For Dad on his first Father's Day away

Here is an extract from a longer memoir I've been working on, remembering my late Dad Ian.

Dad trained hard most evenings, changing into shorts and removing his dental plate before ploughing up and down the Largs seafront promenade that connected our house to the town.  After an hour or so of grimacing with effort against the onshore wind, his return home would be announced by the front door swinging open heavily. This was one of the few occasions he used the front door, in fact. A gust of wind from the seashore seemed to accompany him, and  - as ever with Dad – it was never a quiet entrance. He’d drop down onto to the hall carpet and summon one of us kids out from our homework to sit on his feet as he finished with a few dozen sit-ups. He would tease us, leering over us sweatily, and we laughed hysterically at his toothless grin, feigning to wince at his smell but secretly entranced by his energy, his magnetism, his selfish determination.

He’d then wash for dinner in the downstairs bathroom, using the landing in front of it to dry himself off – he claimed the bathroom was too small for a man used to rugby changing rooms.  As this landing was directly opposite the front door, it was all too easy to return home and chance upon him ‘in the skuds’ as nakedness was known in our family – but he was never embarrassed, he just larked about making the towel into a bullfighting cape or a sheik’s headdress until we laughed along with him too.

Dad’s primary parenting tool was humour, in fact, with Mum covering everything else. Unlike most of Mum’s skills, laughter could be hastily deployed – and anywhere. It didn’t need forward-planning, in fact it hated routine. It could not happen without an adoring audience, and Dad’s scarcity at home certainly guaranteed one in his four kids.  

I had a prodigious talent for sulking, it was my go-to response to most circumstances that didn’t go my way. And being a third child of four, most things didn’t go my way. When the family had to spend a wet day hiking, I would sulk. When it was banana bread for tea, I would sulk. When Mum bought me a cheapo anorak without asking my opninion first, I would sulk. I orchestrated these sulks with increasing strategy as I got older. It was dangerously easy for nobody to notice you were sulking in our big house, and that was obviously a total waste of time and effort. So I soon learnt it was important to choose the location of the sulk well – clearly it couldn’t take place in the upstairs rooms – such as our bedrooms – as no one went up there unless it was to sleep, and besides, there was no central heating and there was a limit to how much I really wanted to endure for my art.  The kitchen rarely worked either, as it was Mum who usually caused the sulk and she was invariably in there – the flouncing out of the room that was the prelude to the sulk was a vital dramatic effect, and you could hardly follow it by returning unannounced just to sit and scowl in the corner.  The playroom was an enjoyable place to carry out a sulk, as there were limitless, fun things to do in there meaning I only had to put the sulk back ‘on’ briefly when someone came through the door. The downside of that room was that in fact my parents didn’t often come in there – it was largely and gloriously out of bounds for them – and as it was Mum (and only occasionally Dad) that I wanted to punish with the sulk, there was a real risk that they might never ever find out about the brilliant sulk I had conducted in there all afternoon.

If Dad was around, he made it his personal mission to rid me of my precious sulk, however it had arisen. If Mum mentioned my condition to him privately, he would search the house high and low until I was found, perhaps pretending to read a book in the lounge, or if the weather was good, mooching around in the garden, picking up ladybirds or confiding all to the rabbit in her hutch. Dad wouldn’t call out to me, he’d sneak up and then would get down onto his haunches right in front of me. He’d bob his head back and forth but I would not look up, of course. Then came an onslaught of interpretations of the chain of events that – as far as he knew – had caused the telling off from Mum that had spawned the sulk. 
“A little bird tells me that a certain person fed her teatime sausage to the dog, and thought she’d get away with this heinous crime....”
 “Soooo - you and both of your brothers were in the garden playing football, and somehow your sister Alison pushed herself down the stairs – have I got that right? Well, I guess there’s no need to check the CCTV footage in that case, as you’re so clearly telling the truth”
“What will Mrs Dorman think when she finds out that her star pupil has been sent away to her Auntie Judith’s in Taynuilt, for being such a naughty girl? Well, I expect you might get a Christmas card if you’re lucky enough to be remembered by her and the rest of the class, but Judith only has room for you in the garden shed, you know.”
Each sentence was delivered with a painstakingly dry comic inflection. It was very hard indeed to hold my ground and soon I was unable to resist glancing up at Dad in front of me - fatal. Within a few seconds I was giggling along with him despite my strenuous efforts to remain po-faced. 
Triumph would sweep across his face, and standing upright again, he’d say, gently,
”C’mon bumblebot” taking my hand and leading me back indoors.

To China, and don't spare the warriors

A post written in November 2016, during my first trip to China, with my film The Closer We Get:

Beijing to Xi’an

I travel to China the day after Trump’s victory in the US election, and the social media control combined with the fact that it’s Just Not That Big A Deal Here has it feeling like a bad dream pretty soon. Until an American-Chinese woman working on the event I’m at tells me how the trauma made her forget to take her passport to the airport in LA, I’d all but forgotten about crying in front of the BBC news at 6am that morning.

If I was going to do a Tripadvisor review for our Beijing hotel (The Traveler (sic) Inn) – and who knows, I just might – I could complain about the tepid bath water, the flea I found biting my shin, and that the sound on my TV didn’t work, but I would praise its globetrotting breakfast (steamed buns, waffles, tofu, conflakes), its atmospheric little garden and chiefly its location, on a central but quiet ‘hutong’ fascinating enough to spend your entire Beijing break in. These higgledy piggledy, low rise areas which mix houses old and new with shops, restaurants and bars of every variety, are being fast cleared away by the city authorities, so I feel lucky to be staying in one and not one of the shiny highrises by the motorway, even if they do offer power showers. Every eating place I tried locally was fantastic, and my picture-pointing was usually augmented by the ubiquitous smart phone and its translation apps. 

Invariably, after much typing, the phone was turned towards me, and on it were the words ‘It’s a bit spicy’. I always communicated that this was fine by me.

The iDocs documentary film forum kicked off with a speech-based ceremony at Beijing Film Academy, that I expected to go on for much longer than it did. Beforehand, a trailer filled with extracts from the selected films was looped on the enormous screen. Some of the crowd were asleep, some on their smart phones and some were paying attention. Dignitaries from various countries whose filmmakers were present, took the stage. A young Polish woman spoke impressively fluent Cantonese, whereas the avuncular Israeli Ambassador spoke in English, telling us that ‘his’ and the culture of China were the oldest in the world. With my father’s voice in the back of my head, I couldn’t help thinking that a tie wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All the film-makers lined up on stage and the mic was passed along the row to each of us. My ‘Ni hao’ elicited a little wave of applause with the huge audience and caught on with the other filmmakers who followed suit. My previous travels in Japan made me prone to bowing unneccessarily though and I made a mental note to try and rein it in. I was certainly far too smartly attired in my green silk dress, but I could at least hope it stuck in the audience’s mind and that they’d return when my film was on.

We film makers realised that our international array of films were not going to be screened with English and Mandarin subtitles (as is common in other international festivals) so, a little frustratingly, we wouldn't be able to easily watch each others films. Most of us agreed to exchange screener links later. So the enticing opening film, Twilight of a Life (which had been in several other festivals with mine, but which I hadn’t managed to see yet) was not one I could stay and watch as it was mainly in Hebrew. So most of the film makers got back into our minibus and were back at the hotel within an hour.

The fantastic Cherelle Zheng, film-maker and founder of iDOCS, had assembled a team of (almost all female) festival helpers who kept everything running smoothly, that is as long as we all had downloaded WhatsApp onto our phones and looked at it very regularly. Cherelle had curated and subtitled the impressive selection of global docs presented herself, an epic work. Most shared the theme of an exploration of love, and I would liked to have spoken to her more about her selection and its resonances with the Chinese audience, but as with all film festivals, it’s a bit of a whiteout for the organisers who have so much to do they often don’t even get to watch the films or the audience Q & A’s.

