Feeling My Age

I love this snapshot by Child K of her brother a couple of years ago, swigging an early morning cuppa from his favourite mug. He bought it from the merch stall after a memorable Ross Noble gig we went to at Croydon Fairfield Halls. Just one man on a stage keeping 1600 people convulsed with laughter for two hours – armed with nothing but a microphone and sheer comic genius.

Between the ages of 10 and 14 I sang in the choir of our local church, where the regime was High Anglican with incense and Candlemass, King James bible and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Despite, or perhaps because of, my vociferously atheist dad I took the classes and got confirmed into the church, and started taking regular Communion.

One reason all the Anglo-Catholic razamatazz resonated so deeply for me was that, even before my teens, I was riddled with guilt. Having been physically attracted by other boys for as long as I could remember – certainly from age six – I might not have understood the full implications of those feelings. But I was certain the secret fantasies that had me writhing nightly in bed were deeply shameful.

The first time I attended communion and heard the 1662 General Confession it hit home like an Exocet. The remembrance of my misdoings certainly was grievous unto me, and the burden of them was indeed intolerable. Faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ seemed to offer some sort of way out. At least until night time, when of course my misdoings recurred all over again. [More]

A couple of years ago a friend sent me a tiny olive tree by special delivery – perhaps the loveliest thankyou present anybody’s ever given me. Last week we heard some lads from the local school noisily larking about at the end of our street.

On going out to see what was happening we found one of the baby branches had been snapped off the tiny tree in our front garden. Perhaps the boys were keen to offer their wary suburbanite neighbours an olive branch.

I love the wild whimsy of children. Billy Bones was dreamed up, drawn up and finally pinned up some years ago by Child K who figured we ought to have a skeleton in the cupboard under our stairs. Constant opening of the door - not to mention dragging junk in and out of the cupboard every time the gasman wanted to read the meter - took their toll on Billy. Things could have gone either way - he was getting pretty tattered and might easily have ended up as a few scrappy bits of chalkmarked black paper in the recycling bin. But last weekend an older and more skilful Child K took pity on him and got out the scissors, chalk and paper to do a thorough repair and rescue job. She even added a baby daughter skeleton to keep him company in his cupboard.

Dear Andy

Thanks so much for seeing me yesterday. I’m sure facing visitors at this point must be hugely painful, and the effort you made to receive an old friend was deeply appreciated. Thanks too for the parting kiss. It’s a moment I won’t forget, weed and advancing years notwithstanding.

Also the sudden strength in your voice when you called out as I was leaving the room, and I spun around in the corridor mid-stride to raise my hand in a farewell that turned somehow into an almost Roman salute. At that distance, in the fading daylight I caught your silhouette with your hand raised in reply and Catullus came echoing down the centuries: “et in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale”. Except that poor fucker never had the chance to say it in person.

I guess there are two kind of brother: those we’re born with, and those we acquire along the way. I’m so thankful we acquired each other so early on in our adult lives. Your brotherhood, warmth, understanding, support, friendship and sheer hospitality have been a constant in my life these past 29 years. Whenever there were breaks, we always picked up exactly where we left off. [More]

In 1964 at age 43 Mum developed a sudden inexplicable taste for pop music and bought “It’s Over” by Roy Orbison. This was odd because she’d never shown the slightest interest in anything else we’d seen on Top Of The Pops, yet she played it constantly on the family gramaphone. “A lot of young people do sometimes feel like that” was all she would say. After lunch every day she would retire to her bedroom for an afternoon nap and lock the door. “Mummy’s crying in there” my eight year old sister said one day with wide eyed wonder. We shook our heads together in sorrowful incomprehension. Orbison’s next hit was the considerably raunchier “Oh Pretty Woman” which I bought, imagining that Mum - as a newly converted fan of the Big O - would be pleased. But after the first few lines she refused to listen to another word, for some reason or other. Women, eh ?

Sometimes travelling in distance can be a bit like travelling in time. Found myself revisiting the scene of some of my earliest childhood memories this weekend… For a full set of pix see the slideshow on Flickr

In the early fifties Huntingdon was still a small county town, chartered by King John in 1205 and with Oliver Cromwell among its former MPs. It was the small, sleepy hub of a small, sleepy county – there were so few people with telephones that my grandmother’s number was Huntingdon 351. The whole population was something like five or six thousand and this 1951 snapshot shows The Causeway completely empty of cars.

My great uncle was rector of St Mary’s parish church there and lived in the imposing red brick vicarage from 1938-1970, while Dad, Mum and us two boys settled in nearby Godmanchester, just a mile up the River Ouse. Every Sunday my atheist father required his two sons to attend morning service at St Mary’s. Perhaps out of family loyalty or perhaps – as he claimed – because he wanted us to know what we were rejecting if we opted to follow in his godless footsteps.

In the seventies – long after Uncle Alexander had retired and the rest of the family died or moved away – Huntingdon got swallowed by the neighbouring country of Cambridgeshire. Visiting it today the population has more than quadrupled. A vast concrete flyover has been driven across the nearby watermeadows while the ringroad brutally gouged through the town centre is like a badly-healed razor scar across the face of an old friend.

