product.
<:>
As a child the notion of a telephone being lost or stolen would have been laughable. Ours sat four-square on its dad-made shelf, fat, black and Bakelite with its plaited cord lashing it to the wall and thence to the outside world. Disposing of it effectively would have entailed dropping it down a deep well or carrying it away on the back of a small lorry.
Losing a phone today is a piece of piss. All you have to do is ensure that it’s inside a jacket pocket without a padlock securing the flap and gravity will do the rest. And of course, with it will go the stack of mock-croc photo albums and the spiral-bound address book. As happened to me on Friday.
<:>
And here’s a view across Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall taken on a winter’s afternoon. Photoshop CS6 has done the rest.
Each one has, in perfect symmetry, paired buttocks, smooth, undimpled, gently curved. So, gender notwithstanding, there’s something here for the most exacting student of anatomy.
Now look further; check the contours of those cheeks – a face, half turned away – the blush of early passion jumped, roseate and downy. Or the rubicund shine of passion unconsumed in age.
And – the span of years aside - if you listen through the breeze, the birdsong, you might hear at the moment of release, the plucked note’s pizzicato, the juice unloosed, the kiss of consummation.
April 03, 2013
A first full draft of a poem that's been on the way for several months. Shared (somewhat tentatively) with dVerse.
GHOSTED
Here’s a strange truth: to me, the passer-by, every house is haunted, ghosted to the core. Windows implacable in slate or honeyed gold in light, doors sealed like pot-lids or promiscuously ajar; the garden paths gone urban sprawl under chicken-wire and bike wheels or clean and green as flushed-out bottles, every street, each lane and avenue, the lone hill lifting its single cottage high, behind the bricks, they’re ghosted all, peopled by wraiths, sluiced and washed in dreams.
This truth has lived with me since childhood. Since I climbed my grandma’s stairs, the Balham flat a sort of mezzanine between the basement and the attic. Down below, the Sextons behind their chocolate-brown front door and up above, Miss Jackson under bird-shat skylights. And in between, a shaft of dusty darkness like a flue up and down which passed a brew of scents and odours, vapour from the days and nights of shapeless strangers.
Through this rich draft, I’d scale the risers, pausing by the banisters to peer into the well in search of phantoms rising through the packed loam of the centuries. Just a bar of light from an opening door or the pattern smudge of diamond tiles, or the scrape of a voice against a voice, and silence. All evidence enough of pickled lives, briny and pungent parodies of my own.
Then I’d climb away, eyes raised towards our butter-yellow light-bulb inside its beaded fringe. And at night in a drift of linen sheets, I’d dream the scratch and shuffle in the walls, those crowding ghosts, ordering their times in alien spaces, angular, ill-lit, a world apart, but through a membrane paper-thin.
So from that time and place, a hoard of ghosts in every house I pass. And if the early mystery has dimmed across the years, eclipsed by the light that language shines, the current flows again and I walk by, a child, my senses charged.
Stones and shells. Each grey disc or pink ellipse is a crashed planet. Driftwood and shards. Dreams tangled up in the mystery script on blown cartons and vagabond bags.
He scuttles, unshelled, under a carillon of seagulls, drunk on salt and ozone. This child who fears clouds and mirrors for the shapes they throw is healed for a day by the moonstruck logic of the tides.
This is the second draft of Touched, shared with dVerse.
TOUCHED
We’re in a hospital lift going up from ground floor to the seventh, just the two of us, strangers and I’m thinking (as you do) what if
the cable breaks and we drop like a stone in a well? How would you reckon the moment at which to jump before the point of impact?
Then, with a jolt, the lift just stops. We look at each other, look away. Too soon yet for that dreadful intimacy that prefigures panic. Now it’s grunts
and chuckles, pantomime impatience and some random button punching. Then comes language, blunt and businesslike. “Right. Now what? Should be an alarm
somewhere or a ‘phone. Let’s see”. But all from me. My partner in misfortune hasn’t moved. Within the ticking silence, he is motionless, head cocked like
someone listening for a distant birdcall or for bells on a breeze. And even as I watch for a flicker, both unfocussed eyes tip back to white and, still without
a word, he drops straight down, within the circle of his standing, like disembodied clothes. My first impulse is just to leave him like some 3-D puddle that I
have to step around as I organise escape or rescue. Two disasters in succession out of a blameless morning seem unfair. But then, as unexpected as the other,
both eyes open, wide and blue and his lips kiss air like a baby blowing bubbles. He’s going to die; we know it, both of us in a simultaneous heartbeat. And I kneel,
like a bad actor genuflecting, and I lean, fingers spread against the tin-can wall and watch the urgent lips trying to mould words out of the unaccommodating air.
