Under Brian's Rock

Roses in the Wreckage

It started with a puppy, and ended with hello.

Monty didn’t run with the pack of other puppies but the day I came to pick one, he was eventually found, shivering and frightened, hiding behind boxes in the garage.  Love was instant and everlasting.  He soon adjusted to the open space of my garden and with age and confidence he began exploring the neighborhood.  It was soon clear a fence would be required.  I put this off for way too long until a knock on the door started a chain of events likened to that butterfly in the Amazon that spawned Hurricane Katrina.

One of the first expressions I picked up in Flemish off Cartoon Network was “Ik bin bang”; “I’m afraid.”  So when I opened the front door that afternoon, to a rather frightened woman who I had sometimes seen in the lane that ran next to my house, I understood that she was frightened of dogs, and had been all her life.  I also knew that I feared another knock on the door, the one that would bring tragic news, because I didn’t keep Monty safe. 

 Come a warm, dry day last September, a friend and I installed a simple and cheap affair of spikes, wire and a gate you could buy off the shelf at Brico.  Monty was curtailed, but safe, and I no longer had the worry about him running out into the road.  Which was just as well, because it saved room for the mountain of worry that was to come.  Unbeknownst to us, one of the pikes we shoved into the ground hit a shallow oil line that ran from the underground tank to the furnace in the cellar.  It was a small line, and no wider than a toothbrush, one centimetre either way would have missed it.   Except it didn’t.  One month later, 1500 litres of oil had leaked into the ground.  My worries were to be somewhat more substantial than no heat or hot water as winter settled in.

The Belgian environmental authorities must, by law, be notified of such incidents.  The contaminated soil has to be excavated, is washed if possible, and replaced.  I don’t know if this was done in my case.  However, this is a very expensive process, and in rural areas such as mine where buried oil tanks are still common, there is insurance for such eventualities.  The Hippocritical Oath for insurance companies is “First, Do Not Pay Out”, so this is currently under negotiation.   But the surrounding soil had to be dug out to a depth of 6 metres, and this also meant the garage had to be demolished, to get to the earth underneath.  Thus, what once was a healthy plot

Had become rubble.

And a crater.

But as these machines violated my soil and ripped out the work I had put in, so they tore down walls that might have taken years to unbrick.  This is Flanders, where you may have a nodding acquaintance with your neighbours years before you know their names, but my neighbours came by, those who could see the garden through the fences, and knew of my love and care, and lamented its loss while sharing the joke of the new swimming pool I was having dug.  They introduced themselves by first name, unheard of here.  I was touched and heartened by such neighborliness brought on by a hole in the ground.

Six months later.

You can’t always anticipate how the cues in your life will lead you down this road or that, because often you don’t have control, or you abdicate control, or you look around at your life and wonder how you lost control, and when you arrive at the end of a road you didn’t plot, you wonder, how did I get here?  This was not on my map and I don’t know if I can ever get back again to where I am meant to be.  Rubble had occluded the sunlight and I was without my compass of sunlight and time.

But that is the way of most of us and my garden is only a metaphor.  I had lost a sense of growth and seasons and the unnerving shake of that put me off the rhythm of my life.  There are other phosphorous bursts in this scenario, but they belong to other stories.   I had lost a desperate muse, and found no way of getting him back.

In effect, the work you put into a garden is your hope of future flowering.  In the destruction you think is your life, you plant seeds, nurture them, watch them grow, and somehow, some way, you learn to make the hard choices to bring it back to life. 

And sometimes to bring yourself back to life.  There are, sometimes, roses in the wreckage.

One of my overwhelming impressions of Paris when I went there for the first time as a young man was that, not only would I never go there with my sister again, but that it was difficult to see the sights when you were constantly looking down.  The Parisians, then as now, were very nonchalant about the manner in which they allowed doggy detritus to foul the otherwise elegant trottoirs du Boulevard des Champs Elysées.  It was more like the Champs du Mars for the minefield of muck one had to negotiate.  Playing hopscotch with the butt-bombs, I was appalled that the French could allow this in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It was as if Leonardo painted a pimple on the Mona Lisa.

A week of professional training brought me to Brussels many years later, and it seemed as if it was déjà-poo all over again.  It even inspired a song:

“Doo-wop, doo-wop, step, step pretty, you’re spending a week in dog-poo city”

Or words to that effect.  I remember wondering if this was a Francophile thing, or a European thing, (Swiss dogs, by law, do not poo), but more than that, why no one seemed to mind any more than they minded flicking a cigarette end in the gutter?   It was amazing to watch the well-heeled and the down-at-heel alike deftly side-stepping these canine calling cards as easily as a loose cobblestone with only the faintest of a Gallic turning of the nose.   I had forgotten that I once had Paris and was not so fortunate.  

Years later I was to return to Paris with my fiancée, not my sister, and was able to walk the Champs Elysées while reading the paper except to be almost run over by a limousine carrying the Queen of England.  The streets had been cleared of muck-mines and on my return to Brussels several years later, things had quite improved.  Signs forbidding the pooing of dogs were ubiquitous, and in the parks there were even bins dedicated to this purpose, provided it was well wrapped in a doggy-doo-bag.   

One of the by-products of acquiring a dog is an education in waste management.  Monty trained up pretty well, and today will now happily be closed up in the kitchen all day, not touching food and drink like an aesthete, and boiling it all day until I come home to let him out to do his bidness in the garden.  Sometimes I’ll then chuck it over the fence into the goat paddock on the premise that goats have no self-esteem and don’t give a, well, you know.  But Monty is a creature of habit and when we go walkies to get the paper on Sunday mornings, he always pauses in front of one particular house and makes a deposit.  One such morning, I had no doggie bags with me and walking a few metres further on, I turned to be greeted by a torrent of Flemish abuse by the owner of the house whose pavement Monty had blessed.  I explained that I was on my way to get more doggy bags (an expedient, if useful lie) and would return presently to relieve his sidewalk of said befoulment. 

Feeling impressed with the forceful change in attitude, though of course somewhat shamed, I returned a few minutes later to the front of his house and made a dramatic turn in front of his windows of scooping the product in a perfumed poo-sack, and, tying it to the dog lead in the chic fashion of country dog-owners, proceeded home, feeling finally welcome in the new Belgium.      

I spent Boxing Day in a hotel, a Christmas gift from my cousin, over 2000 metres atop Mt. Pilatus above Luzern in Switzerland.  After an afternoon in a museum of Picasso and Klee, we travelled up the mountain by cabled gondola for almost an hour over children tobogganing below.  We munched on toasted chestnuts, chucking the shells out a small transom window for the scavengers of the night.  We bobbed to the top to skies that could only end with the curvature of the earth.  Blackbirds that never leave the heights of this mountain scavenged on winter lichen frozen into the sleeping granite.  

