Sandwiches

I am a sandwich. You are a sandwich. He is a sandwich, too. That's enough conjugation. I was just making the point that we are all sandwiches. We are the past and the future with the present the meat in the middle. Should you be vegan or vegetarian, you will have to put another metaphore in the middle. You get the idea. Past, present, future are all essential to making us who we are. One thing that concerns me is whether or not we/I make enough of the present. After all, it would be rare for the bread to give greater pleasure than the filling. And yet, the filling can sometimes be taken for granted. The temptation is to remember the past and wait for the future; not to live completely in the NOW. A Buddhist I know well is eloquent on this subject. It is not exclusive to Buddhists, of course, but dealing with it has become a speciality for them. When it is called "Mindfulness" it has a vogue far wider than among Buddhists. Under that name, we are encouraged, taught even, to stay with the present, to concentrate on the present, on what is happening NOW. I have been confused, I think, about the significance of this. As we speak, I see it as a will to deepen one's experience of the NOW, to be fully aware of it.

But how I do this depends on how the past has shaped me, doesn't it? Isn't my awareness inevitably influenced by the Yes-but of the past. For instance, I dealt differently with the freezing cold of the last few weeks than did the younger - much- Guru. There is familiarity about it. When I was a little girl I would have to dress under the bedclothes, my breath making cloudy puffs above the blankets. There was a winter, in the forties, I think, when windows froze closed and my Mother devised a sort of hot-water bottle for the milkman to put the milk in on the doorstep. When first I had a one-year old, he couldn't be left in his pram in the garden during his first winter in the '60s. We would have had iced baby. Central heating was not ubiquitous and we simply put on more clothes and huddled. It is how things were, so not questionable. I found that made me more tolerant of the recent conditions that were fazing the much younger. It influences my thoughts on global warming. I have been cold before. So help me understand what's new. You may remember, if you have had time, inclination and generosity to keep up - and tell your friends - that I was much moved by a TV programme about shop-keeping during the war in the 40's. I have done without things before, before they were dependant on snow on the runway for non-delivery. What does the future hold, then? The Guru has a relative who was near to restraining him physically when he proposed to use a car for what, in the interest of the planet, was regarded by the other as too short a journey. Petrol was rationed when I was little. Journeys restricted themselves. Past and future have that in common.
A more immediate future is overwhelming a dear old, and aged, friend of mine. Someone who is charged with looking after her told me, to-day, that she is very frightened. She will no longer speak on the phone and says, simply,"thank you" when the carer conveys my or anyone's love. She doesn't know whose love. I hope that doesn't matter and that she can still feel that present love as she moves inexorably in to the future. There is someone else close to me who says we septagenarians are all in the Departure Lounge. (He is just a few months off the next decade.) My very dear and fearful aged friend is already waiting on the tarmac. I pray she gets clearance for take off very soon, safe in the knowledge of an experienced pilot, perfect conditions and nothing to fear. Nos da and Blwyddyn Newydd Dda

Routine

What I'd like to know is whether or not you have managed to keep up your routine during the run up to the looming 'C' word. I am not even going to have to cook on Christmas day but I have accumulated forty nine parcels to wrap and assorted other meals to cook even without the turkey and you-know-what -else. Anyway, if you can call those reasons, that is why I have not been to my blog station for far too long. ( I know, I know, I leave it far too long far too often. On the other hand, I dare not risk boring you with them). What I need is a routine, a day which is write-a-post day. Dilemma: since I stopped working - paid working: housewives' work is never done - I have suffered a routine allergy. I am incapable of doing anything on a set time basis. As I think you know, I signed up for Advanced French and Begginers' German classes. Did I keep my Wednesday lunch-time appointments? No I did not. Not for more than a term, that is. The nature of my work was such that, in many cases, it would have been positively harmful for me to have altered my routine. If I said I would be there then there I would have to be. It has become a sort of 'yah boo and sucks' to that way of life for me to avoid anything, now, which ties me to a specific duty, or even pleasure, at a fixed time. The thing goes so far that I am having problems making up my face. Normally, you would expect to get up, wash your face and wherever else you feel the need, clean your teeth and on with the slap. Now I just have to vary it. Sometimes, I go down and feed my beloved, change her litter and even have my own breakfast before coming back upstairs to disguise the ravages of age. It has been known for me to feed her, make up and then eat. But today I discovered another aversion. I am averse/allergic to the routine order in which the slap, itself, actually goes on. Truly, if you are female, you will know that there is not much scope for variation; foundation, colour here and there, powder to seal it all and off to go. And there's the rub: vary it if you can. I have been doing this for sixty years or so. There must be a way in which I could do it differently. There is the option of not doing it at all, of course. Don't be daft: it would frighten the children - and the horses.

