While the day dragged, mopping up dropped tears, Evan gazed beyond the trees to where an orange sun bled through the thick white cloud. Swell me with regret, sweet rue of bitter moments, Passed like sweetmeats before my eyes. Let me enjoy their passing. It is a sullen joy. Evan's seat grew warm as the hours wound around. But he did not move. The orange sun sank silently, and the cloud remained.
Excerpt from Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage, Byron.
Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,—could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe—into one word, And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; But as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.
Years Ago
She is still sleeping. Even now, at 10.20am she has only slept five hours. So sleep on. I tried to wake her an hour ago, selfish fool that I am, knowing I shan’t see her again until after the weekend. I said something ‘premature’ last night that she quite rightly attributes to sentiment. But what a sentiment! I didn’t know sentiment could be so powerful. Perhaps I’ll open a sentiment spa and serve it to my guests.
The Street is Their Stage (Gambit Magazine, New Orleans)
The crowds stopping traffic on Decatur Street speak for themselves. Passers-by might glimpse a baton in mid-flight, or a streak of flames bursting into the air.
In Jackson Square itself, the milling crowds take their pick from jazz bands, break dancers and unicyclists. Occupying street corners and vacant podiums, the mimes work miracles with their lithe bodies and unworldly expressions. Clowns mesmerise children with balloon tricks only the under fives can understand.
Jose Eduardo Tama is one of the more recognisable street entertainers in the city. His one-man act that encompasses magic, juggling, comedy and theatre regularly draws the two or three hundred people needed to fill the small, half-moon fountain area near the Moonwalk on Decatur Street. For him, New Orleans has been the perfect base from which to practice his art. Its well-educated blend of tropical and European influences gives him the freedom to develop his talent and at the same time pursue a career as a painter.
Jose came to New Orleans four years ago, to escape the stresses of life in New York, his home town. Although he makes many trips to perform at arts festivals in Europe and the U.S., he considers New Orleans his permanent home. For the more talented street performers, New Orleans streets provide the exposure needed to move on to the more lucrative contacts, such as commercials and private bookings. But in a town where ‘lagniappe’ is the password for anything that doesn’t require an invoice, a town made famous for ‘The Greatest Free Show on Earth’ it must be a matter of some diplomacy to actually profit from what some would be surprised to learn is often a full-time career.
Jose has his money pitches handled. His years of experience have built a stockpile of ‘pay me’ approaches. “Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the more money you give, the more money I have. I’ve given you all I can give you. Now you owe me .” When you’re asking people to show you the colour of their money in public, comedy is essential. As Jose points out, performing on city streets is no free stage. Jose and friends pay $74 annually for a permit to operate.
Even with a permit, life as a street entertainer is not always fun and games. In a city renowned for its liberating atmosphere, performers often find that heckling comes easily. More than once Jose has packed up early because of persistent yells from a gathering of those who have too much to drink. There are also those rules to be followed: one performer, Jose recalled, once spent the night in jail after being arrested in mid-juggle. On one occasion Jose was even asked to move on by a high-ranking member of the church because his audience was too loud. And them of course, there’s the inevitable rain.
In an area such as the French Quarter, however, where almost all events except eating take place on the streets, such small problems don’t prevent the continuous flow of touring musicians and troubadours eagerly seeking fame, fortune and an alternative lifestyle. The French Quarter remains one of the top three locations in the country for street performers. Only San Francisco and New York can rival New Orleans’ impromptu stages and eager audiences.
Throughout the coming months, and again again in the fall, the French Quarter will be the site for a whole spectrum of entertainment lost to a generation of couch-potatoes. Carnival passes, but the parade continues.
Ebb Tide (2001)
There’s a town in North Wales I remember well. The Dovey River comes down from Snowdonia, winds gently through the coastal hills, and greets the Straits of Man in a wide, flat estuary called an aher in Welsh. The town of Aberdovey sits snug in a cove against the hills – dozing slate giants mantled with a thin layer of earth to make the walking easier. When the tide ebbs and tips the little boats on their sides, the rippled beach, cratered with ponds, stretches out to meet the bar – almost too far away to see.
Our house was at the very tip-top of Gibraltar Terrace – past the butcher’s and the little shop that sold News of the World and fresh milk in bottles. It wasn’t really a lane, Gibraltar Terrace, but more a vertiginous path cobbled with stone and high-walled on both sides. It wound upward, ever upward, to the little cottage perched on a cliff, with the red door and the shroud of wild roses that grew wilder every year.
