Monthly Archives

February 2017

Above the clouds: thoughts on a flight

Flying by Plane
England from the sky.

The flight is full. Demonstrated by the flight attendants’ silent looks at one another as they try to get all the hand-luggage into the overhead compartments. A baby cries. A woman whines about not being able to sit beside her husband. I imagine she’s probably a little afraid of the rush down the runway to a sense defying lift-off and the screech of brakes forty-five minutes later when we hit tarmac again in Dublin.

This flight is so full that my companion is in the next flight. And in a moment of unfairness, is travelling business class.

Seatbelts on and the wheels roll. The baby cries throughout the safety announcement. Although I expect myself to find such a noise annoying, by my sympathy goes to the parents and I can’t fault the babies rationality. It takes a fair amount of social conditioning to think that being flung into the sky in a crowded metal box is a good idea.

My conscience winces at the thought of this flight and the volume of fuel it takes to rise us so high. It’s not like I can blame my actions on being ignorant of global warming. I know I’m dooming the planet to abrupt change. Yet there’s another part of me which feels free in that moment the plane leaves English soil, and with the nervousness of a first date, my heart expands with glee. I’m in the air again.

The shadow of the plane passes over school fields marked out for a game of football. As we pass over a cloud, I’m delighted to see the shadow being magnified on its fluff. Another plane passes below us. I stare so intensely that I no longer notice whether the baby cries.

I follow the roads, and then I see it. There, beyond the winding river, over the railway line, up the hills which I cycle, right at the  junction, is the buildings of the manor house of our landlord, and the tiny terrace of three. Earlier, in that middle house, I woke, ate breakfast and dressed for this adventure.

Magic.

Just in time, for thick cloud is lathered across the land, obscuring it from view. Bright white in the sunlight. Like alpine snow.

The ferocious air conditioning is on full blast.

Height: 6400 meters. Location: Cirencester, then the Cotswolds.

Complimentary orange juice and a packet of crisps.

We skirt the Welsh coast. Below us, the land is a dark, rich green. We’re too far south for it to be ‘my’ Wales, but I stare at the beaches along the coast with fond memories.

Height: 7924 meters. The sky is an amazing blue. The sort of blue that invites you to admire its blueness. Yet it has a gradient, fading towards the cloud line.

And then the deep, dark sea.

My ears pop.

My friend will be in the air by now.

Tarmac approaches.

And we’re down.

[From the diary.]

Literature and Mental Health: Heartbreak

Heartbreak Moor
Long walks on heather strewn moors a literary cliché?

Heartbreak was the subject of week two in my Literature and Mental Health course. The reading reminded me of a TED talk I watched a little while back about the language of love.

The metaphor of a broken heart feels eternal and the course started by talking about people who have been together for a life-time and then one of them dies. Perhaps the metaphor if more apt than I’d supposed. It turns out that there is a medical condition, named after a Japanese octopus trap, which occurs after the sudden intense emotional stress of losing a loved one. It’s also known as broken heart syndrome and does in fact, temporarily in most cases, break one’s heart.

The misshapen heart looks like an octopus trap.

Heartbreak through the eyes of Jane Austen

In Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, a freshly heartbroken Marianne reads to fuel her misery:

In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving. She read nothing but what they had been used to read together.

I can totally imagine it. The reliving of the memories again and again. The constant looking backwards instead of forwards. I keep my diaries out of reaching distance for they are as harmful as they are helpful.

In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the heroine Anne Elliot counsels long time heartbroken, wallowing Captain Benwick to read prose in addition to his much beloved melancholy poetry.

…he showed himself so intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Apparently, there was a phase in English society between 1750-1798, where acting openly emotional was seen as the best way to live. Sense and Sensibility is set in the last decade of the 18th century but was published a little later in 1811. Marianne is in part a stereotype of this overly emotional, gushing, unrestrained character of the Age of Sensibility, whereas her sister, by contrast, is reserved and closed. Elinor is terrified of the effect that exhibiting how she feels will have on her family and social standing, but also, to me, she seems to feel that because her love was unofficial and in hindsight impossible, that it lacks the validation that Marianne’s open love affair has.

