a second reflection...'time'

This morning I said in passing to my elderly neighbour, who was taking out the trash (this is when our paths always seem to cross): ‘shame about the rain’.  It has been hot and dry recently.  She put her black bin bags in the trash can and said: ‘that’s life’.  And it’s true – in life sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours, sometimes the sun shines through. 

She then asked if I got the community magazine she put through my door.  I said I did, although I wasn’t sure.  ‘There’s lots of things going on around here you can go along to’, she said (lots of life, she meant).  Maybe I thought, but I haven’t the time.  That’s life as well – having time, or lack of it for living.

I remember one of my old bosses used to describe herself as ‘time poor’.  She worked as the editor for one of the local newspapers – hard.  At the time I thought when she said she was ‘time poor’ it really alluded to the fact she had her priorities in life and for living all wrong.

One of my favourite sentences about life and time ever written is as follows  - ‘time is a jet plane, it moves to fast’.  It continues, ‘oh but what a shame, all we’ve shared can’t last’.

Another is – ‘the past is now part of my future, and the present is out of hand’.

I guess the nature of time can make prioritising bits and pieces of life, and deciding which ones to live, difficult.

~

You see, Old Father Time: he seems almost a benevolent character nowadays (witness his statue at Lord’s cricket ground etcetera), yet in reality he remains at least a pain in the arse, or worse, a supreme inconvenience (Ok, sometimes a luxury – but not often).

Indeed, there are several misnomers people attribute to time.  One is that time heals.  Nope, not necessarily.  Rather memory deteriorates or time simply brings the weight of recrimination and regret, sadness and hopelessness into sharper relief, or to bear more heavily (jolly good!).

And if you’ve spent the remains of your savings on an expensive watch, one of those giant ones racing drivers model when they aren’t pretending to endorse the benefits of Cash ISAs, and then scratched the thing soon after purchase, time weighs heavily too, if indeed it didn’t already.

Time is money.

Money can’t, it turns out, buy you time…

…Now let’s go on a reverse tangent.

Yesterday, a man came into work to talk to us about our pensions.  Pensions?  I am twenty nine for chrissakes!  I’ve got loads of time before I retire, or die.

Or have I?

Who knows where the time goes? Especially when we (are preparing to) leave God’s good earth.

God:  it took him seven days alone to create the earth and all living things in (on?) it, thereby undermining the fundamentals of Science in centuries to come.  Science, of course, in the meantime has succeeded in undermining the fundamentals of God.

(Score draw?)

It is interesting, to me at least, that an ‘Act of God’ remains to this day a recognised legal term for events outside of human control, such as sudden floods or other natural disasters, for which no one can be held responsible.

Recently I got my car insured.  Sure enough in the small print my new friends at the car insurance company insist that while I am insured for everything from my monkey antecedents at the wildlife sanctuary snapping off my windscreen wipers, to a hooded (surely) young (surely) and disenfranchised (surelybutwhosefaultisthatreally?) vandal smashing in my windshield, I am expressly not insured for the aforementioned Acts of God.

If in my motor vehicle I run into a plague of locusts, or encounter a fording river of blood somewhere deep in the Welsh countryside, I am in trouble. 

~

You know something - I do wonder if death is an Act of God?  Or a consequence of time?  Whether age is a state of mind?  Or, again, an inevitability of time?

Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time largely makes for exasperating reading, but there is one observation worth a mention by the by.  Namely this   - light is affected by gravity.

So it’s easier to fall over yourself, or drop things, in the dark.

However, wait there!  Further revelations are at hand (beyond Hawking). 

Today I read the average commuter in the US loses 38 hours a year as a result of being delayed in traffic - I suppose their loss in time is Howard Stern’s gain; and I also read, if I can make this leap and/or association, that time in the era of the dinosaur(s) was shorter, a day being only 23 hours in length.

‘The years are too short, the days are too long’.  One of the great, if not greatest writer of the 21^st century said this in his book Something Happened. It is a book primarily about time. 

So many things, however, are about time – it is after all seemingly unavoidable, in the same moment elliptical.  Old Father Time is a constant bleedin’ enigma.  The philosophical and metaphysical equivalent of folk-cum-singer Bob Dylan.

In this short (albeit somewhat time consuming) reflection, I have already quoted Bob Dylan.  Time was and has been a constant preoccupation for him too.  Perhaps one of this most enduring songs (ha) is called Most of the Time.  In it he reflects that most of the time he is alright, getting by, in doing so implying there are other times he isn’t. 

