It isn’t, it’s only a telegraphic account of my Saturday adventures when together with my parents, I visited Gloucester Cathedral – always a pleasure btw – such an incredible building…
… best cloisters in the world…
I was really curious to see the moon installation right in the middle of the big nave… awesome… It’s a 7m (23feet) spherical, helium inflated structure created by Luke Jerram and illustrated with photos of the moon by the NASA Lunar Reconnessaince Orbiter. It’s simply mesmerising. The incongruous location increases the wow factor I’m sure, but you just can’t stop looking at it… it’s magical…
… it’s so realistic… it appears almost suspended in mid air…
Isn’t it amazing?
After that, we had tickets to visit the library I never knew existed… you know me and books, right?
Well, the story goes like this: back in the 1400 the Benedictine monks realised that keeping the books they were studying/copying whatever, in the cloister wasn’t a good idea. Extremely cold temperatures and dampness wasn’t good for them or the books so they build what at the time was the first purpose built library in a monastery in the whole of the England. They built a sliver of a building hight between two other buildings’ roofs and there they studied and collected many precious books.
When Henry VIII ordered the dissolutions of all the abbeys, he turned St Peter’s into a Cathedral instead and because it was, even then, famous for its music and choir, and he was rather keen on sang celebrations he kept the library as a school for the chorister to learn latin and so on so they could read the songs etc etc. It was 1541.
Unfortunately the books held in the library at the time got all taken when the old monastery got pillaged by a bankrupt Henry; he might have set up the school and kept the church but he made sure that anything of any value got taken away… The library remained and the collection is slowly growing with time, although none of the books are from earlier than the 1600s.
Still super cool, panelled in wood and full of old books. Heaven.
It’s definitively soup weather… the mornings are dark and chilly and frankly a salad for lunch is not so appealing anymore.
The first soup was butternut squash and carrots, nothing fancy, but velvety and warming. And I didn’t take any pictures, because… I don’t know, I forgot…
This time though I made an effort and even though I don’t have photos of the final results I have some of the ‘during’… does that count?
Most of my soup (unless I do the famous ‘everything at the bottom of the vegetable drawer’ soup) comes from this book:
To start off I went back to the old classic:
Who doesn’t like this one? No 3 calls it ‘white soup’… probably a strategy to ignore the fact it contains a moderate amount of vegetables. Denial.
It’s a harmless soup, that’s for sure.
The other ingredients are an onion (I was crying, couldn’t take a picture) and some chicken stock. That’s it. Easy peasy.
This week is rolling on in a haze… the sounds appeared muffles. After a loss like we’ve just experienced it’s weird to realise that actually no matter how great is the pain, life just goes on around you. It seems a little insensitive… but actually it should be comforting; like a stable ground after an earthquake .
Cooking, soup, even banana cake help a little. I feel that doing something concrete, and physical almost, helps a tad.
I had the last of the banana bread, sliced, toasted and smothered with Nutella. Zero guilt.
and here’s a poem about soup… just because… that’s how randomly my brain works these days…
I saw a famous man eating soup. I say he was lifting a fat broth Into his mouth with a spoon. His name was in the newspapers that day Spelled out in tall black headlines And thousands of people were talking about him.
When I saw him, He sat bending his head over a plate Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.
My mother in law passed away, suddenly but peacefully yesterday morning. Her death has left us all raw and slightly stunned.
She was a beautiful woman and is already greatly missed.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Breaking all my rules here, which is always a liberating thing to do, and writing about poetry on a Saturday…
The Cheltenham Festival of Literature is still on and today I attended a poetry event: Anthony Anaxagorou… absolutely brilliant.
There is a really good article about his latest collection ‘After the Formalities’ here.
He read beautifully from it, his experience in the ‘spoken word’ world clear from his ‘performance’, and yet he was intimate and fragile and strong and real, genuine, honest.
This is the long poem that gives the collection its title… Stick with it, it’s worth it:
AFTER THE FORMALITIES, Anthony Anaxagorou
In 1481 the word ‘race’ first appears in Jacques de Brézé’s poem ‘The Hunt’. De Brézé uses the word to distinguish between different groups of dogs.