The screening of The Closer We Get drew an almost full auditorium of circa 300, and I sat in for the screening, which I rarely do these days. It was incredibly special to hear the audience’s ebb and flow of laughter and tears, a testament to Cherelle’s skillful translation. The Chinese reactions and questions afterwards (simultaeneously translated) were broadly similar to those in every one of the now over a dozen countries I have screened in, and it’s hard to describe how good this makes me feel. In a world of conflict, it’s beyond heartening to realise that we are the same at heart, everywhere. After the screening a small crowd asks for autographs, photographs with me etc. and I am introduced to a smiling woman who is in charge of marriage guidance in Beijing. She pops a pink scarf on and we have our photograph taken together. She is full of excited praise for the film, and I promise to her that I will get a copy to her for her organisation to use.

My ‘Masterclass’ was intended to be a delivered from my pre-prepared and pre-translated script, but instead it’s decided it should be in a ‘chat show’ format, opening out to questions informally. I’m okay with this, as I am now so used to talking about the film that I actually enjoy being put on the spot a bit unexpectedly. Some of the audience are clearly film-makers and field some technical questions about solo shooting and which parts of the film were ‘re-enacted’ for camera. But in general, questions are philosophical, and it seems that there is a hunger amongst the film-makers here to embark on personal stories but much inhibition and fear of offence. I try and talk about the ‘personal development’ aspects of my film, the terror I felt at its inception and how I overcame this, and I try and reassure them that whilst such films change a family dynamic forever, it can be the most positive transformation they will ever experience.

What Walrus Museum?

Xi’an is the nearest city to the Terracotta Warriors, so this is my first stop when I take the train out of Beijing. It’s a 5 hour high-speed journey, and my first class carriage has no laptop-entranced businessmen, as it would in the UK, just snoozing Chinese. It’s a marked contrast to the nonstop activity of almost every Chinese person you meet elsewhere. The ‘first class’ of the service is marked with luxurious recliners, a gift box of snacks and a woman who cleans the toilet after each visit. When I can’t find the flush and leave the cubicle, she takes my arm and returns me to the site of my shame, demonstrating the flush button in use.

Xi’an train station is beautiful, more like an airport than anything else, and I am the only Western face amidst the thousands of travellers. If there are 8 million inhabitants in Xi’an, there must be a restaurant provided for every single one. Eating places of all sorts outnumber very other shop at least five to one, and they range from ad hoc woks-on-the-back-of-bikes, to Korean barbecues to vast and eerily empty ‘banquet’ retaurants filled with circular tables each with a Lazy Susan at its centre. I choose what looks like a bog-standard one that is full of locals. As in every place I have eaten in China, I am the only lone diner - for the Chinese eating is an intensely social activity, and portion sizes make no concession to the smaller appetite. I eat an excellent ‘salad’ of beansprouts, cooked spinach, peanuts and strips of spongy wheat gluten, spiced with dried chilli and aromatic Szechuan pepper, with a room-temperature beer (the norm here) and chrysanthemum tea. Outside, charcoal braziers with lamb kebabs and vast arrays of condiments (seaweeds, mushrooms, Chinese cabbage, coriander leaves, sesame seeds, peanuts) are everywhere from dawn to late, and there are also pyramids of local pomegranates split to reveal their rich ruby interiors, candy-making stalls, spice-crusted tofu, and deep-fried-whole-anything stalls. They could teach the rest of the world a thing or two here, and not just about cooking. I awake in the morning to the unexpected sound of a Mosque’s call to prayer: Xi’an has lived peacefully with its large Muslim population for over 1300 years.

My brilliant guide Eric tells me about our forthcoming visit en route, to the Walrus Museum. I don’t remember this from my itinerary, and he’s talking as if it’s an important one, but I feel too awkward to ask for clarity. After a while of zigzagging through the city walls and out onto the freeway, hazy with smog, I realise his excitement is about the Warriors Museum. That is, the 8000 Terracotta Warriors Museum that will be today’s focus.

On the way in, as in every transport hub and visitor attraction in China, bags are security scanned. Eric tells me this is a quiet day, but nontheless vast crowds of Chinese people surrounded by tangles of selfie sticks are everywhere, screeching and laughing. It’s actually a delight to witness their joy here, and the lack of Western faces. How often we turn up at an attraction in the UK to find that there’s not a single other Brit in evidence, finding their own heritage worth a look. In fact, a Western face is so rare here that I am invited to join in a number of schoolchildren’s selfies, presumably for my sheer ginger-novelty value.

Despite the competition for a front row view of Pit 1 - which offers the ‘money shot’ of the ranks of warriors that I recall from the National Geographic magazines we devoured in the 1980’s - my first sight of this silent army brings tears to my eyes. Their number, artistry and preservation defies belief. Their sheer miraculousness is intensely moving. It has you thinking what else lies beneath our planet's mud, awaiting our future wonder.

As we move around the vast sunken area, individual warriors in various states of preservation are visible closer to the visitor boundary. Their individuality and benign smiles belie their identities as warriors – as if they knew the afterlife would not present any real conflict to concern themselves with. Eric tells me contemporaneous written accounts exist that show that the Emperor’s top general in fact came up with the idea for the facsimilie army, to prevent his boss from slaying the 8000 best-trained soldiers in the land, and presumbly soldiers who would protect his son, the next Emperor. Like the sculptures of European antiquity, the warriors would have been gaudily painted originally (this is approximated in a rather shonky film projection that concludes the visit). What a fantastical, Disney-esque sight this would have been.

The steep, earthen walls around each pit strongly convey death, and they serve as raised walkways for the odd archaeologist with a wheel barrow, dwarfed by the arched roof and the crowds. The scale is akin to that of a football pitch. Eric tells me that excavation and conservation work here will have no end, and that China accepts this onerous responsibility. I am drawn to a large flat area near the exit with rows of regimented desks, spaced far apart as in an exam hall. Each has an overhead lamp, and behind them there is a hospital-style bed.
At one desk a single archaeologist bends over something far from our view, his lamp glowing orange in the cool, bluish haze of the enormous hangar. He has a lifetime of work ahead.

Lightning Sometimes Does

I recently had the incredible experience of having my first ever film screened on television. As a child of the 1970's, actual terrestrial broadcasting somehow retains its excitement for me, despite the fact that I now consider most of too lousy to actually watch. Despite all the catch-up online possibilities, there is something almost magical about the idea that the BBC has your film and has pressed play out NOW. For everyone to watch.
I was one of those kids that hankered after a personal connection to TV to an almost psychotic degree - I think it's the same for lots of people who grew up in provincial towns that felt as far from 'Broadcasting House' as Mars did. I tried to get my drawings onto Take Hart almost weekly, I was continuously writing into Jim'll Fix It, Swap Shop and the like. The zenith of this phase of my life was when I was runner-up in a Blue Peter competition to design a theme park, meaning I received the much coveted Blue Peter badge. A close second was having Noel Edmunds read out my letter live on air, suggesting improvements for litter bin design. (Well, I did grow up in a seaside town where beachside bins were big news).

So it was a huge delight to sit on a sofa in Paisley month ago with my siblings, nieces and nephew to watch 'The Closer We Get' go out to the nation on BBC2 Scotland. We were in high spirits, my sister had even baked the same cake that appears in the film, and though mass viewings of the film have happened often, we were still excited to be together on and off film. This was in many ways the culmination of over a year touring this 'family project', in cinemas, church halls and film festivals all over the world - talking to each new audience and sharing our story for so long has become second nature to me, so the surrealism of watching myself on TV felt only fleetingly like a weird dream. I think I did squeal when the serious - sounding BBC announcer read out my name though, and even the youngest in the room joined in the collective delight at each new on-screen appearance, whether it was a dog, a family member or a cake.

