Sweating Ink

So, you’re trying to complete a difficult task.  You’re working your socks off, slogging your guts out.  In fact, you’re probably sweating blood as well. 

It all sounds a little messy. 

But if you’re Spanish, you wouldn’t be sweating blood at all, but ink. The Spanish language seems to have come to the conclusion that any job worth doing must involve a guttering candle, a quill, a full inkwell, and piles of vellum parchment on which to scribble, blot and smudge your tome. And so sudar tinta (to sweat ink) is the phrase you would use for such strenuous efforts.

I think I can vouch for this.  Recently I’ve been mopping my brow and armpits as I endeavour to translate into Spanish the poems from the collection I’ve been working on. I’ve pored over dictionaries, scratched lists of vocabulary, written and rewritten drafts.  (Why on earth are you doing this?  you may well ask.  Because it means I don’t have to think up any new poems.)  

The perspiration comes from the need to nit-pick for accuracy.  And there lies the fascination of learning another language – its quirky expressions that don’t have direct equivalents in English.  I came across one yesterday at my Spanish lesson with the wonderful Ana María, when we were looking at an article about the Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who wrote The Shadow of the Wind.  Zafón, it would seem, divides his time between Spain and the United States. 

Except, as Spanish would have it, he lives on horseback between Barcelona and Los Angeles.  (Zafón vive a caballo entre Los Angeles y Barcelona).

And you can just picture him: gripping the reins of his white stallion in one hand, a couple of copies of his new book The Prisoner of Heaven  in the other, galloping at full tilt for Zaragoza, for the Picos Europa, steering a course for the port of A Coruña where, incognito in a cape, he’ll stow away on a transatlantic clipper.  Down in steerage with his horse, he'll enjoy a reflective - if a little stormy - five-day crossing before disembarking  at New York.  Then he’ll speed ever westward, stopping only for sunrise over the Grand Canyon, and on towards California.  As soon as he arrives in LA, there’ll be just enough time for a booksigning, a hurried interview, and a rub-down of the steed before saddling up and cantering off to Spain once more.

I admire and applaud Zafón's horsemanship.  Not to mention all the ink he sweats into his books.

Nooit Meer Oorlog (Never Again War)

Diksmuide from the top of IJzer Tower

Diksmuide in Belgium (pictured above) is a town that has been overwritten by the stories of many different people.  But for me it bears the imprint of my father.  

I was lucky to have visited Diksmuide with him in the 1990s when he showed where he and other Royal Engineers had been stationed for a brief moment in the Second World War.  By blowing up roads and bridges, the sappers were part of a concerted attempt to slow the German advance north in May 1940.  Germany had launched an offensive on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.  When it became clear that thousands of allied troops risked being trapped, a daring evacuation plan was implemented.  Operation Dynamo became famous as the episode when soldiers were rescued by all manner of boat from the beaches of Dunkirk.


Diksmuide, some 35 kilometres from Dunkirk, was for my father a memorable staging post on his route towards the coast and safety.  As I stood with him not far from the arch you can see in the photograph at the top of this page, he pointed out where he had faced the enemy just across the IJzer River, and where the bridge had been blown up.  Just up the road, he found again the farm where he had taken shelter and from where he was the last man of his platoon to flee, losing precious minutes on a dodgy motorbike that would not start.

The IJzer Tower and museum

But the patch of ground familiar to my father also happens to be the site of a monument of significance to Flemish people.  A large tower with the initials AVV-VVK or Alles Voor Vlaanderen-Vlaanderen voor Kristus  (All for Flanders - Flanders for Christ) and visible for miles across the flat Belgian countryside was erected on the spot of an earlier war memorial that was largely destroyed in 1946.  It now contains a fascinating museum.


When I visited Diksmuide again recently while on a daytrip to Dunkirk, I was made aware how keenly the Flemish community has struggled for Dutch language and culture rights.  The issues have simmered for years, the young man at the reception desk in the museum said.  They started at the official birth of the kingdom of Belgium in 1831, when the decision was taken that French would be the main language.  They were perpetuated through divisions that saw the majority of the bourgeoisie speaking French, and officers in the Belgian army speaking only French so that Flemish soldiers did not always understand their orders.  They carried on through continued resistance to Dutch being taught in schools.  "If I go to the French speaking part of my country, I am able to address people in French," he said.  "But if they come here, they cannot speak to me in Dutch.”  And certainly, in the museum the impetus towards Flemish recognition and emancipation was apparent through the narratives and exhibits displaying glories and injustices - how, for example, the Flemish had to fight for the right to have the names on graves of fallen soldiers inscribed in Dutch rather than French.