It was as if you were free of your cramped window seat on a plane in stacked descent, and could sit on the wing.  That afternoon, the skies were as clear as the eyes of a newborn.  The lakes around Luzern were deep and blue; you could see how the city played itself into the contours of the land it had settled in.  Come nightfall, I had hoped for stars, but the lights of the top of the mountain were too strong.  But even then, there was the sense of cold, and darkness, and the wonder of how those who came before us lived in a world lit only by moonlight on snowfields.  When candles and glass in thin windows were the purview of the wealthy.  When, in the age of my grandmother, the lights of stringed pearls along the lakes below did not exist.  The landscape was covered in jewels, and I could stand in the frozen night, not being master of all I surveyed, but wonderfully grateful and humbled at the gift that had been given me.  A sumptuous dinner of excellent company and good wine fed the enchantment of this place.  Plans were laid to see it in summer.

At the deepest hour of that night, I ventured outside to a temperature of -6C.  I was wrapped well and looking for stars in the thin atmosphere.  Content to be solitary in the frozen night a few thousand metres closer to starlight far more ancient than the lights below.  There was peace and stillness and unforgiving cold.

Or so I thought.

 Within days I was on a train back to Brussels.   And a few days after that my garden was buried in snow and a cold doubly harsh to my mountain top.  The earth froze and the snow lay old and brittle on the ground, Miss Haversham’s wedding cake left to dust and grime and the cold of age.  Venturing outside was painful and for a few short winter days I thought I’d never be warm again and longed for the first sunburn of summer.

But this is the stuff of the seasons and seasons will change and the earth moves on.  This is the last chapter of The Potting Shed.   All that needed to be said has been said; it’s time to say something different, casting a new light through other windows.  In a few weeks this space will carry a new column, tentatively called “Blogging Brussels”, observations of life in Belgium generally, Brussels in particular.

I’ve been pleased and humbled that there have been those who have enjoyed these scribblings.  You validate me as a writer and I hope I have been of help as a gardener.  Kathleen has the corner on cooking, my other passion. I will sit on another corner, watch Brussels go by, and write about that.

I wish you all the greenest of thumbs and the joy of watching good things grow.  Back soon. 

I only remember Tante Judith vaguely, though I remember her husband, Onkel Albert well, as he took me to see my Uncle Johnny for the last time before Alzheimer’s took him.  Albert prepared me well, saying Johnny was unlikely to remember me, but may remember my mother as he dandled her on his knee when she was six.  Mother was over sixty the last time I saw Johnny.  And that was what Johnny remembered.

I never knew Tante Cornelie at all, though I became quite close to Tante Helen when I was a young and callow lad in my early twenties.  I stayed then for a long weekend in her flat in Zürich, whilst Helen, a career counselor and psychologist for the young, conducted a battery of tests on me to determine where my career prospects lay. 

We spent hours over a table in her living room; her findings, which I returned to Zürich for a month or so later, were that I would find my strengths as an actor, or in drama in general.  Her findings were to prove true, but what she was not able to find was the lack of courage back then that most young people have to drive them to be what they were meant to be.  I had no courage then; I had allowed it to be beaten out of me.

After the Rorschach Test, she said, didn't say, that my approach to my sexual identity was up for grabs.  It remained so for two decades after that.

Tante Helen was right in that, years later, I was to have a measured success in the theatre in Hamburg which lead to some professional work, but was never to be a career.  Other fears and desires took their penance.

These were my Swiss aunts and uncles and Cornelie and Helen were patient/pupils of Jung.  Though it has now been many years since I have read Jung, (encouraged by my Aunt Jessica, the Tantes’ sister-in-law and my father’s aunt), I remember taking very much to heart his ideas about the collective consciousness, and how it serves to drive societies and tribes to a kind of mass memory and thus, perhaps, to mass culture and opinion.

Jung had a rather more global view about collective consciousness.  Yet even he, in Memories Dreams and Reflections, admits,

In this book, I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking.  It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, and with half -closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being.  If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.

I rather think that in the internet age, where we are enjoined to read less and absorb more on the basis of what our information should be, that we are more compelled to be informed by half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears.  And I fear that this is what drives American and British politics at this most crucial moment in world history.  That America will take its financial cue from another country is heartening in a global scale, but how long again before the world defines its being with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears? 

By a quirk of fate, the table where Tante Helen, in her flat in Zürich, conducted all those tests on me that postulated a future that was only later to be, is now sitting in my front hall.  It is laden with photographs of my family in various periods of our history.  It is centred with an art nouveau piece from her father's house in Zürich.  And crowned with flowers sent to me by my love.

Sadly, a photograph of Tante Helen is not there. 

But she brought me to Jung, and she brought me to me, and bringing the young to themselves was what she treasured and worked for.

And I have her table.

I had been sawing back and forth between my landlord and his agent over an overgrown leylandii hedge at the bottom of the garden.  As is common with such hedges, it had been let go over thirty years and now was tall enough to block out most of the morning sun in the garden.  My landlord, a perfectly nice but rather, ahem, frugal gentleman, had brought in a professional earlier in the spring who recommended that the whole thing be taken out.  This I most certainly did not want as it was a nesting site for pigeons and mourning doves, and blocked the view of an agricultural warehouse on the other side of the goat paddock.  As is the law here, I would have been perfectly within my rights to call the commune and have them trim the hedge and bill the landlord.  But that was not a solution.   I just wanted a short, back and sides, not a shave or ill will.  So I arranged with the agent that we would address the issue in the autumn after the nesting season and I would pony out for a trim. 

This is the hedge that is the perennial problem between neighbours.  It is often a border feature and because it grows quickly; it is a good privacy hedge.  But it has to be pruned masterfully else it grows out of control and you get the neighbours coming through anyway to rail against your sunblock.  But the problem with leylandii is you just don’t cut them back.  They won’t put out interior shoots, so if you prune them back roughly, all you get is dead wood.  They only grow from the outside out.

So you can imagine my surprise to find my landlord and his wife, an elderly couple of at least 70, out all weekend attacking this 20 metre hedge.  He was shinnying up a ladder with an electric chainsaw, and she was at the end of a rope hauling off branches the size of a baby redwood.  Hercules and Amazon in their dotage were fast tackling this wall of insurmountable hardwood between me and their goats.  Gobsmackedly guilt-making.  I was working inside most of that day but would occasionally feel shitty enough to venture out and help shift branches and proffer cups of tea.  They would hack, saw and drag branches over to their van, load up, make a run to the dump, then come back and start over.  At one point I did make the offer to split the cost of a professional tree service with them, which they graciously refused on the grounds that the job was already half done, which it was.  I tucked my tail between my legs and retreated indoors while Monty the Dog was having a whale of a time wagging his at all the excitement and attention.

By day’s end, a full two-thirds of the hedge was gone and even with the waning sun there was so much more light in the garden and, indeed the house.  The sky was open and huge, like the big skies I had loved in Africa and the Malvern Hills.  And yet....

The hedge was now straggled and ragged, stumps of the trees peeking over the foliage like bad dentistry.  And as welcome as the open light was, it left a queasy feeling of exposure and vulnerability, as if I was now out in the garden in only my socks and foundation garments.  A garden that had once seemed so cosy and inviting now was far too big and less intimate.

