I’d left my mobile phone at home.

I stopped at the services near Arundel feeling cheap and second rate. Gorged on tuna sandwiches listening to a problem solving quiz programme on the radio. Felt even worse and crashed out in the car.

Dozed unpleasantly. Woke and drove home. As I walked up the path to home I thought to myself I will never be the same again.

Picked up three messages from Rosy, on my mobile. The first said that she was going to the hospital as her father had worsened. The second said she was going for a sandwich but would be back in the hospital shortly. The third said call her at the Coronary Care Unit.

I had been to see Alec, my father-in-law, the previous evening, calling in on him after work as I was near the hospital. He was dozing as I walked in, but woke and recognised me as soon as I sat down. He was quiet, but looked young and well in the ITU ward. A monitor indicated what seemed to be a steady heart rate. He had a couple of Car magazines on his table – Rosy had brought them earlier. They remained unread.

We said very little. I found the silences discomforting, yet they happened. We talked a little of the grandchildren. He chuckled occasionally. He looked comfortable. He asked for a cup of tea and offered me his sandwiches and shortbread. I asked him if he knew how long they would keep him in. He looked at me as if over his glasses, although he wasn’t wearing any, and said ‘They’ve rather pointedly not said anything to me,’ and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘Draw your own conclusions from that’. He may even have said it, I can’t remember.

After about half an hour I felt that perhaps he had had enough, there were more visitors for other patients in the ward, it was difficult to talk. I said “I’m going now.” We said good bye, and as I did so I held Alec’s left shoulder and looked him in the eye.

~ ~ ~

I now rang Rosy at the hospital and apologised for the fact that I’d left my mobile phone at home. We agreed I should come down to the hospital.

I parked at the front of the hospital in the Pay and Display – buying four hours of time on the basis that I would be there for a while. I believe I even thought, will he last four hours, or a thought like that was lurking, if not recognised.

I walked up through the hospital buildings. A couple were getting into a black car surrounded by large bouquets and wreaths, getting better and leaving, or leaving and grieving. I didn’t know. I took the lift to the seventh floor and asked at Reception to see my father-in-law. The Receptionist didn’t seem to know the name, and acted as if he wasn’t there. After looking around on her desk, she went off to get someone. Then Rosy appeared, looking sad but calm. I followed her through to the ward where Alec’s bed was now curtained.

He was supported by what seemed like a fan of four or five pillows round his head, but was probably only two. There was no monitor above his bed. His feet were sticking out from the bedclothes past his ankles. Rosy had loosened the sheet and blankets as he detested his lower limbs being constrained.

His left hand was clutching tightly to the lapel of his pyjama jacket. He was breathing in deep sighing breaths that pulled his chest to his chin and his chin to a taught jut of resolution and firmness. His eyes were closed. He was unconscious.

Afterwards Rosy told me that this breathing is called Cheyne-Stoking after the man who had described it. The breathing sounded very like Chain Stoking as though a fireman was shovelling hard to keep a fire going.

Rosy and I talked between tears about what was happening. It seems Alec must have had another heart attack in the morning and had deteriorated rapidly. When Rosy arrived he seemed to be disturbed, plucking at the sheets. He recognised her and her sister, who had gone home to look after her daughter. He said he was in no pain. He calmed and slowly lost consciousness.

I think I was deeply shocked because I had last seen him at least chatting, with a spice of wit even then. Now his feet and hands were cold to the touch. Rosy and I sat either side, she on his left and me on the right, leaning over him, holding him. I could see a single tear running down his cheek from his right eye. Rosy caressed her father with great love and tenderness and in extreme pain that was almost unbearable to watch.

Alec’s breathing became more laboured still, and a guttering cough seemed to be drawn up between the breaths. Then the breathing shut down, and he fought for one or two gulping breaths with long breaks between. His eyes began to slide open but unseeing, misty, askew. His mouth opened and the teeth slid apart leaving them offset and ajar.

A couple or more heavy breaths maybe and Alec stopped breathing. His breath seemed to leave his body like air from a Lilo, and his body sank flattened into the bed with only the faintest twitches of muscle. Looking at him, my mind played tricks on me and I kept thinking I saw him move. An inanimate face is such a contradiction.

Now Alec is no more. Now in the memory, beyond touch, beyond conversation, out of presence. There’s a terrible ache in me.

This was my first death.

I said to Rosy at the foot of his bed’ ‘Death seems to make me angry’. In her special way she identified for me with far greater discrimination what I failed to see – ‘It just leaves me confused and bewildered,’ she said. Is it the bewilderment creates the anger?

As I looked at Alec in death I think I went into a childish panic, mentally muttering fragments of Christian liturgy and blessing – into thy hands I commend…..Father, Son, and Holy Ghost…..Great Protector…..on this voyage…..gateway… - bewildered by the experience and my own response.

~ ~ ~

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Sunday June 17th 2018

14.15 Wednesday June 17th 1998

Rosy rang to say that my father-in-law has blown a hole in his ventricle and it is unlikely that he will recover. He doesn’t know how serious things are, but the doctors were very grave.

He came round last Friday to wish my step-daughter a happy birthday and I took him to pick up my son with me. My father-in-law was very quiet and when he left at the end of the afternoon, I felt there was a strange finality in his leaving. He told me his car had only done 1200 miles. The exact details of his leaving blur in my memory. I remember saying something about the beauty of the flowers, or the weather, and thinking how life carries on, my step-daughter’s party, my son watching TV......

