Happy birthday Jon

I reversed into a concrete pillar but seemed to do damage to neither it nor the van; lost in the stand-off with the driver of a big red bendy bus who had run a red light at Norton Street then wouldn't budge from a parking spot I wanted to reverse into; had my driver's side thumped by a P-plater who lost patience with our stand-off at which point I got out the way because my morning was not going well.

Sweat drenched my shirt because I've not been drinking enough, which sends my paralysed system into a mildly stressed response.  I had difficulty transferring out of my driver's seat onto my wheelchair.  I could have wept but that would have changed nothing.

But I found the book I wanted as a birthday gift for Jon Simpson, 60 today.  And a card.  And a pleasant, enthusiastic young woman gift wrapped the book with red paper bound with purple ribbon (which seemed to please her).  And Spike found some decent enough wine in a nearby bottle-shop.  So the morning got better, even if my transfer back to my driver's seat was beyond my currently reduced capabilities.  (I'll worry about THAT another time.)

By the time we reached the wharf at Leichhardt to meet the water taxi I remained sceptical about that whole notion but I was thawing out enough to go with the flow. Its cheery, light-spirited pilot / driver / whatever helped hugely.  He seemed happy to be alive, pleased to offer help, joyful at the weather and enthusuiastic about ferrying me and Spike across the water to Rodd Island.  Martine Hero's brother-in-law, Bruce, and her sons Daniel and Alec were willing helpers, bumping me down a couple of steps then on to the prow of our little yellow and white ship.  By the time Spike helped me off at the Rodd Island wharf, almost perfectly level with the raised deck I was sitting on thanks to fortuitous tides, our two-minute trip on the mill pond that was Iron Cove, through the gentle breeze from the boat's passage, had blown away the bad start to my day.

We had a lovely, lazy afteronon.  Jon and Rosie were clearly happy.  Rosie's choir sang three songs.  I made an impromptu speech at Rosie's request and to Jon's pleasure.  I saw Doug and Martine and some of the Brisbane crew I've not seen for two years; met again some pleasant folk I'd not seen since Jon's fiftieth and was introduced to others I'd not met before.  There was too much food, armies of ants, sparkling wine and a giant chocolate cake.  It was a good birthday for my friend of 35 years and the irritations of my frustrating morning are and were irrelevant to that simple truth.
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Curry and a DVD

Some Fridays need to end this way.  (Memento, 2000; decent movie)

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The tipping point

sit on the edge of creation
not long after pimordial soup,
stirred by the hands of God (perhaps)
weilding a big stick that might be
a long-handled spoon
and speaking softly, comes
to the boil and is torn asunder;
each atom split from the infinite
by forces known as physics,
chemistry, quantam mechanics
and something called string theory
tied up in a bow of speculation,
hypotheses upon hypotheses,
uncertainty and guess work
heaped upon maybe this and
possibly that but all now subject
to the laws men make and remake
every time the need arises
to explain the silent screaming.
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Above and beyond the call of duty

And today's number is ...

53

We dined with Amelia, Shazza, Ken, Deb and Jon at the exhuberantly busy Flying Fajita Sistas, in Glebe.  The food is decent enough (and obviously popular).  I have a tendancy to forget that anything one is required to spoon into a tortilla that's then rolled like a cigar is going to be a minor challenge to a man with my lack of finger function.  There was no great disaster and I was eased gently into my fifty-fourth year with plenty to read.  Thanks Spike for more than just the lemon ode.

Lemon ode! How very droll.

Sad old man.
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First essay finished ...

This essay will show that it is essential to The Aeneid, an epic poem extolling piety and duty, that Dido’s love is fired by how a dutiful man behaves (rather than tells his story) so that the destructive consequences of demonstrably gendered disregard of duty, and female defiance of male authority, lead inexorably to the collapse of self, State and the operation of law, order and good government.

1200 words.  It's a start.

More than an idea, not yet a plan

No. 1 on the list here of the top 100 North Carolina songs.

“Samson and Delilah” by the Rev. Gary Davis Where to even begin with this one? You could start with his unique finger-picking that was fundamental to the Piedmont blues style. Or you could point to the countless blues, country and rock musicians who he influenced. “Samson and Delilah” is a traditional work most notably recorded by the Grateful Dead for their Terrapin Station album, which instantly became a crowd favorite. Though, Bob Weir may have never known it had Davis not taught it to him.

I prefer the PP&M version.  
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UK Election

I read an interesting article in The Guardian today in which well-known, highly regarded writers recalled elections when they were growing up.  The article is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/10/writers-election-memories

I wrote my own (spontaneous) recollections as a result and posted it to the comments site linked to the article.  Who knows why?  It’s vanity probably or a need (mine) to assert that I too passed this way.  Here is what I wrote.

Funny old world.  My father (who died in 1974 - the year Jackie Kay, with whom I shared a year or two at Stirling University, recalls) was a friend of Alick Buchanan-Smith.  I was 2 years old when Ian Jack answered the door in Fife. Our family lived in a single-end in Glasgow.  Hell would have frozen over before my parents or their parents voted for a man like my dad's friend Mr Buchanan-Smith.  But he did call him a friend.