In that hard year grandparents arrived on a boat with a war behind them and a set of dog leads. Bullet holes in the sofa. Burst pillows. Split rabbits. Passports bound in fresh newspapers. Bomber planes. A dissenting priest. A moneybag sucking worry. On the boat grandmother anticipated England’s winters with the others. Black snow on gold streets. Grandfather grieved two dogs he’d left. Pedigrees. Bluebottles decaying at the base of their bowls. The dogs of England were different. The water though. Fine to drink.
In 1606 French diplomat Jean Nicot added the word ‘race’ to the dictionary drawing distinctions between different groups of people. Nicotine is named after him.
In London grandparents lived with only a radio. A lamp favouring the wall’s best side. Curtains drawn round. Byzantine icons placed on paraffin heaters. Arguing through whispers. Not wanting to expose tongues. Stories circulating. What neighbours do if they catch you saying “I’m afraid” in a language that sounds like charred furniture being dragged across a copper floor. Grandfather. Always. Blew smoke out the lip of his window. So too did his neighbour. Colourless plumes merging amorphous. The way it’s impossible to discern the brand of cigarette a single pile of ash derives from.
In his 1684 essay ‘A New Division of the Earth’ French physician François Bernier became the first popular classifier to put all humans into races using phenotypic characteristics.
Mother’s skin is the colour of vacations. Her hair bare-foot black. An island’s only runway. Reports of racist attacks. Father turns up the volume. Turns us down. Chews his pork. Stings the taste with beer. Tells mother to pass the pepper. There is never a please. He asks if she remembers the attack. The hospital. His nose. A Coca-Cola bottle picked from his skull. Yes. She mutters. The chase. Dirty bitch. How we’ll make you White. Aphrodite hard. Dirty dog trembling with the street light. Please God. Not tonight. The kids.
In 1775 J.F. Blumenbach claimed in his seminal essay ‘On the Natural Variety of Mankind’ that it was environment, not separate creations, which caused the variety in humans.
In the bathroom mirror I spat blood from my mouth. Quaver breath and suburban. My brother desperate to piss. Pulled the door open. Asking. What happened? I tried to fight and lost? Why? Because the island we come from is smaller than this. Their names are shorter. Pronounceable so they exist. Even after their noses break they still don’t hook like ours. Their sun is only half peeled. He lifted his top to show me two bruises. To remind me of something. How history found its own way of surviving. A dark wash mixed with the whites spinning round and around.
In the bathroom mirror my brother spat blood from his mouth. Souvla breath and home. Me. Desperate to piss. Pulling the door open. Asking. What happened? He tried to fight and lost? Why? Because the island we come from is larger than this. Here. We chew up too much of their language. Leave behind an alphabet of bones. We will never exist in their love songs. How many bruises does it take to make a single body? I left him. Surviving history. A dark wash mixed with the whites spinning round and around.
In 1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
If the house phone rings after midnight someone you know is dying. Breathing in ten black moons under a siren or belfry. From the wound in my uncle’s back leaked the first atlas. Blood escaping him like a phantom vaulting over the spiked gates of heaven. The knife. Half steel half drunk. The motive. Skin or prayer. We went to visit. In the window’s condensation his daughter wrote Daddy Don’t Die. On the water of her breath. That evening my father came home. One hand trumpet. The other wreath. All his fists the law.
In 1911 eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote in his seminal book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, “Two imbecile parents, whether related or not, have only imbecile offspring”.
She had the same colour hair as Jesus. Most boys smile after. When we were done I moved a blonde streak from my arm wondering how much of my body was still mine. I smelt of rain atop an old umbrella. My fingers a burnt factory. She asked if I was her first and when I said yes she smiled. Pulling the covers up whispering not to get too comfortable. How her father would be back. The bed now a continent. The duvet locking me to its borders. On the shelf a gollywog above her family portrait. Poised like a saint.
