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Thursday, March 16, 2006
The death of monsters
Is it Beowulf in reverse? Geoffrey Howe slew Grendel's mother. Have we just seen Jack Dromey tear off Grendel's right arm and hang it above Traitor's Gate?
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Zero tolerance of arboreal presence
It couldn’t have been less like a war zone. It was last Sunday, I was planting five fruit trees on the Village Trust land above the mill pond. There’d been reasoned debate - our side - and shouting and waving of fists - the other side - and the Trust had democratically decided on a management plan for the bit of land to the North of the pond.
The “other side” - of the disagreement, not the pond - are broadly the natives. They do not wholly appreciate that England has become a country with laws and stuff related to the public good. They would like it to be more like the warlords of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier, owning everything, their word the law, their word death.
They want to get rid of what they call, with angry distaste, Nature.
Animus against nature has a reason round here. It’s the most built rural environment in the world. It’s a stony zone. There are dry stone walls everywhere, often along the sides of streams, and mill dams and leats and steps, as well as the mills themselves, all fine masonry.
The enemy of masonry is trees. Trees lift stones, topple walls, alder roots make dams leak, divert goits from mill wheels; and trees start by being saplings. So you have to exterminate trees. Zero tolerance of arboreal presence.
The natives, who still hold this as a chthonic and unquestionable duty, want to cut everything down. Have grass. Or bracken’s all right. They point to the unmanaged scrub down our end of the pond, ash, hawthorn, bramble, oak, alder, willow, twenty different sorts of birds; they gesture and grimace with genuine revulsion.
“Our side” are the offcomers. We like nature. True, some of us offcomers are offensive idiots. One neighbour is a Southerner who considers himself, on what grounds are never clear, to be posh and the natives to be lower than vermin. He has some sort of ADD problem and a moronic laugh. (He also stands around his garden in a tee-shirt in the kind of weather I need to put on a vest, two sweaters, a fleece and thermal hat before I open the back door. This is really annoying).
The offcomers mostly seem to live up this end of the pond, and the natives live down the other end. It was agreed that the other end could cut down all the beech trees and try to turn them back into the beech hedge they had once been. In the middle section where the bracken is we should plant fruit trees, gorse and broom. And our end we should cut down the Leylandii which had been put in about twenty years ago, add more native trees and shrubs, but otherwise leave it as it is.
So I had just put a few plum and apple trees over the wall above the middle section, the bracken, and walked down with my spade to dig the first hole, when one of the fishermen the other side of the pond starts shouting at me.
These are not fishermen in the sense of fishermen from the village I come from. These arrive at the weekend dressed in camouflage gear, they put up a couple of cowshit coloured tents, they rig up two £1500 rods apiece and leave them on stands with electronic bite detectors, they attach a TV aerial to a tree and then they all go inside the tents and do whatever it is men decked in combat gear do together at the weekend in very small tents.
(In summer you get very different sorts of fisherpeople, sitting in the sun, whole families sometimes, they catch fish and throw them back merrily - you are not allowed to keep them. But I’ve never seen these winter men catch a fish. When they are not in the tent they stand and drink beer. I think maybe they are the advance guard a Countryside Alliance coup.
“What the fuck are you fucking doing?” enquires this particular fisherman.
I explain I’m planting fruit trees. To further queries from him I explain that I know it’s not my fucking land, I explain about the Village Trust in my polite and reasoning voice, I piss him off. He enquires whether I could not plant the trees at a time when he and his colleagues were not fishing.
I explain that I couldn’t.
I start to dig my first hole.
A face pops over the wall above to ask me what I’m fucking doing. This is one of the natives.
I explain - the democratic process and all
But this guy is a victim. His house is at the boundary between natives and offcomers. He wants the middle bit, in front of him, which is to be fruit trees gorse and broom, to remain in its present monoculture of bracken. I explain again about democracy. He explains about warlords and seigniorial rights. I explain it’s only fruit trees and they aren’t really going to cut off the light of the sun from his house twenty metres above and make him die of rickets. He brightens. He says, “Oh fruit trees. That’s all right then, we can prune them, and have lots of fruit.”
It seemed a perfect solution. The other grouse of the natives was that this land had at some time in living memory - living memory goes back thee hundred years round here - been allotments, and they wanted to continue where the Enclosure Acts had failed and procure the land for themselves. So his answer meant, if only symbolically, “I can both cut these trees and own their produce”.
A good resolution. He retired.