Friday June 17th 2022

Saturday June 17th 2000 [from The Guardian]

Casarola

Charles Tomlinson


For Attilio Bertolucci

Cliffs come sheering down into woodland here:
The trees - they are chestnuts - spread to a further drop
Where an arm of water rushes through unseen
Still lost in leaves: you can hear it
Squandering its way towards the mill
A path crossing a hillslope and a bridge
Leads to at last: the stones lie there
Idle beside it: they were cut from the cliff
And the same stone rises in wall and roof
Not of the mill alone, but of shed on shed
Whose mossed tiles like a city of the dead
Grow green in the wood. There are no dead here
And the living no longer come
In October to crop the trees: the chestnuts
Dropping, feed the roots they rose from:
A rough shrine sanctifies the purposes
These doors once opened to, a desolation
Of still-perfect masonry. There is a beauty
In this abandonment: there would be more
In the slow activity of smoke
Seeping at roof and lintel; out of each low
Unwindowed room rising to fill
Full with essences the winter wood
As the racked crop dried. Waste
Is our way. An old man
Has been gathering mushrooms. He pauses
To show his spoil, plumped by a soil
Whose sweet flour goes unmilled:
Rapid and unintelligible, he thinks we follow
As we feel for his invitations to yes and no:
Perhaps it’s the mushrooms he’s telling over
Or this place that shaped his dialect, and where nature
Daily takes the distinctness from that signature
Men had left there in stone and wood,
Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain.

• Attilio Bertolucci, the Italian poet, died this week aged 89.

Monday June 17th 2024

Saturday June 17th 2017

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Thursday June 15th 2016

Monday June 15th 1992

Saturday, after sunbathing, when my father-in-law came round, I decided to cut back the big bay tree next door, which our Polish neighbour and his partner had always seemed agreeable to.

I left only 2 spindly tall branches, so that the tree looks like a lonesome pine on a mountain top.

Our neighbour’s British partner was obviously worried about what our neighbour’s reaction would be.

Then, just as we went out Saturday night, our neighbour came home and went bananas. We could hear him as we left the house.

I got home to find a letter from him telling me I was a criminal (and to our golden retriever having had diarrhoea all over the kitchen.)

When I see our neighbour on Sunday morning he’s very cross.

You castrated my tree, he says, in his deep voice with a strong Polish accent.

I tell him I’m sorry, I didn’t do it deliberately to hurt him.

It is, he explains, his family tree.

His partner planted it in 1965, around the time our neighbour came to England.

His last name means Bay Tree in Polish.

I explained quietly that I had liberated his tree for future growth.

He warms to the idea and brightens.

Liberated, he says, thoughtfully.

He then tells me he’s going to have a pool in his back garden, with those fish that look like carrots.

Sunday June 15th 2003

Thursday June 15th 2000

On Tuesday evening we went over to Saddlescombe beyond Devil’s Dyke to see a lady called Colette about buying a new rabbit after Misty’s death on Sunday. She had advertised rabbits for sale in the Friday Ad.

She lives with her husband in a cottage on a National Trust farm down Saddlescombe private road. Her husband had worked for the farm but was made redundant when the farm closed down 18 months ago. He’s only just found another job on another farm (echoes of current events on the Archers). The field at the back of their cottage has been rented (or bought) by a farmer in Chichester who is using it as set aside – that means earning EU funds for doing nothing, she says.

The stone walled cottage is on the end of a row along a chalky track that leads onto the South Downs Way towards Patcham or, as Colette described it, the horseshoe, a walk to take you round in a big loop back to where you started. Across the way from the cottage behind a fence of chestnut rails was a large field full of sheep and attentive watching lambs with large ears. Two ducks with necked stretched and heads held high in some strange ritual ambled through the clumps of dock and switch grass like a couple having an argument.

A path ran along the edge of the field to Saddlescome Donkey Wheel housed beneath a peaked roof shelter. It’s an old wheel for raising water, with a diameter of 4-5 metres, made of chipped and broken grey wooden slats and struts. The shafts that would have been used to secure the donkey leant up against the wall.

The garden in front of the cottage was a mass of flowers – roses, red hot pokers, clematis. At the side of the front gate was a black wrought iron sign of a rabbit. Another sign warned of the dogs whose barking could be heard constantly from every open window. Occasionally there was a glimpse of a grey and white face, jaws open.

The garden continued to the side of the house where (the woman informed us later) her husband had drained a lower pool and had constructed one above it. Both were rectangular, lined with a rubber liner. The red and orange shapes of carp swam through reflections. Newly plated iris and water lily were in flower.

To the side of the garden was a chalky driveway where an old van was parked. Across this was a field of birds penned in and protected from the cats and other wildlife by a high chicken wire fence topped with an electrified wire. In this pen were hens, ducks, hooting peacocks, including a pure white one.

A couple of cats greeted us when we got out of the car and one a small, thin marmalade cat was pregnant and followed us round. My step-daughter and my son were enchanted by the cats and kittens we found inside when the woman led us into a warren of outbuildings and runs.

One hut held nine or more hutches full of rabbits. British Giants occupied one set of hutches. Two beautiful grey blue does were keeping house. They had been mated with the large dappled black and white rabbits in the hut we would visit next.

Very young kittens tumbled over each other inside and outside the cages. Small fluffy cat kittens scrabbled about on the sawdust floor and played peek-a-boo from behind the hutches. Some were black and white, some silver tabby, one was black and another tortoiseshell tabby. Colette was constantly attending to them as they attempted to find a way to get into the dog compound that lay beyond the wooden fence in front of the hut. They would surely be torn to shreds if they managed to get in, she said.

Inside the hutches were very young rabbit kittens of many different colours – grey, agouti, pied. In front of us was a long low hutch from which four sets of deep brown eyes were watching.

If you crouched down you could see a mother and three kits, all male. But these were no ordinary rabbits. They had deer-like faces with small features and elegant whiskers, bright, wide, intelligent eyes and handsome long ears like the trumpets of beautiful lilies. They were taller than ordinary rabbits, with long slim legs, long feet and toes. But what you most noticed, apart from the quality of their gaze, was the colour and softness of their fur. It seemed to have a deep glow like polished mahoganey. These animals had a smooth aerodynamic line yet their outline seemed blurred by the rich lustre of their coats, a reddy brown sheen that reminded me of a brushed and burnished chestnut mare.

They were Belgian hares.

The kits hopped about, as though expecting a game. The doe watched. The decision was made for me in an instant. In the corner of the hutch one of the young bucks had sat still for a while, ears raised, watchful. I knew immediately this was the rabbit I would chose to fill the gap left by Misty’s death.

The others talked for a while about the other rabbits and the cats. Colette lifted the young rabbit from the hutch and gave him to me to hold. He nestled down against my chest, nervous, fearful, eyes looking up to me. I stroked over his ears and his fragile back, captivated by his physical beauty and presence.