Painting of WWI trenches around Diksmuide: as from top of IJzer Tower

But another surprise waited on the top floor of the tower.  Here,  a painted 360◦ panorama (left) shows Diksmuide as it was at the time of the First World War.  For this area is part of Flanders which saw some of the Great War's heaviest fighting.  What may look like railway lines in the painting on the left are actually lines of trenches, some running along the side of the river, which formed the front line in the Battle of the Yser (IJzer in Dutch).  In October 1914 the Belgians opened canal gates in order to flood the area all round the river.  It was a desperate measure to defend territory, but the town of Diksmuide fell to the Germans in the November.   

I looked out across from the topmost point of the tower over the Diksmuide of 2012 and towards the flat land beyond.  It was a glorious sunny Sunday.  And I thought about soldiers nearly one hundred years ago in appalling conditions for long months in trenches.  I thought about nearby Dunkirk and the smoke, rubble and chaos a generation later in a different war when men waited for help on the sandy beach.  I thought about the relief of the 340,000 allied troops who were rescued, the sacrifice of the more than 4,000 who were not, and the luck of my father who had eventually got the motorbike started and, though wounded in the leg, managed to limp aboard a Royal Navy vessel rather than being left behind to become one of 40,000 prisoners.

Across this patch of land, as in so many parts of Europe, it was clear that history lay in deep layers.  Even now Belgium creaks and strains under the aspirations of its Flemish and Walloon communities.  And the words spoken only an hour before by the museum's receptionist reverberated in my mind: "We are not ETA or the IRA,” he had said.  “We are doing things step by step, politically and correctly."  


This swathe of territory - disputed, seized, liberated -  still asks for constant vigilance in order to maintain its peace.


  

Nooit meer Oorlog - Never again war .  These words are written on the IJzer Tower in Dutch, French, English and German.  These were the languages of the forces involved in the area during WW1.

A Horse up my Exhaust

It was my neighbour Wendy across the road who first noticed that my car had begun to sprout a tail. 

“I found this in your exhaust pipe,” she said last week, putting into my hand what can only be described as horse hair.  Good, part of me thought.  Something to restring my chuniri bow with.  Bad, the other part thought.  What’s that doing stuck up the car’s intimate tubing?

We speculated for a moment on how it might have got there.  Someone with a surfeit of equine material and nowhere handy to store it.  Someone on their way home from the pub and deciding, right outside my front door, hang it all, time to ditch the toupée.

But that was not the end of it.

On Monday, after the usual weekly coffee ‘n’ verse session with my fellow Octavo poets, Jill ran alongside my car window as I pulled away from her house.  We had been reading and discussing poems about the power of the present moment - and for the present moment there was “something very odd trailing from the exhaust pipe.”  I hopped out of the driver’s seat to remove yet more tresses that had materialised and were waving brazenly in the wind.

Yesterday, Wendy knocked on my front door again.  “It’s back,” she said ominously.  Together we walked round the car and stared at the shaggy exhaust pipe.  I yanked at the curling locks like a magician pulling never-ending handkerchiefs from a pair of comedy trousers.  Out came a long string – fifteen feet, like black wig hair with silver highlights.  Could there be a pensioner squatting in there?

Turning for help, I googled the words fifteen feet of hair-like stuff coming out of my exhaust, and behold, there was my support group.  Cars that had started to feather and frond out of their back appendages were causing consternation all over the place.

It turns out that what my vehicle has been expelling is sound-deadening material.  And because there is a finite quantity, it will, at some point, stop this exhibitionist behaviour.  All will be fine – apart from me breaking the sound barrier each time I get behind the wheel. 

But oh the disappointment that I don’t, in fact, possess a miracle car and now can't run away to the circus.  Maybe, though, it’s time to be philosophical.  Maybe this is a simple message from the heavens: to channel my inner horse.  I’ve searched out a website with information about symbolism, and found Avia Venefica, who looks properly shamanic and can be trusted to know about these things.  She tells us how, according to Native American teachings, the horse’s “wild freedom can be harnessed and used to the benefit of the tribe…acknowledging mutual respect and awareness of responsibility to each other.”  

So now I’m thinking, wait, maybe the car is channelling its inner horse.  Maybe it’s fed up with the occasional pat on the bonnet (or hood, if you’re reading this in North America), tired of being corralled in a suburban parking space, and desperate to kick its heels. 

Surrey Hills, here we come…

Horse lovers: check out this blog about the gentle management of horses in the Alpujarras in Spain: alpeuquus.posterous.com

Scam

Yesterday Rodney Blackmore called me on the phone.  Rodney is a supervisor at Microsoft Technical Support. 

In India.

“Are you the same people who rang me an hour ago?”  I asked.

“No.  That was not us,” he said in a very pronounced Indian accent.

“But that was also Microsoft Technical Support.  You must have a record of having spoken to me an hour ago.”

“No mam, that was not us.”

“Not you?  How many Microsoft Technical Support offices are there in India, then?”

“There are over a hundred,” he answered.

“And all legitimate?”

“Yes, mam, they are licensed by Microsoft.”

"Don't you have a record of having made a phonecall to me an hour ago?”