But this I could live with if it meant the daffodils bloomed in March rather than May.  Ivy would soon cover the ragged stumps, and once I had filled and re-hung the bird feeder, the birds flocked back as if nothing had changed.  Come spring I am sure I will get used to the big sky and wonder how I ever did without.

I have never been comfortable with any particular political ideology, and find no home with any party.  Maybe this is has its roots in my being wary about joining groups, but I’d like to think it is the wisdom of age that makes me realise that opinions and stands evolve with age and experience, and that what might have been true for me twenty, or even ten years ago, may not be true to me now.

A back-story to the next paragraph; I forget what the conversation was about and I think it was when I was 13 or 14, but I remember exactly where my mother and I were standing in the kitchen.  I was standing in the doorway to the dining room, and she was in front of the stove, stirring some pot on the right front burner.  And Mum said to me,

‘You’re a liberal thinker.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re a free thinker.’

And that’s what I always thought a Liberal was, someone who was not beholden to any ideology; someone who investigated all sides of an issue before coming up with an informed opinion.  Therefore I am flummoxed that ‘Liberal’ has become a dirty word in American politics, and a sign of a wet in British politics.  From what I have been able to garner from my meagre political sleuthing, a liberal is actually what a Conservative should be.  Thoughtful, inquisitive, tempered by reason, prudent and deliberative.   Actually, what anyone entrusted with governance should be.

So I find myself picking and choosing what I like from across the political spectrum.  Social liberal, fiscal conservative.  Don’t spend more than you have, though some debt keeps the economy afloat.  There’s no reason wealthy countries can’t afford universal health care and high standards of education (the train wreck of the Britain’s NHS notwithstanding).  Having independent watchdogs on finance, law, and business, and generally teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish.  But also making sure that those folk who cannot rightfully hold the fishing pole are taken care of.

I’m sure that makes for a political muddle which is why I should probably never be allowed near public office.  But I have always believed that public service is a noble endeavour, and particularly when I worked for the U.S. government.  When I became a lowly civil servant, I was made to take the same oath that any U.S. President takes on Inauguration Day:

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

I always let the God bit slip, because it was my word, not God’s, and if I couldn’t adhere to the oath, God would be no use.  Anyway, I was rendering unto Mammon.  God wasn’t innit.

Perhaps all this is naïve of me.  But at my cousin’s home in New Hampshire four years ago, I saw this and it made me think of the America my father had come to and served in the US Navy for in 1944, and why he was so disappointed in America before he died.  I and my mother were far more sceptical, but my father believed in America.

I posted what is below in another forum this afternoon.  I’ve always thought politics was highly entertaining.  I never thought it would become farce.

Bearing in mind that, what has struck in the past few weeks as America lurches from crisis to chaos is that Senator McCain has evinced the same contempt for the American electorate as the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal has shown in the past eight years. 

·         Pretending to suspend his campaign

·         Picking Palin as a sop to the Hillary voters

·         Parading the Palin family in the public eye, then crying "foul!" when the press goes after them

·         Gunning for televising Barstool Palin's shotgun wedding before the election

·         Grandstanding in DC while the economy tanks and saying, well, nothing, because none of his seven houses face foreclosure

·         Gunning for drilling when he knows damn well the pumps won't see a drop for at least 10 years

·         Touting Palin's foreign policy creds because Alaska's next door (maybe she can fix this Wall St. mess, she lives next to an ATM?)

How can he believe people swallow this stuff?  I don't want a maverick in the White House, thank you, it's time that job was given to a grown-up.  And I don't want someone "just like us" an old man's heartbeat away from the job.  I want someone whose bar is higher, A LOT higher, and McCain’s standards are so patently low.  Sarah Palin has the intellect of a doorknob, and that's exactly how McCain is using her; as a doorknob to the Oval Office. 

A doorknob with lipstick, sheesh, can these people be serious?

My vote's in.

This crept up on me on the radio as I was doing the washing up, dealing with the mundane of housekeeping.  I stopped scrubbing a pot and went into the living room and jacked up the volume and returned to a time, as songs take you, that remind you of where you came from and had no idea where you were going to.

This resonated with me at a time when I was forced from a home I loved and set off on travels that were necessitated by circumstances I didn’t know then how to control.  It was an era when I thought I had no will and had to go where the winds of circumstance blew me.

I played this over and over again in my bedroom that year, on the 45 rpm version I had then, and after I had left England and moved on to East Africa, my mother once wrote to me there, saying how she had heard this song on the radio and understood the longing I had to stay home that was denied me and that she felt the pain and responsibility for the loss of me to other lands.  In the callowness of youth, I didn’t understand her guilt, though I do now.  She felt responsible for her son’s diaspora.

That was how that song resonated for me then, but that is not why it drove me out of the kitchen, to turn up the volume.  It was because it sang to me of something new, my love.

It started of our beginnings, of you being lost, and searching.  Of my being lost and searching, and us finding one another.  Of questions that perhaps can never be answered, or maybe don’t matter.  Of sunrises and hope, of you speaking an ancient language to me, of hope and finding strength, and the promises you made, when you are a man who doesn’t make promises.

But mostly, my love, I chose this because it’s a show of the Northern Lights, an ambition for you.

I’d give that to you. I promise.

Just hold my hand and we’re there.

Somehow we’ll find our way home.

Corny, I know, but fuck it, we’re in love.

It was dark when I left the house this morning, and it will be dark every morning now, for at least the next six months.  The sun, when it rises, will still shine on a world of green, but now brown and curling at the edges.  It will warm the day and burn off the morning mist, but I notice the dew is a bit heavier on the windscreen these days and there is no longer a gloaming through the window shade as I go to sleep.  The day is not far off when I will awake to see my morning breath.

Like the year, the garden is tired and fading at the edges.  A successful blooming season has left the petunias straggly and drawn.  The lupines have become infested with aphids and are bowing towards the ground for their winter sleep. Too late, perhaps, I sprayed them with a water and dishwashing liquid solution; I’ve heard this is an eco-friendly approach to aphid control, but I’m not hoping for much more than clean aphids with a sheen.  After the May bloom, the roses were given a mild pruning and have put forth new shoots and the beginning of buds.  If the autumn is a mild one, they may flower again.  October roses are like an echo for a spring long past, a trigger of memory.  “Ah, yes,” they seem to say, “I remember when the world was young and I was beautiful.”  The roses of autumn are smaller, though no less sweet for the brown leaves and faded petals, like a parchment old-lady kiss redolent of lace and lavender water.

The passion flower vine is lush and ambitious, serpentine tendrils with their coiled fingers ready to grasp any support at hand.  It is pregnant with buds, though I am not sure when it is meant to flower, as this is the first I have grown.  It was given to me by a cousin from the Brazilian side of the family and is welcome in my garden of family heirlooms.  References tell me the passion flower is not native to Europe, and this may be true, but this is a legacy plant and thus is at home in my garden.