Unfortunately at that moment another native, a hot-headed lad, drove up and went into the first native’s house with him. They obviously spoke together of their victimhood, because the first native came back more angry than ever - not so much about the fruit trees now, but about the process that had decided that they should be planted.
At this point my neighbour, the wally snob with ADD, turned up to “help” me and add fuel to the ancient seigniorial anger. And a group of camouflaged fisherman had gathered on the far bank and were eyeing us silently.
Luckily just then the tree planting expert turned up, a genuinely pleasant person, the first nice person on site that morning, in jeans and a rain jacket with a woolly hat pulled down to the eyebrows.
This expert had two advantages. The first and greatest was that she was a young woman. My wally ADD neighbour explained to her how the local scum (names? natives don’t have names) were kicking up a fuss, and how the hotheaded native lad would find himself with an asbo or inside if he wasn’t careful.
The expert then revealed her second great advantage. She too was a native, born and bred and resident not a mile away, and indeed had grown up with the hotheaded lad. And indeed rather liked him.
At last we could get on with the tree planting.
The “other side” - of the disagreement, not the pond - are broadly the natives. They do not wholly appreciate that England has become a country with laws and stuff related to the public good. They would like it to be more like the warlords of Afghanistan and the North West Frontier, owning everything, their word the law, their word death.
They want to get rid of what they call, with angry distaste, Nature.
Animus against nature has a reason round here. It’s the most built rural environment in the world. It’s a stony zone. There are dry stone walls everywhere, often along the sides of streams, and mill dams and leats and steps, as well as the mills themselves, all fine masonry.
The enemy of masonry is trees. Trees lift stones, topple walls, alder roots make dams leak, divert goits from mill wheels; and trees start by being saplings. So you have to exterminate trees. Zero tolerance of arboreal presence.
The natives, who still hold this as a chthonic and unquestionable duty, want to cut everything down. Have grass. Or bracken’s all right. They point to the unmanaged scrub down our end of the pond, ash, hawthorn, bramble, oak, alder, willow, twenty different sorts of birds; they gesture and grimace with genuine revulsion.
“Our side” are the offcomers. We like nature. True, some of us offcomers are offensive idiots. One neighbour is a Southerner who considers himself, on what grounds are never clear, to be posh and the natives to be lower than vermin. He has some sort of ADD problem and a moronic laugh. (He also stands around his garden in a tee-shirt in the kind of weather I need to put on a vest, two sweaters, a fleece and thermal hat before I open the back door. This is really annoying).
The offcomers mostly seem to live up this end of the pond, and the natives live down the other end. It was agreed that the other end could cut down all the beech trees and try to turn them back into the beech hedge they had once been. In the middle section where the bracken is we should plant fruit trees, gorse and broom. And our end we should cut down the Leylandii which had been put in about twenty years ago, add more native trees and shrubs, but otherwise leave it as it is.
So I had just put a few plum and apple trees over the wall above the middle section, the bracken, and walked down with my spade to dig the first hole, when one of the fishermen the other side of the pond starts shouting at me.
These are not fishermen in the sense of fishermen from the village I come from. These arrive at the weekend dressed in camouflage gear, they put up a couple of cowshit coloured tents, they rig up two £1500 rods apiece and leave them on stands with electronic bite detectors, they attach a TV aerial to a tree and then they all go inside the tents and do whatever it is men decked in combat gear do together at the weekend in very small tents.
(In summer you get very different sorts of fisherpeople, sitting in the sun, whole families sometimes, they catch fish and throw them back merrily - you are not allowed to keep them. But I’ve never seen these winter men catch a fish. When they are not in the tent they stand and drink beer. I think maybe they are the advance guard a Countryside Alliance coup.
“What the fuck are you fucking doing?” enquires this particular fisherman.
I explain I’m planting fruit trees. To further queries from him I explain that I know it’s not my fucking land, I explain about the Village Trust in my polite and reasoning voice, I piss him off. He enquires whether I could not plant the trees at a time when he and his colleagues were not fishing.
I explain that I couldn’t.
I start to dig my first hole.
A face pops over the wall above to ask me what I’m fucking doing. This is one of the natives.
I explain - the democratic process and all
But this guy is a victim. His house is at the boundary between natives and offcomers. He wants the middle bit, in front of him, which is to be fruit trees gorse and broom, to remain in its present monoculture of bracken. I explain again about democracy. He explains about warlords and seigniorial rights. I explain it’s only fruit trees and they aren’t really going to cut off the light of the sun from his house twenty metres above and make him die of rickets. He brightens. He says, “Oh fruit trees. That’s all right then, we can prune them, and have lots of fruit.”
