It is exhausting, this life. I do it because I love my mother and I want her to be safe and free from fear, but it is a form of imprisonment. I do not have the space to work, or think or dream.
Every respite is ruled by a ticking clock, a time by which I must be back. I cannot wander or dawdle. I must keep to the timetable, do my assigned activity and return to duty.
Nothing I do, apart from housework, cooking, shopping and companionship, is complete. When I pick up the book I’m reading, I don’t remember where I am. This post is a muddle, because it’s made in grabbed moments, tied together from separate half-hours, rather than written as a contemplative day of absorption.
However, thanks to my sister, I have a weekend off from caring for my mother once a month. Very kindly, she agreed to extend that weekend this month, to allow Amanda and me to go away for a few days, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. She arrived late on Wednesday and extended her stay on Sunday morning to make us lunch. For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel I was rushing to get back.
We booked a place to stay far enough away to feel we were having a holiday but near enough that we wouldn’t sacrifice two full days to travel. Amanda bought an electric van last year and had it converted to a mini campervan earlier this year, and she wanted to try it out, but I didn’t want to be camping, so we found a place on a booking site, Martha’s Retreat,1 that would give us scope for some picnic trips.
Martha’s Retreat was, at first sight, a little disappointing. The yard was a bit of a dumping ground, with a horsebox and a rotting JCB spoiling the illusion of rural idyll. The cabin was great – lovely, in fact, but the paddock behind was overgrown with scrub and dead cowparsley, and other mysterious uglinesses. It was rush hour, and the B road that the farm was on was busy. I was tired, though, and hungry, and not yet unwound. Gradually, I took in the paths that had been mowed into the field, the seating area with a wood burner in the middle, the messages of greeting and the extras scattered throughout the cabin. I began to relax.
On the first morning, I took Hazel out early, into the paddock, and, while she chased smells and celebrated the misty sunlight, I picked blackberries to go with our cereal.
We had toast with our second cuppas and then we lay in, something we used to do at least once a week, but something that has been rare for a long time. On other weekends off, we have been trying to fit too much in to the one day I’m at home and Amanda’s not working to allow us to waste a morning on books and breakfast in bed. Hazel loved it as much as we did.
No rush to be anywhere or do anything.
I’m reading Marjery Allingham, her second Campion Novel, Mystery Mile, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, so opened an LRB2 and read several articles in a row; a luxury I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. I recommend the one on a calvinist writer’s view of Genesis,3 the review of three books by Celia Dale, who appears to be a writer of Ealing greyness and gallows wit,4 and Josephine Quinn’s review of a book about the Antonine Plague, which may have been the worst pandemic in human history.5
We’d missed the owner on the day we arrived, the Wednesday. We’d stopped in Southampton for lunch at Thrive6 and he had to go out before we arrived. When we did bump into him, on the Thursday morning, after we had finally got ourselves together from our epic lie-in, he was as warm and generous and quirky as his hospitality suggested and we talked for at least an hour, getting the story of his life, of the JCB, of his Bentley that poked out of one of the sheds in the yard.
It was one of those conversations where everyone is being equally chatty. Our mutual enjoyment was palpable. After an hour, we began to joke about our collective volubility and, eventually, we called a halt, so Amanda and I could go and get lunch and Trevor could get some gardening done.
Our evenings were equally contented. There was no wifi, though there was a TV/DVD and a library of soppy films. On the Thursday night, our second night there, we watched Music & Lyrics, an old favourite we saw at the flicks when we were first together. The fact that the disc was in the cabin seemed serendipitous.
On the first night, though, we just let the place seep into us, and the awareness of being free sink in. We’d bought a boxed salad at Thrive and we ate it on the reclining sofa in the last of the fading dusk, and then pulled the curtains and sat with just the spotlights from the kitchenette, in shadow, Hazel curled between us, and had the best conversation we’ve had in a very long while. For once, we weren’t planning or trying to solve things; we just shared impressions and feelings and savoured one another.
The red dot shows the approximate position of Martha’s Retreat.
On the Thursday, after our long chat with Trevor, we had tea in the gardens of a museum, wandered around the town a bit and then, finding nowhere that fitted the venn diagram of dog and vegan friendly for lunch, decided to buy the makings of sandwiches and an easy supper and head back to Martha’s Retreat.
Holiday fully underway.
Is there any better afternoon than one spent on a bed with a book, your lover and your dog? We are not good at sharing the tea-making duties: Amanda has a greater tolerance for empty mugs than I do, so I was up and down a bit, but I read some more articles and dozed a bit, and Amanda dozed a bit more and it was all just very.
Our trips out were more hectic. Amanda likes to fit things in to any journey to the mainland, so we had to post some parcels at an Evri depot on the Thursday – there are none on the Island – and visit a couple of campervan places on the Friday. Wimborne Minster is a lovely town, saved from being swallowed by the Bournemouth conurbation by the A31 which blights its outskirts, as the A14 blights Bury St Edmunds. Unlike Bury, Wimborne Minster is surrounded by protected SSSIs and woodlands and has retained a certain beauty.
All the comforts.
On the Friday afternoon, after one of Amanda’s shop visits, we parked up in Holt Woods, in the car park that sits between the edge of the forestry commission plantation and the moorland that is run by the National Trust. I’d made sandwiches and we had a lazy picnic in the van. It was a success. Small as it is, the van is big enough for me to stretch comfortably in the reversed front seat while Amanda and Hazel have the setee/bed bench thing. Dog walkers and horse riders came and went and we spent a comfortable couple of hours enjoying the quiet, before travelling in search of a campervan place,7 where Amanda bought an awning.