So Huntingdon may be much bigger but it’s also much diminished compared to the county town of which my grandma was the first woman mayor in 800 years. Back in 1954, that was quite a big deal. Today, wandering past the closed arcades and charmless redevelopments along its high street, it’s hard to imagine anyone nowadays giving a toss one way or the other.

That said, even if it was possible, I wouldn’t go back and live amid the quaint rural racism, sexism and homophobia of 1950s Huntingdon, not for a million quid in old money. The good old days are definitely here and now.

A handcoloured statuette of Garibaldi that my dad treasured all his life. He always said Garibaldi had been his hero as a young man, though I never thought to ask him why. Wikipedia  describes the extraordinary life and exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) in considerable detail – and credits him with making possible the unification of Italy – among much else.

But what probably appealed most to Dad was Garibaldi’s anti-clericalism. “He did much,” says Wikipedia, to “circumscribe the temporal power of the Papacy” and Dad hated  religion with all the fervour of a repented believer. It was always faintly baffling when he went off on one of his tirades about the irrationality of religious belief. Neither Mum nor any of his children had any particular opinion about it, whereas he himself once planned to take Holy Orders. At Cambridge in his late teens he abruptly lost his faith and almost overnight swithced to the opposite extreme.

Dad’s been dead for 18 months now, and his beloved Garibaldi now lives – dusty and neglected – on a shelf in our front room. Behind him are the children’s encyclopedias he bought for us at eyewatering expense back in 1955. Sometimes it seems like forever since we last saw him, at other time like today I still can’t quite believe he’s gone.

Sometimes kids get more pleasure from a cardboard box than the present inside it… so how much pleasure in 20 cardboard boxes ? These two seem determined to find out.

Kids, cats and boxes Part 2

The garden’s full of newly fledged starlings almost as big as their parents – and equally capable of feeding at our bird table. But this one still follows its mum/dad around yelling to have the food shoved down its beak. And, with enough nagging, the parent eventually gives in…

Reblogged from JHartho on Tumblr

Coot fight in my backyard on Flickr.

Great photography – and how lucky to have waterbirds in your backyard. We’ve just got a small suburban garden in London with a bird table which until recently has been literally infested with pigeons.

As soon as we put out nuts, seeds or breadcrumbs for the local wildlife, down would come 20-30 pigeons like a swarm of locusts and everything would be gone inside a minute. The outside of our house became covered in pigeonshit as the bastards waited on the roof in rows for the next consignment of food. And pigeon fights are a lot less interesting and picturesque, I’m guessing, than coot fights.

In the end we put the seeds in a caged feeder where only the small birds could get them, and put up hanging cylinders of fat and nuts that the pigeons don’t like. The garden now features starlings, bluetits, jays, magpies and – the other day for the first time – a woodpecker. Result!

From an inherited family book of nursery rhymes…

“What Are Little Girls Made Of ?” The answer always pleased Child K as a pre-school tot back in the day when we used to sing our way through the books together: “Sugar and Spice and all that’s nice – and that are little girls are made of…”

We found my dad’s lovingly restored copy of The Baby’s Opera again the other day and went through it together for old time’s sake. Inevitably, the songs had greater sentimental value for me than they do for her now she’s 13 and too grown up for all that. Perhaps she’ll appreciate them again when she’s older…

Postscript: since writing this have found both of Walter Crane’s beautifully illustrated volumes of nursery rhymes are free online – thanks to Project Gutenberg – with lovely scans of the original pages: The Baby’s Bouquet and The Baby’s Opera

The Lincolnshire Farmer’s family.

Great anecdote from Cousin Rich: “I went to see a farmer last week with his wife and two kids. They needed to Talk about Father’s will – in his eighties and proper poorly. Son had been working the farm for forty years, daughter working as a teacher. We chewed the fat for a couple of hours and brought things out into the open.

At the end of it all I said: ” Just keep talking this way. It’s not about tax, it’s not about farming. It’s just about what you all think is fair. You need to do it now Mr C. or otherwise it’ll be too late.” At which point Ma C said: ” That’s exactly what your grandad said around the table to my family in 1958. Just the same. That’s lovely, is that. You’re just the same as your Grandad, getting us talking like we should.” I thought I’d done well.

The daughter walked me to the door, shook my hand and said to me: ” Thank you very much for coming. You’re hilarious. You needn’t think you’re going to get paid for telling us the fucking obvious.”

My cousin works in his family’s law firm and is a fund of sharply observed local stories. Keep wishing he’d write a book – or at the very least start blog of his own.

My uncle’s kitchen. Design and decor are by his late wife, who had a sudden and shocking diagnosis of terminal cancer towards the end of 2009. She bore it with great stoicism and good humour, and immediatley started a diary – which she kept up until a few days before her death last year. A friend is coming over tomorrow to help out by typing up the diary so that it can be shared with her close relatives.

My uncle is an admirable man: sharp, shrewd, sophisticated. Despite losing his wife and brother within months of each other in his mid-80s, he has the same fortitude and selfpossession we saw in dad when he was widowed in his fifties. They both came from a generation and a background where you took what life threw at you and got on with it. A strong sense of what’s seemly and appropriate. Seeing my uncle’s kitchen table laid out for two before I sat down to dinner with him a few months ago was poignant as fuck.