Enter Sam

Welcome to the world, Sam

Filling dreams
And so, something unique happened this last week – unique to me, but an astonishingly common occurrence throughout history and across the world. But this thing has never happened to me before. I took on a new identity –  Grandfather/Grandad/Grandpa/Poppa/some other word – when a new member of my family arrived. I’m assuming Sam – for that is he – will decide what to call me at some point in the next few years. Sam is a lucky little guy arriving in a loving family in a lovely (new) home in a lovely corner of Planet Earth near shops, woods, a meadow, railways (big and miniature), a canal, a river, a valley, hills and dales and enough sky, clouds and wuthering weather to fill his dreams.

Arriving home

At first the infant
What can I say in a blog about my first grandchild? My brain, heart, guts and soul are rollercoasting with thoughts, imaginings and feelings. Shakespeare’s most famous quotation about babies is negative (but funny):

                                   All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms….

Cuddle with Auntie Em

Things to look forward to….
Sam’s in his First Stage of Life and as well as mewling and puking, I’m sure he’ll do some drinking, feeding, looking, tracking, gurgling, babbling, chortling, biting, reaching, gripping, grabbing, staring, hugging, kissing, tickling, waving, clapping, dancing, pushing, pulling, rolling, sitting, crawling, holding, pointing, smiling, laughing…. And hopefully a goodly amount of sleeping. And that’s before this time next year. Until then, a couple of poems.

"I thought we'd agreed," said Cora, "it was just the three of us...."

Joy is my name

Infant Joy
by William Blake

‘I have no name.
I am but two days old.’
What shall I call thee?
‘I happy am.
Joy is my name.’
Sweet Joy befall thee!

Pretty Joy!
Sweet Joy but two day’s old.
Sweet Joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while.
Sweet joy befall thee.

First Meetings

Dark, peaceful, sacred…

Although Carol Ann Duffy (like Blake, one of my favourite poets) writes the following to her daughter, it’s easy to imagine beyond the pronouns to any child, any time, any where, any when…

A Child's Sleep 
by Carol Ann Duffy
I stood at the edge of my child's sleep
hearing her breathe;
although I could not enter there,
I could not leave.

Her sleep was a small wood,
perfumed with flowers;
dark, peaceful, sacred,
acred in hours.

And she was the spirit that lives
in the heart of such woods;
without time, without history,
wordlessly good.

I spoke her name, a pebble dropped
in the still night,
and saw her stir, both open palms
cupping their soft light;

then went to the window. The greater dark
outside the room
gazed back, maternal, wise,
with its face of moon.

Samuel Miles Grimley

2022 Advent

Spot the Differences

It's been a goodly strange few years and there are many differences between now and any point in the past: one week, one month, one year, or two or three or four weeks, months and years ago. And in some ways it seems like the world in going to hell in a hand cart. And in other ways it seems that life is a bowl of cherries. Whatever that means. But December comes round again and, although there have certainly been some profound things happening on a personal level over the last year, the leaves have just about fallen, the frost's beginning to pinch, the winter fog is creeping through the country and the Advent stockings are in place. Hello December.

 

Diamond Birthday

Waterside Restaurant in Shipley, some birthdays past and Sally's caramel cake

Older and wiser?

I remember, aged about 8, praying in the toilet (where else?) to St Bernadette (who else?) to grant me such a long life that I would live to the age of 48. I can’t remember why I thought 48 was such a marvellous age to reach, but I do remember the number. I also remember aged 18 thinking “thank goodness I’m now an adult and I finally understand what’s what.” And then thinking the same at 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24…. Every year I thought “blimey, I was so immature last year, it’s such a relief to get to this new age of enlightenment. NOW I’m finally grown-up.” And at some point, in my late 20s, it dawned on me that there was NO SUCH THING as being “FINALLY grown-up” – just another year, month, week, day, hour, minute of…. change. Everything changes. And as each year goes by it becomes obvious how much is still left to learn, how understanding Life As We Know And Imagine It is an infinite process.