“No mam. We are ringing to tell you that there is fault with your computer.”

“Yes, that’s what they told me exactly an hour ago.”

“Are you Mrs Griff living in Tommies?”  

( ? !!!*!)  “I might be.”

“Well, mam, all I can tell you is that your computer has problems.  They will interfere with your online shopping and online banking.”

 “Now that sounds really serious.  So what exactly is wrong with my computer?”

“There are errors.  And we can fix these for you.”

“You mean it’s got a virus?”

“Mam, it could get a virus.”

"It’s funny that you say that, because my computer is working fine.”

“Your computer may be working fine at the moment but, mam, it’s going to have problems.”

“In the future?”

“Yes, mam.  That’s why you need technical support now.”

“But I get technical support already.  From two computer experts.  Who happen to live right here in this house, actually.”

“Mam, if you just write in this code, you can check to prove that what we are saying is correct…”

And, if I hadn’t cut Rodney off in his prime, he would probably have directed me to the Windows Event Viewer where I would have been horrified to see what could have looked like a troubling list of errors.  Then he would have painted a dire picture of how these errors were set to devour the workings of my own computer, the computers in my street, this postal district, the Civil Service, Tesco, and the world.  And then he would have extracted a fee for putting it right.

A Guardian article by Charles Arthur, dated two years ago, tells us that such scams from India have been running since at least 2008, probably from call centres originally based in Kolkata where the scammers get our names from phonebooks.  Now in 2012, they must have been drawing their fingers down the names in the “Tommies” part of the telephone directory, as I’ve been targeted several times a week – and that’s just the phonecalls I’ve bothered to answer.

Microsoft, of course, does not cold-call its customers: “We do not send unsolicited email messages or make unsolicited phone calls to request personal or financial information or fix your computer,” they say in their website.  


I did know that, really.  


In no uncertain terms, I told Rodney never to call me again.  But now I regret our parting of the ways, and the words of anger uttered in haste.  For, after watching on You Tube how some other scam victims have handled the situation, I’ve realised just what fun can be had by stringing along the scammers, if you have a little bit of time at your disposal. 

So Rodney.  Our time together was too short.  Call again.  I’ll have a cup of tea in my hand, and my feet on the desk.  And I may record our conversation.  For training purposes.

One way of dealing with the scam:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-Sxi3-VW7k&feature=related 

The Guardian article: 

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/phone-scam-india-call-centres

Microsoft’s information about computer security:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/online-privacy/msname.aspx

Oh My Sisters...

Chris leads us in a stretch. Photo by Lenn Patterson

Last Saturday evening, on a yoga weekend in Dorset, I stood with a group of women at a bonfire, a bottle of wine (or two) doing the rounds. After a day containing three sessions of yoga, and a morning walk which had seen some of us escape temporarily over the perimeter fence, we were feeling mellow as we faced each other across the flames.

“SH!” came loud ricocheting stage whispers.  “They’re coming out!”  We elbowed  each other in the ribs and looked furtively across the grass to the large portakabin.  From our best efforts earlier to peer in through its drawn blinds, we had fathomed that some kind of mysterious sitting and staring activity had been taking place inside.  Now it was finished.  One by one, five men and a woman came down the steps, avoiding the bonfire and any eye contact with us in order to walk back to their rooms in the main house.

 “It’s that Tantric group.”

“No.  They’re here for ‘Love in Awareness’.”

“And they’re not allowed to speak to anyone.”

“I wouldn’t be interested in a man who needed a course in Love in Awareness.  Would you?”

And smoke blew into our faces and down our throats.

And Fi launched a Chinese lantern which first threatened to set fire to the Love in Awareness portakabin and then headed menacingly in the direction of the local sewage works. 

And the fire crackled and sparked.

And suddenly a majority around that purifying heat felt the compulsion, as if in some spontaneous Salem witch hunt, to admit they had attended convent schools and were, in fact, lapsed Catholics.

And then came tales of cruel nuns.  Of kind nuns.  Of expulsions from school.

And the confession from Nicky who, as a child, had once come running to her mother saying: “It’s true, Mummy, isn’t it, that if you’re not a Catholic, you’re a Prostitute?”

And I wondered how I had for so long managed to live without the blissful earthy company of women. 

It’s not that I lack female friends.  But usually I see them in ones or twos, not in a large gaggle.  The last time I experienced female group ethos was at my women-only college at university.*  Then, however, I was often dispirited that some of my college friends were more interested in beetling off to the library of a Friday night than sashaying forth into the town.   And the sea of female faces over the muesli at breakfast was a tad depressing, and convinced me that I had stumbled unwittingly and unwillingly into nothing less than, well, there's that word again, a convent. The urge to hitch up my skirts and climb over the gates – which, incidentally, were shut and locked at midnight – was huge.

