winter wonderland

Living amongst the chaos of unpacked boxes and no place for anything I wondered whether the trusty selection of Christmas music would find its way out from the shadows into the open this year. And yes... much digging later the familiar battered cd and tape cases appear mysteriously next to our make-shift music system. Evie sings again, proclaiming the same old message of her title track Christmas: A Happy Time. Other less hopeful artists... Monkaton for example, have their own slightly more cynical takes on this happy Christmas concept. And while fixing our eyes on the manger scene can fill us with peace and joy if we let it, there often seem to be far too many difficult distractions that demand the gaze of our eyes long before we make it to Bethlehem. Our consumerist society demands that we demand to find happiness at Christmas, but most of us struggle greatly to do so of our own accord and it’s not long before you here anxious whispered hopes that this yearly burden will all soon be behind us again... Escape back to struggling only with mundane day to day realities. Escape!

This Christmas day all pre-prescribed Christmas stress was strangely bi-passed. At least for a brief and wondrous glimpse, as I jumped through an unclosed loop hole into a peaceful winter wonderland. Gently snow clad forest paths glowing in the slowly setting sun, leading to a still, still lake, semi-frozen and framed with icy mist. Yet family frictions follow closely... A porky chap with reddening nose leans against the entrance gate mumbling angrily, ‘you see my **** family, to tell them to ********* well hurry back’ he demands. But even he fades gently away into the background leaving us to tramp along in slowly expanding mangeresque peace and joy...except for the ducks... the wildly ravenous hoard of hooting ducks that follow us around our picture book circuit remind us gently that the Christmas peace and joy comes also through reaching out and meeting needs and selflessly seeking not for happy consumption but for a peace beyond our everyday understanding, that can lead us through all the storms along the way.

BCN metro musings

I wonder why traveling on Barcelona metro doesnt freak or stress me out nearly as much as the London Underground. Perhaps it is because it isn't so far below the ground and is somehow more airy and less chlostraphobic. I`m imagining that we are not so far down beacuse mobile phones seem to work....so youre now just cut off from civilization`...stuck panic-room stlye in a dark black sewer tube.

But then again...if the whole tube network is that much closer to the surface...doesnt that make it all quite architectually unstable... will the city some day soon collapse into lines 3 5 and 6? Hmmm.

Maybe it's because Barcelona city council provide free music for traverlers waiting on platforms. And how can you be intimidated by a system that plays- unconsciusly one imagines -Christmas music in July and a mixture of the Beatles and Oasis in December.

Maybe the security announments also help... smoking is not allowed but jumping down onto the metro tracks is strictly not and never allowed... one feels they have a sensible health and safety prioritisation going n here. Our best interests at heart. Though fines seem to be in opperation for smoking but not for rail jumping. 30 euros and 5 cents. Why the 5 cents? Why?

O...and there is also music provided both on the metro journey and in the metro entrances. The journey music varies substantially but has one thing always in common – there is a soloist of some sort accompanied kareoke style by an onwheels kareoke machine. Solists include acordianists, guitarists, clarinetists and in more traditional mode ...singers. This is more financially complicated than the town hall station music...which is included in the price of your ticket. The quesiton is ...how much do you pay...its a voluntary contribution sometimes encouraged by soloist's accomplice who does a run of the carriage with a plastic cup. I look eagerily to see whether people set a lead worth following and see that it tends to be people with greying hair and wrinked knowledge reaching deep for purses and small change. How many times a day should you reach deep for if you make numerous metro journeys I wonder...and should payment be based on merit , or pity or both or neither. It's hard to say.

The most difficult soloist to listen to is the wailer... she screachs dramatically and operates without a backing tape of any description...'ooooo wooooooooooooo is me....have mercy....millk for my poooor children......' the strangest part of this performance is the sudden visible cut from on-scene to backstage as she preparess to disembark and begin the play again.

Most solisits in metro entrances do have backing music of some description – not normally any wailers there....though there are the beggars-opera style setups which can be inevitably more disturbing than wailing, as malformations are competitively displayed to best advantage... with the weather turning cold there is something infinitely unsettling in seeing 4 splitting red stumps cruelly exposed to the inclemment wind... and bringing out deeper levels of cynicism I wonder how poor 4-stump got to target place a and who the money in the collction pot would be going to.