To paraphrase Dylan and Abraham Lincoln as to why time is so bothersome to human beings: all people can be alright some of the time, some people alright all of the time, but all people can’t be alright all of the time.

That is why we get by part of the time, but not most, let alone all of the time.

Time is inconsistent; it has a spastic continuum.

People the same. 

So, how can either party anticipate which one is going to affect the other next?  Which is presumably why we assert there can be no tomorrow; but if the past is part of the future, then perhaps we need better understand a bit of what is happening now.

Time is all around us people around.  

I repeat often to myself: be mindful of this!

a seventy third story...'oblivion'

Behind the farm house were the mountains, in front of him the terraced foothills covered in olive, almond groves leading down to the Mediterranean. 

Dick sat on the millionaires terrace in the afternoon sun, bare legs, sandaled feet outstretched, a white burgundy in an ice-bucket on the outdoor table beside him.

He was alone.

He was thinking about things that had happened and things that shouldn’t have happened, how things build up a bearing of their own and how the past could not be gotten away from.

He thought about Jackie and how he had hurt her, he thought of Nicole and what he had done, or not done to her.  And that maybe he deserved nothing from either of them, and that they wanted nothing from him anymore.

He remembered what he had written to Jackie that had been cruel and unthinking, and only now was he struck by how rotten it might have made her feel. 

And he remembered Nicole and the evening he took her out in his boat with the intention of having her, how they had sat opposite each other in the stern cabin, how he had an overwhelming desire to take her that came before a sudden realisation of how old he felt, and how young and unspoiled she was; how clumsy his attempt at wooing her.

This was his country, his villa in the foothills of the Alps with views to the sea, his sun terrace, his infinity pool, his sports car in the driveway, his sail boat, his life, and he had no one to share it with.

He blamed Jackie, he blamed himself.  He wanted to blame Nicole, but realised he couldn’t.  He hated her for her cheerful indifference, her youth and beauty. He loved her with every good part of him; he couldn’t quite bring himself to accept she didn’t love him the same in return.  

Dick would sit for hours with the view of the Mediterranean and pointlessly wish for things to be different.  For all his money he had no clue what to do – his future was tied to his past, and the present was everything and meant nothing.

a seventy second story...'in defence of human beings - draft edit'

Human beings are the slowest, dumbest, most dangerous animals on planet earth.

The No-hoper and the Schnauzer (a short story by Phil)

Most of these smallish towns have some sort of home-grown mythology, usually including some yarn about a local hero. My home town is no exception, of course. The heroics in question were performed by a boy in my year at school called Benny Braille.

Benny Braille was long and athletic, possessed of a huge-striding wonky lope. He ran facing a few degrees left, to put his good side forward, although he was nearly as deaf in his right ear as his left, which was completely.

Benny banged around town, playing in the fields and woods and all that. He didn't get much attention from the locals, he was just another lad from down at the special school. I sometimes knocked about with him, but it was always annoying and discouraging how his lip reading and hearing were just slightly better than mine, so when we approached anyone else as a pair, they just spoke to him. I was just his cute mute little friend.

My mother told me not to bother about Benny. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said, ‘he’s a no-hoper.’ This was my mother’s favourite phrase for other children – pretty much all of them were no-hopers as far as she was concerned. Especially the other children in my class at school. There was Daniel Burn, blind as a blocked up flue; my mother called him a no-hoper because his mum and dad had divorced and there he was at St Francis’ School for Special Boys. There was Pierre Girard, whose cerebral palsy constantly made him spill juice on his trousers. My mother said he was a no-hoper because it ‘don’t matter how liberal you are, no one would love an adult pant-wetter.’ Benny Braille, for his part, was a no-hoper because he was just so damn scared of things. You name it: beetles, windscreen wipers on full speed, very large hats, rotting peaches, and most of all, dogs. This made the tale that made him a town legend all the more unlikely.

I saw the whole thing or most of it anyway. At least, I saw the payoff, if not the build-up. The dog in question belonged to Mrs Steeplechaser. Well, that’s what I’ll call her since I can’t quite remember her real name. I’ll call her Mrs Steeplechaser because she had a curious black and white striped picket fence at the front, with her pond just behind it. Mrs Steeplechaser was an opulent starling, perched and gossiping with all the rest but thinking of herself as the leader of the town busybodies. She was married to Mr Steeplechaser (probable real first name: Dorian), who, in spite of his flamboyant name, had the looks and personality of a parking meter. She always said it was him who left the back gate unlatched, allowing her precious Miriam (the Schnauzer, that is) to escape and fall in the well.