One of the difficulties is the usual one: that phenomena all have their pros and cons. Routine can be both irritating, infuriating, even, and also comforting and reassuring. A baby learns about alrightness in life when he/she can count on things being the same every time she/he experiences them. On the other hand, a certain amount of the unexpected is necessary to expose them to change and chance and coping with that. Have you ever changed your routine route to work or wherever just because you couldn't stand the sight of that hoarding with its posters another moment. And didn't it feel friendly and reassuring when you resumed your old path after a long absence away? I find myself dredging for examples which has thoroughly confused my inner world because it's rather a favourite hobby horse of mine, the yes and no of just about everything. Another inhibiter has been the dear old Wizard of Cyberspace. A while ago he swallowed the entire second paragraph and I have had no luck in reinstalling it. I am now working from the 'edit' edition on my blog site and absolutely terrified because it hasn't got the familiar 'save' option. I use this after about every second word as a matter of routine and am now in constant fear that the entire thing will be lost, permanently this time. Oh well, routine for the Wizard - who has also been known to be a Guardian Angel. Back to routine cellotape, ribbon and label. In which order?

Remembering

No irony intended in the current title. I do understand that my inner world consists almost entirely of a huge cupboard of rememberings. The other day, those contents were seriously challenged to move over and make room for a whole lot more. On television, I watched a programme which is, evidently, part of a series. A group of shopkeepers is transported back to various epochs in history. I did not see any of the others, which, I believe, started in Victorian times. The one I saw was war-time Britain. You won't need to be adequate at Maths to work out I was there. A baker, a grocer and a dressmaker were set up to run businesses in the physical representation and the garb of the time. I was overcome by such a sense of deja vue and recognition that I had to keep checking that the Guru, very much a figure of the 21st Century, was actually in the same, here-and-now room with me. I remember the way the shops looked; the sacks of provisions on the floor, the scales, and the scissors which the shopkeepers used to cut the coupons out of our ration books. I remember the queues and the cold standing outside waiting to be served. Things were a touch easier for us in some ways because my Father kept hens and we were able to benefit from more than the one egg a week ration, when they chose to lay, that is. Their rations were not rich, either and, though my Father filled them with love enough to lay their eggs in his hand, they were not so robust they could lay copiously and reliably. Some American Forces were billeted in our town and my Father, having been overseas in the forces in the First World War, went in to their Post Office and arranged to 'adopt' two men who were working there. He felt it was his way of re-paying the local hospitality he had received all those decades before. In this way, we also had supplementary chocolate and treats that were familiar and forgotten to my Mother and sister and fascinatingly new to me. Occasionally, they offered - wait for it - nylon stockings. The older females in my family swallowed their guilt, washed off the black line that had simulated a stocking seam on the backs of their bare legs and wore them as if elevated to Royalty in one silky gesture. Guilt was a real issue among the adults. There was unbearable conflict between the wish to do the best for one's family and the knowledge that one was indulging in unfairness, a sin above many others at that time. I doubt there is a way to make the young to-day feel, empathise with, the altruism and the strength of acceptance of the 'other' that helped keep us afloat in the chaotic, sterile and decimated era of that war. Stuck in a recent snow-storm, how could being told they were sharing in the "spirit of the blitz"mean anything to anyone under 70ish?

