Get Your Fingers Round This

Have been trying to get to grips with a guitar chord.  It’s pictured above, symbolised by the three big dots, and features in a song by KT Tunstall called Heal Over.

Now, it may look easy.  But having recently been afflicted in my left hand with something I’ve decided to call Sheepshearer’s Fingers, I can tell you it’s quite a stretch.

Here’s how you do it.  (Seasoned guitar players may wish to rejoin us in paragraph seven.)  Breathe in.  Put your fourth finger on the 9th fret of the fifth string.  Put your index finger on the 6^th fret of the fourth string.  Breathe out.  Then put your fifth finger on the 9^th fret of the third string.   Rest for a moment, sip some water, and savour the view from here.  Now play the chord, just to make sure the index finger hasn’t got bored and slid off sideways, and voilà.  An E add 9 chord.

Or is it?

Well, the jury appears to be out.  In checking that font of knowledge, You Tube, one guitar teacher states that this is a C add 2 chord.  Another says it’s an E diminished. 

So what’s a confused girl to do other than go to theguitarbuzz.com.  There you can plop your notes down on the diagram of strings and it will tell you, visually and aurally, what chord you are playing.  Result.  It’s an E add 9 . 

So far so intriguing with the first chord of the song.  There’s further disagreement on You Tube over the third chord.  One expert claims that it is a simple B.   It’s not a simple B in the original version! I want to shout.  There’s something else going on! 

In fact, the theme there’s something else going on has all too frequently raised its ugly head.  I used to own a book of Beatles songs that were spookily easy - because they were just a tad wrong.  Most of the chords had been simplified to plain C, or common-or-garden G: the musical equivalent of being forbidden from using anything in your palette other than primary colours.  Which can certainly be exciting territory, until the illicit discovery of flatted fifths, augmented 6ths and add 9s.   These are the stray notes, the guesting notes, the tone-mixing notes.  The notes  that have driven up in a limo, elbowed their way through security, helped themselves liberally to nibbles and sour cream dips, and now are stubbing out their cigarettes on the carpet.  

The notes that have come with the express purpose of slapping that plain old chord around.   

Bad Smells in the Stairwell

There’s something quietly rotting in the fridge today – and suddenly my mind is transported back to the college where I used to work.

I’m not suggesting that the illustrious establishment which once gave me employment smelt anything other than pleasant, most of the time.  Indeed, so heavenly were the aromas emanating from the catering department as students baked doughnuts, breads and Danish pastries that it was pure torture to wander anywhere in the vicinity on an empty stomach.  And even the tang of fresh-paint and sweat hanging about the new Sports Hall, coupled with the peppery scent of overwork pervading the staffroom, formed a familiar and welcoming backdrop.

But there was that one autumn of the weird stench in the principal’s stairwell.  The stairwell in question was a critical entrance for the tutors in my department.  It provided an essential shortcut on mornings when the A3 had meted out horrible vengeance on drivers, and left teachers with one minute spare to race to their desks, rummage for a lesson plan and take thirty copies of textual material from the moody photocopier.

But it was also lethally steep, each step rising from the next at a dizzying gradient, each tread not much wider than a goat’s hoof. 

And thus began the suspicions and murmurings.  How exactly to explain the nasty whiff that offended your nostrils on the lower steps?  At first it was hard to define but, if you stuck with it, there was the unmistakable pong of Munster cheese with hints of festering cabbage.  Then coming through were clear tones of railway-station urinal.  And finally an unmissable top note of decomposing meat.  Who had sprinted too unathletically up the stairs or, more probably, had miscalculated the treads while making a bid for escape at the end of the teaching day?  Who had got buried under paperwork, forgotten the time and got locked in?  Who had camped - hungrily, thirstily and finally fatally - on the bottom step during the long vacation?

The stairwell, worthy of assault course training, is still there, though I’m told the smell is gone…

…which thought leaves me no recourse but to break from these musings and take swift remedial action on the contents of the fridge before the health inspectors come calling.

Irregularity - Where Do You Stand?

I invite you to conduct your own mini survey into the delicate subject of irregularity.

No, not the affliction arising from our western diet, interesting and prevalent though that may be.  But irregularity as it concerns verbs – and one in particular: text.

You sent a text message on your mobile phone last night.  You want to tell someone.  Would you say: “I texted Maximilian last night”?  Or “I text Maximilian last night”?

Easy.  Texted, say English language purists.  After all, the way to form a simple past tense is just to add an ed.  Text, long in use as a noun, is a relatively new coinage as a verb and as such it is likely to follow the rules.  But my contention is this: those purists might write “texted”, but they are likely to say “text”.  When caught red-handed and challenged, they’ll explain it’s simply a matter of having swallowed the ending because they were speaking quickly, and that the ed was there.  Honest. 