Apart from the roses, I am letting the rest of the flowers go to seed, the hope of their return next year.  Already marigolds, cosmos, and portulaca have re-seeded and are thriving, the children of last year’s planting.  As for the others, they will be left to find their own way to a winter’s rest, tired and drawn.  The first leaves of autumn are already beginning to gather where the winds eddy as if waving farewell and good morrow.

In the hour after they left, I stood in the kitchen amidst the detritus of our last family meal, and made noises no human should ever have to make, or even hear.

Someone long ago said to me, ‘What do you want?  Look around at what you’ve got; that’s what you wanted.’  I don’t remember ever wanting this, though I knew when I started down this road that this would come, one of the unintended results of expectation, the road-kill of the course we set for ourselves.

The boys spent their last four days in Belgium with me.  We had pillow fights, I cooked their favourite meals, we went to the movies, cuddled in bed watching television, and I overlooked the endless bickering that adolescent brothers engage in, knowing as I hated it that I would come to miss it.  I woke Alex up by putting a doggy biscuit next to his ear and having Monty jump all over him.  I left Miles for hours at computer games, because I know that’s how he copes.  We didn’t talk about the inevitable; the parting of our ways, because they don’t, because they’re young teens, because they lack for the words, or I don’t know and it doesn’t matter anyway, it was about a happy four days together, not the end of a time and a life.

They were more affectionate and clingy than normal, and we are a huggy family.  The hugs lasted longer, an accompaniment to the comfortable rhythm of competitive patter:

I’ll miss you

I’ll miss you more

I don’t think so

U-huh

Not possible

Possible!

No way!

Way!

Dude!

How did it get to this?  How could I do this to them in a time when the rumblings of adolescence will shake the ground under the feet and the solidity they had counted on has turned to sand?  I was supposed to protect them, keep them from harm. 

There are threads in every story and how we weave them into life is largely up to us.  I could follow the thread back through the maze that led us to this, but that would be as if untangling a knot of vipers.  It is what it is.  I could follow that thread back to hundreds of voices and millions of words but in the end, I am responsible for the love these two young men have for me.  I got here myself.

The last night before they all flew off to the States, they came to my house for dinner, theirs having been packed and emptied of the last compass points of our life as a family.  I grilled some chops, steamed broccoli and made savoury rice from a box. We sat at the dining table that I grew up with, its witness to three generations of a family in love and turmoil.  There were two red roses cut from the garden in a bud vase in the centre of the table.  I told them of a tradition my mother and I had when I was travelling so much and away for years at a stretch: that you would be given a red rose at the start of your journey, and another on your return.  The roses had always to be in pairs to ensure your return.  But they left without the roses and they withered and died.  I have saved a petal from each, wrapped in tissue paper, in a dictionary.

When my father died, a friend who didn’t know him told me to not fight grief; to let it come, it will manifest itself in ways you do not expect and practices stealth to extract its due.  No matter how you anticipate and plan and tell yourself it’s healthy, when it comes, it bites you in the arse.  When they walked out the door that night and I walked into the kitchen to the last of our meal as a family, I was caught by something visceral.  It came from wells within I didn’t know existed and vomited a noise I didn’t know.   It wasn’t a scream, so much as the moan of the damned.  I let it out for the years of the lies and the loss that resulted from them, from the deceit and the damage, the pain I had caused my loved ones and the blame I could not inflict on the dead.  It was late at night, and may have disturbed my upstairs neighbours, but I was beyond that and they never said anything.  They are, in any case, kind people.  The Flemish have a stoicism I lack.

That was a month ago now and though there is still the grief, I realise I am exactly where I should be and have learned to cope with a life that continues in spite of what I feel and what I need.  There are bills to pay and laundry to do and a job to be getting on with.  I am in regular e-mail touch with my boys in their travels and soon there will be webcams and instant messaging, and I am grateful for that.

There is healing only so much as one accepts that life will always find a way.  They are young and their lives will.  My say in that is lessened by geography and the circumstances their mother and I helped to engineer.  But they are with her and she is a good mother.  And I think they will be fine.

As for me, the screams are gone and I start to build a life I have no experience for.  But that’s okay, I’m good at troubleshooting and I still find myself expecting more from life than I have reason to hope for.  This and other disappointments are only other challenges.  I have to learn how to father from a remove, but that can be nowhere near as difficult as learning how to be a father in the first place.  I’ll do that, because I brought myself here.

I grew up a stranger in a stranger’s land.  It was the America of the 60’s and 70’s and it was Texas, and I started life there with so many strikes against me.

I couldn’t speak English until I was five or so, I can’t remember, but I was always conscious that my parents were from someplace other and starting off in a vernacular that is not only foreign to one’s environment, but also inimacable to it, defined the rest of my life.  To this day, I still speak a language no one quite understands.

The short story, then the long one.

My parents were from Brazil.  In Texas this made no difference back then, I was a wetback and that was it.  That my family was educated, cosmopolitan and accomplished counted for little.  That they worked hard to send me to the best schools made no difference.  I was tainted.

But I never minded that really.  I was seen as different and that was what I instinctively knew I was anyway, and it didn’t matter what my schoolmates thought, I reveled in the difference and promoted it.  I am not of you, I said, didn’t say to them, I am something other, something you cannot, or will not understand.  I am Camus’ Stranger and his Plague, because you fear me on so many levels, and you probably haven’t read Camus anyway and so have no idea what I’m talking about.  I was such an insufferable treat back then.

But as I was something other then, there was something more.  The clues to my something other were there from an early age, something I didn’t understand, but that melded into the vernacular of being outside.  I never fit into anyone’s idiom, and this was only an extension of that.  I have written before of my awareness that I was attracted to men from an early age, but this was something that, as I grew with time and a Catholic education, and that in Texas, I learned to hide as something far more sinister than being the child of wetbacks, however ignorantly misconceived.  Being someone other from the beginning only gave me more tools to hide.  But one’s sexuality is a viscerally difficult thing to hide, more so than an accent or a birth certificate.  By my adolescence, I had left the ethnicity behind and found myself vilified for something other.

None of this matters now, except that I found myself at lunch today with a colleague who is Canadian.  He’s a great pal and was instrumental in helping me find the job that may keep me in Brussels.  He’s also a great fan of my gardening columns and we share a passion for gardening and a love for the Northwest of England.  I enjoy this man.  We often talk politics and society, Ralph and I, and his Canadian perspective is valuable.  He gives me the view of a Canadian on America, which is basically, chill, guys, what is the big hairy deal?  He knows I’m gay, and that is as much an issue as his voting rights being married to an American.  Er, not related.  When Canada integrated gays into the military, the initial reaction was the breakdown off military discipline until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  When Canada allowed gay marriages, the initial reaction was the breakdown of society until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  And Canada just got on with it. 