But someone important wasn't in that living room: my dad, Ian - arguably the star of the film, and a man who against all expectations has become as proud of the film as we all are, turning up at screenings and taking film critics' sterner judgements on his character squarely on the chin.

Dad was nearby though, in the big new hospital, having suffered what we now know to have been a stroke.
Like my mum Ann, he managed to walk into the hospital, and like her, it seems unlikely he will walk out. Also like her, a cascade of 'minor' NHS oversights came to tragic fruition in the stroke, perhaps this time round we will chase answers more vigorously,  but it's too raw to think of all that yet.
Although a very different stroke from Mum's (affecting the opposite side of his body, and also his cognitive capacity) I find myself wishing I could un-know her five last years, return to the state of blind optimism I felt once, to encounter this vicious foe as if for the first time.

I attend a session of physiotherapy with Dad, a dogged and determined patient. I sit in front of him, bowed towards him at an encouraging distance - like a parent watching a toddler making its first staggering steps. His expression reminds me vividly of Mum's immediately after her stroke - they seemed to both age and become childlike at once. There is an open-ness in the face, a stare so penetrating you would feel it through walls. Two therapists support his lower body, a bench allows his one good side to balance. Instead of the stooped old man he was a few months ago (dreadful knees, despite the replacements) he is taller than he has been in years, his chin up, reminding me of his proud, knowing handsomeness in those black and white rugby team photographs from the '50s. But there is nothing of him in this stance, the women bear all his weight, and they shunt each foot in front of the other with a great effort, interspersing each 'step' with encouraging words.
The trio debrief, and when Dad's asked how much of the walking was 'down to him', he says 'Oh, probably most of it'. The therapists look down and say nothing.

In the 'team meeting' we are invited to later, various nurses join the physios, perched on desks in a tiny office, to summarise what is called, with a little embarrassment, 'progress'. There are no surprises. I look across at my sister and notice how young and old her fearful face looks.
There are no surprises.

There Was A Boy...

....who - on a busy morning, at a busy station, at the busiest time, just before Christmas - walks purposefully into the shadows beyond the platform. He calmly removes his top and shoes, and throws himself under the oncoming train. Over their morning tea, his family hear news reports of a fatality causing commuter chaos. No-one thinks it's him.

In fact, X was roughly my age. But I knew him best some years ago, when we shared a flat, and even then he seemed so young, so - well - boyish. Thankfully, he never lost this quality. It was embodied in a kind of innocence, an inquisitiveness, and a wayward sense of mischief. Despite a fascination with deeply unfunny spiritual people such as Gurdjieff  - and an occasional devotee of their practices - he was never remotely dour about his quest for enlightenment. He was - literally - a clown, a performer by trade, and my memories of life in that flat are of him struggling to meditate crosslegged in our chaotic lounge, his white face panstick-ed and giggling hysterically, very loud Jungle on the sound system. We'd Hoover round him, trying to distract him even more.

I plan for his funeral, and I look out a suitably neat and ladylike handbag. It won't do to lug my usual gargantuan bag, in its jolly orange hue. I check through the temporary bag and find a few things in its depths - a reel of black thread, a tape measure and a Post-It note, which I turn over and read:
"Funeral List: Black dress, tights (2 prs), nude shoes, cardigan, speech"
I realise the last outing for this bag was a funeral, my mother's. I'm a bit startled by the list - it's spare, uncharacteristically neat and orderly. "Wasn't I distraught, bereft?" I think "How come I managed to - for once - make a list??"

When I get to the crematorium for X's funeral, and squeeze in behind the rows of his family. Though it's been years, I recognise each one of them by the shape of their shoulders, now hunched and stiff with suppressed emotion and purpose. X's mother gets through her eulogy somehow, returns to her seat clasping her notes. She's holding it together better than anyone else in the room. Then it's X's brother's turn, he reads from his iPhone, voice faltering and yet he raises much laughter in the crowd, reminiscing about much boyhood bad behaviour. Then a close friend delivers a brilliant and brave speech, explicitly acknowledging that X's death had been a brutal suicide, and eloquently describing this act's emotional ambivalence for all those who thought they knew him best. People are beginning to cry a lot now, and still X's family hold their nerve. I remember this well from Mum's funeral - you're so glad to have something to do, a role, that it's a relief to have a schedule, a list, a speech in your hand. After a death, however it came about, the haunting of those of us left behind, starts in earnest. Could I have done more, stopped this? Will I feel any different, better, tomorrow? So the distracting work of the funeral is welcome. Even a secular service, like this, has much to busy yourself with.

The final music of the service, 'Nature Boy' is devastatingly evocative of the 'very strange, enchanted boy' present in all our memories. I can't bear to think of how it ended -  the violence, the pain that must have engulfed him.

After the service, the dazed crowd mingles outside in the wintery afternoon sun, browsing the floral tributes and organising taxis and lifts to the pub where the wake is to be. I'm struck - not for the first time - by the warmth of strangers at times like these, as we realise and are glad that we were all parts of X's world, and that we aren't strangers anymore.  It feels odd but welcome to be recognising old friends here, catching up, raising a smile through our puffy and teary faces.

When I eventually reach X's father to offer my condolences, he recognises me instantly. He smiles and hugs me, then suddenly crumples against me, weeping. We stay like that for what feels like a long time, and I realise that I have unwittingly taken him back in time, to when his youngest son was that boy, that strange, enchanted boy with his uncharted life stretching limitlessly ahead of him.

It's About Time

Two years exactly since Mum's death, and I spend a solitary weekend on the kind of pursuits that filled most of her life - Gardening, baking, sewing, cleaning cupboards, fruit-picking and making jam. She wraps herself around my every task, especially in the kitchen - her natural domain. I hear her chide my disorganised worktop, she slurps the foam from the jam-spoon with relish, checks my jars are clean, worries about the set.

I haven't written down much lately, apart from lists and administrative emails. Lots of them.
But the writing-in-my-head hasn't stopped, though 'The Closer We Get' - where it all went for 4 years - is done and dusted and out in the world now.

And that feels very strange, and rather sad. Where should all those thoughts on grief and bereavement, joy and wonder, go now? In Julian Barnes' fine book, 'Levels of Life'  - written in the aftermath of his wife's death - he divides the world absolutely, thus - when we are young, by those who have had sex and those who haven't. And then - usually, though not always, later - into those who have grieved the death of a loved one. And those who haven't. Yet, that is.
Perhaps I am now in Barnes' own farther-flung category - those who have shown the world that grief, for a while.

Both the significant and insignificant things I inherited from Mum are now embedded in my domestic and working landscapes, like a matrix of archaeological finds suspended in insignificant mud. But only I would know them as special - I dry my hands on an old striped towel I rescued from her house as we emptied it, I cook with a packet of cornflour from her cupboard, I swallow a vitamin pill from a bottle she began, use her German stapler on my desk.

Mum shared my passion for plants and gardens. In fact it was our strongest bond in my wayward teenage years when we could barely speak to each other civilly, and yet could happily visit the local garden centre for hours together, a boot-full of plants and a treacle scone in the tearoom to recover from the array of choice. She insisted she lacked expertise as a gardener, and yet she effortlessly grew enormous, slug-free clumps of some of the choicest plants we found together.  She always deferred to my tastes when it came to her garden, perhaps regretting it at times. I remember a year or so before she died, she told me, from her wheelchair parked up at the window, 'I really miss that wee patch of lawn we dug up, you know".
For over a year after Mum's death, gardening - which I'd done so habitually since childhood that I wouldn't even call it a 'hobby', to me it was just something I always did a great deal of -  meant suddenly very, very little to me. The ebullience of nature felt like an affront, how dare it return? Gradually though, we have found each other again, and I take pleasure in the imaginary chats I have now with Mum as I garden - she'd 'shoot the boots off that cat' who's done its business in the border, and she'd certainly have those goosegogs in the freezer by now.