The 1943 famine of Bengal killed 4 million people. Churchill ordered food to be sent directly to British soldiers in Europe. On hearing the number of Bengalis who’d perished he asked, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?”
Outside the KFC racists have always looked so sure to me. Like weathermen. Like fact. Driving his skull into mine like a belief. I saw how even evil can feel warm and smell good when close enough. A crowbar. Wedged against my throat. Slowly the lights began to wave. Chips by my feet. Black iron warming my skin so silently I could hear how suffering learns to soothe the jaws of antiquity. These men. Irrational as any God. And me. Emptying inside the promise of my oxygen tank.
“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population.” – Enoch Powell, 1968.
After the formalities of course I said London and of course he asked again. When I said Cyprus he leaned into his chair recalling a family holiday. The weather sublime. The people accommodating. Particularly towards the English. How it was a shame about the Turkish thing. And your parents. When did they enter here? In the late ’50s I replied. So before the Immigrants Act? Yes I said. Before. Well good for them. He said. Putting the lid on his pen. Closing his pad. Asking me to talk a bit more about my previous roles.
In 2001 philosopher Robert Bernasconi wrote “The construct of race was a way for white people to define those who they regarded as other.”
In those days I was required to fill out forms with multiple boxes. Some I left blank. My father would notice my omission. Filling in the white option with his black biro. I crossed it out. Telling him I’m going with ‘other’. My mother wearing the same sad skin as before said we are not White. The look he gave her was. Snatching the form from me. The same X dominating so much White. Let me tell you. Nobody in their right mind need make themselves such an obvious target. He affirmed.
My grandmother will die. Somewhere in her skeleton. White sheeted. Iodoform thick. Her mouth all beetle. My family will gather round her body. All fig. My mother will look for coins. Despite there being nothing for money to save. Another lady. Dying the same. Will goad our kind. Through thick tubes she’ll scorn. Her voice. A bluebottle’s hot wings. You’re all dogs. Foreigners. And dirty. Outnumber us even in dying. The nurse will apologise for the whole of history. Drawing the curtain. Mud is always the last thing to be thrown. A prayer reaching for the pride of an olive. Like a hint. To hold.
… 2ndweek of Uni underway. Initial thoughts? Many and varied ones.
(This post has nothing to do with fruit crumble by the way, the photos are just here for the ‘bants’).
It’s a strange feeling to be sitting in a room with young people the same age as my eldest, trying not to act like a ‘mum’ and refraining from saying things like ‘a coke and chocolate bar is not really a good lunch’ or ‘it’s cold out there, you should be wearing more than a crop top this time of year’ or ‘maybe going to bed a little earlier might be a good idea’ or ‘’sit up straight’ etc. etc. You get my drift, right? And so far I’ve managed to stay quiet… but what the point is… who am I in these situations? I am a mother, I am a 49 yr old woman in a class of 19yrs olds, I come with a whole load of baggage and experience and ‘life’… should I ignore it? How stupid would I look down in the student bar downing pints or shots of whatever young’uns drink these days. Nobody needs to see me in a skimpy vest, and I’m not about to get a tattoo… and I’m very aware that in open discussions my comments reflect all this… is this bad? stupid? or do I offer an added dimension that they can ignore at will, because let’s face it… find me a 19yr old who listen to their mother…
So, tell me. Who am I? because, ‘mother’ is not enough, nor is ‘wife’ and definitively ‘student’ is not enough. All those are a part of who I am… I’m simply doing this because I wanted to fill my time, because I needed to engage my brain, because I love books, because it’s a fabulous challenge… ‘mature student’ is even worse. What does that even mean… it seems to me to be a euphemism for ‘old student’. I don’t feel ‘old’, old means having given up on things… and I certainly haven’t.