He’s six weeks old. He cost £25. We took him home in a cardboard box but not before Colette had shown us around the rest of her smallholding. In a second hut next to the garden with the pools, she had an aviary full of fluttering budgies, a golden pheasant and various other unspecified fancy birds. In the aviary, taking advantage of its warmth and shelter, she had another eight or ten hutches with miniature Rex rabbits, with small ears, lops and large black and white rabbits with a French name I can’t remember.

Diagonally across yard from the aviary there was another outhouse full of guinea pigs, who were also running around. Earlier my step-daughter had passed a large cat sitting near here that had hissed at her with all the animosity he could muster. He now reappeared – a huge silver grey Tom with pale blue eyes and a firmly set jaw that suggested he would beat the living daylights out of you if he had half a chance. As we were leaving he took the opportunity to see to a number of the females that purred and prowled round him. He looked like a greying old street fighter with his sleeves rolled up doing press ups.

The Belgian Hare is now living in the old hutch my daughters brought down from Preston with their rabbits Blackberry and Hazel. He seems to quite like his new surroundings, although he’s still very timid. Thundery, my son’s chubby guinea pig who looks like a steel brush and is the colour of the sky before a storm, keeps hovering around the hutch. I imagine him wanting to introduce himself…

Hello, I’m Thundery, who are you? There used to be this big fat rabbit here who hogged the hutch and used to sit on me, but they took him out last Sunday and I haven’t seen him since. They were digging a big hole at the side of the garden on Sunday afternoon. I’m not very good at maths but I’ve been putting two and two together and so far I’ve made seven and a half!

You don’t say a lot do you, but wow, you’re an amazing colour. And why are you getting special food? I fancy some of those green flaky things…Lettuce crisps are they? Never tried them. Hey, do you want to come out and play?…

It will probably be another two weeks before we let him out – we have to make sure he doesn’t eat grass as he’s never had any and it takes a while for their stomachs to get used to it.

My son decided the Belgian hare looks like a kangaroo, because he’s got a nice face and he’s red. So we’ve decided to call him Roo which seems to fit and reminds me of my eldest daughter – so I like it.

Saturday June 15th 2024

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Wednesday June 12th 2019

Friday June 12th 1992

Another scan yesterday - everything going OK, nervously bought Rosy a badge: It’s an October baby.

A friend’s daughter killed in a car crash aged 18.

Man lying on the floor at Victoria station yesterday.

Special constable shot by terrorists in Yorkshire. His wife said “There are so many kind people in Britain, a few spoil it for everyone else.”

Sunday June 12th 2022

Monday June 12th 2000

Misty the Giant British rabbit died yesterday, aged about 6.

- lying in his run at the end of a birthday BBQ – the music system playing Korn very loudly

- took him out and everyone came to see him, sit with him

- took him to vets with my wife

- vet handled him – Misty was very upset, crying, mewing through his whiskered mouth

- vet injected him with OD of anaesthetic, twice

- brought him home for burial

- dug hole

- my son held the head then let it go at last minute

- ears covered in dirt

- my son scooped soil in, covered him over

Body and soul – the body is soul

Reason and emotion – reason is emotion

Body and mind – mind is body.

Thursday June 12th 2025

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The Musendrophilus (April Fool’s Day - 1975)

The naturalist David Attenborough gave a report on BBC Radio 3 about a group of islands in the Pacific known as the Sheba Islands. He played sound recordings of the island’s fauna, including a recording of a night-singing, yodelling tree mouse called the Musendrophilus. He also described a web-footed species whose webs were prized by inhabitants of the island as reeds for musical instruments.

I remember it well. I was completely taken in. I even made notes. Only when I tried to find the Sheba Islands on a map did I realise…

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Tuesday March 28th 2000

Sue R told me that Alan S met a Bulgarian lady and has gone to live in Bulgaria. That’s strangely – what’s the word – apt, I said, thinking that most of his poetry – excellent as it was - sounded as though it had been translated from Bulgarian, and Alan always had the look of a political dissident under threat from a harsh regime.

Monday March 28th 2005

You belong to a poetry group
you agree to send each other
images, or things, to inspire.

They arrive when you’re busy
and seethe on your desk.
You resent the pressure.

The first is a black and white photo. 
A man on a railway track. 
It reminds you of Belsen

The second a monotone shot
of the Mona Lisa saying ok
and a news item, a mountain death.

The third another photograph -
a man sits in a shelter weaving
wicker from willow withies.

You decide to alliterate
as soon as you read
the text that comes with it,

loaded with loss. Poetry full
of loss, you’ve decided, isn’t
poetry, but poetry lost.

Next a bus ticket, purple ink
a journey you’ve taken yourself.
Then a postcard with an image…

Choose one of the poetry prompts, we’re asked, as members of Footwork, a poetry collective. But my response became a meta-poem, based on all the prompts…

Messages sent in early spring after a long winter

On a starlit night 

In the night sky above Porthcurno,
we watch a comet, its tail of breath.
The sky is ebony. Stars pierce our eyes,
the wind scything the wires.
The old brick fireplace; in its hearth
red hot coals radiate their warmth 
around our family group: mother, 
father, sons, daughters… dog.


A photograph of the neatest man in Somerset 

The withies are bound like trolls in stooks.
Within their sheltering arbour he grinds
the blade, the whetstone held daintily,
little pinky crooked with reason –
a blade this sharp will cut a finger 
neatly to a stump. His was
the neatest blade. It lies unsharpened
on the mantelpiece; next to the bottle.


To friends arriving from a distance 

No. We’ve not gone to any great trouble.
Is it really that long? It’s hard to believe 
it’s over ten years since the birthday party 
in Letchworth and that unfortunate situation.
We’ve tried to get to the bottom of things, 
many times, without success. You’ll find us easily. 
The road is full of petals, cherry blossom 
blown like snow drifts; our world of pink. 
 

A son’s first trip by plane 

He sat in his seat as if glued in,
little legs almost straight, looking 
straight ahead, lips pressed together
in a determined reverie. He accepted every gift
of headphones, magazine, young flyers fun bag 
and listened intently to Channel 3 as he flew,
but never moved; much like the plane 
which remained firmly at its Gatwick stand. 