I find this plant label (pictured above) at regular intervals during my sessions in the garden now, and it always stops me in my tracks. Somehow I don't want to 'save' it indoors, I want it to live the ad-hoc life it should have had, a life of insignificance, not the life of a memorial. In Mum's neat hand-writing - note the 'dashed' number seven, another thing I inherited from her -  a sowing of hardy annuals is recorded. I hope they came up, and I hope they were beautiful. Because 2007 would be the last summer before her stroke changed everything. Summer 2008 was spent in hospital, windows jammed shut, garage flowers at the end of the bed. The later ones were spent wheeled out onto the specially-modified deck at home, watching me fight back the ever-increasing wildness of the garden and murmuring appreciatively when I brought tiny cut flowers to her table for her close inspection.

Last summer, we planted a young tree in the churchyard garden in Mum's memory - a spot overlooked by the handsome big house that was our family home for over thirty years. It's not doing well, apparently, so out it must come. Mum would be unsentimental about such a thing. I think we should replace it with one from the garden centre up the road, the place that kept us together all those years ago. "Well, what on earth are you waiting for?!" I can hear Mum say impatiently.

Mum in her garden in 2009, with the trowel I made her at school !

On Mother's Day: I am Feeling

I’ve finally watched I Am Breathing, a feature documentary directed by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon, and it inspired me to write the Blog entry below. 

The film documents the last year or so of the life of Neil Platt, a sufferer of Motor Neurone Disease, which also claimed Rose Finn-Kelcey recently, an artist and inspiring former tutor of mine.

The film has been on my radar for ages, initially via our mutual connection with the wonderful Scottish Documentary Institute and then latterly because it’s simply been a huge and deserved success story of a film.

So why did it take me so long to watch it?

In a nutshell – because when you have just lived and filmed an end-of-life story of your own (The Closer We Get) it doesn’t exactly make you hungry for others. Even if you know they will be as life affirming, charming, profound and damned important as I Am Breathing is, you find your appetite veering off to some decidedly escapist film fare instead.

But, of course, the grief of bereavement will get you in the end whatever you are watching. A few months ago I went to see the blockbuster Gravity in 3D, in a small local cinema. I had popcorn and Coke in hand, I was expecting to have fun. From almost the first instant, I was shocked to find myself weeping behind my 3D glasses. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to work out why – a woman, alone, in a dark abyss, trying to fix something she knows probably can’t be fixed.

So to endure I Am Breathing was hard for me. I managed to stay dry-eyed until about half way through - not too shabby. Amongst the people around Neil is his mother, an unimaginably brave woman who has survived the death of her husband and now of her son from the same dreadful disease, as well as Neil’s wife and small son.

So, it seems timely to publish this text about my mum Ann on Mother’s Day, and to dedicate it to the two mothers Neil Platt left behind.

Ann & Karen playing Beauty Parlours

I am Feeling

Exhausted from digging a large plot in the vegetable garden in early Spring, I lie down, utterly flat on the still compacted ground nearby. How seldom I do this now, when as a teenager I think it was a near-daily occurrence, even in the damp West Coast of Scotland. (If further evidence is sought, see final scene of Gregory’s Girl, filmed up the road from my hometown and featuring kids very like we were).

For a spell I gaze upwards into the clouds and the bluest of skies, listlessly tracking the odd bird overhead and feeling the good, cold, dense clods support my body’s form. My breathing slowing, my heaviness reminds me of the body my mother inhabited for those last 5 years, inert bar for her head and neck, and an ever-deteriorating right arm. I remember in the mornings the carers manoeuvring it onto its edges, first one then the other, as solid as clay, a deadweight which must be cleansed and dressed. As the women worked across and along her limbs, my mother’s face held the expression of one who is wondering about a barely perceptible distant sound – the vestigial nerves in her flesh were relaying confused yet tangible sensations she could not quite place. If something was uncomfortable to her, and it often was, she struggled to describe to us how, choosing peculiar words like ‘tight’ and ‘soft’ in an attempt to convey what this new relationship with her body felt like.

The sky above me suddenly darkened and sleet began to fall on my face. It felt wonderful. In such moments when the natural world seems at its most electrifyingly complete and beautiful and part of me and of all of us, I always think of my mother and I usually cry. In a photograph of her as a teenager walking on a beach with a dog, it’s evidently cold, windy weather as she wears a big jumper and a headscarf. But her legs and feet are bare and her face beams with the sensual joy and fun of cold sand and spray. Until her stroke she retained this appetite for earthy pleasures - eating crusty bread, cycling into the wind along the seafront, stroking a supine, sun-warmed cat.

So as I blink in the tumbling sleet, my tears find their path of least resistance from the outer corners of my eyes, down my temples and into my hair, their dampness instantly provoking shivering. I don’t wipe them. Mum very seldom wept after her stroke, it was a very grave sign if she did, but when it happened she could not wipe them, could not lift her hand, and so if I was there I would oblige. But what of the times – there must have been some –when I was not there?

After the stroke, Mum’s short spell in physiotherapy ended with a tacit acceptance that this once sprightly woman, the kind of woman that rarely sat down for long, would be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life. Her damaged eyesight meant a self-drive chair would be impossible. Along with the myriad other dependencies (personal care, feeding, medication, dressing) she was also, suddenly and forever, unable to autonomously decide where she would be and when. After a few months of our caring routine kicking in, I began noticing how listless Mum could become with the clockwork carers visits, the porridge and lukewarm tea, the endless daytime television in the over warm lounge. Her bright blue eyes literally clouded over for days at a time.

What brought back her sparkle was always something unexpected and invariably something sensory, so I became adept at inventing and stage-managing as many of these as I could fit in to her waking hours, and sometimes also into the hours where she was meant to be sleeping but often wasn’t: Whether it was sharing a fruity face-pack or a blast of loud music with our terrible vocal accompaniment, feeding her a very ripe mango or a very salty chip, manoeuvring a furry cuddle from the longsuffering cat Jack, a cold skoosh of Rive Gauche on her neck, an illicit chocolate eaten in bed or a noseful of fragrant sweet peas.

Occasionally these energising episodes also happened without so much pre-planning by me: Shortly after Mum had been returned home from the hospital, we decided to pay a visit an old friend of hers, now residing in a large old peoples home along the coast road. At this stage I’d not yet got used to the fandango of getting Mum into her coat, hat and gloves whilst she was already seated in her wheelchair. But she was patient and after about twenty minutes manipulating awkward limbs and digits and with me in a light sweat by now, I had swaddled her from head to toe and we careered our way out of the house and the close and onto the deserted street. I should have recognised what the peculiar soundlessness and pallor of the day foretold, but keen to reach the beachside ‘Prom’ which had been a daily landmark of her entire adult life I pushed the chair onwards at speed, Mum occasionally complaining good-naturedly over the potholes encountered en route.

Doris, our hostess, was a big, robust woman some ten years older than Mum and suffering from dementia. In her small, neat room, I loosened Mum’s layers and listened in to their conversation, smiling benignly. Doris was convinced that Mum and her had been Wrens in the War together, and no matter how often Mum reminded her of their actual relationship – Mum had been an occasional cleaner and housekeeper for Doris – Doris’ mind would wander off to those wartime escapades she was certain they’d shared. Occasionally Doris would turn to me and speak as if Mum wasn’t there – “She was a gifted telephone operator, you know’. I could not help reflecting on the odd couple they seemed – each with infirmities at such odds with what remained. 

What if Mum had that fit and strong body of Doris’, and Doris could adopt the alert and perceptive mind Mum still had?