And yet, no such swallowing tends to occur when we say tested or suggested.  It’s likely the extra effort in pronouncing the x just before the t in text creates the difficulty, a sound that does not slide out of the mouth as easily as the st in test.  (Take care when trying this unaided at home.)  We hesitate over that xt sound, and possibly then can’t be bothered to expend the extra energy required to articulate an ed as well.  

Over time, the tendency of the language is to regularise verbs, e.g. strive strove striven to increasing uses of strive strived strived, or dream dreamt dreamt to dream dreamed dreamed.  But text appears to be bucking that trend, and is an aspiring bedfellow in the sub-group of verbs that do not change their past tense or past participle and whose endings already have a past tense feel, verbs such as cast, cost and burst (the st endings) or put, set, hit (the t endings) or bid, rid, spread (the d endings).  Text may therefore one day find itself in grammar books nestled alphabetically amongst all the irregular elite:

         …teach              taught             taught

tear                 tore                 torn

tell                   told                 told

text                text                text

think               thought          thought…

For my money, irregular verbs are part of the music of our language, the pleasing sound change that gives us sleep slept slept rather than sleep sleeped sleeped.  That leads North Americans to say dive dove dove, rather than the ho-hum British dive dived dived.   That entices any creative person to choose sneak snuck snuck over the less juicy sneak sneaked sneaked.  Such words behave according to their Germanic bloodlines (send a postcard if you want the complete lecture on the Ablaut, the Rückumlaut and the Great Vowel Shift) demonstrated in the delightful sound alterations occurring in modern-day German cousins, such as blasen bläst blies geblasen (to blow) or fliegen fliegt flog geflogen (to fly).       

So listen hard next time your friends are speaking and need to use the verb text in the past tense.  My bet is that they’ll thumb their nose at conformity.  My bet is that they’ll sign up for irregularity.  My bet is that they won’t stick on an ed.

 No irregular verbs were harmed in the writing of this blog.

A Royal at the Door

There’s an awful lot of flag-waving going on in my neck of the woods at the moment.  It may not have escaped notice that we’re gearing up for the Olympics at the end of July– an event not without its shockwaves.  From a close reading of the map and the planned road closures for the long-distance cycle race, it looks as though this little patch of territory is going to be barricaded in, with no escape route other than swimming to the far shore of the River Thames. 

Which is precisely the body of water where a flotilla of ships will be bobbing by on Sunday in honour of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the other noteworthy impending national occasion.  We are now heading into four solid days of unabashed jollity. 

When I was younger I used to have dreams in which I met the Queen.   It was all fairly ordinary stuff - she would drop in to share a hotdog (no mustard), or play Monopoly, or leave some ermine in the dressing-up box.  But in the intervening years, something has got very garbled on the aspiration front.  Nowadays, instead, I dream about meeting Simon Cowell.  It’s a recurring scenario.  There’s a mediaeval banquet taking place.  The entertainment is going down the pan – the lutes are untuned, the minstrels frankly appalling.  Simon Cowell is rolling his eyes and holding his head in his hands.  In despair he looks across the table to me, chewing on a beef shank and gulping mead from a tankard.  “So,” he says wearily. “Know any good tunes?”

I’ve never met royalty up close and personal, though I’ve waved at the Queen at the Cenotaph in Ottawa.  Oh and Prince Edward came to the college where I used to work.

The first surprise was that the large shiny Daimler with flapping union flag, chauffeur and insignia that pulled up outside the new art block, which was waiting to be officially opened, contained no Prince Edward at all, but the Mayor.  HRH parked behind him some minutes later in a comparatively unobtrusive black Mercedes with his minder in the passenger seat. 

The party of dignitaries detailed to greet him had already been in the refectory snacking on finger food.  (I can’t believe they produced Menu A, observed my colleague Pete Hinton.)  Then, the Principal, the Chairman of Governors, the Mayor and other bechained people escorted the Prince inside the art block while we, the indignitaries from lesser corners of the college, looked on - scarcely a throng, given the low-key advertisement of the visit, and the absence of students who, now that exams had finished, had shown a clean pair of heels. 

In my humdrum T-shirt and not-quite jeans, I tried to duck the sightlines of our head of department who had scrubbed up particularly well and was striding around in a trim suit.  Pete and I managed to breach the atrium and knocked back what Buck’s Fizz we could lay our hands on, while Prince Edward did the rounds, talking politely to staff, and to the handful of students who had been roped in for the day.  