Pandemics and presents

In the weird year of 2020, it’s been fascinating to read about the pandemics that reached England in 664, 1346, 1485, 1510, 1563, 1592, 1603, 1637, 1665, 1775, 1847, 1918, 1957 and 1981, not to mention the outbreaks of, for example, influenza, cholera, smallpox and encephalitis that have swept through populations periodically. Did Covid-19 take the shine off my 60th birthday celebrations? It did and it didn’t. On the one hand (in one of the Libran pans of justice) I couldn’t see groups of people in places (theatre, cinema, restaurant) I often choose. But on the other hand (in the other pan of justice) it meant that everything that happened (socially distanced in the open air) and every message I received and every book, sock, toiletry, chocolate, bottle of wine, fat rascal, jigsaw – everything that came my way felt Valuable Beyond Measure. It felt like Birthday Blessings fit for a Diamond Occasion – rare, precious, glistening.

Thanks, Mademoiselle Soubirous

A tasting meal and wine flight for two at Shipley’s Waterside Restaurant, a homemade caramel cake (with crushed Crunchie on top), a walk across the local moor, surprise visitors, surprise presents. It felt like a “0” birthday. It was unusual, thanks to Covid-19. Merci, St Bernadette, for giving me 12 years more than I prayed for…. How about another 12? My rose-tinted glasses imagine a future birthday without social distancing….

No Time Like The Present

 

Approaching 60: Carpe Diem.

Whatever gets you through the night

Carpe Diem has had a new potency in these unstable times – seizing the day, appreciating the moment, living in the present. (As someone once said….) Plan like you’re going to live forever; live like you’re going to die tomorrow. The Covid-19 pandemic and its fatalities, casualties, pressures, ripple-effect economic blights and uncertainties conspire to to drag hearts and souls into the abyss of despondency. On the other hand, Captain Tom Moore, Marcus Rashford, Jacinda Ardern and millions more people have lifted our aspirations towards a better world. In some ways, I have no idea where Time has gone since the middle of February 2020 when Coronovirus started being publicised internationally. Pre-Covid seems like 10 years ago. Copying Dickens’s opening to A Tale of Two Cities, (as I have done more than once in this blog) the past year has been “the best of times…. the worst of times…. wisdom…. foolishness…. belief…. incredulity…. light…. darkness…. hope…. despair…. we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way….” And when I publish my next new post, I’ll be 60 years of age. Carpe Diem. In 1790, John Trusler, compiling proverbs, glossed the title of today’s post with “No time like the present, a thousand unforeseen circumstances may interrupt you at a future time.” So true.

Rainbows to Trumpkin, Sense to Nonsense

New Deal

Brian and Sue on VE Day, the milky way, Monument Valley - everything changes, incrementally

Weaning off Zoom
So today, pubs and restaurants can begin re-opening and hairdressers can return to work. Some cinema chains are making tentative arrangements for opening but theatres and concert venues remain closed for performances. The Covid-19 Lockdown is “easing” further in the direction of a “New Normal.” The New Normal is likely to be with us for a few years. We’ve booked our first restaurant. We’ve booked our first social event with geographically distant friends (Sue and Brian above, making merry on VE Day.) How have we all coped? Have we learned anything about ourselves individually, as communities, as a country, as a continent, as a planet? Or will we strive to return everything to being the same as it was before? I don’t think that’s possible. Time (and circumstances) change things – notice the images below (the two adverts are absolutely genuine – from 1890 and 1964.) Some things will never be the same: any references to driving to Barnard Castle to test your eyesight, for example.

VE Day Afternoon Tea, the glorious Sophia Loren telling truths, genuine advertisements that wouldn't be printed in 2020

What’s past is prologue
The current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson (Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson to his family) has declared a New Deal and has given the impression he will now be able to deliver on his election manifesto promises (see No Excuses Now for a reminder.) I hope he succeeds in doing everything he promised, though I suspect the Coronavirus pandemic will be used time and again in the next decade to excuse failures. The first political New Deal belonged to President Roosevelt in America in 1933-34. To avoid further economic catastrophe, liberals pushed through the Second New Deal in 1935-36. History doesn’t show how many further New Deals might have been needed because The Second World War demanded everyone’s attention and other economic opportunities arose in the fight against Fascism. Hopefully, a World War is not around the corner in the 2020s. Still, we might as well talk about a New Deal – it sounds more energetic and optimistic than a New Normal. But I hope we can learn and build a better world. Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest (What’s past is prologue) is inscribed on the National Archives Building in Washington DC and can now be applied to any situation where past events should be used to determine exactly what happens next. We should learn from the past. Shouldn’t we? Happy Independence Day!