To a man walking a railway 

Counting the sleepers helps the time pass more quickly, 
except at night when it’s best to sleep in the tunnels.
The trains here are irregular, if they ever arrive at all,
so you need have no fear of sudden expresses.
Do you spit on the rail shine? Do you suffer a mirage
of destinations? That the line ends somewhere?
Out in the country you can enjoy the horizons,
the wind’s generosity with petals. Believe me.


A visit to the walled city 

Lilac and jasmine surround the citadel 
its pavements of gravel flecked by gold lichen
the only gateway black in the noon shade
huge flags unfurled on its towers. The woman
is brushing her hand on the turret, stroking
the stone as if its alive. She flinches 
the moment the crust of the gargoyle splits,
revealing her mother’s dangerous eyes.

 
A man turned to stone

The sky is charcoal, stabbed by stars.
On the high cliff of cloud he rests 
his chin upon his knee, clutches 
his head in despair, weighed down by the vacancy
beneath him. His hands frame his eyes
that stare into nothingness, full of pain.
He sees nothing, except imprisonment, freefall.
Petrified, no parachute, he dare not move.


Ignominious: on the comic and the tragic 

Auden never mentioned the shepherd looking up: 
I could have sworn… he could be saying, 
oblivious of the pale legs about to disappear into the sea. 
Guffaw, says Pieter Breughal the Elder, circa 1558.

On Thursday, a young mountaineer fell 
and swung in space calling for help.
The calls got fainter and fainter until 
they finally ceased on Friday morning.

There’s something about that movement,
like a pendulum. Funny, sad, funny…

Saturday March 28th 2020

Sunday March 28th 2021 Hurstpierpoint

Friday March 28th 2025

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Sunday March 24th 2024. Standen House.

Saturday March 24th 2018. Prague Vaclav Havel Airport, Terminal 1.

Friday March 24th 2017. FOAM photography museum, Amsterdam.

In 2015, at the end of a photography festival in Xiamen (China), Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota Yokota burned a version of the installation Matter, which can be seen in the first room of this exhibition. He recorded the burning process with his camera as a sort of performance art that resulted in the book Matter / Burn Out… His photographs of the ‘cremation’ of one installation serve as the basis for a new one, in which he appears to use the resulting mountains of ash to recreate a new, autonomous work of art. This installation, Matter / Vomit, symbolises the enormous tidal wave of images that is poured over us every day and which barely even registers in our consciousness.1

Friday March 24th 2000

Two men appeared at the top of the garden last Friday and cut down the elm and the sycamore – because they were pushing over the wall and the garage next to them. They said they had planning permission.

I’ve been going round neighbourhood trying to raise funds for the primary school again – 2 ladies in the hairdressers – Spring plants, a painting of daffodils one said she had done, old lino on floor, old hairdresser chairs.

How’s mum, and dad?

He’s deteriorating badly.

When I cut his hair, he sits strangely. It’s those new tablets.

Wednesday March 24th 1999

Air strikes against Serbia today….

War again.

Sunday March 23rd 2003

My son, aged 8, talked about the curse of always seeking a girlfriend. I said I had been like that as a child.

‘Oh, the curse’ he said.

He had a dream of three big pipes to the future he could go down – one said brain, one said heart and one said wits. He found the brain one scary, so decided to go down wits.

Wednesday March 23rd 2005

Go there,
I don’t know where.
Bring it,
I don’t know what.

From a Russian folk-tale

Saturday March 23rd 2019

Tuesday March 23rd 2021

I don’t know if it’s working but it’s connected to the mains and seems to be OK.

When the nurse rings me, she says her heart monitor has recorded 2000 occasions when her heartbeat slowed over the last three years, but 800 of them occurred over the last three months which means incidents of slow heartbeat are getting more frequent, unlike the heartbeat which is slowing down, and not just that the nurse says the longest pauses between heartbeats especially at night are up to four seconds but there was even one of seven seconds. You can wait a long time for a heartbeat.

Arrhythmia is a common problem with poets whose poems don’t scan so they write pros poems instead and call them poems even though they’re not poems but just blocks of text with their own curious rhythm some even create white spaces in the blocks of text to create pauses even quite long

pauses

Flat line here

Saturday March 23rd 2024. Ditchling, Sussex

Hilary Bourne (1909-2004) and Barbara Allen (1903-1972) lived, travelled, designed, made, studied and sold textiles as a couple from 1936 until Barbara’s tragic death in a fire in 1972.

How is it possible that the two women who designed and wove the textiles for the Royal Festival Hall (1951), the fabrics for the costumes for Ben Hur (1959), the upholstery for the newest glitzy jet planes ever to fly in the UK (c1952), who sold curtains at Heal’s and Liberty and ran a renowned, highly profitable London business together - in both their names - for nearly 40 years, have remained uncredited in the British history of Modernist Art and Design?

Is it because they are women in craft?

Towards the end of their lives they created the museum at Ditchling together in 1985.1

Tuesday March 12 1991 - a meeting on the train

On the train back from London , I met a guy, daughter at Cambridge, son at Sussex. He had a fabulous, gentle face, small, neat, a small felt hat, glasses. His right eye was oozing a thick, viscous fluid. It was closed. He asked me how to get to the university. I said, take the train to Falmer.

We got talking. He had worked at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham.

I told him there was a Health Centre at the University, if his eye was troubling him, he became embarrassed and said he had lost his eye.

I told him I didn’t mind about his eye and not to worry.

My attitude to him varied between fear, patronisation, distrust. I saw myself as powerful because I would listen to him, though we conversed more than some people who talk on trains.

He lost his embarrassment and talked more. He told me that when he was little, his father was beating his sister and she was bleeding under her dress. So he thought if he talked to his father, he could calm him, he could draw his fire.

His father hit him across his face with a bare fist and badly hurt his eye. Afterwards, his father always said his son had been born with one eye.

Years later, he was in in hospital awaiting an operation to remove the eye. His father came and stood by his bed and began to weep, and the tears splashed on the son.

The boy said, you cross me? Why are you crying?

