Filial Respect

My daughters are such kind creatures. They know I miss them when they're away and so, when they are at home, they go to lots of trouble to hide little reminders - souvenirs or keepsakes, I suppose you could call them - of their existence, apple-based talismans dotted about under sofas and beds and on sidetables, just to keep me cheerful until they come home:

More Bush Gems

I somehow left these two pretty flowers out of my post about the charms of the bush:

I assume they are natives of Australia but I'm ashamed to say I don't know for sure. Nor do I know what their names are. I would like to have these facts at my fingertips, although I'm not sure why. They are not the kinds of thing that would come in handy on a daily basis, but I'm always impressed when people do possess unusual and slightly pointless bits of knowledge. Maybe it's because I imagine that one day I might have to provide someone with an education about the world and will be found wanting in some areas, like Mr Watts in Lloyd Jones's beautiful novel Mr Pip::

'There were gaps in Mr Watts' knowledge. Large gaps, as it turned out, for which he apologised. He knew the word "chemistry" but could not tell us much more than that. He handed on the names of famous people such as Darwin, Einstein, Plato, Archimedes, Aristotle. We wondered if he was making them up because he struggled to explain why they were famous or why we had to know them. Yet he was our teacher and he never relinquished that status. When an unfamiliar fish washed up on the beach it felt right to ask Mr Watts to come and identify the strange eel-like serpent. It didn't matter that he would end up standing over the creature with the same blank face as the rest of us.'

Behind the Iron Curtain

As well as learning how to be a bloke, I spent the weekend catching up on old copies of the London Review of Books. In the 19 May 2011 issue, a review of a book about Western visitors to Communist China called Passport to Peking (whose title the reviewer informs us 'uses the old spellings for period effect' but which I think is probably a play on the film named Passport to Pimlico) contained the diverting information that Stanley Spencer spent his entire trip to China (courtesy of the Britain-China Friendship Association) wearing his pyjamas as underclothes under his suit, 'the cord ... trailing from the bottom of his trousers', flatly refused to touch Chinese food, living 'on boiled eggs and toast ... sometimes demanding fish and chips' and refused an invitation to a meeting from Zhou Enlai, on the grounds that 'he was too busy with a drawing', but then relented 'on condition that "politics are not mentioned."'

The review also noted that, 'Stanley Spencer explained to Zhou that China was like Cookham. The Ming Tombs reminded him of the village of Wangford, where he had married his first wife. Morgan Phillips found that Beijing was much like Bedford. The physician Derrick James noted that Prague, visited on the way to Beijing, resembled Maidstone [!?]. Hugh Casson compared Moscow to Manchester a hundred years earlier; the great scientist Joseph Needham mystifyingly thought that Kunming was a bit like the vicarage at Duxford near Cambridge; the artist Paul Hogarth wrote that travelling from Beijing to Shanghai was much the same as going from Sheffield to Manchester.'

I think this comparing thing must be a particularly British pheonomenon - certainly, we travelled about Yugoslavia and its neighbours in the early eighties with a book written by a man who could not resist relating the Balkan landscape to one or other of the counties of England. He seemed to have no way of explaining things, other than to say, 'The Vojvodina [or wherever] is reminiscent of Warwickshire, with a touch of Wiltshire, and a splash of the most southeastern tip of Dorset thrown in.'

The most interesting thing in the review as far as I was concerned though, in the light of my mixed emotions about the apparent improvements in daily life in Moscow, was this quote from Hugh Casson (who, I gather, was in charge of architecture during the Festival of Britain):

'Today, once behind the Iron Curtain, every building ... even such prosaic objects as trolley-buses or chocolate cake ... are invested with a new mystery, an atmosphere of the other side of the looking-glass which gives a keener edge to everything.'

It seems to me that Casson perfectly articulates something that I have always felt uneasy about, even though I've never been able to put it into words - the fact that the pleasure one got from being allowed a glimpse of that secret, menacing world, which other human beings had to put up with as a permanent reality but which Westerners could pop in and out of, was at least partly voyeuristic. It was the same kind of thrill that people were seeking when they used to peer through the rails at Bedlam.

And, in case anyone has been too influenced by our friend's positive comments about the dazzling present day reality in what was the old Eastern bloc, I urge them to buy this new thriller, written by Gaw, of Ragbag and the Dabbler. Inter alia, the book describes in vivid detail just what a mistake dipping your toe into the post-Soviet world can be, all proceeds from its sale go to the British Legion and it is a snip at under five quid.