After about 40 minutes, HRH reappeared in our midst, and the Principal gave a brief speech, claiming that the building would change in the region of 30,000 lives.  Prince Edward did not bat an eyelid at this number but did a minor comedy turn: the one about a prince well used to unveiling plaques to commemorate the official openings of buildings, who – you would think - should know what he's doing, but actually is still practising because anything could go wrong and did you see that gap in the makeshift stage that he might actually fall through?  And in any case, what did the people who’d already supposedly been working in this building think they were playing at since it was only today that the building was official?  It was good-natured and got the required laughs. 

He made his way to the front door,  knelt down to talk to a group of children from the staff nursery, gave a final wave from the driver's seat of the Mercedes and was off, followed at a measured interval by the greater pomp of the chauffeur-driven limo of the Mayor.

Pete and I finished the dregs of the Buck’s Fizz.

Poetic Form and The Eurovision Song Contest

I was just about to send off some of my ditties to a prestigious poetry competition when I had the bejasus scared out of me by reading the helpful comments of the judge, who said she preferred classical forms.

So I scratched around for any old sonnet scrumpled at the back of the wardrobe, wishing I’d gone ahead and signed up for classes on poetic form run by Katy Evans-Bush, and got to grips, at least, with the odd villanelle or sestina.

And I wish I’d got into the habit of making more use of those ten-syllable lines that worked wonders for Shakespeare, you know, limbic thermometer.

I mean Olympic amateur.

No. Incumbent perimeter. 

Sorry.  I’ve got that wrong.  It’s enjambement speedometer.

No.  Wait.  Atlantic chronometer.

I give up.  Thrombic barometer?

Iambic pentameter.  That’s the one.  Greek scholars will spot the penta bit that means five.  Iambic: concerning the use of iambs – one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, giving a total of ten syllables per line.

And what’s all this got to do with the Eurovision Song Contest? 

As you may know, The UK is being represented in Baku on Saturday night by the septuagenarian Engelbert Humperdinck.  He and I actually parted company when I took him at his word, and released him, and let him go because I didn’t love him any mo’ -  back in the sixties when his sideburns were  growing for England.

Now, we all know very well that he is not the German classical composer who lived between 1854 and 1921 and wrote the opera Hänsel und Gretel.  But I leave you in the hands of Eddie Izzard to explain what on earth our national songster is doing with such a name, and to tie up the loose ends of this blog…

In Which Coffee is Drunk, A Mug Finds a New Home, and Muffins Beg for Attention

Cafe Central, Vienna

Does a cup of strong coffee turn you frothy?  Ebullient?  Stunningly witty?  Or, do you think it does?  Then you’re in good company.  A survey of workers done by Dunkin Donuts has apparently found that the biggest coffee drinkers are, in order: scientists, marketers, PR people, education administrators, and editors and writers.

In other words, people trading on ideas.  Not so foolish, then, to turn to the brown elixir in order to pump up your creative thoughts.  In a famed quotation, the French writer Honoré Balzac eulogised on the state of mind that coffee produced: "Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labour begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”  (From the essay The Pleasure and Pains of Coffee translated by Robert Onopa.)

In truth, this “cavalry of metaphor” surged very successfully through La Comedie Humaine, all ninety-odd tomes of it.  So what if gallons of the beverage per day sent him to an early grave, his output was of a prodigious quantity that any other free-thinker might think it worth buying a percolator for.  No wonder in Canada and Germany chains of cafés have been set up bearing his name – the author whose oeuvre plus coffee fixation represent a colossus of achievement. 

Me?  I’m usually on decaf, which could explain the dribble of product  compared to Balzac.  But coffee is an essential part of my working day –  to clutch at for warmth and security, to punctuate yawning moments of inaction, and to provide the excuse to get up and go somewhere else altogether. 

For writing has always been a lonely activity.  Peace and quiet are over-rated.  Which is why taking up your scribblings and marching to a suitable café to seek hubbub and gossip has such appeal.  The further afield the café from your own patch the better, so that right under your nose something preposterous is taking place for which you need to messily fill in the blanks.  That the establishment should also have angles and corners you can get your back into, with no passers-by sniggering over your efforts, is a prerequisite.  You’ll need to monitor the number of other writers tapping more adeptly on their laptops or eavesdropping more intently on the same conversations as you.  Which means definitely no J. K. Rowling over by the newspaper rack, already on her third latte and fourteenth manuscript, and much too palsy-walsy with the proprietor. 