His father said, with a broken heart, Come here and live with me. And the boy said, No, what is done is done.

Later, he said, Look at what Lincoln, Luther King, the Kennedys, all assassinated, had tried to do, and look at what Bush has done. He’s brought people together. He denied there’s much racial prejudice in London. He loves Cambridge, very proud of sitting at centre table when his daughter graduated.

To thine own self be true, he said, Don’t try to be smart. Take the chip off your shoulder.

I told him about smacking my daughters. I could see his wise and accepting understanding. He said, Shakespeare had said how the subconscious can take over sometimes and we become not men. Then when we recover, we realise what we’ve done. Talk to the children, he said, and get them to talk.

He felt like a messenger someone had sent on my path. Old one eyed Woden.

Tuesday March 12 1991 [continued] - meeting Lee Harwood

Later, after going to Thomas Cook to try and book a holiday with Air Miles, (don’t bother) and getting my hair cut. I’m walking along Western road, and I bump into Lee Harwood.

Lee tells me that on the 28th of January, climbing in Snowdonia, his friend of 30 years climbing – father of a two and a half year old daughter, husband of a young wife, mid 40s – his friend had missed his grip and fallen to his death from a chimney on the second highest ridge. Lee was very distressed. Lee had been climbing with his friend when it happened. Lee had done the climb again with an instructor to see what they could have done wrong.

The inquest exonerated them both and said it was just bad luck.

Then a taxi driver on the way home telling me a girl of three and a half had been run over in a car park at the university.

The mother had left no address, gone for three weeks in France, the child had been left with another couple.

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Tuesday, March 9th, 1786

This day died poor Puss, aged eleven years, eleven months. He died between twelve and one at noon, of mere old age, and apparently without pain.

Wm Cowper quoted in Nicola Durbridge’s booklet Cowper’s Tame Hares for Cowper and Newton Museum Olney (my note from March 2nd, 2010.)

Graffham, West Sussex. Wednesday March 9th 2022.

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Saturday March 4th 1972

Transcription…

4.3.72

Thrushes. Important to me. A bird of great beauty - mistletoe or common, remember in the damp, brown hedgerow at bottom of garden in Ch. Or. Rd. near the lane and the playing fields, between the trees, under the bushes in the grass and very quiet. Thrush means a song, a welcome of morning, a flurry of feathers, a sharp quickness, a grace of animal, a warmth, a life.

Saw one this morning, splashing and fluttering in a little grassy hollow in the lawn which had filled with snowy rainwater, diving and tossing and shaking and flickering…

[Good to know that some totems last a lifetime…]

Saturday March 4th 2023

We’re helping our golden retriever Wilson into the back of the car but he seems strangely resistant and immediately jumps out to stand close to B, one of our neighbours who has just arrived.  She engages with him immediately and he places himself in such a way – sitting, forelegs straight, head up but nestling towards her – that she can stroke his head with ease. Later she says, I think they know. Our cats have been responding in the same way.

She goes on to explain to us that her daughter has just been diagnosed with cancer, and it’s aggressive, already in her lymph nodes. She’s working in terminal care in oncology, so her work confronts her with her fears. She is in shock but already has been booked in for surgery. She has had a tough time recently with a relationship that broke up. But she has a new boyfriend who is sticking with her.

B’s pain was obvious in her face, strained and taut beneath her bobble hat. She said that her husband has taken it badly and doesn’t feel he can come out yet.

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Sunday March 3rd 1974

My grandfather, my mother’s father, described himself as a ‘Brummagem button’.1

Saturday March 3rd 1990

My father’s grandfather (his mother’s father, my great grandfather, had been a worker in metals too.

His father’s family had been Baptists and walked from High Street Aston to Carrs Lane to worship three times a day.

…………………………………………………………….

I’m beset by an image of a man in a car parked up in a parking space near the small library where my mother used to take me when a young boy. It’s dark. I’m hidden by the dark leaves of rhododendrons watching the man beside the palings near the path to the library.

Words of places from my childhood:

Elmwood

Endwood

Limberlost

Engelstede

Cherry Orchard

World’s End

An undated note from 1974:

The youngest boy in the family couldn’t or wouldn’t speak from the earliest age and he remained silent every day. Days, weeks, months, years went by and still he said nothing.

Suddenly, one meal time, he said, ‘Food’s bad.’ Initially suprised, shocked even, the family were delighted that the youngest had started to say something.

His mother gently probed his reason for not speaking. ‘Why have you not spoken before?’ she asked.

‘Food’s not been bad before,’ he replied.

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Thursday February 17th 2000

“Man is, in general, made up of contradictory qualities.”

James Boswell (on Johnson’s character)

Saturday February 17th 2018 A song thrush sings in the branches of the great elms that stood near the house where we lived until 2020. All the elms have now been felled.

Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]

Two magpies sit with poise and natural grace (then suddenly disappear) in the great horse chestnut (where the woodpecker rattles), which rises like the giant right hand of an Indian dancer, opening in a spiral beyond the new houses away to my right outside the window. The two birds had positioned themselves with the joy of unconscious design, one almost atop the branch that would be the middle finger and one towards the tip of the thumb.

My surprise and intense pleasure is in the way their black and white is so intensely one and the other, a clean piebald precision against the sheet of broad-flagged blue behind them and the tree. How poised and pen like their black tails, one moment as firm as a plastic moulding, the next quavering for balance like a tightrope walker’s pole.

I look again as another, or one of the same birds lands in the branches. I realise that from head to tail the magpie is black, white, black, without compromise. And how the white shines in the sunlight and how the black defies perception, a loss, a gap, and then to prove me wrong the great broad head dips beneath the wing to nestle and preen in its oxter (a word I discovered this morning), in that action of all birds that is so bird-like, humorous and endearing, showing how that which appears negative may be supremely positive.

The green grey branches are evenly lit by pinky sunlight. This morning the character of this wooded urban landscape – with its broken glimpses of walls, an elegant eau-de-nil chimney with faceted sides and bevelled mouldings rising from the foliage next to a bright citric evergreen, a roofline delineated by the white soffit of the eaves above coppery brick, the terracotta of roof tiles – is determined by the flood of yellowy pink sunlight through it, pale peach. In the far high heaven an airliner, like a tiny silver bead draws a pencil thin line of white, whose dissipation follows at a discrete and constant distance.