In the programme, the grocer was found guilty of serving people " under the counter". Should you, Dear Reader, be of the wrong epoch, this meant he sold goods over and above the ration allowance. This was not only immoral, it was illegal. I remember the collective guilt if one had benefitted from this practice, and the perpertrator was caught and seriously fined. However, if one had not benefitted, one was obliged to collude in ostracising the guilty one. Talk about a no-win situation. What a strange set of morality and rules of community I must have absorbed and what an odd old lady that makes me, to-day. I apprehended the Guru looking at me in a way I couldn't read. Perhaps it was the way I would have looked at someone whom I knew had taken part in the Charge of the Light Brigade. History was sharing the living room with him. How rum is that? (Actually, he was probably wishing we were watching "The Apprentice" or something else with contemporary relevance. I must ask him.) I experienced the rippling chill of the air-raid siren when it was reproduced: the chill, but also the excitement if you were a little girl pulled out of your bed in the huge dark of the middle of the night. I re-felt the hands of my sister helping me zip up my siren-suit with its bunny- eared hood. (For those of you lacking a Grandma or acquaintance of the age, a siren -suit was just like a baby- grow but for all ages. The Prime Minister wore one. It covered you and your nightie from tip to toe and kept you warm in the air-raid shelter). When you are a little person, your way of life simply is; everything after is change. Perhaps I never really moved on from that time. In future, shall I have to call this blog "75 going on wartime"? C U soon.
PS My gas mask was Minnie Mouse shaped. Go on: you do know what a gas mask is.

More love

You don't need me to tell you that it would take more than one blogpost to cover the question of love. It has taken me this long, though, to recover from the shock of my temerity in discussing it at all a post or two ago. I did suspect at the time that I would be drawn in to discussing it some more. This time, there is the magnet of lost love. Is there any quality of love, through circumstance or choice, (see below if you are new to 75goingon40), which can be counted on as rock solid? It's possible that the love of one's children could be expected to overcome no- matter -what. Equally, the love for one's children.But, big but, don't we all know of situations which can , nevertheless, be categorised as 'never-darken-my-door-again'? A fictional one comes handily to mind. Do you remember "Fiddler on the Roof"? Briefly, this was the story of a very poor Jewish family of Father, Mother and five daughters living in Russia at the time of the pograms. The story was not the most subtly developed, but none the less potent for that. There was a progression, seen through the eyes of the obdurate, traditional Father, from his ultimate acceptance of his oldest daughter's right to chose her own husband to the marriage of a younger one to a Christian. Between, there was a middle daughter's alliance with a radical whom she followed to Siberia. Faced with each abomination, he first disowned and then came to reconciliation with them. Non-specific experience tells me that it is less likely the other way around. It seems to me that children are less inclined to accept, or even need, the rock solidarity of the parents' love, anyway, on the surface. One doesn't know the effect on their unconscious, that is, as P.G. Wodehouse, puts it, if they had one. I can think of instances, however, where a parent has 'sinned' by all rational measures of that crime, and is still loved and related to by his/her young. Indeed, the greater the 'sin' against love, the stronger the pull to have it back.