But as we were having lunch today, and talking about all this, there was a chap queuing up to pay for his tray and I said to Ralph that I thought this guy was a bit of all-right, he was good looking and had a great arse.  Ralph got a bit squeamish at this and then I said:

“Look, mate.  All those years of growing up with locker room conversations where I had nothing to add, because they were talking about things that I had nothing to say, and now…”

“And now you’re making up for lost time, Brian.”, he said, laughing.

“Yes!!”, I said, and I knew he understood. 

I know what it is to grow up in a society where your vernacular has no translator.  I know what it is to live in a world that has no cues for who you are, where they mitigate against who you are, and to strive for an identity in a world that denies you a tick in a box its imagination has no room for.  I understand this on so many levels that few are favoured with access to.

I remember a few years ago writing a response on someone else’s blog about a question someone had asked them about their HIV status, on the assumption that they were gay and so must be HIV+.  I can’t find that posting now, but what I think I said then went something like this:

I am a man, and a father of two wonderful boys, and a gifted writer; I am an excellent cook, a good gardener, a loved son and a good brother.  I am gay and I am a polyglot, and addicted to cryptic crosswords.  I have been a talented actor and a successful theatre director.  I have been a great teacher, and a poor one.  I can’t read maps, I am inherently lazy and so have an instinct of how to make things run efficiently.  I pick at my toenails when reading a good book, and am in unending search of the perfect fried chicken recipe.  My roots are in Brazil and Maine, Switzerland and Hamburg, Dallas and Baltimore, London and Brussels, and I left part of my heart in East Africa.  All these and none of these define who I am.

So I will make up for the lost time in ogling that security guard, or checking out the guy in the line at the cafeteria, and I am grateful to Ralph that, even though it made him uncomfortable, he understood what it is to look in through another window. 

Cheers, Ralph.   

 The day that my grandmother died, I looked up into the doe eyes of a giraffe, and I heard a lion roar.  And the sound of that chills me still, all these years later.  It is often said that once Africa is in your soul, it never leaves, and is yours for life.  Karen Blixen understood this, and so does my editor, Judy Miller. So Judy, as thanks for all your encouragement and friendship, here is a piece of my soul that we share.  Kwaheri!

Normally of an evening I like to sit out in the garden with a glass of something and the crossword, the windows open to a jazz radio station I enjoy, and my goofy dog chasing his favourite ball back and forth and barking at the goats.  The bird feeder is as crowded as a truck-stop with beautiful green finches that bully even the pigeons to scrape fallen seeds on the ground.  It is my favourite time of the day, what my mother used to call ‘goat-time’, but that is a story from another time and on a different island.  I have the goats, but not the frangipani and hibiscus blossoms of that summer, but as I stood in the kitchen doorway this evening watching the rain come down, memory took a detour and I smiled to remember another island and another garden, this one in Southeast Asia.  This garden had no goats, but it had hibiscus bushes, orchids and humming birds, but best of all, at the end of our lawn, we had a swamp.

Then, as now, we’d sit out after work with a cold glass of something, leaving the air-conditioning to the sit in the evening breeze.  Beyond the lawn, the swamp was lush with reeds and water lilies and further still, there stood the forest that lined a distant river.  At dusk, which falls with a certainty only found in the tropics, monkeys would howl and screech, chasing one another in the trees and if we were lucky, monitor lizards, some two metres long, would haul themselves out of the water to monitor the lawn below us, perhaps waiting for the neighbour’s cat to make a careless pass.  Occasionally our Chinese landlord would let his gardener come with a sharpened machete to chase after these beasts which, I was told, made for an excellent meal.  Thankfully my companion at the time was an excellent Italian cook, and monitor lizard does not taste like chicken.

But when the rains came, hard and thunderous, any willing friends that were around would don a huge old t-shirt kept for the purpose, a chair would be placed in the grass, and they were given the sublime treat of having their hair washed in the rain.  The rain came down like a warm water shower and a bucket was kept at hand in case it let up, but there is nothing so wonderfully refreshing as having ones hair washed in a rainstorm and that, followed by a gin and tonic, a meal we all cooked together and an evening of cards, made for a perfect Saturday by the South China Sea.

Over the years that followed, many of us left the tropics, promised as you do to keep in touch, meant it, and then didn’t.  Changes in life led some of us down roads we never expected and for some of us, our hair-washing days are gone for good anyway.  But for the time of our time, in that garden by the swamp, we treasured the food, the love and each other, knowing perhaps that it could never last, and so was prized in its impermanence. 

Until it’s celebrated again years later, in a kitchen doorway leading to a garden under the rains of Flanders.

I am not normally a political animal and find no home in any particular ideology.  Over the years I have found that political maturity is a process of evolution and what was true for me once, is not true for me now.  I hope that I have now come to the point of realising minds can be changed and opinions can give way to new ways of thinking, and to just enjoy politics for the gladiatorial freak show that it is meant to be.

But I have always been nervous and suspicious of overt nationalism and its ugly stepsister, jingoism.  Samuel Johnson once described patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I would argue that by the time the scoundrel has taken shelter at that bus stop, the bandwagon of unthinking jingoism is pulling up for him to jump on, and anyone who doesn’t run after the flapping tailcoats is held as a traitor .  This was exactly the thinking behind the passing of the so-called Patriot Act by the U.S. Congress in 2001.  This egregious document was stuffed with provisions that tampered with or gutted many of the provisions and ideals that characterised my father’s America, leaving him bewildered that it could be so casually tossed aside into a bush of poison thorns.

I had none of this in mind when I wrote Say My Name in the autumn of 2006, at least not entirely.  What moved me to write was the lists carved into the cold stone of the Menin Gate of the tens of thousands who were never found and the cost paid to the incompetence of those who prosecuted their deaths.  I tied it into the Iraq war as naturally as the Great War was tied to the Second World War and the Cold War.  In a knot of vipers, every snake has its fangs firmly in the tail of the one that came before.

My editor at the embassy newsletter where I write a regular column on the subject of gardening liked it so much, he ran it as a front page feature a few weeks ago.  Careful not to disturb sensibilities, he added a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the opinions therein were those of the author and not of the publication or its parent company, a department of the U.S. government.  I had no argument with this from the simple premise that I wrote the thing, of course the opinions were mine.  I recognise that care had to be taken as this was an in-house publication of the embassy in a major European capital.  A small price to pay for having your by-line above the fold, particularly as this paper was read world-wide, in no small part because of my regular contributions to it.

The backlash was almost immediate, and a chilling reminder of what America has abandoned in the name of “patriotism”.

The piece was published in a weekly publication in Brussels on Friday morning, the 25^th of April.  That day there was a party at the home of one of my dearest friends and mentors.  Carie always threw a party for all her staff, scores of us, every spring as a thank you and this was her swan song.  She was soon to leave for Baghdad and her loss to all of us was keen, not least to me as she was my champion not only for work, but for my family in a very difficult time.  As it happens, she spent her swan song trouble-shooting the ridiculousness that often accompanies U.S. government service.