Suddenly, there’s a grey-blue blur and a pigeon wheels across the dimensions turning on its final approach right in front of me. Next to the tree in which the magpies no longer sit, a wreath of dark olive foliage piles like clouds. At the horizon the darker green tuft of a Scots pine stands sentinel.

Beautiful day. Sun very warm. Outside a little bird sings cheepy-cheepy-cheepy.

The rabbit’s fur is warm, he snuggles to my touch.

Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]

I’m worried about my son at the moment – partly because of what’s happening at school. Also because he’s very pale. He’s seven.

Sitting in the bath the other night he makes up his own metaphysics

A few days previously he had said to Rosy that he had a dream where he tried to kill a friend by pushing him down a lift shaft – ‘Do you think that’s to do,’ he asked Rosy ‘with the ups and downs of life.’

Roughly this is what he said to me:

The day that Rainbow (the cat who died on New Year’s eve) was buried he saw a shape rise up outside the window, a kind of grey shimmery shape. It was Rainbow and he was saying thank you to Joseph because Joseph looked after Rainbow better than his brother did.

Suddenly there was a flash and Joseph was in this other world where there were lots of cats and other animals and his great-great-great grandfather.

Then he heard a voice and it was the voice of eternity, of all life that’s ever been and it said to him ‘You are special.’

'It also said ‘Solve Within.’ ‘I don’t really know what that means,’ he said, ‘do you?’

Then there was a rather confused conversation.

I said it must be nice to have the voice around.

He said, ‘It’s not around, you can’t see it and if you do see it, it means you have to go back to the beginning and if there’s something you have to do when you get a grade, (he suggested this meant something enjoyable) and if when you go back you get a bad grade you have to do it all again….?

It was strangely touching, as if he is battling with something. School work, probably…

Thursday February 17th 2000 [continued]

I reconnected with my the draft of my novel The Reward of Delay1 after all the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks – I feel confident and happy about the way the work is progressing and it’s partly because I feel the characters lead me to it, Samuel especially.

Trying to get the balance right is really difficult. Writing as prayer, as contemplation of truth.

The process of editing – the challenge I have faced since last June – has been like gutting a fish. Within my draft is a skeleton, another story, that belongs to the consciousness of some of the characters, that is somehow in their heads but doesn’t belong in the book.

So slowly and carefully I think I have been trying to fillet it out – stopping when I feel I may be making a mistake, laying down the knife when I feel too great a risk is involved, stopping to think and work out – work out the shape of the skeleton and where the knife may lift this piece of bone but leave the valuable flesh.

With the backbone of this other story removed, it then became clearer that the barebones of Dr Johnson’s story must also be removed, all cod philosophy and faux morals, to be replaced if at all by character and event.

There remain some large bones, like those of the hake hidden in potato.

I danced a swirl in the kitchen at the thought – I’m nearly there.

Well done for sticking with it, well done for resolving difficult creative problems – or at least for trying to.

I got wrecked on Proseco and Jamesons – I drank a toast to myself . Well done for sticking with it, well done for resolving difficult creative problems – or at least for trying to…

Then my father rang to say my lovely godmother Nancy G died on Monday…

All photos ©John Davies

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All photographs ©John Davies

Tuesday February 8th 2000

This morning it is dark, with a dirty grey sky above bleak skeleton trees, raining, cold, miserable, and yes, I’m assailed by doubt again.

I’ve been putting together a quote for AA to produce an interactive version of the training project. I want to do it well but don’t feel I have – my old problem of partial vision seems to bedevill me, not being focussed enough on what he needs – although it’s all speculative – no payment. I’m blaming myself for not being able to write out from scratch a clean definition of an interactive learning package.

It’s 8.15, the day is a dark grey green of sodden matted trees, droplets of rain like tiny lights on each twig tip, scattered through the lilac, buddleia and damson like little pearls or jewels.

Quite a number of things have happened over the weekend.

I had a very bad migraine on Saturday morning possibly because I got cold outside cleaning out the rabbit hutch and pruning the apple trees. It was the second one I’d had in two days – so I’ve started taking propanolol again.

It was a very bright, beautiful, fresh morning.

I met Malcolm D outside Sainsbury’s. He had followed me out as I struggled with the industrial strength multiple carrier shopping trolley we now use. He expressed suprise that I was not in gaol yet…

Memorable quotations harvested on 8.2.200

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.

Mae West

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Friday January 29th 1993

A medieval poem on the underground (anon. 15th century).

‘I shall say what inordinate love is:

The furiosity and wodness of mind

An instinguible burning, faulting bliss,

A great hunger, insatiate to find,

A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind,

A right wonderful sugared sweet error,

Without labour rest, contrary to kind,

Or without quiet, to have huge labour.’1

Video shot from Bostal Hill, Sussex on Thursday January 29th 2015.

Saturday January 29th 2000

Bo Peep – Firle Beacon again with Milo.2

Sitting with Milo on top of the hill near the stile. Milo’s golden coat matches the gold of the grass.

Landscape full of curves – of slurry piles, of promontories, of undulating fields, of ploughed furrows. A patchwork of fields fanning out to the distance. Alciston (Rose Cottage) below – Alfriston over the downs.

Milo sits, tongue out, ears cocked, nose swivelling.

Cloud hanging over the hill near Wilmington. Dark grey, smoky, pale mauve underbelly, blowing from the sea.

The sound and speed of the wind at the top of the hill, buffeting and exploding and roaring in the ears. Milo walking along with his ear blowing up and over his head and all his fur blowing in one direction away from him.

The view across to the sea, Newhaven. Open heathland like Egdon in Return of the Native.

Pale blue-white smoke blowing along a hedge, rising in plumes, a silver spray of bonfire smoke.

Wednesday January 29th 2020

An amazing long walk to Lamorna, St Loy and back to the Merry Maidens. Beautiful valley where the stream flows down to St Loy. Made a few mistakes en route and ended up in people’s gardens. Met an old lady who lived in a white cottage perched high on edge of cliff overlooking Lamorna Cove. Beautiful location. Not that tall, she had a broad, weathered face with a gap where one tooth was missing. She said she had lived there for sixty years since the age of two.