Maybe, there's the rub. Is it that we forgive and accommodate sins against love because of our need to find a rock solid one, at all costs to avoid its loss? I think, often, about the ramifications of divorce, for instance. Is it possible that the love, whatever its quality, that brought to people together in the first place, simply ceases to exist after divorce? Where does it go? In to the ether, down to the other place, is it transformed in to hate or indifference? Does it linger, in dreams, in cupboards, in the stuff we consign to Oxfam? Someone I know and love loathes her ex with a passion that can be almost scary. But, she dreams, with desolation, that she has lost her wedding ring. Is it the 'ghost of love lost' rather than 'hate found' that is hiding in her inner world? Death is different. It may be that there is not such an 'if only' possibility in the loss of love through death. Death clears our relationships of acrimony: divorce of tenderness. In the past, I have been careless with love, thinking it rock solid when it turned out not to be. There is a sort of see-saw in it: the 'no-matter-what- I-do I- can't-lose - it' against the 'no-matter-what-it-costs I'll -keep- it'. This morning it cost three different kinds of cat food to get it. I know, I know: no boundaries, no shame, no leave-her-to-it-and-if-she's-hungry etc etc. But rock solid it certainly is; for the moment, anyway. Bora da

Timing

What good practice it is to find a title that is succinct and pliable; one that will enable me to stick to the subject in hand but be not so specific that it will force me to run out of steam after two sentences. As I was saying, timing: I seem to have spent my entire life being too late to shop early for Christmas. Very little has changed this year except that I am even more aware that November is only just within the bounds of shopping early - my bounds, anyway. But I have made one purchase, that is, a real one, one that involved going in to a shop, asking a question, examining the goods, making a decision and paying, and, wait for it, going back out on to the street with a little package in my hand. I have also made two on-line purchases. (Stop it! This is no laughing matter. I bet your Grandmother isn't Christmas shopping on-line). I do not see this as a real purchase. I have touched nothing, exchanged words with no-one and certainly not wandered anywhere with a package in my hand. This is a cyber-purchase and if I ever see the goods no one will be more surprised than I: I, the pedant, that is. I am off on a little trip for five days and, who knows, perhaps there will be two tangible packages when I get back, or two cross notes from the postman saying he tried to deliver such and such without success and would I please present myself with all dispatch at an unfindable location at times which don't exist; oh, and bringing proof of identity. As if I didn't find it hard enough remembering who I am, myself, from time to time, without having to prove it to others. One other concession to shopping early: I have cut down on the number of presents I am going to buy.

However, the underlying inspiration for these reflections is rather more serious, I fear. I have left it too late to get it right. ' It' what? you may well ask. Life, actually, is the nearest I can get to it. At the weekend I went to a party, a mixed-age party. Present was a breast feeding Mother, her husband and, of course, the baby. At about eleven o'clock, having heard stirrings from the monitor, the young Mum slipped out of the crowded room. Moments later, the baby's Father followed her. I found the implications of this very moving. He was clearly going to take in the spectacle of his loved wife feeding their lovely small daughter. My mixed feelings, of pleasure and delight and, it must be said, sadness, were because it is now too late to have a Father for my children who would have felt able to do that. I must add, at once, that this would be largely generational. When my littles were little, going on for fifty years ago, Fathers would have been rarely seen and never heard of in the basic environment of child-birth and very early rearing. It is equally too late to breast feed them for as long as Mothers currently do. At the other end, it is too late for me to be better to my own Mother than I managed to be when it was right I should have been. Most of what was done was done from duty. Will she have known this as a child knows when its parent is only simulating love? There is even a lesson on this kind of verisimilitude from my above young friend: she speaks to her baby as if she were a fully cognisant human being. Sometimes, she even tells her the day has been difficult and she is feeling rather cross. What confidence in herself, her baby and their mutual understanding is shown by this way of communicating. How sad I am it is too late to be that kind of Mother. Now, I have the experience and the confidence and the ability to feel the tenderness for my own Mother I couldn't allow when she was alive, but, sadly, one can't re-do mothers who have passed on. We'll gloss over what kind of wife I was. Definitely too late to do that again and differently.

The order I put in for my life then, must, though I didnt know it, have been done on line. You type in what you want, furnish your credit card details and leave it to the Wizard of Cyberspace to deliver. You can't see the goods in advance, you can't question their viability and they often turn out to be very different, indeed, from what you expected when you put the order in. You can, of course, send them back, so there the analogy has to end. Happy shopping early for you-know-what.