My piece had touched a chord with a secretary at NATO, part of our bailiwick.  She rang my editor that morning, who reported that,

‘She objected to:

"Walking through the exhibition, I was reminded of another, more present war, but one equally mismanaged, overseen with spectacular incompetence, with no reason or goal, to which young men and women are sent because they feel they owe a duty to their country. Theirs is also a price paid to the stupidity of others, in a war no one wanted, that was fomented by arrogance, ridiculousness, and a moral inertia that was allowed to run away with itself.”

Bells rang immediately and the PC network kicked in.  It seems this solitary objector went to the highest authority at the U.S. Mission to NATO who then rang through to the hostess of the party demanding that the piece be pulled. 

I don’t blame Carie, but feel bad that her farewell was clouded by such silliness and cowardice on the part of the nabobs at U.S. NATO.  I don’t blame the complainant, though I would have preferred she had had the courage to address the author of the piece, which she failed to do.  There was nothing I expressed in the piece that has not been published in every newspaper in America for the past five years, and even then, my disclaimed opinions were expressed obtusely.  Though it has been reported to me since that this woman’s husband was felled by a heart attack in Iraq, he is among the named, and he is among those who were sent home to be received, cherished and buried.  Say My Name was written for those who weren’t, in another war.

As a writer, I am happy to address disagreement, and I hope that, if what I write invites dissent that those objecting to my words will tell me so and we can then have constructive engagement on the issue.  I love a good argument, preferably after a good dinner that I cooked and a bottle or two of wine that lubricates the discourse.  That didn’t happen here.  Better had they taken me to task over what I had written, something they had objected to.  Instead they enfeebled the argument by going straight to the top, the first port of call of the unimaginative, and playing the patriot card.

Say My Name was to be published the next week, with the offending paragraph censored.  I asked that it be withdrawn entirely, and my editors agreed.  Others followed suit:

Brian,
I salute you and your standards!

The guys in the mail room said "this was the first time a newsletter has been revoked".

Can I just say... DAMN! Who wrote that? and can I tell them "YEAH!" and give them an imaginary/internet high-five?

I can't say "no problem" about your decision, but we all salute you.

I thought you should be aware of the rumblings in case there is more to come.  I think this is a beautiful story that is a poignant memorial to all those who have served and sacrificed. It is a sad reminder of the pain and loss of life that effect families of any war conflict, regardless of which side you are on.  However it is easy to see how this could be a taken otherwise by someone who I understand has lost a spouse in the current war and is understandably sensitive.  I hope that with another reading will take it for the honorable memorial that I’m sure it was meant to be.

Dude, You rock! And I think you know why…

Patriots ask the difficult questions and say what the authorities don’t want to hear.  Your friend is a patriot…it reminds me of Wilfred Owen, ‘ Dulce et Decorum est…’

Others argued the issue over dinner parties and one friend found himself in a reception next to the complainant, itching to take her to task, but lacked an appropriate moment.

Gelert argued most eloquently on the subject in his blog, for which I am grateful, and gave me the forum my government denied.

But, perhaps you’re not really blooded as a writer until you’ve been censored by your own government.

But that is not only what disappoints me.  What disappoints me is that the U.S. government so easily caved in to one person’s objection, and demanded that my piece be pulled from an inconsequential newsletter. 

Never mind First Amendment issues, I’ve been cautioned before that they come secondary to the face one has to put on working for Uncle Sam.  But to be censored by the U.S. government on the complaint of one person is more than deeply disappointing.  .

I realise this is a tempest in a teacup in the grand scheme of things.  But to me and many others it brings into relief the sad depths this country has sunk to in the name of “patriotism.”

My father would be so deeply disillusioned.

My father had only a small terrace garden in his two-up, two-down, but it was bright and sunny and he had managed a small garden with everything in pots, including those of my mother’s roses he was able to bring with him when he sold the house.  These had lived in pots for many years including one, I think that had been on her grave, but I no longer remember.  I brought his roses home with me last summer, intending to put them in the ground but time and emotional inertia left them to winter over on my terrace, cold and root bound.

But with last Sunday’s warmth and sunshine it was time to clean up the garden for spring and with the help of my boys and a basic lesson in geometry, I dug a diamond-shaped rose bed in the middle of the lawn.  Diamond is perhaps too elegant a word for as my astute twelve-year old pointed out, it was more of a rhombus, but that was fine; I have always been diametrically opposed to symmetry. 

My garden flat is the downstairs of what had once been a farmhouse, and the soil of the garden, though underlain with the local clay, is rich and dark and easily workable.  It is riddled with large healthy worms and the things I plant seem pleased to be there and flourish.  Nevertheless, I dug a large quantity of compost and manure (fumier séché de vache) into the soil and added rose food to the soil packed around the roses.  As they had been pot-bound for so long, they had been deprived of nutrients and so were spindly, with rickety branches and little leaf growth.  As with people, fresh starts and transplanted environments are tricky times, and care and encouragement is needed to put down roots in a new home.  Care should be taken in keeping the root ball intact and leaving some of the original soil attached to the roots so that it feels a little at home in a new neighbourhood. 

Mine is not a broad sweep of lawn and it ends in an overgrown leylandii hedge that blocks much of the sun, but the new bed seems to have enlarged the garden, giving it depth and perspective and when the roses bloom this summer, I hope that it serves to extend the view, a trompe l’oeil of hope winking at limitation.  Small spaces are only as girded as imagination allows, and my little rose bed serves to broaden the view from my window.

But more so, I was pleased that my sons had helped to dig a new home for their grandparents’ roses, and as long as the roses live, my boys will have a stake in the soil and in the family.  Alongside these heirlooms, I planted my own Blue Moon rose, a favourite of my mother, and a blowsy, show-off rose called “Samba”, a nod to my parents’ childhood. 

It is easy to feel smug and self-gratified in a garden and it is healthy to realize that the natural world will cock you a snook at the first opportunity.  The next morning I woke to find that the neighbours’ cat had dug a hole in the soil and used my rose bed as a latrine.  Mother would have laughed, and been pleased.

Sam and Alice accepted me into their family without hesitation and without reservation, and such love is rare.  My wife had been a childhood playmate of their daughter, Adele, almost thirty years of history and affection was mine by default. I never felt I truly deserved this, but theirs was a nature that held that family extended far beyond the bounds of biology, and they had the hearts and the open arms to accommodate as many as came to their home and sat at their table. 

I shared in their history, just as the countless exchange students they hosted over the years did, and when their own children spent their own time in foreign lands, so too were those families drawn to the front porch with an open door in a leafy suburb of Baltimore.  They immediately understood my chaotic parentage and when I offered to make them the Brasilian national dish of feijoada, they jumped at it, they had been there before, an exchange student had brought them to it.

Sam played trumpet voluntaries at our wedding, I served a formal table with Keith, another exchange student/adopted son at their 35^th

wedding anniversary dinner, they shared the joy of the birth of our children, and one of my abiding memories of Sam will be the motley group of extended friends, family and children that caroled the street at Christmas-tide, Sam playing carols on his trumpet as we stopped at each house with a light in the window.  My own children took to calling him Grandpa Sam, and when my elder son took up the trumpet, and asked one summer to play Sam’s, he beamed with pride and joy. 