But as Rosy said, ‘I’m 67 so surely she must be 80 or more.’

Homemade vegetable soup with Scotch bonnet chilli for tea.

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Friday January 26th 1990

The last thing you expect. Actor Gordon Kaye brained by a piece of hoarding flying into his windscreen.1

………………………………….

I must move to where the unbroken egg spills its yolk.

The ache is the ache of the intellect desperately trying to do a job it can never do, never achieve. It cannot satisfy the hunger

If you are hungry you eat bread, you cannot eat words.

The ache is the ache of the intellect trying to control, summarise, encapsulate, define something which it lives with as an equal faculty, its twin, its doppelgänger.

………………………………..

St Mark 8.22–24

22 And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him.

23 And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.

24 And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.

……………………………….

Cras ingens iteabimus aequor. [Horace Odes 1.7.32]

Tomorrow we set out once more upon the boundless sea.

Mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum

Sera moretur [Odes 1.28.3]

Cease your efforts to find where the last rose lingers

…………………………….

A farmer on radio this morning defending chemical farming ‘…if people don’t take care of the land they’re soon brought down to earth….’

…………………………..

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida

Aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credulo postero. [Odes 1.11]

Even while we speak, Time, the churl, will have been running

Snatch the sleeve of today and trust as little as you may tomorrow

…………………………..

Ground Old English Grund

The bottom, the last part or downward limit.

To run aground.

Ground-ways – the large blocks and thick planks which support the cradle on which a ship is launched.

…………………………..

Sidney Webb Sent Beatrice a full length photo of himself. Beatrice sent it back, asking for another of his head, ‘since it’s your brain I’m marrying.’

Sunday January 26^th 1992

First sense of Spring

Skyline brightening, not sun but something in the winter sky that feels like Spring.

Snow melting in the leaves of snowdrops, over primroses.

Muddy, slippy, soft turf. Doors left open. A traipse of damp footprints

They’re playing Abba songs. A day off school.

Sense of leaving something behind, an illness, winter, the last year, Christmas.

Coming out of the woods. Feeling better for the first time after flu.

Clearing up at Epiphany, the hallway swept clean. No pine needles.

All the cards tidied away.

No sense of loss, but adventure,.

All the tackle and trappings cleared away, now you can see where you’re going, feel the wind of Spring.

Trees drop their final leaves just after Christmas.

Then surprise, surprise, each branch is studded with buds.

Wednesday January 26th 2000

We saw Matthew in hospital on Sunday – he seemed reasonably cheerful – laughing especially about what it was like having hallucinations (caused by the septicaemia – he believed he had been abducted by aliens and was inside a 12 seater alien minibus when he was in fact on the upstairs loo, which was once painted apple green. But he couldn’t get out unless he had something in his hand from planet earth – so he asked Gill for a knife – not likely, said Gill, so she gave him a six inch plastic ruler and then he could open the door and come out. Not long after that he was taken into hospital. It turns out he has an infection of the smooth interior lining of the heart – endocarditis – a life threatening condition. They may have to operate to repair/replace damaged valves – this is obviously a worrying time for Gill (and us all) but hopefully he’ll get better.

Talking to Matthew, Rosy said that her mother had plastic surgery but no one noticed…

Friday January 26th 2008

…this hollow place, the ship…

From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African by former slave Olaudah Equiano first published in 1789.

I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning. For that purpose I have often taken up a book, and talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.

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Monday January 24th 2000

Susan Cooper author of The Dark is Rising, King of the Shadows:

Writing is a closed room without a handle. Just occasionally the door opens and you can get in. Writing four books like that was like writing a symphony. It had a very clear shape. For me, it was reliving a past I couldn’t get back to. I wrote continuously. I wrote as soon as the children went to school and stopped when they came home. The books were in my head all the time. They protected me from reality.

Quoted by Julia Eccleshare Guardian Review 22.1.00

Remembering the seminar at Swan Hunter Shipbuilders, when Lou Chirillo talked about W.E. Deming’s ideas.

Shipbuilders adopting this new religion… Now these ideas have permeated through car makers, financial institutions, hospitals, schools, and I have spent most of my life helping to spread the message.

In tandem with therapy, change to feminine, teamworking, sport not army, encouragement, overcoming fear, Thatcher, New Labour, consumerism, travel, IT, internet.

To write a story about, around, this process.

Friday January 24th 2003

Art is not autobiography – it’s much more important than that.

Advice to young composers – write the music you want to hear. Express yourself.

Witold Lutoslawski (1913-94)

Christine tells me how she went on a navigation weekend about mapping and she was the only woman and all the men wanted to stay under cover of the trees and she kept saying no, come out, I want to go and lie in the sun in the field, but all the men wanted to stay in the shade, watching, observing.

Is it something about hunting she wondered? Something about men and hiding, being camouflaged?

And voyeurism? I think.

God of nature and pleasure, 100 BC-AD 100

Dionysos was the patron of vegetation, winemaking and the theatre. His cult symbolised religious ecstasy, freedom from care and rebirth. He was believed to have a large entourage of countryside spirits such as maenads, satyrs and nymphs. Masks such as this colossal limestone example were sometimes hung from trees or on pillars, and draped in real clothes and vegetation as offerings.