In a wooden box in the attic of the cottage at the top of Gibraltar Terrace was my collection of holiday toys. Every July since I was five this box awaited my arrival, and every year the contents became larger and more respectable. There were figurine soldiers, and personnel carriers, and scale-model trucks; there were bright-orange crab lines – tangled and reeking of brine- and little wooden frames to wrap them around; there were spades for digging and buckets for dredging, and wire-framed nets for interesting things the tide left behind.
It rarely rained in Aberdovey in the summer but when it did the box held cards to play, and a game called Pairs that one day I rigged so expertly I never lost a set until I was twenty-one. There was a toy shop in the town that was open ’til six, the kind of shop that – come July – burst its bud with beach balls and kites and bathing towels and racks and rows of snowshakers and shell beads – all tagged with lurid green labels that grew more ragged as the summer, and the beach-sticky fingers of children wore on.
On certain days the beach became a battleground, where grey armies of the Wehrmacht, retreating over the beach blanket, succumbed to the superior forces of the British desert army who, being buff coloured like the sand, always returned to the box fewer than before. When the fighting was done, the bucket and spade came out, and the limbs of slumbering parents would disappear beneath mounds of shovelled sand. Then the yellow bulldozer – my favourite – a miniature replica with real rubber tires and a tiny man behind the controls. Under my gaze it grew to full size until I forgot myself and became the driver, ploughing industriously through golden sand, ploughing around the legs of giants, ploughing past thermos flasks the size of lighthouses. At low tide, the little man and his yellow dozer journeyed out to the water line where the sand was wet and pliable, and raised grand castles on the bar.
When the world turned on its axis, and the mussel-crusted pier sank low in the water I would go crabbing – with my line, my bucket and a packet of meat from Griffith the butcher. Crabbing was man’s business and required the best tackle money could buy. There was an assortment of weights in the box – rings of lead with nodules that served some purpose I never discovered – and blue steel hooks wrapped in neat, wax paper bags. On a good day my bucket bristled with blue-backed crabs. It was very nice to peer in occasionally, and watch them blowing tiny bubbles, climbing over one another and making a crackling noise like pocket pebbles. When the time came to go home, I’d pick them out with my small, careful hands and watch as they floated back down into the greeny briny gloom.
Nineteen seventy-two was the year the yellow bulldozer, with its real rubber tires and articulated bucket, did not return to the box that went back in the attic on the second Sunday after our arrival. It stayed on the beach, buried in the same hole its driver had dug and then abandoned. I try to explain to myself, even now, how I could have lost my yellow bulldozer. At what point did my imagination falter? At what point did my grip on that busy little dozer loosen just enough to let it go, to leave it behind in the sand? The next year, on the first morning after our arrival, instead of pulling down the wooden box in the attic, I went sailing with my father. All afternoon I roamed the exposed sands, half-heartedly searching for my yellow bulldozer with its little man inside. But the search was in vain.
Caveat. March 2nd 2021.
This blog was established on February 28, 2021 at approximately seven o’clock in the evening when I waved my ‘phone’s QR reader over the screen and the fee was instantly deducted from my account. The following hours were spent mostly shouting and cursing, as an indirect and unintended result of which my core strength was improved through many small, reflexive muscular contractions.
Today, the field is mostly mine. I’ve planted my flag. Hence, the caveat. I’m posting and splitting editorial hairs. It’s a process. Excuse, if you will, typos, misspellings, poor grammar and, most of all, poor judgement borne of innocence. I will get around to fixing it all. Eventually.
Behind Those Shaded Eyes
Goodbye Jack.
Attendant upon death, particularly that of a relative, a close friend or a pet, are the rituals and learned behaviours designed cleverly to distract us from the horror of death – and especially the unattributable cruelty of premature death – that get us through those first few hours and days. Those first few hours and days. The brutal, butcher’s rendering of our reality’s comfortably-aligned fabric that we cannot possibly turn away from; the chasm that opens before us; the recorded fact confronted, that reaches out impertinently and slaps us in the face, again and again, leaving our salted skin reddened and raw. The answer will not come, will never come, and yet we must ask, again and again: why? why him, or her? Why now?
On September the 24th, a cloudy Tuesday morning, I finally gathered Jack in my arms, his remaining front leg lolled over my shoulder. I’d had to drag him from under the bed where he’d retreated spooked by his preserving instinct. Under the bed; always the last resort, inevitably.