Of course, since this is Jane Austen, Elinor, Marianne, Anne and Benwick all end up happily married.

Heartbreak Moor
There are stone books scattered on my moor in homage to the Brontë sisters. I haven’t read any of their books.

Romantic novels

Unfortunately, there are too many bad novels out there – by which one means, novels that do not give us a correct map of love, that leave us unprepared to deal adequately with the difficulties of being in a couple. In moments of acute distress in relationships, our grief is too often complicated by a sense that things have become, for us alone, unusually and perversely difficult. Not only are we suffering, but it seems that our suffering has no equivalent in the lives of other more or less sane people.

Alain De Botton, (in this amusing article)

It’s this sense of being alone which Jack Lankester talks about in his interview within the course. The way, he says, that he eventually stopped feeling alone, was by reading the poetry of Philip Sidney who was writing about the same grief of being broken-hearted as Lankester was feeling.

I believe that poetry can snap you into a new perspective. My moment of realising I wasn’t alone, after a horrible break-up some years ago, came through the song Paint It Black, which was sung, beginning to end, by someone who seemed to see me completely.

Not-so-romantic novels

Romantic novels have never played a significant role on my bookshelf. Much less than several friends seem to believe. Some of the historical fiction I’ve read has romantic aspects, characters that are infatuated, but I think I prefer books where there’s more at stake than a break-up.

This doesn’t seem to have protected me from delusional fantasies of what love can achieve.

I don’t want to read about perfect love, because I can’t believe in it.

Instead, the failures of relationships so often depicted in novels seem more real. For some reason, I find myself thinking of An Edible Woman, by Margaret Atwood, in which the heroine becomes more and more aware of the sensation that her life with her fiancé is following an unswerving pattern of consumerism. A way of living which she’s quietly manipulated into by the expectations of society. Trapped in the status quo. And it’s a consumerism, which in her role in at an advertising agency, she herself reinforces.

Perhaps I’m just disenchanted.

Do you think romantic literature can give us harmful ideals?

An English cook in Sicily (and the commotion this entailed)

Sicily Cooking
Ok, this is the neighbours outdoor over, not the actual one I cooked on.

The morning began when I asked where the coffee was – in the fridge duh – and Maria started making tea. That is tea with rosemary, red berries and orange peel.

Maria looked at me, “Candle?”

Being English wasn’t working.

Sicilian Cooking
Ingenious or crazy?

At eight in the morning with my coffee unmade I observed the commotion in silence. What does anyone want a candle for anyway? I figured it was the wrong word, and that the ideal word was lighter. We needed to light the gas to use the hob to heat the hot water for the coffee and this so called tea. Either way I couldn’t help.

It turned out, the candle was for the tea. A lighter was, as I presumed, also required, and found. The kettle boiled. Maria poured the hot water into the teapot and stood it above the tealight – to keep it warm. A jam jar lid went on top because the original lid is missing.

That was breakfast. We worked for a while, until lunch, which Maria forgot, half started and then abandoned with flamboyance. Moving faster than I’d ever seen her move before, Maria instructed me to tell Leonardo to stop working. We were late and… the children. Until this point there had been no prior mention of any children. Missing or otherwise.

I said, “Ok.”

Confused because my instructions had been given in Italian, I went to the workshop where Leonardo looked at me and had the same panic as Maria. He ran out of the house behind her. I’m not sure either of them were wearing shoes.

The children appeared sometime later trailing behind a joyful Maria and a singing Leonardo. We ate. Thankfully. Then Leonardo made them wooden toys out of the scraps of wood that remained from making the Christmas letters.

In a moment of chaos, mid-afternoon, when numerous neighbours appeared, the children disappeared again.

I discover, that due to Maria’s need to be productive, I’m cooking dinner. But I don’t know what dinner is, or when we’re having it. Nor do I know what I’m cooking. Lentils and carrots float around in a pot.