Summary of the forthcoming (expensive) Enquiry into the Coronavirus Pandemic

Yearly trick of looking new

Spring turns to Summer
As night follows day and age follows youth, so the seasons move along whether or not we humans are loving, reproducing, fighting infection or dying. Walls fall, buildings fall, whole cities and empires fall. But, for now at least, the flowers and plants and trees continue to grow, Earth turns, and after the dark comes the dawn. Further lockdown measures have been “eased” and the crowds (mostly socially distancing, but not always) are returning to beauty spots. After Summer, the Autumn will come, and Winter will be here anon. In the meantime, Phllip Larkin’s poem The Trees has been on my mind on recent walks.

Yearly trick of looking new

The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

New horizons

Had we but World enough and Time
In the past week, the Coronavirus Lockdown has begun easing in the UK. Will “normal life” return? What will “new normal” be like? I hope a kinder world emerges.
….at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
In Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, the voice of the poem urges us to Sieze the Day before, in the words of Cleopatra’s attendant Iras, “The bright day is done/And we are for the dark.” The pandemic has caused a great Pause in the affairs of much of the human race. What are the future horizons?

No Excuses Now

 

I hope Tory Voters are right
I hope the new government will turn the UK into a huge post-Brexit success. WHAT DID THE TORY MANIFESTO PROMISE?

• Get Brexit Done
• Take measures to reverse the climate emergency
• Protect and enhance the NHS
• Boost the Education Service
• Improve the national Criminal Justice and Penal systems
• Develop an immigration service appropriate to the 21st Century
• Build enough social housing
• Protect and enhance the lives of all vulnerable people
• Unleash the potential of the UK’s forgotten towns with major investments
• Improve our transport infrastructure
• Protect jobs and human rights
• Be taken seriously on the World Stage.

THAT’S WHAT THEY’VE PROMISED IN THEIR MANIFESTO. That’s (I hope) why TORY VOTERS voted for them because TORY VOTERS BELIEVE THIS WILL HAPPEN. I hope so too. Really hope so. I love the UK. I love its history, its culture, its countryside. I wish we had voted to remain aligned to Europe in the Referendum back in 2016 but we didn’t, so I have always thought that Brexit in some form should happen, despite my reservations about the honesty of the original exercise.

Well, the Tories have had three-and-a-half years to deliver Brexit. They haven’t – and for two of those years because of their own in-fighting – and NOW the country has voted to give the mendacious Boris Johnson a chance to Get Brexit Done. So, I watch with fascinated interest – and hope the Tory Voters are right – and within months the country regains its pride, strength and stability. Time will tell.

Right Left Divide
My final comfort is that (in the graphic below, with one result left to call):

• the Right of Centre Vote Share (Con + Brx) = 45.6%
• the Left of Centre Vote Share (Lab + LD + SNP + GRN) = 50.3%

with the rest made up of Northern Ireland parties and Independent individuals. If only a New Left Alliance could emerge from the ashes of the 2019 election…. a Rebel Alliance?

East Riddlesden Hall

Chameleon building
Cobwebs and faux giant spiders, as well as a red floodlight or two, added a spooky Halloween atmosphere to the Great Barn at East Riddlesden Hall, not far from where I live. A building has been on the site since the 7th Century so an Anglo-Saxon owner seems to have been forced to give the land over to the Norman de Montalt family and traces of manor buildings from the medieval period can still be detected. The Paslew family are known to have built extensions in 1466 and over the next hundred years the place doubled in size. The Rishworth family sold the Hall to James Murgatroyd in 1638 and a visit today shows all the weird alterations and quirky features resulting from the changing ownership. I understand it’s one of the most popular sites in the National Trust for wedding parties today and has appeared in a number of TV programmes and movies, most memorably for me in the Charlotte Riley/Tom Hardy Wuthering Heights (not to mention the Juliette Binoche/Ralph Fiennes Wuthering Heights and the Kit Harington Gunpowder.)

Andrew Lincoln, Charlotte Riley, Tom Hardy at East Riddlesden Hall for Wuthering Heights

Today is the day it all starts

Soft blessing of rain
On Friday 16th August 2019 the extended families of my (Leapling) niece, Rebecca, and her fiancé, Marc, gathered under a beautiful pavilion with a countryside view at King’s Croft Hotel in Pontefract. Rain fell like a soft blessing and the service was friendly and profound, as it should be when two people commit to each other in public in front of family and friends.