In contrast to this some of the soloists do raise a smile. One panpiper in metro entrance c was playing a tune called flower song.... strange. I played that on the piano many years ago except my brother told me that I was missing the light fluffy character of the whole thing...and that it sounded like the poor flowers were stuck in the mud...or was it that it sounded like people were wading through mud, one or the other at any rate. Panpipe man was doing a much better job than me, though amazingly it must have been the current backing tune on the block because at the following station there was soloist number two also having a good bash at it, but this time playing the recorder and sounding not so much like a mud discourse but more like a stormy sea discourse...this poor soloist hadnt even made it to kareoke machine level and was still stuck with backing music coming from a portable cd player...and it sounded like he could be stuck with it for some long time to come...unless there are mechanisms of purchase in that world that I know nothing about. Hmmm. The flower song, I think I'll get that out and have another go at it when I get home.

Full Moon Forest

image adapted from: http://thecorner.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/full-moon-oak.jpg


Poetry has been described as a means of making simple topics complicated but as the historian Frederick Lewis Allen noted “Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.” The following is an attempt to describe a late evening wander in the Forest of Dean last week. Stunningly beautiful!


Full Moon Forest

Glistening pathways
Snake inwards,
Lost islands
Clutter together
Whispering stories
Reflected in the full moon shadow;
Our giant blundering boot-steps
Crush them one by one.

A sudden flash. Not the wind
But a grunting deer outline
And another,
Eagerly pursued by
Out of work sheep dog
White tail framing
Beatific chase.

Then with quiet calm
And eerie restraint
Leafless branches hush.
The moon’s muse
Engraved in black ink
Across narrowing trail.
We sense the command and
Poised spellbound
Watch
As we too
Are painted into crescent portrait.

Blood and Rain

These days I am feeling the affects of the mysterious percentage of gypsy blood flowing through my veins, as I rarely spend more than two nights in the same location at a time. Constant movement, minimum possessions (somewhere there are a whole load of boxes containing all my stuff but I haven't needed any of it in the last few months since its storage, and so I guess it's not all that important), and long train travel engender random ponderings: life, origins, identity, identity. I should note that British National Rail services, alongside London Underground Services, very much help to cultivate this line of thought as long delays and cancellations become part of the daily process. Another instigator has been the typical set of circumstances that are created through meeting a whole lot of new people who ask the same old question: 'where are you from?' which is a sort of synonym of 'who are you?' ...or is it...

I don't really know where I'm from but does that lead to me specifically questioning who I am? Perhaps. I guess it led me last week to the Odeon, Covent Garden to the opening of the DLAFF (discovering latin america film festival). The film was Jorge Navas' controversial 'la sangre y la lluvia'. (blood and rain). Set in Bogota, my birthplace, the film relies on stark realism to present the darker side of the city. Years of working for tv advertising set Navas off on a rebellious trail, in a refusal to play the commercial, capitalist fool. As Navas himself asserts, just as we are about to begin viewing, it's not meant to be light entertainment. I rediscover the streets of early childhood, mediated through the harsh night life of the city. It's not just drugs, sex, violence and death however...the filmatography is stunning, at times quite beautiful...leaving a radiant, though brooding, landscape imprinted ...to be taken away and contemplated. The message is also more than 'don't get in a taxi at night in bogota...or indeed...don't ever leave your house if you can help it' There is also love...and the potential for human connection and hope that this connection might one day be more durable.

The shocking discovery came at the end of the showing, in the director's question and answer session. There were numerous angry Colombians there who seemed to question how Navas could dare to show such a portrayal of their beautiful country to the wider world (the film has made quite a hit in numerous important festivals). 'Why didn't you think it would be better to show something more lovely...more... ?' they challenge him. 'We go to the cinema to escape' another protests. Navas is unfazed by these questions, though a little saddened, and he answers calmly. 'You can't escape the reality of your own day-today existence' he states. 'It must be faced...and if it can be changed in some way it must first be challenged in some way'. 'This is a part of our identity'.

Time worth pondering over this is not lost time then... perhaps I should be more grateful for the train delays that enable such a luxury.











ps - I guess I should acknowledge stealing a google picture which I played arounda little bit with to create the above - original accessable at: http://www.worldsbestlanguageschools.com/Bogota_Colombia2.jpg

maybe the language school is actually in one of these buildings...

Sausages

Recently becoming a little self-conscious about the shape of my fingers and toes I began a daily survey of those I spotted on others, in order to rate the normalness of my own. A very good place to do this is on the tube. The vast realms of recent tube-inspired art have dwelt much on the amazing people spotting opportunities at your fingertips ...so to speak. In a colleague's descriptive terminology... shits and giggles. My first impressions of the tube led me to picture the masses as oversized and underimportant rats, being hoarded down the sewer pipes ...by the establishment pied pipers. The establishment pied pipers probably have long pied wily pied piper digits...but the digits displayed by the city rats vary vastly. Many have traveled far, many are spreading unknowingly the winter germs around, some were definitely not washed this morning and some have come directly from Miss Posh and Poncy Nail Parlour. Some are protected from the inclement weather by oversized fluffy gloves...or are the fingers themselves oversized...in which case the gloves would be acting as quite a cunning masquerade.... Some are tightly wrinkled, each crevice has a long dark story to tell, some are soft, gentle and seemingly Innocent. Some are tense, anxiety clutching the metro that the eyes are not focusing on, and others nervously tap out a late arrival. Some tap less intensely, in time to the stop/starting , the opening/closing and some tap in tune to mp3 music that must surely be on full volume to overcome the deafening rumble ..but then why can't we all hear the music each time the train stops at a station...maybe the earphones are just earplugs to block out the closeness of other rats? Some fingers touch a partner...some hold back form touching...but want to all the same. And some fingers look just like sausages.