It seemed a perfect solution. The other grouse of the natives was that this land had at some time in living memory - living memory goes back thee hundred years round here - been allotments, and they wanted to continue where the Enclosure Acts had failed and procure the land for themselves. So his answer meant, if only symbolically, “I can both cut these trees and own their produce”.
A good resolution. He retired.
Unfortunately at that moment another native, a hot-headed lad, drove up and went into the first native’s house with him. They obviously spoke together of their victimhood, because the first native came back more angry than ever - not so much about the fruit trees now, but about the process that had decided that they should be planted.
At this point my neighbour, the wally snob with ADD, turned up to “help” me and add fuel to the ancient seigniorial anger. And a group of camouflaged fisherman had gathered on the far bank and were eyeing us silently.
Luckily just then the tree planting expert turned up, a genuinely pleasant person, the first nice person on site that morning, in jeans and a rain jacket with a woolly hat pulled down to the eyebrows.
This expert had two advantages. The first and greatest was that she was a young woman. My wally ADD neighbour explained to her how the local scum (names? natives don’t have names) were kicking up a fuss, and how the hotheaded native lad would find himself with an asbo or inside if he wasn’t careful.
The expert then revealed her second great advantage. She too was a native, born and bred and resident not a mile away, and indeed had grown up with the hotheaded lad. And indeed rather liked him.
At last we could get on with the tree planting.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Dremel
“What you need is a Dremel,” he told me. so I bought a Dremel. It turned out not to be suitable for the purpose (a technical matter involving the toilet cistern suddenly shifting forward two centimetres in the middle of the night - subsidence? ghosts? Nothing else had moved). So I had this Dremel.
A Dremel is a mini power tool that spins at 33,000 rpm - that’s what it says on the side.
When I was about sixteen I took a girl to a dance. This was in Cornwall, and long ago, when lying in bed in the still of the night I could hear the seas round Dollar Ogo and the Devil’s Frying Pan through the wisteria that grew into my open bedroom window.
Dances were held in the Village Institute, and we danced - the girls danced - quicksteps and foxtrots and waltzes. We tended to trudge, which was manly at the time.
I was in love with, and still remember the feel of, the middle of three beautiful farmer’s daughters who lived in the next valley, Poltesco, but that evening I’d met another girl, older than me, in the pub when I’d come back from fishing. She usually went out with navy guys from Culdrose air station, but she was at a loose end and she said we should go to the dance. I went home and I hope bathed or at least washed the fish scales off and dressed up a bit but I only had my black school shoes, so I borrowed a pair of sharp suedes from my stepfather. My feet were two sizes bigger than his. The effects of this were more lasting than I anticipated.
The evening was a steep learning curve. I did not shine, and the girl got engaged to a lieutenant the next week and never looked in my direction again. But I also suffered physically. Life then involved a lot of walking, from my house to her house at Prazegooth then down through the Cove and up the steep hill to Ruan, and all the way back again when the dance was over. By the time I had sorted out my emotions and limped home with bleeding feet (and scratches down my back which were more fascinatingly disturbing but more transient), my right little toe was basically finished, twisted over, mis-aligned, a prisoner beneath the next toe in, and abraded into a corn of amazing durability. The wages of inadequate sin have been with me ever since.
So I suddenly thought, the Dremel. Instead of those industrial emery boards you get in Boots, or a scalpel, I’ll try this miracle of delicate engineering. It worked perfectly. But afterwards my toe really hurt. I hadn’t anticipated that sandpaper applied to dead skin, even lightly, at 33,000 rpm, is going to generate friction and heat; enough to traumatise - on a miniature and delicate scale - the living tissue beneath. It seems that night will be with me for ever.
A Dremel is a mini power tool that spins at 33,000 rpm - that’s what it says on the side.
When I was about sixteen I took a girl to a dance. This was in Cornwall, and long ago, when lying in bed in the still of the night I could hear the seas round Dollar Ogo and the Devil’s Frying Pan through the wisteria that grew into my open bedroom window.
Dances were held in the Village Institute, and we danced - the girls danced - quicksteps and foxtrots and waltzes. We tended to trudge, which was manly at the time.
