Heirloom

Trying to make some space in the garage this afternoon. I'm still in England for just over a week but after tomorrow I won't be at the house here much, so it has been a day for finishing off chores.

As usual my eyes alighted on the fire screen. Trawling through the garage often feels like a bit of an exercise in practical geology - there is the sediment from at least three previous homes deposited in layers in there and I am a terrible hoarder; throwing out potentially useful things just isn't me. But the ones I wrestle with most are those with some kind of an emotional charge involving dead family members.

The fire screen must be the classic example of this attachment. As you can see it isn't up to much. Is this kind of coarse stitching still tapestry or is it some kind of fine carpet work? I can tell you the whole history of it I think.

My grandmother made it in 1954 or 1955. My grandad had bought one of those "Hobbies" catalogues that were so popular around then ("Buy a fretsaw and see the World"). Suddenly the place filled up with plywood toast racks, marquetry of flying ducks and teapot stands skillfully fretted with a picture of the setting sun, all of which I guess were destined to become heirlooms in the dim future. But the piece de resistance was the fire screen, an 'Olden Day' scene of a stagecoach outside a half-timbered inn, hand crafted by my grandmother and set in a dark oak frame made by my grandfather. Stitching by numbers.

It graced our 'front room' in Barnard Castle for years, then the house at Nateby and since 1980 it has been on a tour of the lofts of England from Lancashire to Bedfordshire. And so at last to our garage. Not really wanted but not something I could throw away.

It isn't pretty is it? Sometimes I wonder what the heck to do with it We don't even have a fire place any more. But truth to tell it is one of the very few things I have that belonged to my grandmother and the only one I have actually made by her, so it will probably survive as long as I do.

Horny ballad

Driving into Garstang yesterday I was laughing at a programme on BBC Radio 4. It was about English eighteenth century street and 'broadsheet' ballads and the presenter was reading a very raunchy London street ballad. Not much doubt what the author of this work had in mind! It was sometimes so explicit that I was a bit surprised that it was being broadcast at that time of day. Us Brits have always loved vulgarity it seems.

For me there always something rather comical in coming across such sexually explicit work from a different age. All that archaic language and those strange metaphors, it disguises the intensity of the underlying passion in the verse for us, we find it hard to take seriously. It underlines how difficult it is to think ourselves back in any real sense into any historical context. Sometimes though the words find their mark, physical love is a lingua franca after all, and not just in space but in time.

But this ballad was resonating on a different level with me, it tied in with my recent research on lifespan and life chronology in Japan. How different common experience was of pairing and mating and raising families even only a century ago. Such 'sweet flowers for picking' at seventeen but already by twenty five or at the latest thirty a string of pregnancies and infectious diseases and no access to dentistry had already taken their toll. Youth vanished - "this body is as transient as dew on the grass, swiftly the body passes away, in a moment life is gone". If you were poor you would be lucky to make it to even fifty. We forget now how 'nasty,brutish and short' the lives of our ancestors - those who gave us the gift of our own lives - could be.

Perhaps that makes the intensity of blossoming and the fierceness of love the ballad writer describes that much more poignant and precious. Truly like butterflies, brief and beautiful.

Brontes Revisted

Over at Haworth yesterday. I haven't planned to go there regularly but it is a place I seem to have called by at a lot over the last few years. It is a great location for watching trains - one of the best of Britain's preserved railways runs through the village - but of course it is better known the world over for its connection with the Bronte Sisters. That has probably been the reason for most of my trips in the last ten years. Bronte novels - well, two of them - are popular with Japanese ladies and I've visited the parsonage with a few of those since we first made a trip here with students in 2000.

Yesterday was a railway visit - and also to meet a friend and enjoy a fine fatty 'all day breakfast' in the pub across the road from the station, I confess all. But I did end up calling at the Bronte Centre in the old parsonage looking for some postcards related to "Wuthering Heights". A student I know in Hasunuma - I helped her with conversational English before she came to Europe to take part in a music festival in 2004 - is doing her undergraduate thesis on the novel. I got a couple of pictures of the farm which was supposed to be the setting for the story and also a set of six cards from a very early film of the novel made in the 1920's. They told me in the shop that the film itself is now lost, and only these 'stills' remain.

I often came to the village back in the 1960's and 1970's when my favourite great-aunt, Nora, lived in Keighley and the place has some happy if wistful memories for me. But sitting in the sunshine outside the parsonage yesterday admiring my postcards I was startled to suddenly remember that I had also been there with someone I was very close to back in the 1960's too. I'd quite forgotten that trip, it was the picture of Charlotte Bronte that reminded me of it because her hair and forehead back then were very similar to that classic 'Charlotte' painting. Goodness knows how we ever got to Haworth, it must have been the bus from Keighley. But what were we doing in West Yorkshire? We must have walked up the hill from the station, it wasn't a place visited so much forty years ago. But it was a similar kind of a day to yesterday because clear images of it suddenly came back for me. Like jewels hanging in the sunlight suddenly refracting some vivid energy of the spirit into my eyes.

Here's an interesting thing. That friend discovered this site quite recently and reads it sometimes. And she's a writer now too. But not about the Yorkshire moors eh?

Kitchen hazards

Seemed like a good move to keep out of the kitchen tonight, and so we ended up eating from the 'take-away' down at Barton. One explosion and one fire in there today so far and as things like this tend to come in threes I'd better check that all the nuts and washers under the sink are tight before the floods arrive.