Blokemanship

This weekend I have been taking a crash course in how to be a proper Australian bloke. This is what I've learnt so far:

1. Always talk with complete confidence - make sure your voice booms, never allow yourself quiet asides or conversations that are not performances aimed at the largest audience possible;

2. Ensure you have an unshakeable opinion on every subject. The following statements capture the kind of tone you want to achieve: 'Oh mate, Johnno was a legend'; 'Fuck no, you don't want to get the AX59, it's a piece of shit, mate; you've got to go for the SL70'; 'The selectors should never have gone for Sitrione, he's always been a numpty';

3. Try to restrict your conversation to the topics of sport and consumer goods. If you do allow yourself to wander off into areas such as the arts - 'AC-DC are the best thing Australia ever produced', for example - maintain the correct degree of vehemence and do not allow irritating facts, eg the UK origins of the AC-DC band members, to deflect you for an instant from your position;

4. Always have an ample supply of anecdotes about yourself at the ready. Ideally, these should involve stories about stupid, dangerous activity, involving a group of reckless, possibly inebriated, blokes, with you as the central figure, (although you must always play down your own importance and bravery - and, vitally, the whole escapade, no matter how much pain may have been suffered by you or others as a result, should be presented as a huge joke). If you have an impressive scar, it can be a useful opening gambit for the telling of this kind of tale. Don't point it out yourself though; just yawn or stretch or remove your jumper in such a way that it is suddenly revealed. Someone will then be sure to ask you how you got it, and you're away.

If you really cannot muster anything at all in this vein, (in which case you are starting your quest for blokedom with a considerable disadvantage), at least make the effort to present the events of your life - no matter how dull - in such a way that they are transformed into episodes in a kind of mythologised odyssey.

For example, if someone asks you why you support a particular team, don't say, 'They've got a player I like.' Instead, shape a saga round your decision: "Oh, well, it was about twelve years ago now, when I was still working over at Mudgee, and my boss at the time - Eric Musselton, top bloke, really top bloke, once you got to know him - he said to me, 'Barnesy, d'you want to come round and watch the soccer at my house?' and I said, 'I'm not watching that shit, mate, that's for wogs' and he said, 'Mate, you're talking through your arse,' and I said, 'You must be joking,' and he said, 'I'll throw in free beer,' and I said, 'You're on,', because, me, I'll go anywhere for a free beer, (everyone knows that). And so I go round to his place, and he has this unreal TV - one of those really massive jobs, it must have been 90" easy, I am not kidding ...." (story goes on for 15 minutes, with many colourful twists and turns re who drank what, who else qualified as a top bloke and who didn't, who claimed what about which player and which player turned out to be definitively the best, leading you to select his team as the one you would honour with your support).

Of course, all this newfound knowledge is never going to be of any use to me, since I am, after all, a girl. It is for this reason that I am now passing it on. I know there are people out there who can only dream of blokedom at the moment and so I hope what I've discovered may help them.

In saying that, I feel I should also add a warning, which is this: it seems to me that being a bloke is a tough and demanding role. It involves vigilance and considerable strain, if you are to consistently maintain the correct appearance. Most importantly, intimacy of any kind is out of the question for true blokes, because they must never let their guard down. That makes blokedom a lonely road to choose.

In conclusion, I suppose if I had to boil down what I've learnt to one central all-embracing piece of advice, it would be this: never for one fraction of an instant allow anyone to detect a scintilla of vulnerability in your personality (or, to put it possibly more blokishly, 'Never, ever let the buggers get a glimpse of the whites of your eyes.')

Pike

One of my favourite of Ted Hughes's poems is Pike:

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date:
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.
Ted Hughes

I wonder if the pond he refers to in this 1968 letter to Assia Wevill was what he had in mind when he wrote it:

'Yesterday Gerald & I drove to Mexborough & to the pond where I used to catch all the pike. The lodge, where my friend had lived, was a ruin. The garden was a forest. We went down to the pond and it had shrunk to an oily puddle about twenty feet across in a black basin of mud, with oil cans & rubbish. Nicky had brought the fishing rod and he made a few casts into the poisoned looking water among the rubbish. It was horribly depressing. My name carved on the trees. It began to pour with rain. Then I made one token cast - a ceremonial farewell - and there among the rubbish I hooked a huge perch. The biggest I ever caught. It was very weird, a complete dream.'

Sad, if so.

Untold Stories

I don't read biographies, but I love reading letters. The collection I'm going through at the moment is Letters of Ted Hughes, edited by Christopher Reid, who is a wonderful poet in his own right and also an extremely nice person (I worked with him briefly many, many years ago).

In the book, I've just come across a letter from Hughes to Anne Stevenson, in response to a draft of something she wrote about Sylvia Plath. He remarks interalia:

'...the whole motive of writing finds perfect and satisfying expression in fishing. Fishing is a substitute symbolic activity that simply short-circuits the need to write.'

So, next time you are strolling along a river bank or beach and see men with buckets of bait and rods setting up for an afternoon's angling, just think how many books are being lost with each cast of that fine, almost invisible line.

Words and Phrases - a Continuing Series

After our roofer talked about 'closure' the other day, I was interested to hear a woman who helps the parents of missing children say this on the radio this morning:

'I absolutely hate the word closure - it's really about the platitudes that some of us use when we get uncomfortable. Using words like closure to help package things up and make them a little bit more neat allows us to think we are helping a little bit, but really we are not.'

I think that phrase 'it's really about the platitudes that some of us use when we get uncomfortable' applies to many of the usages that I don't like. I don't know if it is a recent trend or whether it's always been the case but it seems to me that too often language, rather than being used for its real purpose - describing reality - is used instead to cloak and obscure the truth.