I stoop to listen – more, maybe, to read the fragile shapes in flight. “Touch me”, he breathes. “Touch me”. But I hesitate: unlinked, I’m free, like standing water;
once connected, there’s a current drawing me towards another place. But then I cup his cheek as I might a child’s and, on a long unwinding breath, he speaks quite clearly -
“Mummy” – and he doesn’t breathe again. Sometime later, with a jolt, the lift glides upwards, graceful, silent, as if no time had passed for anyone, as if I might step
through those doors, untouched, untouchable, as if the light should shine as brightly evermore, doors open, close again, as if the axis of the world still held as trustworthy and true.
into a middle distance somewhere over my shoulder.
“Done?” you murmured. “All done”, I answered.
So you lifted back your chair, stood up
and stretched and looked along the
slow path down towards the bridge.
February 19, 2013
A quiet 10th Patteran Pages birthday. Just a few people round.
Faute de mieux - very few are left. It's a bit like reaching a great age: just
the odd fellow veteran and a brisk and business-like nurse! Well, up in a
trembling grip goes the glass of Pouilly-Fumé...
As to that past
decade - well, those aspects of it that have impinged directly or indirectly on
my life have been recorded on these pages and the curious can locate them in my
back files. In respect of the great verities of life and death, the years in
between 2003 and 2013 have incorporated:
an explosion of major conflicts,
their impact upon their own immediate regions and the world beyond and their
(ongoing) body count, military and civilian;
the birth of three children and
the restructuring of my life in late middle age around them;
the death of my mother and my
assumption in late middle age of the status of orphan;
a tsunami, a nuclear disaster
and a hurricane;
my diagnosis of prostate
cancer, its treatment and my current freedom from it; the crippling anxiety
that came in its wake, its treatment and my current relief from its worst
effects;
a concomitant sense of my own
mortality accompanied by a powerful consciousness of the need to align my
priorities and live right by them.
Positives have
persisted the way a good deed shines in a naughty
world:
My
granddaughter Kitty was born to my daughter Zoe and her partner Russell.
Ancient Lights was published and courtesy of Beth Adams and
Phoenicia Publishing a long ambition was realised.
We moved into a house
that feels like entirely the right place for the five of us to be at this time.
After many years, I
resumed playing with Bill and Paul and it was as if we’d only put down the
instruments the day before. Now with Doug on board as well, the music is as
satisfying as I could wish it to be.
As to the
future, I shall keep the blog open for poems and the odd ponder or rant, as of
old. But, Typepad willing, I shall
make some design changes and I‘ll cull the blogroll and links list. Then at
least there’ll be enough of a sense of renewal and future purpose to keep the
blog operational. Ten years is a long time and an unceremonious bailing out
would seem something of a waste.
This was how I made my tentative debut into the nascent blogosphere. How very long ago it seems now...
DICK JONES - WHO HE?
Born in Horton Kirby, Kent, UK, during a V2 raid on the night of December 25th 1944. Thus 58 years old. Divorced, two grown-up offspring, living with partner (younger) & 5-month-old son. Teacher of Drama in a progressive school, facing retirement in 2.5 years time after 36 years in the profession.
Thus my identity - 58 years consigned to an 8-line paragraph. By the time I retire 2/3 of my life will have been given over to the business of being a teacher. So being a teacher has over the years come to define as much what I am as what I do. That which provides my salary has come to define my identity outside & beyond the workplace.
A sobering thought. Is an actor an actor when s/he isn't on stage? Is a politician a politician when s/he is standing in a supermarket checkout queue? What will being a retired teacher do to my sense of my own identity? What will I have become? A retired teacher is a ghost teacher, a yesterday teacher, a theoretical entity whose skills are dormant. They will be active only in memories - mine & those of any ex-students who may recall the lambent wisdoms or stupefying boredom of my lessons.