Cafe Hawelka, Vienna

Nor do you want the aroma of freshly-baked cakes and pastries to be so tempting that all creativity goes into the girth of your thighs rather than the thickness of your novel.  Here you’ll need to steel yourself against the ice cream confections at the Café Lepanto in Malaga and the Schokozauber at the Café Central in Vienna, but there again in a place such as The Nest in Ripley, Surrey, a new favourite of mine, your conscience could be salved by the beetroot part of the delicious chocolate and beetroot cake.

And so, clutching shitty first drafts  (as the writer Anne Lamott calls them) and hoping to salvage anything from the wreckage, I’m ever on the hunt for the ideal café, a place  to sit smack-bang up against other lives that spill noisily and imperfectly. 

And I was thinking how wonderful it would be to share coffee with you, good reader, in such a place.  As second best and in an act of coffee solidarity, I’ve decided to put the names of the loyal followers of this blog into a hat and pull one out.  He or she is going to receive the very first, inaugural A Woman in Goggles mug. 

And so, the lucky recipient is……..here goes…….wait for it………just juggling the names now…….oops, butterfingers……. the recipient would seem to be…………Diary of an Unfinished Woman.  

Unfinished Woman, I wonder if you might also be interested in the following recipe that I’ve been road testing, worryingly frequently, in my household over the last couple of months.  It’s for healthy muffins – an excellent way to soak up the coffee contents of your new mug.

(I tend to measure in cups – a hangover from my Canadian days.  But don’t get into a flap about exact amounts.  These muffins are robust, and can cope with a shaky hand on the measuring device.  I’ve measured out the amounts in cups, weighed them – and yes, the oatmeal is light so 1 cup did weigh the same as ½ cup of maize flour.)

Oh So Fab Guilt-Free Oatmeal Muffins

¾ cup Greek yoghurt (6 fl oz/ 200 ml/ 340 grams)

1 cup oatmeal   (4 oz/ 100 grams)

½ cup maize flour* (4 oz/ 100 grams)

½ cup polenta or cornmeal* (4 oz/ 100 grams)

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

1/3 cup olive oil (3 fl oz/ 90 ml)

2 large eggs

2 medium-sized mashed bananas

½ cup raisins or sultanas (4 oz/ 100 grams)

1. Set oven to 350◦F or 180 ◦C.  (This will be 160 ◦C if you have a fan oven.)
2. Line a muffin tin with 12 muffin cases.
3. Mix the oatmeal into the yoghurt and allow to sit while you prepare the other ingredients.
4. In a separate small bowl beat the eggs into the oil then add the mashed banana.
5. Combine the maize flour, polenta, baking soda and baking powder in a third bowl.
6. Add the egg/ oil/ banana mixture to the oatmeal mixture.
7. Then add the dry ingredients also to the oatmeal mixture and mix only just enough so that the batter is moist.
8. Stir in the raisins.
9. Spoon into the muffin cases.  They will be quite full.
10. Bake for 20 minutes.

Best eaten warm, with a modicum of butter.  (Or lashings of butter.)  If you have left them to go cold, they are delicious if heated up individually in a microwave for 20 seconds.

Enjoy!

*Instead of maize flour and polenta, I’ve also used a combination of rice flour and wholemeal flour with excellent results.  

What Am I Doing Here? Sean Bobbitt, Cinematographer

I am curious about where individuals derive their personal set of mores.  How they set their compass to live a good life, a purposeful life.  And how they reconcile their own existence upon this earth. It’s been my observation that many people change tack throughout their lives – either throwing out wholesale the beliefs of their parents to adopt new ones, or none at all.   Some seize on science to embolden an atheistic approach.  Others seek New Age philosophers. Yet others reaffirm the faith of their forebears. In this first of an occasional series What Am I Doing Here?, the award-winning cinematographer Sean Bobbitt talks about the ethics that have informed and shaped his life.

Sean Bobbitt

Born in Texas, but educated in both England and the USA, Sean Bobbitt is the cinematographer who filmed the raw and uncompromising Steve McQueen films Hunger - about the Northern Irish hunger-striker, Bobby Sands - and Shame, a depiction of sex addiction.  Other films, for example Wonderland, The Killer Inside Me, United 93 as well a long list of TV credits which include Nicholas Nickleby, Sense and Sensibility, Unforgiven and episodes of Spooks and The Canterbury Tales have displayed his considerable skills in different genres. 

Films he has worked on that are due to come out within the year are: The Place Beyond the Pines, (directed by Derek Cianfrance and starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper and Eva Mendes), Hysteria (directed by Tanya Wexler and starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Felicity Jones, Jonathyn Pryce, Hugh Dancy and Rupert Everett) and Byzantium (directed by Neil Jordan and starring  Gemma Arterton, Saoirse Ronan  and Sam Riley).