The flatness of the platform shouldn’t surprise one, and it doesn’t. It is after all a platform, long and flat, a nondescript colour, perhaps eau de nil or the anonymous grey of paving slabs. It sits there at the base, as the base of our consciousness. Black metal bench seats with yellow armrests at each end are spaced along it’s centre. They face both tracks. A gentle flow of people leave the west bound train and head towards the exit, along the platform, under the green station awning, up the two flights of metal-edged concrete stairs and out of the main entrance, a Victorian gatehouse of stale yellow brick with a red brick portico topped by a wide blue sign telling all and sundry the station name in thick white letters. Above it a tiled pyramid roof with pale greeny-gold lichen along each angle rises to a ball-headed concrete finial at the apex. Sleepy blue black pigeons nestle beneath it. On one side, a tall chimney stack with a rectangular red brick top stares blankly at the afternoon. The most surprising thing about this station apart from its incongruous name is the green of the wooden station awning and it’s supporting cast iron girders and beams. It’s a green no longer recognised in catalogues or paint pots. It’s a green from another age that is now hard to match as the column bases painted lime green indicate. It’s a green from forgotten designs and lost specifications. It’s a green that could say Southern Railway of long-ago, but doesn’t. It’s a green that no one remembers yet here it is in your face day, in day out, whether west-bound or east. It’s a green in the process of becoming another colour that no one can predict. It’s the colour of the unexpected and unexplained, the hue of Covid and avian flu, the tint of decimation and denial, the colour of the new platform of threat that is slowly, inevitably, extending itself into the lives of all the passengers waiting there beneath the surveillance cameras with the bird repellent spikes and the hanging baskets full of mouldy compost and the sticks of dead plants.

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Tuesday January 20th 2009

Harry Chapin (talking to Bruce Springsteen).

‘I play one night for me and one night for the other guy…’

‘You become the work or the work becomes you…’

The Wire – last episode – the Lieutenant.

D, the editor in the studio where I‘ve been working, has two children with his husband. For a while he was in the American military.

He used to work in the porno industry, re-editing US films to comply with UK regulations.

It was a bit like a mirror image of Cinema Paradiso, collecting all the bits of penises and cut off members.

Afloat

Above the gone before
borne by it
dazed
considering
possibilities
no longer
part of it
albeit enveloping
someone asks
Cup of tea?
Lying there
you try to tell yourself
a truth about it all
what happened
and its intepretations
blinking like a goose
you spiral it, reach
no conclusions.

Thursday January 20th 2000

‘Life is difficult enough without going back to the battle of Stalingrad every night.’

Tuesday January 19th 1999

So what I’m puzzled about is I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a drama about a love story that I really relate to, that I rate but every story I think of seems to be a story about not love, about love failing, about love ending, about a sense of termination and finality to love, and I can’t seem to remember one story about love that works that I really rate – I find this worrying. And if I think of stories where love works – Sense & Sensibility, Sliding Doors, the central focus disappears, there’s a sort of smudgy mess where the love is – why is this? What’s going on?

Wednesday January 19th 2000

This morning there was a fine icy rain drifting across the garden illuminated by gentle, diffuse sunlight. The most perfect rainbow arched overhead from far beyond the great tree 180^o to way past the station.

It is the colour in the midst of a rainbow that is so enticing, the middle band and the contrast between the two outer bands: red and violet, against the green. The sky was the colour of a wood pigeon’s breast. Against this a crow flapped from foreground to background beneath the bow, a moving absence of colour or tone, utterly, completely black. Later in the far distance a wide winged white gull flew into the sun, a crook-winged snowbird, dazzling, brilliant. There are the slightest changes in tinge along branches and in the green of evergreens, a slight lightening of colour, the pale light has a fresher feel.

The other night I remembered the great uprooted tree trunks that used to stand at the bottom of Cherry Orchard Lane opposite Phillips Playing Fields where I lived in Birmingham. We spent hours there talking, scratching sand away from the base of the bole, gaining an intimate understanding of roots, and the strangeness of a stump at right angles to normal reality.

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Tuesday January 17th 1989

*The Man with the Child in His Eyes

Over a number of sessions, my therapist has been saying something about me having a problem with my mother.

I’m going through a very difficult time post-divorce. The pressure of feeling is so great I can barely contain it. I wonder if a problem with regard to my mother lies at ‘the bottom of all this’, and what could that be?

I talk to the child within me.

My child must learn again to love other children and not be afraid. My child can play with the children.

My child can help a lot.

In my angry arguments someone else is involved not just my child. I have to ask them all to come out and own up. I would appreciate it if you would all line up for me. Perhaps a teenager. I have no image.

(My father would get us to line up for a bollocking.)

I perceive my child as hidden. Explosive. Violent. Tantrum prone. A baby. (With a black-boiled, fly-blown face). A child. Demanding centre stage. (Wanting its mother). How do I propitiate this demon?

You can come out.

Come from behind the door.

We won’t hurt you.

Very quietly, I’m calling to you,

like coaxing a wild animal.

A wild child.

Come here to me.

Let me throw my arms around you.

Kneel down for you.

Frightened child,

shocked away

I hold your hand and stand with you and say,

Look at this world. Isn’t it fabulous?

Some giant sun at the shoulder of some giant gold-lined cloud.

*See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_with_the_Child_in_His_Eyes

‘The Man with the Child in His Eyes is a song by Kate Bush. It is the fifth track on her debut album The Kick Inside and was released as her second single, on the EMI label, in May 1978.

‘Bush wrote the song when she was 13 and recorded it at the age of 16… Bush said in a 1979 interview on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, when asked about the meaning of the song, that it was “something she felt about men generally... that a lot of men have got a child inside them... that they’re more or less just grown up kids... it’s a very good quality... because a lot of women grow up and get far too responsible, and it’s really nice to keep that delight in wonderful things that children have, and that’s what I was trying to say, that this man can communicate with the younger girl because he’s on the same level.”’

Monday January 17th 2000

Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 with Gwen Adshead, Consultant Psychotherapist at Broadmoor, and Antonio Damasio.

Brilliant phrase from AD – ‘The Improper Labelling of Events’

The Improper Labelling of Events


Where the label is attached is important

and significant.

It should always be put in place after the event,

never before.

Events should be labelled in alphabetic or chronological order.

They should not be kept in cellophane envelopes with handwritten stickers.

Events should be labelled carefully.

Never try to include two events under the same label.

If the label doesn’t stick to the event

you may be trying to attach the wrong label,

or your gluestick is empty.

Gwen Adshead: ‘Violence a kind of necessity.’ Managing fear is part of our mammalian heritage. We are born in fear

‘To be mammalian is to be in fear.’

Cp Bruce Chatwin – the idea of fear of the cat.

Friday January 17th 2003

An item in a radio programme all about first woman to write a sonnet sequence – niece of Sir Philip Sydney. The sequence was about her losing love and making the choice to leave behind promiscuous love.

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