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.

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.

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.