Nominated this year for a BAFTA award for Crack House, he has also won a BIFA for Hunger, a BIFA nomination for Shame, BAFTA nomination for The Long Firm, RTS award for The Canterbury Tales (The Man of Law’s Tale) and RTS Yorkshire nomination for Unforgiven.

But cinematography is, in fact, the second part of a career which saw him first as a news and documentary cameraman, a role which took him to the most conflicted spots of the globe.

Sean, in the first part of your professional life, you were a news cameraman.  Were there any events that were real epiphanies for you?

It’s been more of a gradual process.  Yet, coming out of Beirut in 1982, after the invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut, in which probably 40,000 innocent people were killed, I was enraged.

I can remember having a discussion late one night with my father and being very angry at him for not letting me know that things like that happened in this world.  To which he replied: “Why would I destroy your childhood by telling you the world can be a really horrible place?”  He’d spent all his time making money to try and protect us from such things, even though as children moving around in the Middle East and Africa, we’d witnessed poverty and violence.  The anger was completely unfairly focused on my father at that point, because I had always looked up to him as being the power that explained.

Lebanon was the first of many, many civil wars that I covered that, ostensibly, have religious justifications to them.  But were actually just families against families, or individuals against individuals, plying for the wealth of that nation.  But religion was the rallying point for both sides.

Did you yourself grow up with a religion?

My brothers and I were brought up, baptised and confirmed as Roman Catholics, but at around the age of fourteen or fifteen we were given the choice whether to carry on.

And what was your choice?

Not to.  I had done a lot of reading - psychology, sociology, but also looking at the history of the world and the number of conflicts and deaths that had occurred through  religious ideology.  The whole spiritual element seemed to me to have been subverted by political control. 

Would you say it was the symbolism of the Catholic rituals that you were rebelling against?

It wasn’t a rebellion. I was also reading a lot of Lenin and Marx, religion is the opium of the people, and to me at the time there was a lot of sense in that.  But I didn’t feel that people who did believe were in some way beneath me.  I could see, looking back historically, the need that mankind has to put faith in something and, to me, religion is simply one of the methods by which, as a gregarious community, we come together. And we need to come together.  It’s a primal instinct we have.

And so at that point, how would you say you met that need in yourself?  What did you then put your faith into?

I don’t think I put my faith into anything as such.  I think also as a by-product of the fact that we moved around a lot of different countries, I’ve always seen myself as a bit outside and looking in to different cultures and societies.  I haven’t felt the need to become part of a larger group for any specific reason.  If there were a religion that I would be attracted to, it would be more towards Buddhism, where the emphasis is put on the self.   I don’t feel any great need for there being an overall set of rules that I need to conform to in order to have a perfect life.

But rules do allow civilised behaviour to occur.

Absolutely.  But rules can also subvert.  Some of the most uncivilised behaviour history has ever seen has been based around one group of people disagreeing with another group of people’s rules.  And so, from a historical perspective and specifically a modern historical perspective, and having witnessed a lot of conflict, the conclusion that I’ve always drawn is that politics and religion are both inherently, I was going to say inherently evil.  But that might be a bit extreme.

Inherently divisive, perhaps?

Inherently divisive, and open to an incredible abuse of people’s ideology.  There is a lot of validity in the Ten Commandments, and having been taught them as a child, it does tend to be the basic tenet of your morality.  It’s the one thing that from an early age you are brought up to understand and believe, and it sets a baseline.  But that would have come from my mother, who was a Roman Catholic.  My father is a very practical classic American self-made man.  So his morality is much simpler.  And was something that was imbued in us from an early age.

How would you characterise his  morality?

It’s one mainly of respect. That you respect your elders, that you respect others. That you would treat them as you would want them to treat you.

Did that rage that you later expressed to him, after your experience in Lebanon, manifest itself in any way? Did it lead to a hardened resolve?

When you are working as a journalist, you try not to take sides. And that has always been something of interest to me – that there is always another side.  It’s trying to find the other side and find what the truth is. I’ve never come across it, but in the end you find layers of truth that you’re able to believe in.  Until they’re torn asunder by another revelation.

There was one other thing that happened that was specifically in relation to my own animosity towards the Roman Catholic Church, which has grown over time. I was filming a documentary in the Vatican, funded by a Polish group who were in the process of trying to beatify a Polish nun.  It was at the time of the Polish pope, John Paul II.  They had raised two million dollars to make the documentary as part of the beatification process.  They’d brought in a public relations company and hired a big-time director and screenwriter.  That in and of itself I found really disconcerting.

We were taking the equipment down into the catacombs of the Vatican where there is a small chapel to this nun.   As we passed through a long hallway of very high vaulted doors, all of which were sealed down either

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