All the senses in play
Weddings unite. All our eyes were bathed in filters of happiness. All our ears were treated to wishes and hopes, desires and dreams for the couple and for each other. We had a wonderful feast of food and drink. All our hugs and kisses, dance moves – fast and slow – smiles and tears of joy and nostalgia reminded each person of other occasions, other people, including those who were absent and were missed, and other situations. You can’t help contemplate your own life when you see someone embarking on a new phase of theirs.

All the elements throughout the world
Why is marriage still a desirable rite of passage? Before the year 1184, religious leaders in England had nothing to do with weddings and the ceremony itself was only allowed inside churches in the 16th Century. For most of human history, the joining of two people together has been a secular affair, from the pagan woodland ceremonies (using the four elements of Air, Earth, Fire and Water) to the community handfasting represented onstage in Shakespeare plays like As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. But throughout history, in every country in the world, in very different settings and buildings, following customs and rituals as varied as the people on the planet, humans still want couples to succeed when they join together formally.

Family and friends
I've always loved being a member of an extended family catching up at get-togethers. And it’s always fascinating to get a glimpse into the work and leisure lives of the couple being married. I can honestly say it was a day where goodwill was palpable, where love was, indeed, all around and in the air.

Daddy bear
The father of the bride, my beloved brother Chris, gave a speech from the bottom of his Little House on the Prairie heart. Did he blub a bit? Yes he did. Did I love him all the more? Yes I did. Aaron read the following, the final line of which provides the title of this post, though I’ve always thought (probably the form tutor in me) that every day is a fresh day, a new day, the day it all starts again….

Just two people in love
Today is a day you will always remember
The greatest in anyone's life
You'll start off the day just two people in love
And end it as husband and wife.

It's a brand new beginning, the start of a journey
With moments to cherish and treasure
And although they'll be times when you both disagree
These will surely be outweighed by pleasure

Secrets of marriage
You'll have heard many words of advice in the past
When the secrets of marriage were spoken
But you know that the answers lie hidden inside
Where the bond of true love lies unbroken

Today is the day it all starts
So live happy forever as lovers and friends
It's the dawn of a new life for you
As you stand there together with love in your eyes
From the moment you whisper ‘I do'

And with luck all your hopes and your dreams can be real
May success find its way to your hearts
Tomorrow can bring you the greatest of joys
But today is the day it all starts

When one door closes

Change is in the air
It was Alexander Graham-Bell, I think, who first set down on paper:

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

Early retirement in 2014 brought for me a different sort of life, as busy as before but not subjected to the timetabled routines of a school day, term and year. I changed job seven times throughout my career and my daughters have each changed at least twice, depending on whether or not you count voluntary work and internships…. I’m a great one for rationalising and not looking back at closed doors. The summer of 2019 marks a new perspective for my family as Emily ends her work for a national charity and begins training to join a much bigger organisation: the NHS. When one door closes, another opens….

Undercliffe Cemetery

Magnificent Memorial
As part of this year’s Bradford Literature Festival, we booked onto a twilight tour of the famous Undercliffe Cemetery. The haunting site overlooks the city and contains impressive Victorian funerary edifices and tombs, as well as areas of neglected dilapidation. There are also over 200 military graves from different conflicts in history. The site features memorably in the 1963 film of Billy Liar.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
It’s hard not to reflect on humanity’s ambitions and the fleeting span of lifetimes as you contemplate the inscriptions and imagine the forgotten stories of the great and the good, the greedy and the vain, the humble and the tragic. In Victorian times Bradford was one of the richest cities in Europe because of the thriving textile industries; civic pride is evident as you wander across the enormous site. Six of the memorials have listed building status and the place is now run by the Undercliffe Cemetery Charity.

Spirited Away

Changing, Moving, Travelling, Spiriting….
Time marches on. Things change. I’ve been out of sync with my blog and writing, partially as a result of radical changes to the structure of Rhenium Tales and Raydan’s story (see tags opposite) but also because of Christmas, New Year, my depression about Brexit and This and That. But my planning is up to date (again, for now….) and I can see the wood as well as the trees.

Chihiro (Sen) and Haku....

Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
The subheading above translates roughly as Sen and Chihiro's Spiriting Away…. Sen is the name forcibly given to the heroine, Chihiro, in the Studio Ghibli film that English-speaking audiences know as Spirited Away. In the story Chihiro needs to remember and reclaim her own name before she forgets it and is trapped forever. We all need to remember and reclaim who we are. I recently re-watched Spirited Away with family and friends (in the "Harry Potter Film Club") and was reminded why it was a deserved winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The director Hayao Miyazak has created a fantastically imaginative world with inventive landscapes and extraordinary attention to background details.