We left Doris in time to speed back along the Prom in time for the carers’ mid afternoon home visit, and almost as soon as we were parallel to the pewter gray sea the sky whitened dramatically. A blizzard began and within minutes enveloped us to a dramatic degree – we could barely see 5 metres ahead. By now I was almost running behind the wheelchair, terrified that Mum would be scared and confused, or at the very least rather cross with me for getting us into this mess. Bellowing over the chair handles, I assured her we’d be home in no time, who on earth would have guessed this snow was on its way, etc etc. Snow clung to our every surface, it wasn’t so much falling as propelling itself horizontally onto us. Every hundred metres or so I stopped the chair, dashed round to the front and readjusted Mum’s hat, scarf and collar so that barely her nose and eyes were open to the elements. With every pit stop she was giggling more, until be the end of the journey we were both howling with laughter.

When we finally reached home the carers were already indoors, more than mildly concerned as to our whereabouts given the extreme weather. They gently scolded me for being caught out in that with Mum, but as they removed her layers and the fast melting snowflakes we caught each other’s eye and shared a deeply conspiratorial smile.

The Closer We Get - life becomes film

If you follow me elsewhere you may have noticed my new feature doc The Closer We Get (a hard-won title!) now fundraising on Indiegogo here until end of Sat. Jan 18th.

Much of this film was inspired by writing here in this modest Blog, and getting the occasional lovely message of support from this audience - here has always felt like a good place, where I wasn't writing for work, or because I was obliged to. I always wrote here because I wanted to, and the result is a sort of diary of my last few years, of much sorrow but of some joy too.

And this is what has become The Closer We Get. So I thank you Blogger :-)

I'm biased of course, but I think it's an important film that I encourage you to support, especially if like me you have found yourself suddenly in a family 'car crash', reconfiguring your life and beliefs after something earth shatteringly dreadful has happened.

For everyone who has survived that, and for everyone who will have to in the future, this is a film that must be made. So please - come and be part of that with me.

Managing. Christmas. Expectations.

Ah, Christmas in your hometown. Twenty odd years ago I might have been that girl outside this bedroom window at 3am, making a bit too much racket en route back to her parents' - to late, too many drinks, too high heels, too many school friends to catch up with in the three day (and three long nights) festive home visit.

Now I don't seem to know any of my school friends any more. At least not outside Facebook.I was rather too good at making a life elsewhere for myself, and perhaps they smelled my arrogant derision for this place, the home town that had formed us all, and that I was too good, too interesting for - or so I thought.

Occasionally now I'm in the local Tesco and I suddenly recognise a familiar face from a gym class, a choir rehearsal or a school dinner queue - but now it seems to be set in an overweight and hurried middle aged person - shopping or behind the till. They are looking at me thinking the same, probably - don't I know that tired woman from somewhere?

How did we all get like this? And have they been in our town all those years since school - and if so, doing what? How come I didn't I notice them before, on those annual visits I used to make when all was well and my parents' were conveniently (for us kids) trapped in middle age. Or have they too come back here because of family woe, a private tragedy like ours, something that somehow marks their face and demeanour and makes it recognisable to me again - a mark of some kind, that we afflicted daughters and sons share?

So there's no time off or social distraction from the parents and the house now, and anyhow there's far too much to do here now.
As kids our pre-Christmas calendar was a delicious cycle of homemade tree decorations, carol concerts, un-PC telly comedy and revising lists of what we wanted from Santa. My sister had a talent for wrapping gifts, my hand writing was deemed good enough for the tags. After homework on long December nights we were tasked with sorting the many gifts our family would buy for our nine cousins and all our many aunts and uncles (great and otherwise). Our (real of course) tree was always a breathtaking and magical spectacle in our playroom bay window, and it was a stolen night time treat to kneel silently on the edge of the vast pool of gifts beneath it, inhaling its delicious scent and believing that surely every Christmas for the rest of your life would be this wondrous. My father's huge, stripy rugby socks were hung up on Christmas Eve, four in a row on the mantelpiece. On Christmas morning we would often swear to each other we'd glimpsed Santa's sleigh in the sky as we'd struggled to stay awake, and we always seemed to have literally piles of gifts, plus the obligatory tangerine in the sock toe. Great Auntie Minnie (our ersatz grannie) and her brother Uncle Robert (a cantankerous old Capstan-smoker) would join our family of six for Christmas dinner, our grandparents having long since died. I was an adult before I had the very straightforward realisation that Robert WAS my grandfather in fact, having been Mum's adoptive father. For some reason Minnie had always seemed the important one, the do-er (a feminine traie in our family) and Robert was so repellant to us and so it also seemed to Mum, that I literally failed to make the connection. It wasn't concealed, it just didn't fit my world view that we could be in any way related to such a man.

One of my strongest Christmas memories is however one of disappointment, albeit of a rather hilarious and very Scottish sort. We four kids all raced down one Christmas morning - I think it was 1978 - to find an impeccable child-scale golf bag replete with clubs, under each stocking. The disappointment was crushing - I'd asked Santa for a Girl's World after all (a rather grotesque doll's heads you put makeup on) and had less than zero interest in fulfilling Dad's ambition that I would one day become Scotland's Ladies Golf Champion. The only aspect of this gift I appreciated was that the leatherette of my bag was the very ginger shade of my hair. After examining these woeful presents for a brief spell, my oldest brother Mark turned to us and confessed that he'd found them under our parents' bed weeks ago. And he'd known it would be best to spare us the news and let us keep our Christmas hopes up. Bless him.

Five Christmases ago we'd only just extracted Mum from hospital some six months after her devastating stroke. In the family photo taken after the Christmas dinner, she still wears her cracker hat, poised and regal in her wheelchair, having managed to feed herself her meal. And boy had she eaten. I didn't know then that they starve the elderly in hospital. Not on purpose, but with every discharge since she has been literally famished for weeks. So the event was something of a milestone.

I don't honestly think I expected her to make another 4 Christmases on top of that one, so it's not surprising I'm feeling a little maudlin now. Today I cooked the meal at her house solo for the first time, the baton having been passed around a few siblings and venues before resting with me. My father, my brothers Mark and Campbell, Mum and me ate together - Mum can no longer travel far enough to enjoy a dinner elsewhere. This time, Mum reclined in her vast bespoke lounge chair, a little vacant and under the weather. I positioned myself beside her, where I could split my attention between our plates. Mum's appetite was modest this time, and she can no longer feed herself anything more complex than a bread stick. The atmosphere of the event struggled to rise, alcohol helped eventually as did stories about the family Chuck Berry cassette (one of only 5 our father ever possessed) and our pets. The men all ate my feast very rapidly (and who knows, perhaps appreciatively - they don't say much, the men I'm related to) while I seesaw-ed between Mum's plate and mine, swapping cutlery and bite sizes.

Mark had made a very decent cold dessert, which vied with the traditional pudding, but shortly afterwards he vanished upstairs. Working nights, he has a very odd body clock. Or maybe he just wanted to avoid the washing up. Which he did - he always was a clever boy.

Advanced Retreating

This weekend I've submitted myself to a Meditation Retreat at a local Buddhist Centre, part of the tedious journey of personal development afflicting all middle youth like me.
It's not in fact much of a retreat for me, as I'm an outpatient, sleeping and eating at home and twiddling my thumbs during the generous tea breaks provided in the daily sessions. Twiddling ones thumbs in a Buddhist Centre in fact means eating a lot of the not especially healthy but vegetarian foods that seems to be favoured by the Buddhists, slouching on sofas and wandering in the mud of the lovely if unkempt grounds.

