And today's word is ...

Volatile  

Sometimes it's just how things are.  If you don't look closely enough or deeply enough you'll get your arse kicked.  Today is one such day.  Thank goodness it was not for real.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Mid-March and only now have I managed to finish reading my first novel of 2015.  Shame on you Douglas Herd.  It's also my first Alan Hollinghurst book. I'm not quite sure how I reached my grand old age without having opened anything by an author universally acclaimed as one of England's finest.  Better late than never (which may be my motto ... or an inadequate apology).

The Stranger's Child is a compelling read, superbly constructed around five episodes taking place at key moments of social, cultural and personal transition, loss or recollection in the lives of characters connected directly and indirectly over a span of 90 years.  I had my doubts at the outset, 1913 upper middle class England, thinking, did not Virginia Woolf get there first and better?  But I hadn't grasped the point.  As we move from each carefully constructed, beautifully written scene to the next the novel's scope expands and diversifies and yet the individuality of the human stories at the heart of the novel don't get lost.  As the novel's driving force - Alfred Hitchcock invented the idea of the McGuffin to describe the force that propels the narrative, like the Grail in a Grail quest - Cecil Valance, the handsome, lost war poet, recedes from view Alan Hollinghurst opens up a fascinating and entertaining examination of loss, memory, secrets and lies, artistic endeavour and changing tastes, reputation, social status, mores and change.  And if all that makes the novel sound dry and literary that only tells you I'm not a very good critic.

Much more accomplished reviews of a fine novel are available here in The New York Times and here (as you might expect) in The Guardian.

Two paces forward or ten steps back?

It can do your brain in, this writing business.  I've been staring at - working with - these lines for hours.  They're a bridge in a poem that started out in life as Blackstrap Molasses.  It's something different now. 

Theirs was an alien landscape, force-fed

From that once-mighty river; no longer

The greatest nor, ever again, the nation’s

Life blood. Sucked dry. Like metaphor. 

First there were three lines.  Now there are four.  And the chances are that there aint much poetry in them whatever the number of lines. But you keep at it because the voices don't stop.

There's a Clydesale horse in it.  Makes sense to me.

Freewheelin' Fyshwick

Before ...

The day began with Spike attempting emergency repairs on the broken axle housing on a front wheel of my wheelchair.  Sadly it was beyond redemption.  After maybe twenty years of use should I be surprised?  No, I don't think so either.

The irrepairable broken wheel necessitated a trip to the wheelchair supplies store, aptly named
Mobility Matters.  It's in Fyshwich, perhaps the oddest but in many ways most practical suburb in this already odd national capital of ours.  Set apart from the rest of the city, on the north side of the Monaro Highway, one can buy anything ... or almost anything.  

There's a Bunnings, Pet Store, Harvey Norman, Clark Rubber plus a host of other retailers of choice for an endless range of practical shopping purposes.  Along the many winding, interweaving (not to say confusing) side streets there are innumerable electricians, plumbers, tile & bathroom appliance sellers, re-sellers and much, much more.  There's one antiques seller that I know of; the maker of Australia's finest macrons, reputedly; at least one daggy sex shop (adjacent to JayCar where Spike buys her LED bulbs for glass works - which is the only way I know about the sex store by the way) and what one must take to be a brothel, currently called the Lollipop Lounge (sure makes me want to enter ... not) painted in what may or may not be intended as an ironic pink.  I suspect 'may not' is the favourite in that each way bet. 

Anyway, we parked outside Mobility Matters inside which Spike conducted protracted negotiations while I - bereft of a functioning wheelchair - entertained myself to the best of my ability inside the car listening to local radio.  Negotiations were not straightforward.  

The repair man was 'away' for an unspecified duration but I could leave my wheelchair and borrow one of theirs until the repair was completed.  Not dead keen on that option I nevertheless asked (not only because I'm polite) to see the loanable wheelchair, which was then brought out to me.  

Hmmm, I thought.  But I also understood my wobbly wheel would not last long.  

'How long before I'd get mine back?' I asked.

'I wouldn't like to be too definite about that until he's seen it" came the reply.  "Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe the day after"

"Oh well," I said, "if it's just a day or so I can wait until he's back then come over to have the repair done."

"Wait" replied the sales woman, trying to be helpful. "I'll go see."  Then just before heading back inside with the still untested, possibly on loan wheelchair, she paused to add, "I love your accent."

What could one say in response except "thank you.  I love yours too"?  She was a New Zealander.

Spike, who had been patiently spectating, leaned into the car.  "It's amazing what an accent can do for you," she said.  "I asked all those questions - and more - and got none of what you were told."

As she pulled herself back out the car Spike paused.  "She thinks you're my father you know." It's neither the first time nor, I suspect, will it be the last time we're allocated those roles in the minor dramas that interrupt the business of getting on with life together.