A debate, in Sicillian/Italian/French, followed about how one doesn’t need a fork for soup. With Leonardo shouting from the workshop that Maria had to ask me how to say spoon in Italian. All I could think of was the French, which I started shouting back. At least I now knew I was making soup.

To add to my difficulties, the stove required constant feeding with wood. But hey.

Furthermore, dinner required salt. It was my job to taste the food and add the correct amount of salt. I’m ungenerous with salt at the best of times. I save it for special occasions.

And the ‘sale’ jar was empty.

If it was just dinner, or just the salt, I might managed to remain restrained.

Just as we’re sitting down for dinner, there was a commotion about the ladle. I waved my hands in despair. Some shouting and laughter. Leonardo handed me the ladle and I repeated its name three times.

Everyone laughs because I’m saying the wrong thing again.

I lift my hands in a big Italian gesture.

Now I’ve raised my voice, it’s feeling more Yorkshire.

And I’m like, “What?”

Although tempted to swear, I don’t. This is just what it takes to adapt.

As we sit down for dinner, everyone seems more relaxed. I realise it’s me. And my English restraint is as hard on them as their Italian cresendo.

What’s the most challenging kitchen you’ve ever had to cook in?

[Read more about my adventures in Sicily.]

How to deal with that day of travelling when nobody likes each other

Travelling with friends
Icarus, crash-landed in the ancient Roman forum of Pompei, telling us it’s inadvisable to get too close to the sun.  Sculptures by Igor Mitoraj.

For good reason, travelling alone is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, it can, on occasion, seem preferable to travelling with a friend.

Travelling with a friend can stir up a whole set of small irritations that in normal circumstances would pass unnoticed. Imagine spending every waking, and non-waking moment with someone, more time than if you were in a relationship, every little friction intensifies. Happy interdependence heats up, until you realise you’re bound together and can’t escape. Or at least can’t escape without breaking an unspoken contract.

You entwine your plans around each other, because you love each other, and only later wonder why in this travel – which is supposed to be freeing – you feel trapped. Aren’t you having fun?

I’ve travelled alone, but not everybody has. Alone, with nobody else to please, I’m capable of walking around the central streets of a city for half an hour trying to decide where to have coffee and a croissant for breakfast (Modena). And that’s without anyone else to appease. That’s just taking in my desires for the right looking croissants, happy clientele, serving staff who smile. Coffee that smells good. A week of such behaviour and even my most loving friends are going to be going batty.

Expect the friction

DeepThought and the Circumvesuviana

In Italy, on the first Sunday of the month there’s free entry to the tourist sites of Pompei, Herculaneum and the scattered villas that Mt. Vesuvius buried with its volcanic spread of AD. 89.

DeepThought and I had been going crazy visiting places and seeing things. Neither of us are concerned by a 40-minute walk here or there, so we’d also done a lot of walking. Mostly searching for an elusive pizza restaurant with a chimney, but that’s another story (and all my fault).

Sunday morning, I overslept. We disagreed on the urgency of lunch. At the train station, acting out of habit, we got on the wrong train. On realising, we then got off the train, took another train back and then a third train to get to where we’d wanted to be. Finally at the station we were heading to, we became uncertain as to whether we were at the right station. There were no obvious signs to the mysterious villas, and this being lunch time on a Sunday there was nothing open and nobody about.

We started walking in a direction. The threat offered by the grey sky was no bluff. Only I had a coat. We began again, walking in a different direction. Changed our minds, and finally ended up at a cross roads where a small sign pointed down the road to a villa.

Since it was the first Sunday of November, in the ticket office there was a visitor book that one had to sign. I signed my name in all the boxes, recording DeepThought’s home city as a squiggle of my own name.

At Pompei, the rain would have been miserable, but although the villa wasn’t architecturally as exciting as anything we’d seen in the previous few days, it was at least mostly covered. This was something to be grateful for.

After viewing that villa, we walked along the road to the next villa (taking another wrong turn along the way). There was no path. And it was so late when we finally arrived that the villa was closed. Quiet.