The apparatus of the North Wing Meditation Room is the same shrill, corporate blue of the local kerbside recycling boxes: we don't kneel or sit cross-legged, instead we sit on a conference-style chair with a matching blue foot cushion. Unfortunately this (relative) comfort leads to many of us novices sleeping instead of enjoying a 'journey out of our transparent skins made of light' and it is the distraction of the surrounding snoring that in fact is my meditative undoing. The aesthetics of the place fascinate me: a significant and vast mid 19th C mansion dotted with huge Buddha casts and paintings, each with its offering of packeted vegetarian foodstuffs in front. One could eat for a year from these - I wonder what happens to those rice cakes, the elderflower cordial, the halva when they are past the sell-by date? A resident lay Buddhist gives us a tour but it seems an idiotic question to ask.
Nevertheless it's a fascinating day: Fat is not a Buddhist issue: the monks' robes are - after all - one size fits all, and they freely admit that the banning of stimulants and alcohol leads to a love of chocolate and cake. Most course attendees are women of a certain age and a certain size, so we are all compatible. The state of the gardens attest to a certain lack of physical activity as the Buddhist norm - ah, the limited power of prayer when it comes to weeding.

Our main teaching monk resembles Lenny Henry, except that she has a natural gift for comedy. At one juncture in the soothing babble about business of mind and meditative objects she mentions her predilection for meditating on rhubarb, for the reason that it so repels her and thus offers her a suitably potent meditative focus.
I'm there more for the eyes-shut meditation than the Buddhist theory, which in any case seems only gently promoted (noone speaks above a loud whisper here). The exception is a singalong to a dreadful dirge written by the Centre's founder that punctuates the day. It reminds me of then Church tried to go cool in the late 70's (in some places - like Coniston - it got stuck there) - long hair, guitars, songs not hymns etc. The Founder Monk should have stuck to the day job of promoting world peace, for sure. All I recall is that this Buddhist version of 'All things bright and beautiful' includes the line 'My body is a wish fullfilling jewel' and that we were required to sing (most of us whisper in embarrasment) along with a backing tape at least twice before meditation. Clearly if you know the song by heart - as the monks did - this in itself becomes a kind of sung meditation, as they are no longer squinting at a laminated songsheet with typos, as we novices were. To them this song can become abstract, ritualistic, reassuringly timeless. Oddly this song is our only shared sound and I find myself wishing from some kind of group 'Ommmm' to drown out the snores, coughs, yawns and wheezes that so put me off.

Finally I'm reminded of a recent visit to the church I attended all through my youth, now with my frail mum in her wheelchair. Despite her illness and fading memory, and though it was nearly 25 years since the sung service was a weekly part of my life, we both sailed through the complex Episcopalian Communion bits and bobs, neither of us needing the booklet (which she can no longer read anyway). I can now see that this might be as close to meditation as I've ever been - the confident ritual, the beauty of the language and music, its familiarity cleansing the mind and even offering the body some relief in the gentle seesaw of kneeling and standing. My hand rested on my mother's shoulder as she repeated softly 'Take, eat, this my body, it is broken for you'. The power of these words melded with my intimate physical sense of her - somehow still robust - won't ever leave me.

A New Niche Blog

I've a thing about other people's gardens, so here's somewhere I've started to write about them.
Do join me there if you too share this obscure interest.
http://otherpeoplesgardens.wordpress.com/

“I'm supposed to be indestructible”

My father’s words down the phone-line, as he recuperates after a mini-stroke he has suffered at work in London. Mum – in hospital again herself for stroke-related bowel problems – speaks to him encouragingly via my mobile phone. She tries to gee him up, they share an innate and now rather comic stoicism despite being ex husband and wife - albeit the friendliest you could hope for.
Earlier on that day I made use of mum’s hospital stay by having a big and overdue clear out of her kitchen cupboard, a space that had become chaotic without her fastidious and regular attention. As my brother had pointed out a few months ago, this Mary-Poppins-bag of a place still contained the water bowl and collar of our family dog – dead for some twenty years; a rug beater in a house with no rugs; tennis equipment for a garden with no lawn and inexplicable oddities such as a single shelf bracket and meticulously-dated empty lightbulb boxes. Mum was no hoarder – even as a child I was unsettled by her unsentimental attitude to possessions that had passed their sell-by date – so this space was a surprisingly intimate view of the important minutieae of her life before she became ill.
I had to re-assess many useful things within, now with the acceptance that the bicycle clips would not be needed again, that she would never be able to water a houseplant now, nor mend a fuse. I even found the bag she must have used on the very day of her devastating stroke – complete with an array of cloths for her cleaning job, a tiny notebook recording hours worked, and a foil of nicotine-replacement gum.

As I sorted and re-catagorized the last of the neatly packed and labelled objects I found a frail narrative of her feelings on making the move to this house, after seperating from dad and living alone for the first time in her life: a personal alarm, a front-door spyhole and a number of large locks – all still boxed, unused.

A Kind of Normal

Mum's stable. That's what I tell kindly, enquiring people who - like me, before - have usually heard only the good stories about stroke victims. The "After a few weeks he was up and about" and "When she's tired she walks with a slight limp" stories. After nearly a year visiting mum in the stroke unit, you almost get used to seeing the many younger and sicker stroke victims and their families. But outside, once these sufferers are back in their own homes, they are - of course - as invisible as they were before their strokes. This is one of the challenges for charities trying to raise awareness of this mysterious curse of a disease - the worse sufferers are behind closed doors, not in marathons or in celebrity magazines.

There are times when I wonder if my 'real' mother is simply on a long, long holiday. She'll be back soon, I hope. The lively wee chatterbox, always on her bicycle, nipping to the shops, has left behind this little, bloated and sleepy old person in her place - just to make us appreciate her more when she gets back home to us.
And then, at night as I stand by her bedside once the bustling carers have gone, she will fix me with the piercing gaze she has somehow developed since the stroke and we will speak about something intimate, something she has remembered from our past. Sometimes these conversations are deeper than anything we managed to find time for before. Now we are free from the workaday rituals of mother / daughter relations - sharing shopping, cooking, worrying - we have an odd, luxurious amount of time.

Sometimes I bring her a bit of chocolate in bed. The rules of our childhood have been unilaterally abolished by the stroke: There are no rules now - we can have sweets after bedtime, a CD on while she waits for the night carers; she's allowed to refuse to brush her teeth, yawn without covering her mouth and let the cat onto her bed.

Hugging a tub of flour

A few weeks ago, to my great shock, my mother suffered from what seems to have been a stroke. After last week's visit to her in hospital, where she lies immobilised down one side, I returned to her empty house alone. On a whim, I decided to fill the vacuum by baking my sister - who I was seeing the next day - a birthday cake from us both.
I opened her kitchen cupboards, searching out ingredients, tins and the like. Mum had had her kitchen refitted recently so I wasn't too familiar with the new layout. I eventually found her flour shelf (Mum was always a keen baker) and then the old Tupperware tubs of carefully labelled flours that she'd had since I was a kid in the 70's.
I found the self-raising and stood for a long moment, hugging it very very hard.

Class in the classroom

I was struck by the media's statement-of the-bleedingly obvious last week, about well-to-do and not-so-bright kids overtaking their more gifted peers from less affluent backgrounds.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, my class -like all others in Scottish primary schools at that time - had its fair share of 'wee nyaffs' as my soundly middle-class parents would call them. They'd have a more politically correct title now, but these were kids who lived 'up the back' (i.e in the housing estates at the back of Largs), often in single parent families, and with some quite serious behavior problems. With hindsight I now worry much more about the origins of their problems than I - or perhaps anyone at that time - did: There were a few very small boys who spent any free moment drawing and circulating obscene and anatomically accurate sexual drawings, for example. Much later, these young mens names would appear in the local paper linked to a small-town world of drugs and theft.