Spike followed the woman and the empty wheelchairs - mine and theirs - back into the shop.  I waited, searching local radio stations for anything to pass the time.  I now know more about the finals of local sheep dog trials than is necessary, strictly speaking, for a man in my position.  But it was interesting enough in its own way.

... and after.

Some time later Spike returned with the New Zealand born sales woman and my wheelchair sporting two new front wheels, fitted I know not by whom and nor does Spike because the job was done without consulting us.  But I'm not complaining because the woman, who smiled in a friendly, helpful way, told us we'd been charged only for the parts (new to me but clearly used lightly by some unknown other before me) and not for the labour involved.  Maybe the 'away' repair man had unexpectedly returned from 'away', wherever 'away' might have been; lunch, the lavatory, a pub?  It matters not.

We drove off through the puzzling maze of Fyshwick streets in search of a camera repair shop that turned out to be located six doors down from the Lollipop Lounge.  

"Sorry," Spike was told.  "We don't do Nikon. They won't let us open them up." 

Lest there be any doubt here, it was the receptionist inside the camera repair shop, not anyone in the brothel, who gave this information to Spike.  Tell you the truth, I suspect the staff inside the Lollipop Lounge, if asked, could open up almost anything.

Late-season sun

It feels slightly strange today to be sitting here in our suburban garden in south Canberra. I have retreated to some shade to escape the fierce intensity of the late season sun of this Indian summer. But although it's uncharacteristically hot we seem to be languishing in a spell that's neither one season nor another. I shelter from the heat. Somewhere in the vicinity of our drowsing cat a cricket chirps forlornly, it seems, for there is no response from any other lonely cricket. Perhaps ours is the last cricket to sing this year. Elsewhere the signs are telling us that summer is over, the fall awaits.

The garden's earth is hard and unforgiving. It has been weeks since the last heavy rains soaked the ground to feed the plants, many of which look tired and in need of a good long drink. Some, it's clear, have already shut down for the year. We will not see their brightly coloured flowers, vibrant green leaves or new growth for months now. The lower branches of the majestic pin oak at the end of the garden also display the early signs of season's change. Here and there brown leaves disrupt the coat of green. Every now and then, when the breeze picks up, a leaf or two tumbles to the ground.

We are in between the seasons (we have them in Canberra, unlike most of the rest of Australia). But whatever name we might given to this liminal space it's neither summer nor autumn, neither one time nor the other.

Do I pick up on (read too much into) this not-season, these days of this as well as that, neither one nor the other because it fits my own sense of displacement? Sundays always heighten my feelings of being from somewhere else, not fully belonging either to this new home of mine (after more than fourteen years it still feels new) nor, self-evidently, to the home I left behind; the place and its people.

Why Sundays particularly? 

It's easy enough to see. First act here is to check the football scores back there because for reasons I cannot begin to explain it matters to me how well or (as is more likely) how badly the team I have followed since I was ten or eleven performed. Yesterday, against the odds, we won. Next, one of the great rituals of a Scottish - British - Sunday; a long, luxurious read of the Sunday papers accompanied by tea, toast, a breakfast one can browse through just like the stories. I am infinitely more interested in the news, the sport, the cultural life and - especially - the politics of my homeland than the petty circus here with its unappealing set of clowns and comic singers. I wonder how my friends back there spent their Saturday nights and what stories they will tell to one another over Sunday lunch in a favourite pub. But if or when they meet I will be absent as I've been for many years now. Emigrated but far from integrated. Neither here nor there but somewhere in between. Not one thing or another.  A bit like this unseasonable weather.

Sarah Braunstein's All You Have to Do

Pic: Grant Cornett / Hand Lettering: Mousecake

I read Sarah Braunstein's compelling short story in The New Yorker here.  As I read I listened to the accompanying sound file with the writer reading her story.  (Does that count as me reading - which I was - if the audio file was running too?)

It's a good read.  Short stories are meant to include a twist at the end and Sarah B delivers one - for this modern age of ours - but credible nevertheless.  The story is set in an unnamed town in 1972 when the central character Sid Baumwell is, we're told, sixteen.  I was fifteen that year so the story touches on a familiar period of awkward adolescence.  Sarah B captures that time, those emotions, the uncertainty and the smothering small town feel of Sid's situation very well.  It wasn't hard to suspend disbelief and go with the flow,  I laughed more than once - at the continuous repetition of "Sid said", the magnitude of a life time's supply of aluminium foil, the awfulness we wrongly find as teenagers in family life - and the slight twist at the end made me pause to think about how a comfortable and safe growing up (such as I enjoyed) sometimes, perhaps always, hangs on fragile, invisible threads which, if we're lucky in our growing up (as I was too) we seldom notice.

Well worth reading.

Sarah Braunstein's web site is here.

Filming in Sydney