By 1974, my grandmother had been moved from her room and kitchen (60 years without an inside toilet) in Glasgow's East End ... they called it de-canting as I recall ... to the 'new flats' in the Gorbals.  My older brother and I helped her move her old, large wardrobes and dressing table ... too large to fit properly into her municipal shoe box in a soulless tower block that has subsequently been demolished.  The horror of that all mod-cons Council flat in the wasteland of neglect that was inner city Glasgow reduced my grandmother to tears.  That was the one and only time I saw her cry.  Despite her distress and circumstances, however, my grandmother would have faced the hounds of Hell rather than vote Communist.  She would have had the same disregard, by the way, for Tories and that numptie Teddy Taylor.

Oddly enough (in more ways than one, now I think on it) I joined the Communist Party at Stirling University (my mother still believes it was a phase I was going through ... like acne, perhaps) and got to know Jackie's father a little.  I was later (82-83) a full time employee in the CP head office in London, reporting to Ian McKay who was, at the time, National Organiser.  THERE was a period ... in the lead up to Thatcher's second election victory ... when to be a Communist Party member was to be insane, irredeemably optimistic and hopeful, just plain daft or all of the above.  Nevertheless, if the Party hadn’t take the profoundly mistaken decision to wind itself up, I’d probably still be a member; believing as I do that our politics needs a non-Labour, non-Trot, non-Tankie strand of Left thinking that behaves like a Party, not a think-tank.

I lived in Tower Hamlets at the time.  It was a desolate, neglected Hell hole made worse by the excesses of Thatcher and Tebbitt.  (I couldn’t get on my bike Norman … someone nicked it … literally.)  In 1983, there was nothing uplifting about distributing election leaflets to the armour-plated doors of ghastly Council flats inhabited by people who felt scared of their neighbours and abandoned by a political system that must have seemed irrelevant and pointless.  But we were ever optimistic that someone somewhere would buy the Morning Star from us even though, as Eurocoms, we didn't care very much for its 'Tankie' fundamentalism.

Which brings me ... at last you must saying, if anyone has made it this far ... to Margaret Drabble's evocative comments in an excellent collection of evocative writing.  Ms Drabble perfectly identifies the difficulty and problem of the Left, it seems to me, when she writes "Now I don't know who 'we' are anymore ..." 

One could bet one's house on the fact that David Cameron and his ridiculous, dishonest crew know exactly who they mean when they think about "we".  All I can do down here is hope that the rest of us don't get fooled again.  That and hope that the Left works out again what our "we" means then builds again a broad democratic alliance (sorry, couldn't resist that piece of British Road revisionism) to mobilise people around a progressive agenda in favour of an equal share in more than just hope for the future.

(Sorry to go on so.  In my defence, I'm obviously inspired by the good writing of your contributors)

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Hubris

To look again and by that single look

not quite see the certain paths we took;

not that they, the paths, were any less

than often taken by the more or less

adventurous among us: you and me,

a few others (stragglers) to make "we"

seem credible (or at least desirable)

to our naive, if not quite risible

intentions, held too easily, perhaps;

bereft of doubt, oblivious of traps,

contemptuous of reticence,

dismissive of all pretence,

the inauthentic, the less than wholly true

which we, alone, then knew we knew.

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Aeneas and the Harpies

Book III of the Aeneid.  I have an essay to write about Dido's love for Aeneas.  This evening, however, we've not yet reached the end of our hero's long re-telling of his misadventures after Troy fell.  (Although it's a long re-telling it's nothing like as long as the tall tales told about Odysseus, which are - from time to time - ponderous.)  When we reached Strophades and the Trojans set about the "sleek lusty herds of cattle grazing the plains, / flocks of goats unguarded, cropping grassland" I was on the side of the Harpies to be honest.

It may be that there are "no monsters on earth more cruel, / no scourge more savage" than Celaeno and her sisters.  But Aeneas must have known to whom those cows and goats belonged when he started hunting them down.  Sometimes, one despairs of these epic heroes.  As Homer (Simpson) might say: Harpies?  Doh!

Aeneas and his companions fighting the Harpies.  Francois Perrier (1646-47)

God bless the New Yorker

Definitely White Rabbit ... but which one?

I'm late, I'm late ...

Surely not Grace Slick?

Stand By Me

Taking a break from The Aeneid, we watched Stand By Me (which Spike had not seen before).  I had forgotten about 'barfaramma'.  Locked into some Classic texts (as I currently am) I watched the movie and couldn't help thinking of The Odyssey Book XI and The Aenid Book VI: Odysseus, Aeneas and Chris Campbell visiting the dead.  It may not be entirely correct to say that there are no new stories to tell but it's certainly easier to identify variations on well-worn themes.
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Roman Fever by Edith Wharton

I stumbled over this excellent short story by Edith Wharton after googling Winifred Peck.  Her name led me to the web site of Persephone books.  It was in there, in their most recent bi-annual newsletter, that I found and read Roman Fever.  By the time you reach the sting in the tail you've already seen what's coming.  The pleasure is in the getting there: Mrs Slade's disdain, repressed for quarter of a century; her hubris and the silent fall after pride.  You can almost hear the penny drop.  Mrs Ansley need say nothing more.

How To Train Your Dragon

Very sweet, laugh out loud in places (Hiccup's Norse helmet got the loudest laugh from all the adults in the audience).  It could be the perfect kids movie.  I can't tell you I was overwhelmed by the 3D.  It's interesting to see how cool it is to be Glaswegian (according to Hollywood): Stoick and Gobber here; Mad Hatter and the March Hare in Alice and Shrek (of course) in Shrek I, II and III.

It's surprising ... the things that trigger memory

1974 ... I was seventeen.  My father died that year.