Anyhow, I remembered last week about a particular poetry recital competition I had entered for whilst at primary school. I am born on the same day as Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, and as a child had dreamt up a quasi-mystical relationship with the bard due to this concidence. (Virginia Woolf is also born on January 25th, but is/was not quite such an appealing icon)
Many of my fellow pupils competed in the memorising of tracts of Burns' poetry, which were to be performed in front of a stern and vaguely Dickensian panel of Scottish 'elocution teachers' as they were then known. It was a fraught and very competitive environment, given that few children of that age could memorise their full names and addresses let alone 8 verses of weird-sounding Scots poetry.

The school was to offer one star pupil forward to the next regional level of recitals, and as we were efficiently knocked out, a surprise contendor, I'll call him Ian McCabe, emerged. A tiny, under-nourished looking kid with a mum off the rails, he took the classroom floor aback with his energetic recital. Now, I can see Kenny could have grown up to be a Robert Carlyle-like actor, wiry, full of barely-surpressed anger.

As a child I had a prodigious memory (as evidenced by my Higher Maths qualification - didnt understand a single figure but could memorise and repeat all the neccessary data to pass with flying colours). I made it through to a final stand-off with Ian, where we both recited the same poem to the selection panel.
I don't remember the final event, or anything about how the decision was made, but I won the contest against Ian. And I am still haunted by the injustice of that decision, because even then I knew it was a done-deal before either of us stepped up to the podium - I felt it then, nearly thirty years ago, as I do now.

One flavour: Cornish

I was brought up on the West Coast of Scotland, where we know a thing or two about ice-cream. An adopted dynasty of Italians, the Nardinis, had (and I believe still have) the monopoly on the ice-cream outlets of my hometown Largs, and as a people we were so keen on our ice-cream that we were as likely to be seen with a ’99-er’ cone (what has a half chocolate flake got to do with the number 99?!) in a January hailstorm as in the July sunshine.
Cornish ice-cream seemed to me – at that time – something that Mum bought as a cheap ‘standby’, and economical alternative to a (gasp) whole family-size carton of Nardinis, which was a massive, and rare, treat. The Cornish ice-cream was invariably bright yellow, very soft, and tasted like margarine. It came from the supermarket and in one flavour – Cornish – only.

My first trip to Cornwall recently has - you'll be glad to read - expanded my appreciation of the place many times over.
At first I couldn’t quite get over the fact that Penwith sounds like just a comic mispronunciation of Penrith. Of course Cornwall’s bizarre place names are part of its charm, as all the Nibthwaites, Crosthwaites, Slappersgates and Backbarrows are in the Lake District.

I travelled to this far-flung county at the kind invitation of the Newlyn Art Gallery to do a bit of R & D...
Cumbria and Cornwall: From afar they seem broadly comparable – tourist-dependent economy, a far distance from the UK’s main cities, a conservation and heritage-minded public profile, dying industries (farming and fishing). Both counties have their diehard supporters in rose-tinted spectacles (is there a Friends of Cornwall?)...

However, in Cornwall I was struck by how a surprising number of dynamic, ‘can do’ people we met had jettisoned any reliance on the public funders or officially sanctioned ways of doing things; or had found imaginative ways to get round legislation or rules: One guy – a fish merchant whose pilchard-salting factory was had up by EU health and safety police – had turned it into a ‘living museum’ and this apparently meant that his product wasn’t bound by the same red tape. He continued his line of business until the bottom fell out of the Italian pilchard market (I’m not kidding – it did, didn’t you hear?) and now the museum was being converted into flats as he plans to go off fishing with his mate Rick Stein.
Another retired civil servant was restoring a lugger (a traditional kind of local fishing boat) to working order so that it could actually be used as a viable fishing vessel, not a museum piece.

Everywhere we went people - whether they were fishermen or business entrepreneurs - lamented the crippling rules of politicians and the EU. Most got on with it anyway and sadly I think this little shred of fight is what generally marked them out from the Cumbrians I tend to meet. One exception here is Carol, an incomer who fairly recently took on a nearby holiday let / tearoom business. She runs the excellent tearoom on an honesty / ‘pay what you think is right’ donation system, even corralling visitors into digging her garden in return for tea. Naturally this goes down with the various authorities like a lead balloon. I hope they’re not, but I fear the days of her business are numbered.

Anyway back to Cornwall:
The Newlyn gallery staff were a tad – and rightly - preoccupied by an eruption of discontent amongst their membership: the gallery is still has a membership with a say, a precarious situation for any progressive contemporary art organisation operating in the vigorous demimonde of en plein air painting that is Cornwall. During our visit, wherever we went people voiced ill-informed and at times downright bigoted opinions about what was going on at the gallery, the mental health of the exhibiting artists, their own rightful ‘ownership’ of the space as tax payers (surely that’s like me saying that I have a say in who Kendal NHS trust admits for kidney dialysis? Me, I’m happy to trust the appointed...)

The director James is a really nice guy and certainly didn’t strike me as spoiling for a fight, but like most contemporary art curators, he is more used to public apathy than this.

I know a bit about this scenario – a long time ago I worked at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, a place with its fair share of revolting members. In fact, after my time there a successful coup was indeed orchestrated and various staff thrown out.
I asked my boyfriend Adam (he’s the director of Grizedale Arts) for a bit of advice: Grizedale had an – ahem – ‘tricky’ membership, when he joined seven years ago. But the contexts are so different: GA’s members were generally reliably apathetic to the new wave GA, though a few were nostalgic for the days of Ken Dodd in the Theatre in the Forest (they still call the office for his next gig) and Andy Goldsworthy in the leaf mould.

So Newlyn’s very vocal besmocked bourgoisie are a different kettle of fish as they clatter about the prom with their easels: I left wondering if a New Newlyn School of Contemporary Art Appreciation, Tolerance & Debate was needed.
Count me in as a speaker.

Va bene cosy? Italy again...

We're just back from a week in Tuscany and Umbria, a country I lived in for a year back in the mid 90's but have seldom visited since, except for the odd art weekend at Shoreditch-by-the-Sea, aka the Venice Biennale. Back in 93/94 I lived at the peculiar and charmingly archaic institution of the British School at Rome(BSR), a boarding-school like base for all sorts of scholars with all sorts of Italian fascinations - from topiary to Roman Republican coins to cottaging in the nearby Borghese Gardens (I had my own share of less welcome sexual encounters with the exhibitionist men of Rome there too - in particular I recall a dismounted motorcyclist clad in waterproofs who didn't mind at all feeling the rain on one particular body part).

My affectionate memories from the BSR at that time are of lengthy dinners, midnight jaunts to the fabulous library and much simmering sexual tension - could have been our youth, the heat or the epic discussions on Piranesi's 'Great Drain' etching, who knows. I shared a studio with Roddy Thomson, whose art-prank, deeply satirical letters in collaboration with Colin Lowe (later published to some deserved acclaim as The Harang-Utang Letters) were just beginning to be devised. The arrival of Colin's drafts by post were a source of regular hysteria and a good reason to postpone getting down to anything like real work. Roddy is still a close friend, and I remember his final BSR show included a straight jacket made out of one of the School's bedspreads - it seemed to say it all ;-)....I know that the BSR has been upgraded significantly since my time - in fact the Sainsburys visited, chequebook in hand, whilst I was still there - maybe a recent BSR scholar can post a comment and let me know what's changed.

Anyway, despite not venturing as far as Rome, it was of great interest to return to a country which had played such a large part in the early part of my career, if not in the way it strictly speaking was intended to. This return was made all the more intriguing by my holiday reading of Tom McCarthy's great novel 'Remainder' and of Duncan McLaren's 'Looking for Enid'. The author of the former I met a few years back during the R & D of an aborted exhibition on re-enactment by curator Sarah Cook. The book is everything it promised to be at that early stage - a creepy and forensic study of the power of memory and trauma.
Duncan I have known for some years and he was a participant in our film 'Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future', during which he met Kate, who features throughout his present investigation of Enid Blyton. Weirder still, Duncan - who has previously cast me as a re-incarnation of John Ruskin in his novella 'The Strangled Cry of the Writer in Residence' (don't ask) - includes the Bata-ville project in his book on Enid, albeit disguised as a trip in the name of Marcel Proust. Both books are mille-feuilles of memory, Duncan's a more robust (as you'd expect from something on the cheery and relentless Enid) confection than Tom's, but each prone to fissures through which glimpses of personal obsessions amid universal experiences can be seen.