We imitate the professional insouciance of our vet – compassionate but efficient. We muffle our ears from the voice that tells us, stop! We pull shelves aways from walls, we drag furniture aside, lift chairs and reach behind sofas. We are sheep shearers, cattle prodders, heartless cullers, late-for-school chastising parents. Finally, we are the bailiffs of death and our pain does not spare us from the irrascibility of impatience. We want this all to be over.
Jack feels heavy in the carrier as we walk the half-mile to the vet’s clinic. The carrier rocks back and forth as I walk. Bumpy ride for Jack. Then the thought, Jack is a bag of bones compared to three weeks ago. His vertebrae are countable, his haunches are hollowed out. I’d convinced myself he had a kidney disease, or some hormonal imbalance Google said was common to felines. He does have one leg less than he had a year ago. Cancer had dissolved his femur at the shoulder. We’d gone through the drama of amputation and recovery – and then the expatriation and beginning a new life in a new country – but his long term prognosis wasn’t certain. Of course it wasn’t. Every day I woke to Jack’s eyes – sleepy and green – staring into mine, inches away, imploring breakfast, was the confirmation I needed that death can be eradicated from consciousness if only one feels enough, tries hard enough, for long enough.
At the clinic my attention always lingers momentarily upon the clean, stainless-steel examining table. The space between examination and autopsy can so quickly collapse. Cold steel. Jack turned to look at me as the vet squeezed his mid-section and winced. Cold, clinical steel. That animal you’re squeezing now, like a bag, I recall the very day I brought him home and opened the cardboard carrier box given by the shelter, watching him emerge, cautiously, tiny and wide-eyed with that soft, kitten sheen, thrust into a sensory wilderness in my unproven care. The steel examining table. He turned his head and gave me a look – a certain stare. And wanting (expecting?) to think that, at that moment especially, he was communicating something to me alone, I looked back and I thought, Jack is asking asking me: when can we we go home? I’m really not enjoying this.
The next half hour passed in what seems now a state of unseemly haste. Indoctrinated into the veterinary creed, I concurred with the prognosis. Nothing more to be done. We could take this approach but of course…. quality of life, inevitable, likelihood, months maybe, suffering, prolongation. Better to… . It’ll be quick and painless. Would I like to hold him?
A pinprick in the rump and after perhaps thirty seconds Jack exhaled, heavily and noisily, and was still. I waited to watch his chest rise again, but it lay flat. And there it is. There, he was. Our journey together at an end. For Jack, no more. Never more. Jack was, like us all, a tiny spark ejected from the universal fire. I was unprepared. It didn’t yet make sense. As if it could: the excision of life, the bridge to love, sense and graspable meaning. With the tick of a clock’s hand, delight in body warmth and slowly blinking eyes passed into a future of memories and shelved photos.
I walked home, blubbing, shamed by the flimsy, now empty carrier. It’s another morning in the neighbourhood; the world is unmoved by the commonplace horror of another death, and my beloved, three-legged Jack with three black dots on his toes, will no more be in need of his breakfast.
Untitled. February 21
I find I am awake, disembodied. Dawn’s first penetrating light flecked off the green, dewed leaf. A vast, strafed maw, a dark chasm appears. Now fears, poorly forgotten, borne like ungainly sacks, resurge to haul me over the edge.
Highgate (Excerpt)
“Give her a shove, Brian, for fuck’s sake!” Michael groaned. Claire was very nearly over the fence but her long winter coat had become snagged on an overhanging tree branch and her trespass into Highgate cemetery had been momentarily halted. Not one for delicacy, Brian didn’t hesitate in promoting the upward progress of his girlfriend’s buttocks as she shimmied the last few inches over the iron railing fence. She landed with a comforting sibilance of crushed leaves and disappeared through the bushes that lined the perimeter path The two of them quickly followed. The others were already inside by an point of entry, but they would meet up on the path that ran the perimeter of the cemetery.
Claire’s plan was unanimously agreed, if not with equal enthusiam. It was approaching the end of October and it seemed appropriately mischievous to Claire that they should infiltrate the hallowed ground of Highgate Cemetery. Everyone who knew Claire realised that the prospect of being able to boast among friends of having carried off with aplomb another risky endeavour was the primary consideration. Hers was the broad masterstroke. Others could work out the details.