Fi  lends support.  Photo by Lenn Patterson

But sharing sleeping quarters in a mobile home last weekend, nattering over mealtimes, seeking out collectively the recipe for the delicious home-made seed crackers (but generally there’s been too much brown rice, said Katherine) helping each other, confessing our joys and our sorrows, doing lots of giggling - this is what it's all about.

Oh, and the yoga?  That was absolutely brilliant.

Photo by Lenn Patterson

Our yoga teacher for the weekend was Chris.  She was excellent, and you can check out her classes and yoga retreats.  Highly recommended:
http://www.yogawithchris.co.uk/

A core group of seven of us are devotees of the wonderful Estelle:
http://www.yogawithestelle.net/

A gentle and uplifting documentary on what life actually can be like in a convent  - on Rab in Croatia -  can be found here: 
http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/8419/RAB-SILENCE

The Love in Awareness group was, in fact, practising a technique of pure speaking and pure listening, in order to learn to drop the layers and masks that we all present to the world.  It, and other interesting developmental courses, can be found at Osho Leela:
http://www.osholeela.co.uk/

*Why a single-sex college, you may ask.  At the time I attended my alma mater, there was no choice.

Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops

Last week’s blog was about magic boots.  This week, footwear makes another appearance, but only because Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops was a newspaper headline that caught my eye.

It’s the word und that gives the game away, for this is actually German, and a phrase from a Viennese paper.  And it is the evidence that an awful lot has been happening in the German language since I last looked.

Basically, the world of fashion has embraced English in a caring sharing way.  So there are articles with lots of Tipps telling us how to appear younger through correct hairstyle und anderen Anti-Aging Tricks, or using den richtigen Make-Up.  We can chart die coolsten Outfits of the week.  Of course, dein Look is extremely important when you want to be seen at die besten Hot-Spots or even out Shopping.   

You might think that our generous donation of words to continental Europe has brought us slim pickings by way of return.  You, too, may have been disappointed by the arrival on our doorstep of that rather plain German prefix über (as in übertrendy).  Yet, to its credit, it has been valiantly punching above its weight and is now so überused in most of our British Sunday newspaper supplements that you may have become übersick.

But in fact, we have little to whinge about.  We Anglophones have for centuries been snaffling up words from different corners of the globe, stuffing them up our jumpers and into our bulging pockets, and then strewing them around as if we’d dreamt them up ourselves.

It’s time to redress the balance, and I’m hopeful that German will not ditch its original words to make way for the modish English imports, but keep both.  In this way synonyms arise, giving the option to match words to different contexts.

English speakers have long been basking in the luxury of this kind of choice, especially after King Harold took an arrow in the eye and the Normans waded ashore in 1066, unpacking their version of French in their requisitioned castles.  Rather than supplanting the Anglo-Saxon tongue of the local inhabitants, Norman French grew alongside as the language of the landed gentry.  Thanks to this legacy of duality, we can use words originating either from Anglo-Saxon, which often sound more basic, or words from Norman French, which give a more educated feel.  Depending on exactly what effect we are trying to create, we could say dig.  Or we could say excavate.  We could say lift or elevate.  Find or encounter.  Wash or launder.  Speak or converse.  Stop or terminate.  The list goes on and on (or continues, to use the Norman word).

Languages can be invigorated by their borrowings.  German speakers no doubt enjoy the flexibility provided by English additions running parallel to their traditional words, allowing them to decide between, for example, ladylike instead of damenhaft, or clever instead of raffiniert.

Or Nightlife in High Heels und Flip Flops instead of Nachtleben in hohen Absätzen und Gummilatschen. 

Nightlife in High Heels und schmützigen Trainers

Post Script
And in the way of these things, I've come across a fun blog called High Heels and Flip Flops.  You can check it out here http://www.highheelsflipflops.com/p/why-high-heels-flip-flops.html

Magic Boots

On this Leap Day, I wish to offer you some boots.  Not just any old boots, but ones with lift, oomph and a surprising spring in their step. 

I once owned such a pair. 

It was a time when my fitness was, shall we say, less than ideal.  It was a pain to walk up hills, or let’s face it, walk pretty much anywhere.  (You can guess from the less than balletic proportions of the legs in this photo that any device to assist forward propulsion will have been a boon.)

And then I bought my magic boots.

A pair that were very cheaply priced and bog-standard basic, whenever they were on my feet, they surged power through my legs.  They pushed, they reassured, they encouraged me over new terrain, away from the straight and narrow, and even up inclines.   On an annual visit to the Alpujarras in Spain, they enticed me to stand on ancient stone threshing floors, to wander in almond groves, to walk through soft green grasses of varying hues, to climb and lie in gnarled olive trees. 

Those boots were the business.

One day I went to a tiny hamlet along the Guadalfeo River.  By no means a wide river (a creek in North American terms) it was nonetheless February and the water was running swiftly.  I spotted a patch in the sun on the other side and wished to cross over.  So as not to get my special boots wet, I took them off, laced them together with the socks stuffed inside, and threw them across. 