I was in love with, and still remember the feel of, the middle of three beautiful farmer’s daughters who lived in the next valley, Poltesco, but that evening I’d met another girl, older than me, in the pub when I’d come back from fishing. She usually went out with navy guys from Culdrose air station, but she was at a loose end and she said we should go to the dance. I went home and I hope bathed or at least washed the fish scales off and dressed up a bit but I only had my black school shoes, so I borrowed a pair of sharp suedes from my stepfather. My feet were two sizes bigger than his. The effects of this were more lasting than I anticipated.
The evening was a steep learning curve. I did not shine, and the girl got engaged to a lieutenant the next week and never looked in my direction again. But I also suffered physically. Life then involved a lot of walking, from my house to her house at Prazegooth then down through the Cove and up the steep hill to Ruan, and all the way back again when the dance was over. By the time I had sorted out my emotions and limped home with bleeding feet (and scratches down my back which were more fascinatingly disturbing but more transient), my right little toe was basically finished, twisted over, mis-aligned, a prisoner beneath the next toe in, and abraded into a corn of amazing durability. The wages of inadequate sin have been with me ever since.
So I suddenly thought, the Dremel. Instead of those industrial emery boards you get in Boots, or a scalpel, I’ll try this miracle of delicate engineering. It worked perfectly. But afterwards my toe really hurt. I hadn’t anticipated that sandpaper applied to dead skin, even lightly, at 33,000 rpm, is going to generate friction and heat; enough to traumatise - on a miniature and delicate scale - the living tissue beneath. It seems that night will be with me for ever.
Saying Goodbye
Loïc wrote this when he was seven. He’s not usually melancholy, though he does sometimes like to stand very still on top of a pedestal or tall tree stump for twenty minutes, like a statue, face distant and immobile even when you try to make him laugh because you’re a bit worried about where he actually is.
He didn’t write the poem for homework or anything, nobody suggested it, he just wrote it.
Saying Goodbye
If I don’t say goodbye, I will
Never see my family again.
I would love to stay, but
I know I can’t because of the war. If I don’t say goodbye
The war would never end because
I didn’t say goodbye. I don’t
Want to say goodbye because I
Know I would have to leave my
Family, good, good, goodbye.
November 2003
He didn’t write the poem for homework or anything, nobody suggested it, he just wrote it.
Saying Goodbye
If I don’t say goodbye, I will
Never see my family again.
I would love to stay, but
I know I can’t because of the war. If I don’t say goodbye
The war would never end because
I didn’t say goodbye. I don’t
Want to say goodbye because I
Know I would have to leave my
Family, good, good, goodbye.
November 2003
Friday, March 10, 2006
Thursday, March 09, 2006
The colour lobsters come with
One of the things they needed, desperately by now, were three cooked lobsters, and the guys on The Apprentice were aerosolising a fishmonger with testosterone charm. “They need to be red,” said Syed, “not green, or the original colour they come with.”
If the onrush of humanity is powered by a symbiosis of the human brain and a lifelike evolutionary form called, rather vaguely, culture, which lives out there in the world and in here in our heads, but can only replicate and mutate deep in the human cranium; then celebrity is the boiling, seething wave front of human culture. Hollywood, Footballers’ Wives (I know there’s a theory that Footballers’ Wives is fiction, but it can’t be, it’s too good for fiction), even The Apprentice, are places where the new stuff is reproducing and mutating (and often dying) at a massive rate. That’s why, so powerful is the cultural current running through these celebrities, so familiar and yet verging on the alien and incomprehensible, that the actual human beings that are the attraction points on the celebrity grid hardly seem to exist as individuals. They seem like beautiful zombies possessed by a trillion electron volt gabble of neo-stuff.
The colour that lobsters come with. A new world, where properties; hue, health, labial hysteresis; can be cut and pasted, rotated, solarised, textured, pixellated, diffused. Not the old one, where lobsters were blue.
If the onrush of humanity is powered by a symbiosis of the human brain and a lifelike evolutionary form called, rather vaguely, culture, which lives out there in the world and in here in our heads, but can only replicate and mutate deep in the human cranium; then celebrity is the boiling, seething wave front of human culture. Hollywood, Footballers’ Wives (I know there’s a theory that Footballers’ Wives is fiction, but it can’t be, it’s too good for fiction), even The Apprentice, are places where the new stuff is reproducing and mutating (and often dying) at a massive rate. That’s why, so powerful is the cultural current running through these celebrities, so familiar and yet verging on the alien and incomprehensible, that the actual human beings that are the attraction points on the celebrity grid hardly seem to exist as individuals. They seem like beautiful zombies possessed by a trillion electron volt gabble of neo-stuff.