Ravenous, I bought and consumed a large packet of chocolate brioche from an open supermarket.

Sicily and the loud house

It’s not such a different story from what happened only a month later, when, confined in a house with two Sicilian’s and not enough space I found myself angering at the slightest provocation. It felt like an impossible situation but it was simply a matter of too much all at once.

Sometimes it’s just not so easy to be having fun.

“But we’ve been friends forever.”

Sadly, it doesn’t matter how well intentioned the other person is. Neither Maria asking if I was alright, telling me that my happiness really mattered to her, nor DeepThought gritting his teeth and behaving with supreme English gentleman’s reserve was enough. It happens every time I travel with anyone.

And it’s not just me.

When I pull up my chair in a café or bar, and start listening to people who have travelled a lot, everyone seems to have stories to tell about travelling with friends. Home friends, that put up with our not being there and don’t let our never-ending supply of photos of sunny beaches grate on them too much, especially while they’re in the office on a Monday morning, are valued and precious creatures. These are people who know us by more than first impressions. And that mix of history and knowledge makes for an intimacy and belonging that lonely travellers long for.

And yet, everyone seems to have cautionary tales of mixing close friends and travel. I’ve witnessed enough exchanges of horror stories where one person ends up leaving the other in South Africa or India alone. Or two people have a spat and a breakdown in the supermarket, on a hostel floor, or in the middle of some tourist’s photo of the Arc De Triumph

Don’t waste your time blaming, plan space

I’m going to irritate anyone travelling with me.

I’m going to get crabby at some point as I wear out if they have too much time without a decent and whole chunk of solitary space to recover and rejuvenate. The least I can do is be upfront about it and encourage whomever I’m with to call me out on any sharp or snide comments that escape. It’s not personal.

Sometimes it seems like a waste of good time that you could spend together, to have days apart, to visit coffee shops alone, or endeavour to accomplish a lone 10km run. But space is what makes getting along possible. If I don’t read a book, write my diary and go for a walk or a run I’m insufferable.

I used to feel bad about not always being attentive. But now I know that in the long run, escaping a while is a kindness.

In the Bay of Naples, with DeepThought, when we arrived back at our apartment, I hid in the kitchen and cooked. Cooking is a great solace. An apartment offers more space than a hostel or hotel.

What to do if being alone scares you

Budapest. I’ve pushed Midget for days, forcing her beyond her comfort zone. Her feet ache from the walking I’ve made her do.

Budapest is big. It’s heavy and it’s dirty. The stunning buildings scream the richness of Vienna but look like Miss Havisham is in charge of the housework. Midget, quite frankly, had reached a point of enough.

So, she curled up on the bed and read a book.

And I went outside, not so far because when she’s feeling uncertain about things it’s not worth worrying her about where I might be. But I went outside, leaving her alone in our apartment, and I sat on a bench which she could have seen if she’d peered out her window, and I sat and sketched the parliament building.

And when she’d finished her book, she was ready to play again.

Don’t let intense emotions surprise you

“Which of us was crying?”

“I think it must have been me.”

“By the coffee shop by the metro station.”

“Yeah that’s right.” Understanding pause. “So where shall we go next?”

It’s just an acknowledgement of reality. You can’t keep up an illusion or pretence of perfection, which is itself a precious freedom. Travel isn’t about just exploring the scenery. It’s as much internal as external. When you travel with a friend you’re taking them on that journey with you. You’re going to have intense moments, deep conversations and as cliché as it is, you’ll change.

Laugh about how you’re going to get it wrong

So, if I were to give one piece of advice to any friends travelling together, it would be this, laugh at how you’re going to irritate the hell out of each other.

As one friend joked, on a particularly vexing afternoon: “At least being stuck with me is good practice for when you have children.”

Literature and Mental Health: Poetry and Mindfulness

Poetry and mindfulness

What is poetry anyway?