So where shall I locate my identity when the bell goes one morning & I stay at home? I believe that it will reside in three distinct places: • partnership • fatherhood • poetry
And I guess beneath them all in a fourth - the Child Within who never dies; who defies age & withering experience; who retains a capacity for wonder, surprise & hope; the child who, my mother tells me at age 88, survives the mortification of the flesh & waits for a new dawn every night..
What of the first three? • Partnership because I'm lucky beyond deserving & reasonable chance to have met E. • Fatherhood because now that I'm free of many of the vanities & stultifying certainties of youth I have an opportunity to get parenting more right than wrong this time. • Poetry because the writing of it - that most solitary & internalised of processes - enables me to continue to have a rich & sustaining inner life & gets me closer sometimes to knowing - or thinking I know - who I really am. THE BLOG - WHY & WHITHER?
WHY? How can it be about anything but vanity? Or, if that's too cynical, maybe it's about verifying, confirming, validating one's existence in a public place. Who is really going to give a damn about what makes my world real? Who out there is going to log on &, without even checking their email first, rush to my blog to catch the latest shimmering perception?
Well, I shall. I shall be my own best audience; I shall read each paragraph & stanza, enthralled & lost in the wonder of it all. And if that sets me alongside Robbie Williams in the conceit & self-regard stakes, all that separates us - & you too if you're a blogger - is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
WHITHER? This blog will log random thoughts & notions, sparked off as the world goes by. And I shall use it too as a little roadside stall for the poems as they get sparked off too as the world goes by. 19 February 2003
:::
Well, once again I must be 'my own best audience'. What held true then must hold true now. Continuity is all. Another 10 years? A decade on I'm standing in a different place with a different view before me. One day at a time...
:::
February 17, 2013
A poem from my collection Ancient Lights, published by Phoenicia Publishing. Shared with dVerse and The Mag.
THE SUN HOTEL, DEDHAM, 1954
I wake to the hysteria of bells - medieval laughter out of my stained glass dream.
Paddling Daddy's slippers across bare boards (as black and ancient as the mud
that silts up the Stour), I reach the leaded window. Beyond, the church squats on its bones,
brooding music. Hymns are hatched stillborn; organ voices rage in vain, quelled by the crowing of the bells.
The street in both directions is innocent of cars. Phantom mist - an atavistic veil - blurs outlines:
passers-by are cloaked and cowled, pacing the tracks and byways of their ancestors. My child's breath
smokes the glass. Morning thickens; even the light seems ancient now. Yawning, I curl back into
a tumulus of sheets. The bells cascade, mocking the shape of my few years. I sleep again and now, in the
mapless dark, my green heart beats faster. Mine is the steady pulse that animates this room; its beams
draw new sap from my source. Plaster, lath and tiles expand; the house tests its roots. The bells rejoice
a continuity of mornings. This, the moment and the lost years, are swallowed in their shining.
February 10, 2013
A fourth draft for a poem from 20 years ago. Shared with dVerse and The Mag.
THE TEARS OF THINGS
Conventionally, lovers should part in a soft storm of blown hopes and unconsumed potential. Tears blur the old horizons and refract
a new world in which one is the number. Some might perceive a beauty in this crafted heartbreak, others simply paradox: from the grit of parting
the tears that form are like pearls. Or blood may be shed: spitting slanders the lovers may wheel and dive like wolves in a corner, the one
heartsick on betrayal, the other one punch-drunk with guilt. Little to choose, maybe, between the hall of mirrors and the killing floor, but passion spent
and smoke where once was fire are markers for despair. The truth is more prosaic. Just after dawn they’re sitting in a car. The street
is narrow and the houses small and terraced. The engine mutters and he leaves it running, a string of phonemes all about departure.
A man clips a breakfast posy, turns and goes indoors. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, she murmurs and the silence shivers but it doesn’t break.
He lifts her tear onto his knuckle, tastes its salt as last communion, floats the final platitudes. She steps out; he drives away.
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