I want to see whether any toes look like sausages too... but toes are much harder to spot in November...even with the vast eccentricities offered by the sewer world. I have to imagine peoples toes by the shape and style of their shoes. This imagining makes the toe variety ...endless.

little rays of sunshine

Eeyore days can get off to a good start when, having dragged yourself out of bed to get on with endless amounts of uncertain work, you look out the window and simply feel miserable. It's practically dark outside and drizzling a pathetic type of rain with a secret potential to soak through to the skin, and putting on the light makes all scroogish sentiments rise to the surface. It's even possible, you think, that the electric company is playing with the weather, to reap in their oversized profits. Nothing is possibly going to be good about today.

But... if you concentrate on uneeyorelike thoughts and look hard enough there may well be some little rays of sunshine to make you smile. There were several for me today.

A peregrine falcon landed on the upper branches of the tree at the bottom of the garden. With the bird spectacles kept handy in the conservatory the feathers burst into life, the white-chocolate tummy protruding proudly. Predator shakes lazily and begins preening, ruflling up, gently nibbling. Of course I got just a little bit too excited coming back an hour later, convinced that Mr. Peregrine had gone and come back with Mrs. The bird spectacles dashed me down, revealing only a crow and a collared dove. Sometimes we do see what we choose to...in my case quite a lot.

Later, braving the icky drizzle, taking over-excitable walk-deprived dog down to the forest edge, a small child buried in galoshes and bright pink raincoat was merrily jumping in each of the mud-brown puddles in the clearing, giggling and pleading, 'may I jump in the next one too mummy?'. I wished I also had put on wellies! Dog made up for it by doing plenty of splashing and wallowing. He has a piglike desire to get down and dirty with any type of mud.

On the way home I noticced that the neighbourhood fetish for enstalling old-style red phone boxes in once's front garden has grown...Perhaps I'll look on ebay now to see how they are priced. ;->

remembrance

The soothing sort of pitter-patter rain that acts as a therapeutic lazy morning lullaby encouraged myself (and the cat) to roll over and press the snooze button a few too many times until the nagging feeling that I was supposed to be somewhere became a sudden urgent panic that I probably wasn't going to get there on time, and I certainly wouldn't be having breakfast. I wonder how different my life would be and whether I would feel any positive results from less pitter-patter snoozing and more tea and porridge.

I don't often expect much of a Sunday-morning church turnout these days...and certainly not when the service is being held outside and the pitter-patter has become a windy downpour. This remembrance Sunday it felt like the whole of this small, unknown town had turned out to gather around the cenotaph. Hearing the names read out of the fallen ... First World, Second World ...Wars was not the sentimentalist play of history that is perhaps at times can be, but rather a very real enforcement of so many suffering here and now. Solemn army presence evoking tears and a helpless anxiety.

The vicar, white robes soggily clinging to a bony frame, prayed a simple pre-scripted prayer:

"O God of truth and justice

we hold before you those men and women

who have died in active service:

in Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

As we honour their courage and cherish their memory

may we put our faith in your future;

for you are the source of life and hope

now and for ever. Amen"

A peaceful silence descended briefly ... swept away with the closing lines of the prayer, but offering still the distant possibility of a tangible hope lying beyond ourselves. And what else could more fully explain so unusually large a performative act, if not the search for hope?

Cake

Cake! Baking it, designing it, eating it. Good for the soul. Good for creating time to contemplate life, love, the universe etc. Cake makes time out with a friend in a snug coffee shop a great indulgence. Cake celebrates every occasion, is a useful tool to demonstrate both thanks and repentance. Gaile Parkin brings the Rwandan capital to life through the medium of cakes. Baking cakes in Kigali is a gentle but terrifying rebuke to the western reader, a moving insight into the aftermath of empire, racial tension, war, and the simple but profound efforts taken by one solatary, hurting figure, to reach out to the community. Angel's unique cakes uncover the daily horror of survival but begin to offer quiet comfort and hope, bringing in return a slow but certain measure of healing for the deeply-proactive and extremely human baker.