I hated poetry at school. Mostly because I could become fascinated with a poem, and draw all over it, creating my own ideas about what it was about, and then the teacher would talk. I’d stare at the annotations I’d made wondering how it was that I couldn’t see the rhymes. Why was it that my syllables added up differently each time I counted? And I blamed the poet for not writing more explicitly what they were trying to say.

The silent pursuits of reading and writing are great. I just had a problem with sounds.

Over Christmas, my sister left a couple of poetry books lying in the living room. She is very much fond of spoken word poetry. I started reading and looked and saw that this poetry, which followed no obvious pattern, which sometimes makes less sense than my own diary, didn’t resemble the poetry I remembered from school.

And I didn’t like it. Or rather, I liked it, because it was soppy at times, emotional and poignant, but I didn’t regard it as poetry. It was more like the rubbish that I would like to tweet as my heart breaks, but hopefully judge it wiser not to. Of course, I love what I write, as I write it in that emotional splurge of a moment, and to me it feels real. Very real. Genius in fact. But I just don’t imagine anyone else quite understanding without a heart transplant.

Literature and Mental Health

So how come, that now, today, I’m thinking and writing about poetry? Well it comes down to my decision to do a free online course called Literature and Mental Health. There is little logic to how I chose what to study next. I have done multiple courses in the art and archaeology of Ancient Egypt which I picked because the course title began with an A. The gift of a wonderful curiosity.

But I read a lot. And I read a lot about how we think about ourselves, and how we as people might have brighter happier thoughts. So maybe it does make sense.

I read when I’m heartbroken. Specifically, books that can educate me in such a way as the pain I weep is logically and rationally assessed, a strategy put in place, and understanding found. I swear off repeating the same stupid, stupid mistakes.

Seeing a course on literature and mental health started me wondering whether there was an alternative, additional way to use reading to get me from numbness or fear back into that realm of bright happy thoughts. (Not in any way negating the success of my aggressive self-help reading strategy. For me at least, such a strategy is more effective than chocolate.)

Mindfulness, meditation, taking a walk or reading poetry

Week one, and Stephen Fry is talking about how ‘great poetry isn’t a tantrum’ which I get. And prosodics and enjambments and ottava, which I got momentarily, but have now forgotten.

Poetry can do something special to the mind. It can slow you down, pull you towards specific images: the calm of nature or the soothing familiarity of something as ridiculous as a child’s ball game or the shipping forecast. A bit like meditation. Except in poetry you have sounds and ink and with meditation you have that continuous inhale and exhale.

I’d never thought about poetry like this. For me, it’s always felt combative. As if the poet was challenging me to see why it’s great. Unsurprisingly, I only like a few poems. Normally only ones about hedgehogs.

Yet many other people have strong, positive experiences of poetry. So I’m slowly letting these uncountable syllables and mysterious rhymes into my life.

So, my question today, as a person ignorant to the world’s vast array of poetry, is whose poetry do you like?

How do you learn a language?

Life on a French farm

“Mon serviette,” the trilingual three-year-old demands from his high-chair.

“Ma serviette,” Grand-meré corrects.

“Mon serviette,” the boy insists.

“Non, ma serviette. C’est feminine.”

“Mon serviette.”

Later on, the grand-daughters are practicing their spelling.

“Onze?”

“O-N-S”

“Non.”

“Z?”

“Oui.”

“O-N-Z-E?”

How do you learn a language?

Not how do you memorize vocabulary, or correctly conjugate verbs, but how do you open your mouth and persuade a sound to come out? What’s more, how do you make this sound loud enough and clear enough that someone sitting at the other side of the dinner table knows you’re speaking to them?

This is a skill that the children have and I struggle with. Everyone at the table is in the process of learning. The children are learning both English and French, the grandparents are improving their English with the help of my frequent but gentle corrections and I’m…

… I guess I’m learning to overcome that debilitating panic that numbs my memory. I’m lost every time I want to ask for something or reply to someone in French. It doesn’t so much matter that I’m stuck in the present tense, nor that I have atrocious pronunciation. I just have to start.

How do you feel about speaking a foreign language?