Love

Ok: there's no need to shout. I am perfectly well aware of the presumption of writing a post entitled "Love". Nevertheless, that's just what I am going to do. I have been thinking about love for the best part of three score and more than ten years. Recently, I came to the conclusion that love could be columnised in two lists. There is love by circumstance and love by choice. Love by circumstance would include ones children and ones other relatives. By and large, these are people one loves simply because they exist. Surely you have come across the phenomenon of the prodigal son. I thought so. For my purpose, though, it would need some modifying. What I had in mind was the impossible behaviour of the breaking-out teenager, with which we are all familiar. Short of murder, manslaughter, arson, you know, the sort of behaviour which tends to bring in the outside world, often dressed in blue, to deal with it, I have observed parents going on loving the most dastardly little darlings who are ruining the lives of all with whom they come in touch. Parents tend to forgive rudeness, unkindness, indifference without losing the pull at the heart which is the best I can do to categorise love for the moment. I suppose this may also be true the other way around: children forgive parents who abandon, abuse, neglect and are indifferent to their young. When I was little, I had an Uncle whom I now realise was a sandwich or two short of a picnic. (Not a blood relative, I hasten to aver: married to one.) He was a horrible little man whose idea of one good joke was to play the sound of an air-raid siren on his fiddle in the middle of the night. (I don't feel able to tell you the really bad ones). He had a sqeaky voice, which should have made him sufficiently to be laughed at by me and my cousins - other than his own children - that the sting would have been taken out of his power to fighten and undermine. Do you know, we actually believed we loved this man because he was our uncle. We certainly kept going back to his house although his wife, my actual aunt, whom I suppose I did sort of love, made the worst Welsh cakes in the country. I was seventeen when I announced that, not only did I not love Uncle D, I hated him. The ensuing parental argument was along the lines of " of course you don't hate him: he's your Uncle".

To love by choice is a quite different kettle of lobster. Definition, description, everything defies possibility. From best friends in the playground to partners in life, those we choose to love, or, rather, the reasons we choose to love them, have to be recorded under 'enigma', anyway, by me. I am prepared to talk about the pull at the heart, but, in the last resort, is'nt one just left with the 'you know what I mean' option? Take the Guru - no don't, I need him to out - face the Wizard of Cyberspace. Love is a word good enough for my response to him. Why? He is no longer an enchanting toddler, an interestingly clever five-year-old. We negotiated teen-age well enough. We do have some similar ways of looking at the world but not enough to fill a questionnaire. I am left with the possibility that we were somehow related in another life. That would/could make him loved by circumstance, though, depending on HOW we were related. What about my cat? I certainly love her, which, considering how rotten she is to almost every other human in her world, doesn't immediately qualify her as eminently lovable. Perhaps I love her because I can interpret her way of being in the world as including love for me. I am the provider of the safe haven in which she lives, but I don't know if that is sufficient to explain the way she follows me and waits for me to provide a lap or a tummy to climb on to and miaows if I am too long about it. Her little head rubs against my hand and - that's quite enough. The rest is private. If I think about those I love through choice, I begin to suspect they do have one thing in common, though: what you see is what you get. There is no organisation, manipulation of the personailty to confuse or deceive. A spouse/partner starts as choice and in due course becomes circumstance, a relative. Of course, the loved by circumstance and the loved by choice may each induce the same phenomenon: the 'Ah/Yes' that stirs your heart and waters your eyes and delights your soul. Blood is incidental then. Each is just joy. See you sooner.