See, this was where Benny Braille was supposed to have found little Miriam while he was just out loping through the little wood over town. There was a well there in a clearing, usually covered but, fair enough, yanked off by youths periodically for them to sling down empty lager cans and the dead ends of their joints. Seems Miriam found it open, took a dicey walk along the edge and slipped into it. A good job really, that there was still water down there to break her fall. Another stroke of luck, apart from the water and Benny coming by and looking down the well, was the abandoned car. Only a few feet from the well was a beat-up rusty saloon with a tow bar for a caravan or trailer.

Benny saw Miriam down there; she could have been barking or whimpering too, for all he knew. Of course, he knew who it was. Mrs Steeplechaser walked Miriam around the neighbourhood all the time, and she liked introducing the dog to any of us St Francis boys as we walked home or were wheeled home from school. Benny Braille always hung back from meeting the friendly Schnauzer, naturally, but he put up with Mrs Steeplechaser like the rest of us. Mrs Steeplechaser seemed to love talking to us, grinning like a hornet’s nest and telling us just how sweet we all were. My mother called her a saint of good appearances and a patronising Christian, which I guess made her a no-hoper too. Anyhow, Miriam was in the well, swimming in tiny pathetic circles, washing the butts and tins up against the stone walls. Benny Braille took it all in and figured out what to do. I didn't witness this bit, but it’s been told enough times around town. First, he sprinted home, with giant strides and his listing head. Second, he went into the shed and grabbed a huge bit of rope, which was hanging from a masonry nail. Third, he looped it diagonally across his chest to look more like a cowboy or leading man or something. Fourth, he ran back to the well and tied one end of the rope to the tow bar of the corroded family car. Fifth, he hurled the rest of the rope down the well and started to climb down.

This was around the time I showed up on the scene. I could see the blue rope running taut from the tow bar to the lip of the well. I thought that someone was hanging themselves in the well; there was form for this in these woods after all – everyone in town knew that Dr Applecart had hung herself from a tree just over there. Her husband had been the one to find her, as it goes, and he wailed so loud that even Benny Braille heard it with his right ear from the other side of the copse, where he was with me trying to make a crossbow from fallen branches. We ran over and saw Mr Applecart with his arms around his wife’s bare ankles. She’d stupidly hung herself wearing a skirt, finishing up with her feet a yard and a half from the ground. Mr Applecart stared at Benny and me with eyes so blood-curdling we legged it. We went and told my mother, who smirked weirdly for a second before she called an ambulance.

As it happens, nobody was hanging themselves on that day when I saw the rope tied to the tow bar. I went up to the edge of the well and looked down to see Benny at the bottom. He was in the water up to his armpits, holding the vertical line with one hand and using the other to circle the free end of the rope around Miriam’s midriff. He got it under and let go with his supporting hand, treading water for a minute as he knotted the loop of rope just over Miriam’s spine. I tried to call down to Benny but can’t have been making enough noise because he didn't look up; he just concentrated on what he was doing. He hauled himself up first, pulling on the rope and scrambling with his feet on the walls as much as he could. At the top, he saw me, and artlessly I gave him a clumsy hand over the edge. Then, with a painfully manly expression, he signed, ‘I've got this.’ He stood just behind the ledge of the well and heaved on the rope, hand over hand. Miriam must have been scraping on the wall of the well, but she came out covered in green algae on her left flank, so I guess the slime must have smoothed her ride.

Benny Braille borrowed my penknife and cut a crude lead for Miriam from the rope. He asked me to put the lid back on the well and trotted off to return the dog, leaving me in the clearing. He was soaked but beaming like a conductor with an ovation. I guess he wasn't so scared of dogs after all.

He got Miriam back to the Steeplechasers. No doubt she thanked him at ten to the dozen while Mr Steeplechaser just nodded his head like a bucket of sand. That’s what he always did to me anyway: just swung his big head up and down, up and down. I expect he thought his bad harelip scar would make lip-reading too difficult for me, and indeed, for Benny Braille.

So, obviously, Mrs Steeplechaser tells the whole town, Benny Braille gets front page of the gazette and all the rest of it. There’s a special assembly on him at school, although it was cut slightly short by another fit from Humbert Heinbacher on the front row.