Maybe I need to stop trying to define myself. Who said we need a badge? I am who I am, like everybody else I’m multifaceted and cannot be squashed into one word. Like the young people around me I can be silly and immature and happy and depressed and insecure and confident and mature and old and wise and responsible and irresponsible and smart and stupid. We’re all the same, although to be honest, two drinks are enough for me, and they’re mostly still in bed while, by 9.45 this morning I had done one set of laundry, filled the dishwasher, finished the ironing, made my bed, dropped a forgotten folder at school to No 3 and prepared tonight’s dinner…. Just saying)
I think it’s a slight case of impostor’s syndrome creeping in. I do feel conspicuous sitting in class surrounded by people who were born after the first 4 Harry Potter books were published, and I do feel like hiding at the back if it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t see the screen/board properly if I do…
Sigh.
Let’s have some crumble.
BUT BUT BUT… I’m also loving it. I love to see young people around me, having fun, ‘chatting breeze’, I love to discover new stuff, tiring my brain on new ideas… and my modules this year are totally fabulous: post-colonial literature (never even knew it was a thing, and now I do and love it), ½ semester on children’s literature (I get to read Little Women and Harry Potter… as homework!), Shakespeare from a social history point of view (fabulously interesting, clever boy old William) and a class on philosophy (which I think should be compulsory for everybody).
… too be or not to be… maybe that it’s not the right question… we should all just be the best we can… and now if you’ll excuse me I have a washing machine to empty…
Did you know that ‘Abbey Road’, the Beatles’ final album was released today? I didn’t, someone just told me so I’m sharing. Growing up in Italy yes I knew who The Beatles were, of course, but I wasn’t really a major fan – unlike my mother who was mad about them – to the point that a musically snobby boyfriend (he was seriously into hard core Jazz) bought me the blue album (the red one? can’t remember) for my 18th birthday in an attempt to lure me away from Bruce. (See a few posts back). Fat chance. Of course it didn’t work, my love was real.
BUT, now, after living in England for many many years, and being force fed their music at every opportunity by Mr M, I have come to realise their greatness and importance (blah blah blah…) and I quite enjoy their music.
Sooo, in honour to their final album, as I was saying, I give you this little gem which I had never heard before today (and I thought I’d heard them all before, so there you go…), from the b-side of the album… sung here by Paul McCartney..
They lyrics come from a poem by the seventeenth-century playwright and poet Thomas Dekker from his play ‘Patient Grizzel’ (1603), set to a Lennon & McCartney’s new melody.
Here’s the poem:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you;
You are care, and care must keep you.
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby:
Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
So there, have yourself a nice weekend, ours will be silly busy and I’m tired already… but hey, onward and upwards, right?
I love history. I cannot believe it when people say it’s boring or useless or ‘they hate it’… to me that stinks of bad teaching, not bad subject… I mean, how can you not be interested in ‘stories’? in people? in what happened to people? that’s what’s history is all about after all…
Currently I’m up to my neck in Richard III, my first Shakespearean history play… and that meant an accelerated and not particularly thorough foray into the whole War of the Roses and subsequent messy aftermath… oh boy. It’s a rather confusing affair. It doesn’t help AT ALL that so many characters in this play have the same bloody (literally in most cases) name!! C’mon William… two Richards, two Elizabeth, two,or three, can’t work it out Edwards… I’m seriously confused, not to mention that one is supposed to know who were the Lancastrians and who were the Yorkists. Nope. All I’m getting is a lot of plotting, cursing, and murders, that’s about it.
But I’m digressing, what I wanted to say was that I love a good historical novel and in recent years I have absolutely loved the ‘Shardlake’ series written by CJ Sansom. Stupendous. They way he manages to recreate the tudor period is second to none. You can actually SEE the places and the people he describes, magnificent. And accessible. All the books are LONG but they fly by and I’m genuinely sorry when I get to the last page, every time.
Matthew Shardlake is a lawyer (and you learn so much about how things are run in those days, in a non boring way) and he seems always to find himself into some sort of trouble/misadventure/helping out people/solving crimes… If you’re interested here are the titles in order; it helps to get to know the character and to place the events in proper chronological order: Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Revelation, Heartstone, Lamentation and the final one Tombland. You won’t be sorry.