The colour that lobsters come with. A new world, where properties; hue, health, labial hysteresis; can be cut and pasted, rotated, solarised, textured, pixellated, diffused. Not the old one, where lobsters were blue.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Sunday afternoon at about four o’clock a man called to ask me questions about my radio-listening habits. I was about to wash the car at the time. It’s a shameful thing to wash a car, especially with proprietary emulsified waxes in a bucket of warm water. The kind of people who wash cars, especially on a Sunday afternoon at around four o’clock, those are the kind of people who walk importantly round supermarkets, one pushing the trolley and the other guiding it with a hand on the side, muttering to each other about brands of instant coffee.
When I was young I would have jumped off a high cliff rather than become the kind of person who might ever wash a car. But we are born, we die, and in between, mostly, we deteriorate. And so we find ourselves measuring a capful of emulsified wax into a bucket and filling it with warm water.
At which point the man turned up with questions about my radio listening habits.
I let him in and gave him a cup of tea because I’m an antisocial bastard who - an admission I’ve never made before because, shit, there’s nothing more interesting than people - finds quite a lot of these people teethgrindingly tedious. And so I overcompensate and try to act as I imagine a friendly and decent person might act.
After what seemed like several centuries he left me with a log which I have to fill in saying where, when and for how long I listened to what on the radio. I can’t really do that because it requires memory, knowing what day it is, and being able to find both the log I’m supposed to be filling in and a ballpoint at the same time - the kind of organising power that if I had it along with my actual talents I’d probably be head of a major corporation or the Army by now. But hopefully before the week is out I’ll remember to sit down with the Guardian guide and fill in all the programmes I approve of and would have listened to had I noticed they were on, and leaving out all the programmes which I did actually listen to because they turned up uninvited while I was stuck in a traffic jam on the ringroad but know are only really listened to by the kind of people who think the Brass Eye on, ostensibly, paedophilia should have been banned and Chris Morris publicly vivisected .
So this guy came in and after the initial questionnaire he finished his tea and started on a seamless monologue of... I listened to the first cubic metre or so, he’d been a joiner, he left that to write a book, he didn’t write a book, the book would have been about rugby league... it was like a limitless grey wall of uniform words where you look for the slightest irregularity, hairline fissure, insertion point where you can get in “OK, but now fuck off.”
I thought, maybe it’s joiners.
Jimmy is a joiner, he did a lot of work for us, was round the house for weeks, and he talked. He’d have his snap at the table, reading our Guardian, and if I tried to tiptoe out of the house behind his back he’d turn just as I’d managed to silently open the back door and say, “What about that Tracy Emin, then? Should she be strung up or what?” before luring me into a debate about the morality, given his devout Irish Catholicism, of marriage between first cousins, especially as it affected the gene pool of his ancestral Castleisland.
So I thought about Jimmy for a bit, and then I thought about the nature of truth. Because Jimmy was swapping our kitchen with our bathroom and he subcontracted a guy who in his estimation looked like a meerkat but was a truly excellent plumber.
He was a crap plumber. He was the most shite plumber possible. Everything he touched leaked, water where nothing else was available, sewer gas if that didn’t take too much effort. “Aye, it’s funny, that,” Jimmy would say, “because he’s a right good plumber.”
“He’s not a good plumber. He’s the worst fucking plumber in the world. It’s not even that he’s a standard cowboy. Look, he was here at half five this morning, wasn’t he?”
“Aye, right enough.”
“And why was he here? Because the whole ground floor was flooded because he hadn’t done up a fucking joint before he left last night - so before he sets off for Penzance or wherever he’s on his daytime contract he had to come here and fix it. Even if he’s aiming at cowboy economics, it’s self-defeating because you know where he lives.”
“Aye, aye, it’s funny that. Because he’s an excellent plumber.”
The received Truth outfaces all things.
In the end I stopped looking for a decent entry point into the radio questionnaire man’s possibly endless concatenation of lifeless words. I just said at an arbitrary point, “Which reminds me, just as you arrived I put a capful of proprietary emulsifed waxes in a bucket which I then filled with warm water. I was about to wash the car. The temperature out there is about +0.5 degrees and the sun is already behind the leafless trees.”
Once I’d got him out the back door he only paused for five minutes to rehearse things he thought I might have missed the first seventeen times around before he was on his way, promising to return next Monday between six and eight in the evening to pick up the questionnaire.