It was no distance at all. 

And yet, I did one of those ridiculous girly throws, when the trajectory of the arm flails skyward, instead of retaining any idea of the perpendicular. 

And so my boots formed a looping arc in the air and plopped down, right into the centre of the river whose currents went to work.   Though the water was only about ankle or calf deep, the boots did not sink, but floated off downstream.

I tried to race after them, but was impeded by the numerous pebbles and stones of the riverbed.  And the boots – the bow of their joined laces still visible - never stopped, never snagged themselves on any rocks, but carried merrily on, borne away by the glinting river.

And suddenly, ping, a deep understanding in every cell of my body came like a voice from the depths: It’s not about the boots!   The magic isn’t in the boots! 

I needed a river to teach me that I had become fixated on a quality that was not exclusive to my boots but, in fact, was all around - if I simply chose to open my eyes and see.

And so, for Leap Day, I wish you, too, a pair of magic boots that you can use. 

Then lose.

The Sleeping Place

I am very drawn to graveyards.

Odd, perhaps, to want to mooch around in such spots when, in the end, there will be plenty of opportunity.

This is not to make light of the fact that cemeteries are places that can evoke immense sorrow.  Walking amongst headstones is tantamount to reading a history of cruel loss – the scythe of epidemic through families, children taken long before their time, teenagers who gambled and lost.

But they can also document the triumphs of longevity, and the pull of love between spouses who die within a year of each other.  They can give a humorous nod to the fallibility of stone engravers who neglect to forward-plan and add a tiny hasty “a” to the word “dughter” or scrunch lettering as they come too suddenly to the end of a line.

As a child I first wandered through churchyards with my mother in Northern Ireland, pulling brambles away from old stones in order to locate the resting place of ancestors.  It was not morbid, but brought a deep sense of belonging and of my own history.  In recent years, my mother has had the privilege of leading new-found Australian or American cousins to an abbey graveyard near where she lives and stand, linked through the potency of bloodline, in front of the stone bearing the name of a mutual five or six-times great grandfather.

Foreign cemeteries contain their own quirky hints about how the dead are mourned, or celebrated – the stacking of the recently departed in what look like wall lockers above the ground in places such as Spain, the cedar fronds placed in a bowl in front of graves in the Black Forest in Germany and used to sprinkle each plot three times with holy water,  the addition of photographs in countries such as France (leading, no doubt, to debate about which exact picture to use), the picnics enjoyed in graveyards by Mexicans and Japanese, the asymmetric headstones in Georgia and the structures built around them – sometimes even with a TV set so that relatives can spend longer time at the side of their loved one.

Yet the most moving cemetery I have ever visited was a war cemetery in Northern France.  Unlike in the Commonwealth war cemeteries with their immaculately kept flowered borders and white stones, here were no fine words about how this parcel of land had been donated in thankfulness by the French nation.  Stretching up a slight incline towards the horizon were dark metal crosses.  Eleven thousand of them.  Each cross marked the burial site of at least four soldiers.  Over forty-four thousand men lay in the ground. 

The cemetery in question was the German war cemetery at Neuville-Saint-Vaast.  And the most eye-watering irony of all was that scattered in amongst the dark crosses were one hundred and twenty-nine headstones bearing the star of David.  For during the 1914 - 18 War, Jewish soldiers, too, fought and died for the Fatherland.

In the English language, cemetery or graveyard as words both seem too harsh to provide much solace.  Other languages appear more palliative, such as German where Friedhof  translates as peace yard.  Spanish, similar to us, has cementerio, yet also uses camposanto, or holy field.  And yet within the English word cemetery is hidden a much gentler derivation, from the Greek koimētērion –  literally meaning sleeping place.

Every time I wander such a sleeping place, my feet still firmly on the surface of the earth, it appears to offer up profound instruction.  Live now, it seems to say.  Live as though your very soul depended on it.

Them Thar Hills

If this blog were a sign on a doorknob, it would say something like:

OFF TO THE HILLS

because, yes, I have packed up my belongings, wrapped them in a large white handkerchief on the end of a stick, and am now off down the road, the very long road, to more southern climes. 

This is my annual trek to a wonderful village in the mountains of southern Spain where I shall be staying for a week in the home of a gifted artist friend.  In that magical space I shall be working on my novel, banishing cobwebs and seeking new inspiration.

What I love about mountains is that they:

• clear the head
• pose an eternal challenge
• provide uncontested grandeur
• invite ever-changing plays of light
• point to the heavens
• yet are a solid anchor  
• need to be approached with respect
• remind me of my own insignificance

I may also have the chance to sit and contemplate this river you can see below, listen to its song, enjoy its haste, wonder at its purpose.  This very river once stole a pair of prized walking boots of mine but that, as they say, is another story...

The region I am visiting is the Alpujarras, made famous by the writer Chris Stewart in his book Driving Over Lemons

It is also home to the extremely perceptive writer and artist Meg Robinson.