Sam’s memory began to fade in recent years, slowly at first, but this disease is as relentless as a glacier.  The family has worked to keep him active and vital, and that has helped, but I, who am a sporadic visitor, need to remind him who I am.  And so, one spring, in a garden now long gone, I planted forget-me-nots for Sam.  I told Alice, because I knew she would be pleased.  And she was. I have since given up that garden and have begun another.  And with the passing of my father and the loss of another beloved garden, the forget-me-nots were left behind.  But unlike memory, forget-me-nots are sturdy and spread, and one evening last weekend, lamenting the weeds I needed the time to tackle,  I noticed among them the familiar blue and pink of forget-me-nots that had somehow crept their way among the tulips.  I thought of Sam, and was grateful.

Because unlike memory, gardens revive, year after year.  My garden has always been a haven of memory of people I have loved and have gone and in that it is alive with them.  It renews itself and at the same time grows in the tracks of what came before. 

But that is what gardens should be: an inviting haven for those you love.        

Like Sam and Alice’s front porch.

I posted this a month or so ago on a night dark with regret and poisoned by loss.  I removed it the next morning because a cold winter’s dawn forced a sober glare on raw feelings and left me open and bleeding.  I hate that about myself and, slow as I am, it took a month or more to realise that to deny when you are raw and bleeding is to deny something as basic to yourself as joy. 

I have changed the music because the first one posted was about hurt and defiance.  This one is simply the truth.  There is no resolution to this and acceptance of that is the start of healing.

Here it is, baby.  ag cara beunydd.

You think I don’t think of you.  You think me neglectful and uncaring.  And I can’t do anything about that because that’s all you and little to do with me.  You pull that out of your own bag of tricks, we all have them.  

But you’d be right that I don’t think of you.  I’ve come to the point after over four years that only every other thought is of you, and I guess that’s some kind of progress.  I don’t fill the coffee machine at night thinking of you but I do wonder if I’m grinding the coffee beans to your taste.  I don’t get dressed in the morning thinking of you, but I do wonder sometimes what you’d think of this sweater with that shirt.  I don’t think of you as I’m cleaning my teeth, but wonder if you’d think kissing me as I’m out the door with fresh minty breath with baking soda is to your taste.

I don’t think of you as I’m driving to work, but for that song that comes on the radio, that maybe was one you like that you sent to me, or some tragic, slit-your-throat lyric that reminds me of us.  No worries there, mate, even the happy songs remind me of us, because I see you in the seat next to me rockin’ and rollin’.  I only think of you as I pass that last large billboard into the Kortenbergh Tunnel, advertising an exhibition at the Museé de Bozar that we’d both love, but that’s gone in 10 seconds.

I don’t think of you when I laugh out loud at work; I only think of you when I realize that you won’t be there at the end of the day to share it with.  I don’t think of you as I wonder what to make for dinner at night because I’m still trying to cook for one, without thinking how to make this so you would like it and we could share it.  

I don’t think of you with all the changes I have to make in my life right now, because you won’t be there to share them, or bounce them off, or see them come to fruition.  Because, I guess, you really have to be there.

I don’t think about you when I crawl into bed at night, because I can turn on the telly to distract me and I have the dog to stop burrowing under the covers to sleep on your side of the bed.  I don’t think about you last thing before I go to sleep, because you haunt my dreams anyway.

I only think of you when people ask about you, which is becoming rarer, because they know how painful it is for me.  So that’s only once or twice a day.  I only think of you when I come home and close the door and here it echo, and love the dog without sharing him with you.  If he could speak, he’d ask about you, because I spend more time trying to find you than I do with him.  Then I realize he’s here and he’s flesh and blood and needs my love and attention so we go for a walk and I spend it having imaginary conversations with you.

Maybe that’s why I got the dog: his slavish devotion to me will never replace you.  My slavish devotion to you will never get you into my arms. 

So no, I don’t think about you.

There was a recent story in the Dallas press about a Baptist Church in Texas publishing their directory.  This church is welcoming of gay members and their families in spite of the objections of some of their members, which is to be expected, these are Texas Baptists, aren’t they?  The usual practice of including photographs in the directory of families was dropped because these same members objected to gay families being depicted in the same publication as their own families, the implication obviously being that gay couples with children aren’t really families and don’t reflect Jesus’ family values.  They forget that Jesus never married, lived with his mother till he was thirty and hung out with sailors, but I digress.  The point is that their objection to gays as sharing heteronormative values (ghastly expression, but I borrowed it) was not to be suffered.

So the church deacon and its pastor came up with a compromise.  Group photos were allowed in the directory, even individual photos, but no family photos.  Of anyone.

Now compromises are messy things.  They involve someone giving up something so they can have something else and are never a solution because no one is satisfied and no one gets to be right.  But that’s the point of compromises; they aren’t about what is right but about what you can live with and the deacon and pastor in this scenario have the thankless task of trying to find a solution that adheres to their interpretation of Christ’s teaching of inclusivity of all his children while serving the politics of running a church.  No mean feat.

I have a great deal of heartburn with any argument that throws the baby out with the bathwater and what I find difficult to digest concerning the gay and lesbian approach to people of faith is that all religion is wrong and does much damage to human dignity and countermands the teachings of Christ and that people of faith cherry-pick the Bible or other texts to support their bigotry.  People do that, to be sure, but that is exactly my objection.  It is not enough to object to bigotry, a fair cause, but to blame bigotry on religion and faith is like blaming a bad dinner in a restaurant on the food, rather than the chef who prepared it.  I quote my entire post on the matter here:

This is Texas, what did you expect?  Obviously the deacon and the pastor are between a rock and a hard place and they did their best to find an accomodation that would suit the needs of the congregation.  That's their job, and hats off to 'em.  The teachings of Christ notwithstanding, running a church can be just as political as any other human organisation and to work out such a compromise in Southern Baptist Texas is commendable.  Is it right, maybe not, but compromises aren't about right, they're about what you can live with.  

The comment above is correct in that churches are for sinners, even those who think they are saints.  To condemn them for cherry-picking the bible is, well, cherry-picking the bible because Leviticus and Romans say what they do.  No one expects the bible thumpers to stone an adulteress to prove their authenticity, any more than throwing the whole book out because of Leviticus and Romans makes any sense.

Right or wrong is not the question, and condemning the church and Christians in general is not an answer because their hatred of gays has nothing at all to do with religion or faith, faith is merely a camouflage for a more visceral reaction.  It's like saying, "the Bible supports my stand on gays" except the Bible also has something to say about that bacon sandwich and wool/cotton blends.  They'll reject the latter and adhere to the former, so I contend it isn't about faith or religion.  

Which is why I think attacking religion is to miss the point and is the wrong tactic.  Sure people do rotten things in the name of religion, but they would do rotten things anyway, religion isn't in it.  The Bible (and the Koran, and the Torah, and the Sutras) has a great deal of wisdom but it's only as reliable as the last person who read it.