Not bad for an afternoon’s work, that, I said to Benny, many years later when we were both here back in town visiting our folks. Well, he was just visiting his father; his mother had died a couple of years before from a kidney infection. We had seen each other down the pub and had more than a few drinks together. Speaking in sign language means you can’t slur your words, so it has that going for it, but it sure makes it difficult to hold onto your chair. So, falling off our chairs midsentence every now and then, Benny Braille and I downed some scotches and gabbed about his local hero status. I told him what my mother had said: that the story morphed over time and now it involved him being trapped down the well with the dog for twelve hours before hatching a cunning plan to get them both out. One version had an adder down there too.

‘Mrs Steeplechaser (or whatever) is long gone now,’ Benny signed to me. He got back on his chair and continued. ‘So I can tell you the truth now. I was so sick of her thinking I was nice but dim, sweet but incompetent. I chucked Miriam down that well, tempting her up the woods with pork scratchings, just so as I could get her out again and teach that woman a lesson about who’s capable.’ He didn't know that it was my mother he really needed to convince in this town, but that’s another story.

Benny Braille fell out of his chair and swore me to secrecy from the floor, a promise I intend to keep, except from you, dear reader. 

a seventy first story...'waking up to dying'

That was when I first noticed it – through the long winter hours, hunched over my writing desk; a dull pain in my lower back I first put down to bad posture.  But it didn’t go away, the pain, and steadily became more insistent.  So I went to my doctor in the end; of course I put it off until, as it turns out, it is (was?) too late.  Still, I guess there's something to be said for stoicism in the normal course of events. 

My doctor is older than me by nearly twenty years – tall and lean, sallow skin, full head of silver hair, big, soft, gentle hands – he may even be in his seventies, and the plain fact is it may be he'll always remain twenty years older, I’ll never make it that far: I am waking up to dying.

He had to tell me. 

The tests came back: at first it was jaundice, then the secondary tests revealed the uncomfortable (incomprehensible?) truth.  Any time in the next five months, I will die. 

When I came into his office in the surgery, he was sat facing me as I walked in the door, sleeves of his white coat rolled up, forearms wresting on his knees, hands cupped together. 

‘John’, he said, ‘fucking hell’.

‘You fucking poor sod’.

Then he asked me if I wanted to sit down. 

So I sat.

There was a nurse in the room too, wearing green scrubs; we made for a moment a bizarre triangle, and when I left I said thank you and goodbye.

Now it’s getting light outside, the dawn chorus has begun, and I'm ready for bed.

Have-nots - a short story by Phil

Awaking quickly, Ana hit the alarm and caught her breath, gulping back a cough. Her daughter, Marina, just a few feet away on the tatami mat, mewed slightly but was not roused. Ana exhaled slowly and forced herself to lie still for a count of thirty seconds. If she started the day at a relaxed baseline, below her average tension, maybe it wouldn’t rise to intolerable heights by the time the day was through.

Ana stood up; there were no sheets to fold and stow at this time of year. She was a slight woman, but with woven muscles that stood out when she lifted heavy objects, like the ceramic rice pan. She looked into this pot on the one-ringed stove now for breakfast rice and put it on to reheat. Stepping out of the only door to the room, Ana went into the corridor and checked the lavatory, shared with next door. Mr Lu had beaten her to it again, huffing and grunting as he went through his morning schedule.

Back in the ‘studio’, as Ana used to optimistically refer to their tiny one-room place when her husband was listening, Marina was stirring. She coughed gently, wearily, into the handkerchief Ana always left beside her mat. The deepest, frustrated sorrow gripped Ana at that cough, sadness for Marina’s utter resignation to her own chronic chest irritation. There wasn’t any drama, no exaggerated hacking or attention-seeking, which might have been appropriate to Marina’s seven years. The coughing loosened the dark strands of hair sticking to Marina’s dewy temples. She clambered to her feet and pulled her faded red jumper over her vest, still much too big for her.

“Let’s have breakfast before we use the bathroom today,” said Ana, spooning out the rice. The pair ate opposite one another, cross-legged on the tatami. Afterwards, Ana looked out of the window. She couldn’t see the alley floor, five storeys down. Even the building across the way, only ten feet away, was hazy. The smog was a drape, a Jurassic dust cloud that concealed the sky.

They heard a door banging nearby and Ana and Marina went next door to the toilet, each holding their breath. The window in there couldn’t be opened, same as any in the block. Ultimately, this was for the best. Ana managed a smile between bulging cheeks at Marina for the farce of their daybreak routine.