Quiz: What Kind of Snow Person Are You?

Which of the following three statements (the first lines of novels that may never be written) most accurately sums up your own attitude towards snow? 

1. Snow fell overnight, stitching up the town, zipping it shut like a hand over a mouth.  Snow wiped the slate clean, smoothed over all mistakes.   

2. Snow deposited an impossible burden on the buckling branches of the ailing beech tree, and brought the world to a juddering stop.  It spread relentlessly down the street and into the churchyard,  where only the gravestones had the nerve to poke through.

3. The snow was a yielding bed – soft and tickly like the feathers that had blown into the breeze the day she shook out the heirloom eiderdown.

You’ll find a psychological interpretation for your choice at the bottom of this blog.

Having grown up in Ottawa, Canada, where winters didn’t even bother to bare their teeth before grabbing you savagely by the short and curlies, my first years in England were marked by confusion.  Was this October?  Was this April?  Maybe it was February.  Who knew. 

Since then, I have grown to celebrate the more subtle gradations between the seasons here in the southeast and tolerate the absence of anything that could call itself winter.  And in these recent days, as snow has swept across Europe and temperatures have plunged, I’m pleased to say that we too experienced a dusting of the white stuff last weekend.  OK, it may have only lasted 24 hours, but it was a start.

In my childhood one time, when freezing rain fell on top of a thick layer of snow and turned the outdoors into a giant rink, I skated into the woods behind my house – twirling through and around the trees during a spell-binding afternoon.  That memory became the inspiration for the following poem, first published in Ambit magazine.

 

Skating

Overnight the snow has hardened to ice,
has crusted the field where yesterday
we lay making the shapes of angels.

I leave cornflakes untouched, search the attic
for old skates whose toes are stuffed
with crinkled headlines from ancient papers,

glide across the backyard
past the derelict barn, amongst trees
that have been stripped of all logical thought,

over the highway and into a whiteout
of slippages and crossed lines,
teepees, tents and medieval fairs.

My cheeks are pocked with frostbite.
I know the chill diplomacy of kings.
I beg for morsels of suckling pig

though something wiry and untamed
has beaten me to the feast,
see: it has devoured both flanks.

Beneath my blades the ground keeps its counsel,
too withdrawn for resolutions, too frozen for burials.
I will skate

until my gut feels a kick of green shoots,
until the melt exposes winter debris
to new air.

© Katie Griffiths
 http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=7483


Poets! 
Check out Ambit magazine here: http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/
And take a look at the Poetry Library site.  It has info on magazines (online and print), poem competitions and events. http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/
  

What Kind of Snow Person Are You?

If you chose A:

You have a rumbling guilt complex that is manifesting itself in the weather.  Precipitation holds no answers.   Seek therapy.

If you chose B: 

There is clearly no fun in your life.  Go on!  Get out there!  Build an igloo!  Move in!

If you chose C: 

You are an incorrigible romantic, and I think we should meet up.  I’ll make the hot chocolate.

The Chuniri Challenge

In an enchanting village high in the Caucasus Mountains last summer, I watched closely as the singer and musician Ana Chamgeliani played a strange instrument.  Looking a bit like a banjo, a bit like a lute but held upright like a cello, this was her chuniri.  Its three strings were bowed simultaneously, producing a warm, rustic sound – at times creating harmonics on the notes.  I was instantly captivated.

I had travelled as part of a group to the republic of Georgia to learn traditional songs in the Svaneti region.  Ana was part of the household in which I was billetted.  Responsible along with her sisters for breakfasts and dinners, teaching songs and looking after the guests, she had scant time to devote to individual tuition.

But, for half an hour on the second last day of our visit, Ana patiently taught me the accompaniment to one of the songs we had learned.  It was deceptively simple.  Simple for her.  Deceptive for me.  Having played violin in my childhood (never fully mastered, but past the strangled rooster phase) I thought the chuniri would be, at least, the peasy bit of easy. 

Well.  

First of all, you’re not meant to press the strings down hard against the neck of the instrument, but rest your fingers on top of them instead.  Then, sometimes, you need to put your finger in between strings to sound two of them simultaneously.  Thirdly, to bow it using the kind of chopping and sawing movement that on a violin would make an audience homicidal is precisely what is required on the chuniri. 

In Ana’s hands the music from the intricately carved instrument was beautiful and earthy, like home-spun wool.  Playing it involved a wonderful physicality – with the round drum-like part placed around her knees.  I could instantly understand why the chuniri, national instrument of the Svaneti region, has been ascribed magical powers for its ability to draw forth immense sadness in songs of loss, or tenderness in lullabies, or joy when used to support three-part sung harmony. 

Upstairs in my bedroom in the wooden village house, alone with Ana’s chuniri, I began to make a modicum of progress, with recognisable notes emerging at roughly the right pitch.  Just as well, as several days before I had indicated an interest in buying one to take home with me. 