Dialogue

I suspect I really mean dualogue. What I have in mind is mimicing a duck. A calm, polite, co-operative conversation is going on on the surface and a frantic, angry, border-line unpublishable contra-flow is going on below; like a duck skimming smoothly across the top of a lake,while underneath, running, unseen, a being demented, to catch the last bus ever. For instance, to-day, at lunch time, I underwent some tests on my heart. They were deemed necessary after the flurry of heart overkill that took me to hospital a couple of months ago. An event which ended by distracting all the nurses in A and E. (See below for the Guru-effect). This was not a proceedure to which I was looking forward. I am rarely a happy bunny when arrangements are made for me that mean I have to skip lunch. Just because the practitioners are prepared to sacrifice their midday sustenance doesn't mean the patients are. But I duly presented myself and thus began the dualogue of which the title. Political correctness dictates staff should explain every move they/you authorise/make. "Remove all upper garments and put on the gown, tying at the back. That blue and white garment is the gown". Inner voice:" I've put on more gowns than you've had hot dinners, idiot". Outer voice: "Shall I leave my things here?" "Yes, except your bag, of course." i.v. "Actually, my bra is more valuable than my bag". o.v "Thank you Nurse." Head pops back in: "No, gown to the front on this occasion. I have to attach terminals to your chest." i.v. "Make your b....y mind up". o.v. "Thank you, Nurse". "I'm not Nurse. I'm the Radiographer". i.v. "I don't give a d..n who you are." o.v. "Oh! sorry. What about my trousers?" "You can leave them on. Elastic-waisted are they?" i.v. "No, they are certainly not elastic waisted. Do I look like the sort of woman who would wear elastic-waisted trousers. Leave me my last vestige of elegant womanhood you stupid radiographer." o.v. "No, they're not. They have buttons and a zip." "Well, we'll just roll them down then". Once in the operating theatre - in the non-invasive sense: the room where things will happen - every nut and bolt is explained. i.v. "Just get on with it. This is more information than I need to deal with. Yes, I have been fasting: why?" o.v. "Thank you. I understand. I'm fine, just a bit hungry. Oh, I see. No food in case the injection of dye makes me sick" i.v. "You infantilising nincompoop. I've had this sort of injection before. I'm not going to mess up your lovely white clinic." Three tries by junior radiographer, then senior, at placing a canula in a vein in one arm then the other. Doctor called. He manages to get it in to a vein in my hand. i.v. "At least look at me and greet me before your tear my hand to pieces, and where are your sterile gloves?". o.v. "Thank you very much", when he succeeds where others have palpably failed and left me sorissimo. (I do know that's not a word. Would you have left the 'e' in for greater clarity or put 'exceedingly sore'?) Anyway, there I am. The semicircle of magic machine is in front of me, I am taped in to a canula, my back is uncomfortable and the tourniquet is biting in to my wrist. "Everything alright?" i.v. " Why would it be, Stupid? Has anyone ever done this to you? Yes, I do remember the dye will make me feel hot. This will be the fourth time you have told me in the last three minutes. Trying to impress Sir?" o.v. "Fine, thank you."

She is right. The dye does make me feel hot and swirls round in places of more intimacy than I dreamt would have been involved. I am in and out of the machine like a cuckoo clock. Each time, I dutifully hold my breath and pray she remembers to tell me to breath normally in due course. Mostly, she does. To be fair, there is only one occasion when the breath-holding seems over long. "Alright?". i.v. " Must have as much breath control as a mezzo soprano. But it's not your business to assume that. What if I'd had the breath control of an angry infant? Hurray for me." o.v. "Fine thank you. What stage are we at?" " Nearly finished." Then a lot of step by step explanations about what will happen next, even to putting my clothes back on. i.v. "She means well; but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Shut up and get me out of here." o.v. "Thank you. That's very helpful."

But out of there she does get me. "You've done very well", she says, carrying my bag, my stick and my raincoat - how did that get in to the 'theatre'. i.v. "Done very well, have I? perhaps I'm a swan after all." o.v. "You made it very easy." Oh Dear, is nothing as it sounds in this world? See you before too long.

P.S. Before you label me economical with the truth, both the i.v and the o.v had its degree of verisimilitude; the i rather more than the o to be wholly honest.