Characters and scenes from Spirited Away

Pig parents….
The central emotional journey is that of Chihiro’s growing understanding that she has to rely on her own resources to survive in the world, rather than expecting her parents to show her the way. She begins the films angrily and sulkily, grieving because she has been forced to leave all her friends behind as her uber-professional parents relocate the family to a new house in the provinces. Chihiro’s father drives recklessly down a short-cut, boasting about his four-wheel drive and the family are drawn, dream-like, into an abandoned amusement park where Chihiro’s parents cannot stop themselves gorging on food which turns them (literally) into pigs.

Thank you, Amy and Maggie, for our Saki set....

River spirits and dragons….
Chihiro meets Haku, a young man who persuades her that the only way to save her parents is to get a job in the bathhouse (populated by weird gods and spirits) ruled over by the powerful Yubaba. Chihiro has to navigate adventures in the Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz-like environment and she meets further strange characters like the spider-like boilerman, Kamaji, the down-to-earth Lin, the hard-working soot creatures, the Stinky slime-god (who turns out to be suffering from catastrophic environmental pollution), the Yu-bird and the giant baby boy, Boh. Not to mention Yubaba’s sister, Zeniba, who delivers my favourite line from the film: Once you do something, you never forget. Even if you can’t remember.

Delicious food to accompany the film: Gyoza dumplings and Katsu Chicken

Tears flow upwards….
What's it all about? Love? Family? Childhood fears? The need to belong? Loneliness and alienation? Endurance? The rat-race? The dangers of material wealth? Self-determination and courage? Asserting your own identity? Working hard? Accepting what cannot be changed? The horrors of enslavement and exploitation? Environmental pollution? It’s about all of these things, and no doubt many more. At one point, tears flow upwards…. hello, February.

Exciting times

July memories with Harriet, Chris, Emily, Alex from Badby, Sally and random daleks

That was July and this is August
Yes, another brief blog, but, then again, loved ones tell me some people only look at the pictures anyway…. which is fine. So, yes, the 2018 summer heatwave continues (gorgeous weather or the beginning of our planet’s final descent into a cosmic inferno of global warming? Who knows? Time will tell.) My eldest daughter celebrated her July birthday in fine style in beautiful places and doing cool things and is plotting the next stage of her life (what will happen? Who knows? Time will tell.) I’ve been revisiting my past notes on Merry Wives of Windsor and Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays in anticipation of this year’s Royal Shakespeare Company Summer School (my manly vice.) And I’ve been receiving feedback from my beta readers (thank you, all) on the (6th ? draft) of Raydan Wakes, the first book in the trilogy Rhenium Tales on which I’m doing my final feedback-fuelled revisions. Plots for all three books are sewn up, the website is almost ready to be released to the world, so that’s one item on the bucket list that can be ticked off. (Will an agent champion it? Who knows? Time will tell.) Exciting times.

top page of the soon-to-be-released website about my trilogy....

New Year, New Routine

 

Epiphany
And so the Twelfth Day of Christmas comes around again and all the trimmings come down. Baubles go back in the cupboard for another year and pine needles are vacuumed up…. I enjoyed the annual treat of walking round the atmospheric streets of Saltaire to see the creative Advent Windows (see previous years here and here.) I’m enjoying getting hungry again and not feeling so permanently kaylied (drunk….) I’ve vowed to write only a maximum of 3 blogs a months in 2018 so, despite having the material, I’m saving up my blogs on the New Year’s Eve Murder Mystery, a winter walk at Bolton Abbey, thoughts about EM Forster, Anglesey, Norway, Bletchley Park, Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece…. and no doubt many other things that bounce into my brain.

Resolutions
What have I resolved? In common with every other year in living memory I hope to get fitter, declutter and avoid procrastination. But this year, 2018, fresh off the boat, I resolve to get my novel, Raydan Wakes, ready for submission to an agent (or six.) The edit of Book One is coming along in fits and starts with radical cuts and restructuring; the first draft of Book Two seems plain sailing in comparison; events are unfolding as I expected them to. No surprises so far in Book Two, but Book One is proving to be discombobulating, like a wild animal nipping, clawing, scratching and biting chunks out of what I thought it was. Ah, the life of a writer….