My chuniri was being made in a neighbouring village and would not be ready until our minibus passed through on its homeward-bound journey towards Zugdidi.  As soon as the blue plastic bag with my instrument inside was loaded on the bus, I felt unease.  It looked smaller than I had expected.  Indeed, when we arrived in Tbilisi after a sweaty overnighter on the train from Zugdidi, a proper examination confirmed the chuniri was about three-quarters of the size of Ana’s. 

As far as I know, there is no Brussels-stipulated size for a Georgian chuniri.  My instrument may well be within the bounds of normality.  Yet if I place its body around my knees (why does this remind me of wrestling with a miniskirt) the neck scarcely reaches my shoulder.  If I set it on my lap, the neck is in a better position, but I lose that wonderful feeling of my knees connecting with the instrument.  

“Never mind,” friends have said brightly, glossing over my general ineptitude.  “If you were beginning any instrument, they’d start you off on a smaller one.”

So, this is the excuse for not having made greater strides on what is otherwise a beguiling instrument.  I’m stuck in the musical equivalent of trainer pants.

You can see Ana playing the chuniri here, and singing a lovely song called Mirangula with her sisters:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YVwiu3pQtA&feature=share

This is a programme about how chuniris are made.  It’s in Georgian but, fear not, the visuals are good!  (And the guy at the beginning looks like he’s playing quite a small chuniri…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp36fUw-vB0

You can see a range of Georgian traditional instruments being used in a more modern context here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph9HIjqLvWM&feature=related

The Composing Hut

I was going to spend today at the piano.  Not the piano pictured above, which was Gustav Mahler’s and, besides, it’s in Austria and as the sign says, you’re not allowed to put your grubby hands on it in the first place. 

But I got sidetracked by thoughts of that forbidden piano, and more precisely where it is located – in a little hut on the edge of a lake not far from Salzburg, the Attersee.  For Mahler had the sense to seek peace and quiet for his musical scribblings and had the  luxury of using during his lifetime, not one, not two, but three huts, or Komponierhäuschen as we perhaps should call them.  How wonderful to have a retreat to mess around in, to make noise to your heart’s content, not in some airless nuclear bunker but in what is effectively a garden shed whose windows look towards an impossibly blue lake and mountains beyond.  And disturbing no one but the cows, the wind, the flies…

So then I started thinking about my own composing hut, more precisely composing nook in the dining room, where it is a scary prospect (not just for me) to let loose, caterwaul, experiment, bang out endless chords, all for the sake of writing some new songs.  It is hard to keep such work under wraps.  Today I had the house to myself, free from trapped listeners who could have easily got distressed.  I thought I would rumble up and down the ivories, stand on the loud pedal, gargle, open my throat, see what happened…

But then I got sidetracked again, because I couldn’t resist the attractions of my new toy, a Boss-BR 800 digital recorder.  And giving the piano the cold shoulder, I turned to a different instrument and plugged it in to the Boss.  Dear reader, I am excited to admit that for the first time in my life, today I made my acoustic guitar sound like a bass guitar.  Just by twiddling some knobs on a machine.  Yes, I know, this is old hat to all you techno-geeks.  But for me to hold and feel strings resonating and sounding,  in my headphones, as a bass guitar does –  I tell you, I wanted to elbow Jim off the bass at tonight’s band rehearsal.  I wanted to slap.  Pop.  Even go fretless. 

I temporarily forgot about Mahler’s composing hut.  I temporarily forgot about my piano.  But during the fling with my acoustic-masquerading-as-bass guitar, it sat, it listened, it waited, and settled itself more firmly into the dining room carpet, confident that it would never be banished to the garden shed.

Mahler’s Komponierhaus  in Steinbach on the Attersee is located in a campsite in the grounds of the Hotel Föttinger.  You can ask for a key and go and have a look.  He wrote part of his second and all of his third symphony there.  The other two huts are in Maernigg in southern Austria, and Dobbiaco on the Italian-Austrian border.

Learning While You Sleep

In my childhood, each night before a school test, it was my habit to smuggle the relevant textbook to bed and place it under my pillow, believing I could absorb the information by a kind of osmosis.  Because I tended to receive OK results, the strategy appeared to work. 

Wind forward a few years to university and a degree based not on continuous assessment, but totally on final exams.  How could anyone in their right mind not stuff English-French dictionaries, English-German dictionaries, texts on Baudelaire, Racine, Kleist, and Goethe under the pillows?  During that fraught exam week, my books were piled high on the bedclothes then coralled under the meagre bolster.  Talk about a crick in the neck - it was like permitting your body to go to sleep in the basement while subjecting your head to a pummelling on the ground floor.