When I was young I would have jumped off a high cliff rather than become the kind of person who might ever wash a car. But we are born, we die, and in between, mostly, we deteriorate. And so we find ourselves measuring a capful of emulsified wax into a bucket and filling it with warm water.
At which point the man turned up with questions about my radio listening habits.
I let him in and gave him a cup of tea because I’m an antisocial bastard who - an admission I’ve never made before because, shit, there’s nothing more interesting than people - finds quite a lot of these people teethgrindingly tedious. And so I overcompensate and try to act as I imagine a friendly and decent person might act.
After what seemed like several centuries he left me with a log which I have to fill in saying where, when and for how long I listened to what on the radio. I can’t really do that because it requires memory, knowing what day it is, and being able to find both the log I’m supposed to be filling in and a ballpoint at the same time - the kind of organising power that if I had it along with my actual talents I’d probably be head of a major corporation or the Army by now. But hopefully before the week is out I’ll remember to sit down with the Guardian guide and fill in all the programmes I approve of and would have listened to had I noticed they were on, and leaving out all the programmes which I did actually listen to because they turned up uninvited while I was stuck in a traffic jam on the ringroad but know are only really listened to by the kind of people who think the Brass Eye on, ostensibly, paedophilia should have been banned and Chris Morris publicly vivisected .
So this guy came in and after the initial questionnaire he finished his tea and started on a seamless monologue of... I listened to the first cubic metre or so, he’d been a joiner, he left that to write a book, he didn’t write a book, the book would have been about rugby league... it was like a limitless grey wall of uniform words where you look for the slightest irregularity, hairline fissure, insertion point where you can get in “OK, but now fuck off.”
I thought, maybe it’s joiners.
Jimmy is a joiner, he did a lot of work for us, was round the house for weeks, and he talked. He’d have his snap at the table, reading our Guardian, and if I tried to tiptoe out of the house behind his back he’d turn just as I’d managed to silently open the back door and say, “What about that Tracy Emin, then? Should she be strung up or what?” before luring me into a debate about the morality, given his devout Irish Catholicism, of marriage between first cousins, especially as it affected the gene pool of his ancestral Castleisland.
So I thought about Jimmy for a bit, and then I thought about the nature of truth. Because Jimmy was swapping our kitchen with our bathroom and he subcontracted a guy who in his estimation looked like a meerkat but was a truly excellent plumber.
He was a crap plumber. He was the most shite plumber possible. Everything he touched leaked, water where nothing else was available, sewer gas if that didn’t take too much effort. “Aye, it’s funny, that,” Jimmy would say, “because he’s a right good plumber.”
“He’s not a good plumber. He’s the worst fucking plumber in the world. It’s not even that he’s a standard cowboy. Look, he was here at half five this morning, wasn’t he?”
“Aye, right enough.”
“And why was he here? Because the whole ground floor was flooded because he hadn’t done up a fucking joint before he left last night - so before he sets off for Penzance or wherever he’s on his daytime contract he had to come here and fix it. Even if he’s aiming at cowboy economics, it’s self-defeating because you know where he lives.”
“Aye, aye, it’s funny that. Because he’s an excellent plumber.”
The received Truth outfaces all things.
In the end I stopped looking for a decent entry point into the radio questionnaire man’s possibly endless concatenation of lifeless words. I just said at an arbitrary point, “Which reminds me, just as you arrived I put a capful of proprietary emulsifed waxes in a bucket which I then filled with warm water. I was about to wash the car. The temperature out there is about +0.5 degrees and the sun is already behind the leafless trees.”
Once I’d got him out the back door he only paused for five minutes to rehearse things he thought I might have missed the first seventeen times around before he was on his way, promising to return next Monday between six and eight in the evening to pick up the questionnaire.
Monday, March 06, 2006
la conexión iberica
El bis bisabuelo del más abajo, ségun Javier Marías*, “fue el General Sir William Napier, autor de la monumental History of the War in the Peninsula, en la que por supuesto tuvo destacada parte y que en nuestro suelo conocemos como Guerra de Independencia... cuando llovió sal, y esparció calaveras.
*Negra espalda del tiempo, Alfaguara
*Negra espalda del tiempo, Alfaguara
People you never met
My Dad was shot down three times in the first two years of World War 2. Twice he made forced landings, the first in Belgium. He and the crew walked to France, my Dad with a broken ankle. The second time was over the Channel, and they were picked up from their rubber dinghy. The third time was like in the photo. He was 22.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
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