My first impressions of Italy this time round were not great - the vast industrial sprawl between each exquisite hilltown seemed to merge each into the next; the roads were just as crazy but now even in towns the pedestrian seemed a rarity (except for for the enduring ice-cream eating flaneur's 'passigata'). It took a while for me to realise that, of course, 13 years ago I had probably arrived at most of these hilltowns by train, and been remorselessly carried along by the erudite enthusiasm of some BSR scholar so that by the time I was in front of the Piero Della Francesco in question, I was blind to anything but the aura of the treasure in front of me. I remember almost nothing of the journeys of these pilgrimages, apart from once when Nicholas May nearly drove into the car ahead in thick Umbrian fog. It can't be a coincidence that this excursion is not one for which I have find memories: Not only did we avoid near death on the autostrada, we also survived the vast Collezione Burri which was the destination of that particular trip - 5 ex-tobacco warehouses filled by the Italian painter before his death with his morbid abstracts. Bizarrely, we chanced upon the place again during this trip (whilst looking for the nearby folk art exhibition which we would have no doubt ignored as young art enthusiasts) - it felt smaller and more interesting, I nearly asked to see their old visitor book so I could be sure what I'd thought of it in 1993. Adam got the giggles over the ludicrously overblown guide text, and when the stern curator (God, what a job) declared that no they didnt have an available copy for us to take away, it definately wasn't for wont of a photocopier.


How different these 'grand tours' felt now, at once liberated by having our own set of wheels and enough cash for a fine lunch each day, and yet so much more complicated and filled with the distractions of maturity, the small portion that Adam and I have between us, that is.
Adam, this being his first visit to this, the motherload of art, was suitably awestruck at each new 14th century fresco we saw, whilst I dallied on the pews, trying to focus - futile, like I used to do before I gave up yoga. Each revisited masterpiece had, for me, the quality of a photograph or a reproduction - not from art history books, it's too long ago that I looked at any of those - but from my own past visits to see them whilst at the BSR. Tom's book resonated strongly in my mind, as I tried to flick backwards through my memory's card index, to re-experience the moment of their impact on me.

After a few days I began to recognise shreds of the old Italy I had been fond of: there are still old women everywhere, still wearing standard-issue flowery wrapover aprons over their huge chests, still carrying buckets (why? have they just cleaned the church?) or arched over a dusty vegetable bed. The infamous inefficiency of the country is still evident in queues of all nationalities all over railway stations, especially at the timetables which bizarrely are arranged by departure time instead of destination. There are still -magically- almost none of the usual high street suspects such as Starbucks or the Body Shop. The Italian teenagers still don't seem to rebel any further than ordering a chocolate wafer on top of their copettas of ice-cream.

Perhaps Duncan McLaren is trying to tell me something, next stop 'A la recherche de temps perdu' ?

Love shack bay-beee!

Praise be!
Some 4 years since we snapped up what seemed to be the only affordable rural property in the Lake District National Park, we have finally obtained planning permission for what has become known as the "Love Shack" - to replace the mouldy-log-cabin-the-size-of-a-static-caravan, with possibly the LDNP's first bit of domestic contemporary architecture since the portcullis crashed down some time in the 1970's. I'll spare you the details of this torturous and expensive planning process here, suffice to pass on these words of wisdom to anyone thinking of following our lead:
- Don't use a consultant - the LDNPA moves in too 'mysterious' a way for anyone to be much good at dodging their bureaucracy
- Don't expect neighbours and parish councils to hold to my mum's adage 'If you've got nothing nice to say, say nothing" - even if you go out of your way to be inclusive, nimbyism thrives in the LDNP
- Don't give up - go to Appeal if neccessary and make it clear to the planners you intend to see your plans through at any cost

So, many thanks to our friends and families and colleagues who have survived our endless moaning during the process, and here's to the next few months of creating a tiny bit of the future in the Lake District!

Potty time

Last week saw a visit from my three nieces who live in Glasgow, and hence many days and nights of me trying to recreate a temporary 1950's rural childhood for them as they looked on bemused - hiking, nature watches (owls and toads) and wholemeal bread. All things I hated as a child, but that's not the point of course.
Last night we broke out to Ambleside to see the latest Harry Potter film together, surprisingly watchable I thought except for the creepy thirty year old actors in school uniforms. I particularly enjoyed the none-too-subtle 21st c socio-cultural references, which were so leaden they made the Simpsons look like Kafka.
Most striking was the 'Ofsted' sub-plot whereby the 'Ministry' deems the Hogwarts magic school to be below standard and too focused on practical teaching and dominated by rather charismatic and arch staff who the kids love. This regime is replaced by a Ministry-approved Mrs Umbridge (dig the pink Jackie-O in a size 16 - costumes) who preaches theoretical-only magic (ie no wand-action), posts thousands of notices prohibiting absolutely everything and generally is torturous and snide. It's not a complex metaphor, and not unenjoyable either but I'd be interested to know how many kids see it as clearly as their parents must.

When in Barcelona

I was raking around in my handbag for my always elusive mobile phone last week when out came an old sugar sachet from a place we'd eaten last Christmas in Barcelona. It reminded me that I always meant to post a recommendation for the place online:
El Convent, Jerusalem 3, 08001 Barcelona, T 933 171 052
(It' s one minute's walk from the back of the famous food market Mercat de Sant Josep/ La Boqueria on La Rambla de Sant Josep)
There we had a 3 course meal for around 8 Euros, delicious, traditional rustic food in a fascinating old building with friendly but low-key staff.
If you fancy it, read one of my earlier food rants here

Keep the faith

Last weekend we held an Architecture Week event at a log cabin we bought in Cunsey in 2003. For 4 years we have been trying to replace the decrepit cabin with a small contemporary wood and glass house by Sutherland Hussey Architects. The design - on their website - has attracted everything from Sunday broadsheets to Grand Designs, and even if Adam wasn't related to one of them I'd find it hard to fault their credentials, and yet most meetings with the local planners end with them suggesting some design 'improvements' . Even the (failed) Appeal we endured on the first application ended with the Inspector making some 'helpful suggestions' and wondering why we wanted to bother with all this pretentious nonsense - why not just plonk another prefab down?
Thank God I'm not the architect, I'd have to be carried off shrieking, but being the 'client' is no easy ride either.
As anyone who has tried to engage with the Lake District National Park planners will tell you, they're not a bunch to embrace contemporary architecture readily, being much keener on slate-clad walls, cute pitch roofs (Brazilian slate since ours is too expensive, is fine tho') and faux-heritage trimmings. Being a very special National Park they can largely ignore the shift in national planning policy towards 'greening' architecture and accepting that Modernism is here to stay and actually rather nice to live in. Instead we see endless, poorly built perpetuations of Lilliput Lane / Beatrix Potter style houses - Disneyland actually does them better, using better building techniques and attention to detail.

Anyway, back to the event. An amazing 30+ people found our tiny, remote site and an informal support group for self-builders and lovers of good architecture, emerged over cups of tea. After years of neighbour trouble and planning friction, it was genuinely moving to meet like-minded people who loved the design and were willing us to succeed and not give up! I had heard of urban Architecture Week events with noone attending, so was amazed to find that in the heart of what seems the most conservative place in England, there is a healthy group of dissenters.
Let's hope we can keep the faith long enough to do everyone proud and build the darned thing.

You can read Adam's blog about the event here.