But my learning methods have moved on, thanks to an interesting discovery made when I began to use a radio alarm and John Humphreys on Radio 4’s Today programme to wake me up in the morning. What tended to happen was that, rather than springing up out of bed, I would doze off again with the programme still on in the background, and experience dreams that were frequently interwoven and embroidered with snippets of news.  I know this because I've checked on Radio 4 Listen Again and found how entire dreams have been constructed from a sparky interview with David Cameron or turgid item on Eurozone debt restructuring.  Clearly I've been listening, though seemingly asleep.

Could this also be applied to language learning?  For study purposes, I've defected to Spain’s Radio Nacional for my wake-up call, in the full knowledge that listening to a foreign language that you haven’t fully mastered can be dispiriting.  You think you are making strides.  You embrace the radio.  And there be gibberish. 

And yet, nowadays when I wake, then doze off, to the dulcet tones of Juan Ramón Lucas, lots of Spanish invades my dreams.  A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt I was holed up in a pub while at the far end of the bar my normally monolingual partner gave full vent – in Spanish.  In fact, his Spanish was so brilliant (gosh, I said to the wine-sipping friends beside me) that in the dream, I got out a recording device just to prove it to the folks back home.  

But, this is the potentially interesting part: he happened to be talking at length about crime, and even demonstrated robbers’ disguises by pulling a stocking mask over his face.  Was this being discussed on the radio at that very moment?  Did my snoozing brain actually understand more than my awake brain would have?

On the one hand, the ability to listen has, of course, everything to do with concentration.  We tune out when something bores us, tune in when we’re interested.  To learn to catch every tenth, then every fifth, then every second word in a foreign language requires extraordinary effort. 

On the other hand, the dozing or semi-dozing state – territory of hypnotherapists in accessing memories or releasing conversation – may be free of the stress that curtails concentration, allowing the brain to take in more.

Have I checked that Radio Nacional España was talking about crime on that occasion, I hear you cry.  Well, having only just today discovered its listen-again facility, I have yet to wade through the numerous news items and pinpoint the suspect, so to speak. 

But it is an ongoing experiment.  Stay tuned…

En días como hoy

http://www.rtve.es/radio/20100901/dias-como-hoy/289689.shtml

Let's Talk Lipstick Colours...and Ancient Greeks

First, the lipstick.

Pink Crush.  Golden Rose.  Petal.  Sugarplum.  Pink Lemonade.  Coral Dream.  Mulberry.  Shiny Conker. Plum Beautiful.  (Available from your local friendly High Street pharmacist, who shall be nameless but think footwear.)   

These choices, especially if you are serious about smearing colour enhancement on your mouth, are all based on one over-riding assumption – that they need to be reddish, or pinkish, allowing for the occasional foray into the orangeish or even brownish edge of the spectrum. 

Our capacity to see and enjoy shades and tinges is essential to adornment and has become, in the last century, a marketing dream.  But more important of all, perhaps, is the vibrancy we see occurring naturally – in the crimson fire of sunset or the dazzle of an azure sea.

Which brings me to the Greeks.  Or, more precisely, to Homer. 

For it would seem that the great poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, writing over two and half thousand years ago, interpreted colours differently to the way we interpret colours.  And we know this through his use of language.

In the fascinating Through the Language Glass, author Guy Deutscher tells us that it was actually William Gladstone, best known for being British prime minister in the 1800s but equally at home writing scholarly tomes, who made the initial observation that Homer’s use of colour adjectives was bizarre:  describing the sea – and sheep - as wine-coloured, honey as green, and faces going green with fear. This seemed to suggest a totally other – or perhaps even less evolved  - way of seeing colour.

Was this some kind of colour-blindness, and simply in Homer himself?  No, contended one Lazarus Geiger, a German multi-linguist, who set about searching texts of past cultures, and found, amongst other things, a lack of reference to the colour blue – across, for instance, ancient Indian Vedic poems which yet contained many passages referring to the sky, and in the ancient Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written.   Geiger put forward the notion that our understanding of blue as a colour in its own right is a modern phenomenon.  "He showed that the words for blue in modern European languages derive from two sources; the minority from words that earlier meant green and the majority from words that earlier meant black.” 

Were these ancient cultures, then, rubbing along in some kind of pre-blue world, hampered by their perception of colour?  Or were there just anomalies, the way we might, for example, protest that orange juice is always orange?

Take the Greeks’ word for green, chloros (from which we get chlorophyll).  If the word also encompassed the idea of freshness, of growth, of light, of something even anchored in movement, we might better understand its use to describe honey, or even a face filled with fear. 

Colour seems fixed to a frame of reference, a context.  But, as Guy Deutscher would have it, how far can the eye see what words describe? And how far can words describe what the eye can see?  Does this ability differentiate societies and their languages?

Which brings me back to my periwinkle-blue make-up bag, a swift look at the lipstick, and a recollection that last time I was faced with the bewildering array of colour choice, it seemed crucial to opt for Rosewood instead of Red Carpet.

Deutscher, G. (2010) Through the Language Glass, London, Heinemann. 

Thoroughly recommended!