The explosion was a bottle of sparkling wine that someone had left on a work surface too close to the cooker hob. I was happily sitting here reading John McTaggarts essay of "The Unreality of Time" when there was a heck of a bang next door. Lucky that there was nobody working there or it would have been a serious hospital job, fragments of exploding glass bottle covered half the kitchen and it took another bottle of cooking wine with it as it disintegrated. Those things are like bombs when they blow.

Then a bit further on into meal preparation the chip fat on the tray in the oven caught fire and there was much rushing around with wet tea towels to smother it although it was more a case of containing the smoke than any serious risk to the place.

That exploding bottle reminded me of a nightmare hour I had when I was working as a 'promotions manager' for Whitbread a few months after I started with the Company. The boss wanted to impress a bunch of pub landladies at a 'trade dinner' that I had to organise for him and insisted on 24 bottles of some cheap 'bubbly' on the tables in addition to the even cheaper brand of 'Corrida Full Red' that comprised his usual tipple. The caterers at the venue we were using were more used to serving primary school teachers their lunches on training days. Somehow they managed to chill the red wine in the fridges and leave the Asti Spumanti - I think that was what it was - behind the boiler. Of course half the Whitbread family were turning up for the event, just what I needed. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

But that wasn't the worst of it, no sir! When I started to undo the safety wires on the 'bubbly' bottles to ease the corks out in that vaguely erotic way that us Masters of Wine employ I discovered that someone in the bloomin' brewery depot didn't know that you are supposed to store this stuff on its side. Once the corks dry out and expand they might as well be riveted in there. I ended up attacking all the corks on two dozen bottles with a hacksaw the caretaker found for me, followed by kitchen knives and various corkscrews. And as the last bit of cork came out of each one the contents exploded anyway and I got thoroughly showered with the stuff.

I don't think that I've ever even looked a bottle of the sparkling wine in the eye since.

Swiss Interlude

I managed to squeeze a couple of days in Switzerland this week. Julia had some business to attend there so we got the cheapest of cheap Easyjet flights from Liverpool down to Basel. Not a country that I have spent much time in, Switzerland, I often seem to have crossed corners on the French-speaking side but until now I haven't put my wellies on and waded into the middle of the pond, figuratively speaking.

Yes, really enjoyed it. I headed off on my own on both days to enjoy my usual cocktail of train spotting, buying maps and tramping around and taking photographs. But mainly - let's admit it, honesty is always the best policy - some really serious train spotting. Not surprisingly Switzerland has an especially fine collection of mountain railways, trains designed and built like goats for grunting and groaning their way up impossibly steep gradients.

My destination was Andermatt, down in the high Alps just to the north of the St. Gotthard Pass. This little town is as high in the mountains as they come, and just a few miles further south German speaking Europe comes to an end and Itailian speaking Europe begins. Andermatt is a junction on the 'narrow gauge' - what used to be called the Rhaetian Railway but is now known as the Matterhorn - St. Gotthard Line. This is a stop for the legendary Glacier Express that runs three hundred kilometres across the roof of Europe from east to west.

My 'perfect day' eh? I'm quite a solitary person, but if I really like you maybe you can come with me as long as you know how to just enjoy yourself. A sunny spot to sit next to the tracks and watch some exotic trains roll by. Wish that you could all have been there with me! That sun was hot, I really got sunburned up at that altitude. Two sandwiches and a bottle of 'pop', a kind of nirvana in fact. I often think that happiness in life consists mainly in being content with simple things and that is what watching trains go by is all about. Who needs to get more complicated than that eh?

Missing footsteps

One thing I've noticed several times on this trip to England is the 'hole' left by Darcy.

Darcy was Julia's dog - a big, black, bouncy and very cheeky Flat Coat Retriever. Actually she wasn't 'legally' her dog, she belonged to a friend who was a breeder of Flat Coats, but somehow over the years they came to 'belong' to each other and she would spend most weekends here in the house, often longer if Julia was on holiday or I was around. She was a real 'chancer' actually, almost delinquent if there was food in prospect. She'd tip the kitchen bin over rummaging for something tasty no matter how many times you yelled at her and you only had to rattle a plate and those big gentle brown eyes closed in on you like magnets. I've never known a happier, friendlier dog, and I have known many happy, friendly dogs. I could roll on the floor wrestling and playing with her for hours.

A few weeks after I was here last summer, around this time of year, she was diagnosed with a virulent and painful liver cancer and the vet recommended to her owner that she should be put down immediately. It was a big shock for all of us because there was no period of ailing or old age to adjust to that prospect of bereavement. Having been walking with her on the hills around here just a few weeks before I could hardly believe what had happened.

This trip, perhaps because of the season, there are many moments when Darcy has 'come back' into my mind very vividly. And especially early in the mornings. If she was sleeping upstairs when I got up I would hear nothing until the moment I opened that fringe door when suddenly there would be a clumping around on the landing and that 'shaking and stretching' sound that all dogs make when they stir themselves. I'm sure that she could have heard that fridge door catch, with all its promise of cheese and snacks, at least a quarter mile away.

Other mornings, if she was in philosophical mood, she would be stretched out enjoying the quiet dawn on the sofa in the conservatory. You knew she was there because as you came into the kitchen you could hear the soft swish of her tail wagging as she lay 'doggo' willing you to walk on through and give her the first cuddle of the day.

Wonderful, wonderful dog. Friends like that leave an awful void in your life when they are no longer there, too painful even to look at sometimes. But the wound doesn't last forever, later perhaps a deep sense of love and affection, of gratitude, might take its place. By inches.