Due to some local restructuring, Marina’s school was closed for the time being. Sparse council communiques promised a maximum two-month closure, yet it had been three so far. Ana had no choice but to take Marina with her to work. They donned their greying face masks and descended the stairs to street level.

Ana put her head down, grasped Marina’s hand and plunged into the morning commute. The duo weaved down the narrow alleys and joined the main streets, giant blocks all around them but barely discernible. Thousands of people flooded past them in both directions. There were workers in the green meat-growing factory uniforms, on bikes and on foot, off to culture stem cell steaks and chicken breasts. Hundreds in grey headed the same way as Ana and Marina, towards the polymer recycling complex. They turned left while Ana and her blue-clad colleagues turned right towards the shore. Two miles further along lay the desalination plant. Marina lurked behind Ana’s legs as they passed the guard post. The unwritten agreement was: the guard pretended to watch for intruding children on site and parents pretended to hide them.

The desalination plant was huge, with pumps stretching half a mile each way down the beach. The plant itself stood in the middle, a cuboid sarsen. Ana was a temperature regulator. Heated waste water from the nuclear power plant three miles up the coast was pumped to the desalination plant. Its residual heat was used to evaporate water off the briny sea, leaving dull grey salt behind. Ana had to keep the temperature just so. If it jumped or dipped, as the flow from the nuclear plant changed, productivity was compromised and her wages docked appropriately.

Marina curled up under her mother’s station and re-read her book. Ana had given her this book, her own favourite as a child. It tells a story about a seven year old girl who wants to run away from a breaking home. She gets as far as a pine-clothed hill behind her village and finds a wooden cottage on stilts up there on the slopes. Smoke comes from the chimney and rain begins to fall, so the little girl goes and knocks on the door. A wafu opens it. The little girl has never seen a wafu before, a wise hermit lady of the hills, but has heard enough about the bright red robes and bare feet to recognise one when she sees them. The wafu invites her in and gives her hot soup with fat noodles and tiny enoki mushrooms. The wafu talks to the little girl about chaos. She tells her that when many simple things are happening all at the same time, big confusing things emerge. The wafu talks about the birds that nest in the trees behind her cottage; how each one flies in a simple loop before coming in to roost, but flying all together they inscribe a pulsing vortex against the dusky sky. The little girl understands the meaning and returns to her troubled parents.

For Marina, the descriptions of the natural world, the hills and trees and bulging clouds, are the most captivating pieces of the fable. The city, the block, the factories and the foaming smog are all she has known; like any child, she’d like to know more. Ana and her husband had to bring her here when fresh into the world. The government had bought out Ana’s father’s farm to grow biofuel crops. Young, intellectual farmers like Ana’s husband, who worked with her father on the land, were forced to the cities. He couldn’t bear the crushing march of it all and wandered out without a mask, dying a few days later from a thousand cuts in his delicate lungs.

Ana had wept for a day and night, until Marina, just two, had pressed her face on her mother’s chest and told her she was hungry. And so Ana numbly went on as the world squeezed her tighter and tighter.

As Marina read, Ana clicked buttons on the monitor to alter water currents and check temperature indicators. There was a flow to her work, a sort of feel to it, which was calming, even meditative. Marina occasionally asked questions, always at the same parts in the book: what’s a pine tree look like? Did you live in a village like the little girl’s? Ana encouraged Marina to read the book in the morning then write her own stories in the afternoon. But Marina always wrote the same tale, about a little girl who was lost in the fog until her father found her.

At the end of her shift, Ana stepped with Marina out into the diffuse, brownish yellow evening light. The smog was so thick they could barely see their shoes.

Ana and Marina shuffled out past the same guard, his eyelids drooping, his pale blue uniform creased. The road was clotted with bicycles and stooped pedestrians, everyone masked. Many had their government-issue greasy goggles on today too. The traffic and smog became denser as Ana and Marina neared their block. At one point, a titanic black diplomatic car glided through. The road cleared for it and the narrow pavements became crowded, jammed with bodies and bikes. In the confusion, Ana lost her grip on Marina’s hand. She called out, the mask dampening her voice. Even as the throng dispersed, Ana cast about her, but could only see three feet through the opaque darkening air. The polluted atmosphere had sucked in Marina like a gang of children drew in their innocent peers. Perhaps she was searching for her own wafu, or her missing father, or just for her broken disappointed mother.