This last one is not set at or around the Royal Court we’re in Tudor England, but a couple of years after the death of Henry the VIII… when Edward VI (or course another Edward ) is too young to rule so his uncle – yes you got it – Edward Seymour rules as the protector, when the country is in the grip of a total unrest… there are religious tensions between the old Catholic religions and the new Protestant one, a young Elizabeth and her supporters, and most of all there are rebellions in the country side…
The unlikely hero, the hunchback, clever lawyer is once again caught in the middle of history whilst trying to solve a murder. I am not going to spoil the story, but it’s a fascinating and interesting setting for a story: history from the people point of view… unexpected.
Brilliant, brilliant.
Now I can only sit tight and hope for another one.
I was 15 when I first heard Bruce’s music. It was 1985, a bunch of tapes on my bedroom floors and I can honestly say it felt like he was talking to me, me alone, me personally… I became – slightly – obsessed, I translated all his songs into Italian because I wanted to know everything he sang about; I learnt all the lyrics, I collected every article I could find… he was the soundtrack of my teenage years. Let me tell you it wasn’t easy… I was surrounded by Duran Duran fan but they always seemed too fluffy to me. Bruce was real, he wasn’t ‘pretty’, he was gritty, sweaty, he was a man, not a boy. He sang about cars, and the road and running chasing demons away and chasing dreams and for someone who couldn’t wait to escape into the big wild world that was everything I needed to hear. His shows lasted for hours and hours and left you exhausted and full of life at the same time. Full of hope. And lord knows when you’re at that age you want hope, you cling to hope… even if you have no idea of what you’re hoping for.
I was lucky to have seen him live, giving his all in concert a few times and so today, on his 70th birthday, I’m going to go on a little trip down memory lane because nothing does that as well as music… one song from most of his albums… come along for the ride…
From ‘Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.’:
Blinded by the light
From ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’
Sandy
Only Bruce could have tempted me to a music festival… I didn’t go… but I wish I had… listening to the crowd singing gives me chills… from the magnificent ‘Born to Run’, the life affirming…
Thunder Road
From ‘Darkness of the Edge of Town’ a lesson in never ever give up…
Badlands
From the double album ‘The River’, this is my favourite song… I literally wore out the album…
The River
and this one too… because I think it is one of the best and most underrated love songs of all time…
Then came the surprising, intimate ‘Nebraska’…
Atlantic City
And then ‘Born in the USA’ exploded and my love started and I’ll forever envy ‘Monica’ from Friends for dancing with Bruce in this video, I almost cut my hair like hers, it would have been an error… (it is a terrible and terribly cheesy video… but it was 1985 after all… the whole decade was! just focus on the biceps…)
Dancing in the Dark
1987… from ‘The Tunnel of Love’…
Brilliant Disguise
From ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’… the haunting…
The ghost of Tom Joad
From ‘The Rising’… the amazing…
Waiting on a sunny day
From ‘Magic’…
Long Walk Home
From ‘Working on a dream’ the most beautiful love declaration…
Kingdom of Days
From ‘Wrecking Ball’ …
Land of hope and dreams
and from his latest album…
Hello Sunshine
Thank you Bruce, thank you for ‘chasing the blues away’, thank you for giving us reasons to believe, thank you for the music, the words, the times, the miles…
My cousin has the most gorgeous baby daughter. Seriously ovary-twitching cute. She’s soooo cute as a matter of fact that I made her a 2nd quilt and she’s not even one.
I was asked to make more of a floor mat than a quilt, really thick and insulated for winter playing on hard floors.
The fabric was all from the stash apart from the back and the batting.
I keep making quilts out of the stash and I swear the fabric reproduces itself in the night. I can’t remember last time I bought any. Weird. AND in my post Japan frenzy I gave away three bin liners full…. so really I don’t know what’s going on.
I machine stitched the binding (made out of the same colour of the reverse fabric) for added strength. Quite a feat with the thick wadding, let me tell you… it’s synthetic super insulating wadding which I’m sure will be perfect to use on the floor, but it was a beast to work with. I tried quilting it and failed spectacularly… so I tied it and actually I really like it.
It felt so good getting back to making things… I must make time to do it more often…
while you're ahead... 