Humans are flawed, and the deacon and the pastor in Fort Worth know this and I think are dealing with it the best way they know how and trying to do the right thing. T'aint easy.  They have my prayers.

Organised religion certainly has a lot to answer for and even the Vatican, under the direction of Pope Ratz-Arse, is making feeble attempts to recognise this.  

But in the end, you can’t blame the chef because people choose to eat the menu.

It begins before spring, when farmers’ fields stir from their fallow sleep.  You don’t notice it in the cold, but only when the days begin to warm, and windows are tentatively left open to the promise of balmier days.  It wafts in and spreads, sweetening the air and singing of renewal and fertility.  The beasts that inhabit the invisible world of the soil welcome its arrival.  It awakens them, nurtures them, and they rise to meet the imperative of spreading its richness.

From the dales of Yorkshire, to Somerset and Kent, from the Pas de Calais through Flanders, the Rhineland, and the steppes of the Volga, it covers a continent and perfumes the air and farms and gardens everywhere welcome it as the kiss of botanical life.

Manure.

I have always slept with the window open and I can remember as a young man the first morning when the sweet pungency of manure crept in through my morning dreams, and I would awaken with the hope of longer, warmer days to come and the prospect of the world coming back to life after the death of winter.  Manure is the smell of hope and of life renewing itself.  It brings thoughts of rosebuds in May and the lazy hum of insects in my mother’s fruit trees, pregnant with blossom.  It foretells of long bicycle rides in the lanes through the farms with the spikes of summer wheat waltzing in a June breeze.  It prepares the garden canvas for the colours of cosmos and marigold and brings visions of snapdragons and the firebrands of lupine dancing into my head.  It presages the taste of sweet corn in September and summer squash and apples and pears.  It is the first taste of the juicy explosion of a vine-ripened tomato and the robustness of the first pumpkin of October.

My neighbour and I often walk our dogs together in the lanes and byways bordering the local farms.  This last Saturday, she was bemoaning the smell of manure, and wrinkling her nose.  Her husband had commented wisely that this was a part of country life, and unbeknownst to her, the dogs were friskier, there was a spring in her step, and she was full of her plans for an unknown future.  This is what manure does; it creates a future.

Indeed, as you drive the country lanes and roll down the windows the fragrance comes into the car like sunshine and if you had a soft top, you’d roll it down, put on your shades, and let the car go where it will, as long as you could take in the heady scent of country air and let it permeate your body and soul, the smell of the fecundity of the earth that drives one to thoughts of love.

Ah, manure, the stuff of life itself!

Hostage to Sleep

It used to be the butt of jokes and I believe somewhere on the internet there exists a tape of me snoring at my desk a few years ago.  I had thought it was too many late nights, or not enough exercise, or bad diet.  But it temporarily disappeared during a year of far too many nights far too late and too much booze.  It was during that period that the pounds dropped off me like snakeskin and I didn’t think I needed more than a few hours sleep a night.  But they took their toll, and a diet of alcohol, grief, and no sleep was going to kill me and soon.  The grief took time, but the diet changed and the booze had to stop if I wanted to see Christmas.

Or maybe it was because I was spending more time in bed that V began to notice again:  the seismic snoring, the struggle for breath of a drowning man (I was drowning then, but not such that I couldn’t learn to swim again, against the currents of my own life.)  And it was then I began to notice that I was constantly tired.  No energy.  No “lust” as the Germans might say to categorise complete indifference to life. 

Elements of this had been around for decades and odd ticks began to fall into place.  A girlfriend I had in my twenties noticed that when I was concentrating, say a book at bedtime, a card game or even a film on the telly, I would stop breathing.  Wide awake, aware, conscious, even sober sometimes.  I would simply.  Stop.  Breathing.

“Breathe!!” she’d scream, horrified that I had stopped for almost a minute.   In my sleep, and she’d elbow me to start me breathing again, as if my lungs had forgotten what the body remembered it needed. 

Maybe it was drink, or the giddiness of those years, or the stress of trying to cope with a nature that was not my own in a life I didn’t want, but didn’t seem to have a say in.  In any case it took a great many years before I was able to follow the threads of what I have now to what I had back then.  Dawn comes slowly to a mind as crowded with clouds as mine, but the horror of it, and what it was doing to me now was clear, and spurred me to action.  I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in twenty years.

Through a chain of referrals I landed in the waiting room of a sleep specialist a few weeks ago.  A tall lanky fellow, with a deceptive mad scientist air to him that belied a very kind and gentle manner, he listened while I laid out the symptoms.  He nodded sagely through each one, but it must have been my shell-shocked, hang-dog face, and the bags under my eyes that stretched to my shoulders that convinced him I had sleep apnoea.  

He explained the consequences of doing nothing, apart from perpetual exhaustion and public embarrassment.  Heart strain, memory loss, organ stress, etc.  We decided that I could do the sleep test at home, once he sorted out the machinery.  Now I, who sleep like a tossed salad anyway, questioned him closely on this.  He described a small pack strapped to my chest, electrodes to measure brain, heart and lung function, he’d wire me up in the office and I’d go straight home and sleep in my own bed.  I favoured this approach, as I sleep naked, talk in my sleep, and fart on the dog, if he’s foolish enough to burrow under the duvet.  This was not for public viewing, I don’t care about medical confidentiality clauses.

My friend Paul drove me back to the doctor’s a few weeks later.  As I sat shirtless before a very pretty girl from Madrid, she smeared my head and chest with ether and with a tube of glue squeezed in the middle, (I did ask her what her toothpaste was like at home;   Madridlenas do not appreciate toothpaste jokes), she wired me up like Frankenstein’s monster.  No, worse.  I was Borg, and scratching was futile.  To secure all this cabling, they then slipped a plastic latticed mesh over my head, cut out holes for my ears, nose and mouth, and told me to get dressed.  I caught a glimpse in the mirror.  I looked like a very expensive melon with glasses.

In bed that night I was keenly aware of the brick-sized mini-computer on my chest, and all the wires I had to be careful not to dislodge, by having to sleep perfectly still, which is not my habit.  I must have eventually fallen off, because I woke up exhausted at half-past dark, ripped all the stuff off, and proceeded with the sleep part of the study. 

The results were not good.  I stop breathing for protracted periods, averaging 20 seconds and sometimes almost a minute.  I get less then 30% of the REM sleep I need, and I go an average of five and a half hours a night without oxygen.  These are dangerous levels, never mind the exhaustion.

I am now in the experimental phase with a breathing machine at night, which is rather like scuba diving in bed.  It leaves me feeling still slightly Borg-ish and I can’t nestle into my desired sleep position which is on my chest, one arm flung out, a hand fondling my right breast, my arse turned ready to fart on the dog.  Some tweaking may still be necessary as I am still exhausted, or perhaps I am the anti-Rip Van Winkle: I have twenty years of sleep to catch up on.

I proffer you this, gentle reader, by way of explanation for my protracted absence; I have been a hostage to sleep.