That evening, I had the feeling I remember from the last day of the school holidays: a sense of gloom. It needn’t have been, really. We still had all of Saturday, as Charlotte wasn’t due to go home until Sunday morning, but the anticipation of heading back, leaving this little hideaway, weighed on me.
Amanda went to bed early and I stayed up reading for an hour or so. I lit the woodburner, which was decadent but lovely, and I was at peace.
Hazel, after adjusting to our being in separate rooms, came and joined me, lying on the hearth under my feet, until after I had fallen asleep and the fire had lost its warmth, when she got up in a huff and went through to Amanda. I joined them, I assume, because I was in bed in the morning, but I don’t remember it.
We got home mid afternoon on Saturday, stopping at Waitrose to buy buns and salad. We had an early supper of burgers and oven chips and went to bed to catch up on the last of the most recent series of Dr Who, which we both found disappointing. We’d watched a couple of the other episodes on an earlier weekend off and had loved them: Ncuti Gatwa and Daisy Miller are wonderful together and the writing has recovered this series, but the double bill finale was a bit all over the place and only just saved by the acting. Still, it was a nice ritual.
And, Sunday morning came. I was expecting to be early out, so Charlotte could catch a morning ferry, but when I texted her to say I’d be with her at nine o’clock, she suggested she make lunch for us. Gratitude was unbound. Another morning of lazy tea and dog walk, and then we were back at my mother’s house, feeling okay about it, because we were the guests, for once.
For the first five years or so of our relationship, Amanda and I travelled a fair bit, both in the UK and in Europe. Indeed, one of the reasons I took up cycling to work, and became a cycling enthusiast, was to free up money for holidays. We went to Barcelona, Paris, Gent, St Austell, Northumberland and to festivals in Cornwall and Suffolk. We had fun.
Then came my father’s illness, then his death8 and then my mother’s increasing dependence, and life seemed to close in and become unrelentingly serious. Now, it is as restricted as it has been in all out time together: we actually live apart and I spend my time caring for my mother and she spends her time working and managing the dog and our house, that we really don’t want to give up.
This trip might seem a small thing, and this post a “what I did in my holidays” rote exercise, but it is a holding on, a contributory element in the miracle that is the survival of our marriage through these years of never being first priority in our own lives. I want to preserve it, for the winter, so that I can look back and remind myself that we can have some freedom, some respite and some mutual enjoyment and congratulate us for the fact that we are, somehow, hard as it is, making this work.
It has been seven years since I gave up Twitter;1 almost eight years since I deleted Facebook,2 and though I did get tempted back to tweeting for a few months around the 2019 election, I have otherwise done without the main social media platforms for the better part of a decade. Other ‘socials’ have intruded, most notably Quora and Reddit, and I took a long time to delete my Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ account, but the tug of needing to check whether my breathless prose have elicited any tokens of approval or replies has not been a part of my life for long enough that I look upon people who are too dependent upon that behaviour as slightly pathetic, and I congratulate myself on sticking to my principles,3 and seeing through the lie that is ‘engagement’.
That pleasure has been heightened by the very public psychic, intellectual and reputational collapse of the fragile, racist narcissist who now owns the shoddily rebranded Twitter. He seems to have missed that his new name for it would bring to mind something that is past, as in, “my ex,” but he probably has some personal mantra about only moving forward, regretting nothing, etcetera. I used to admire him, having fallen for the attraction of Tesla cars: the Model X was, and is, a wonderful machine. Now, I despise him, in the era of the Cybertruck. His unravelling seems to be multi-faceted and the only reliably creative thing he has left.
Because my life has changed quite a bit, my blog has remained quiet. I am living with my mother in a bungalow we have bought on the Isle of Wight, eight miles from the home I have shared with Amanda for thirteen years. My mother’s dementia, exacerbated by a fall in which she cracked a vertebrae in January, had left her unable to live alone and accelerated the need for her to move in with someone. The care system in the UK, as with most of the systems whose effectiveness and humanity define a nation’s level of civilization, has been eroded under successive neo-liberal governments to the extent that one cannot guarantee one’s parent will be free from torture in a care home.4 Residential care was, therefore, not an option.
Amanda and I are still together, though we live apart. We had planned for her to move in, at least part time, but it hasn’t happened. She is here a couple of times a week, and I am there a couple more, for a few hours at least, while a personal assistant sits with my mother. Once a month, my sister comes down to stay for a weekend and I spend Friday and Saturday nights at home. For most of the time, though, I have a twenty-four hour a day job, caring for someone with ‘moderate-to-severe’ dementia.
The relationship with my mother is not unalloyed tedium, and I’ll perhaps write more about the rewards and pleasures of caring for someone you love, for there are such things, at another time. However, one of its most devastating downsides is her constant need for attention. She can read a magazine still, or even a book, but it makes less and less sense to her and will, of course, be entirely unfamiliar to her when she picks it up again. She can watch recognizable television, and she can play solitaire on her iPad if it’s set up for her. However, she needs reassurance four or five times an hour, and that’s not just a stock phrase or two. I need to listen to what form her generalized anxiety has taken this time, and respond in kind. I am getting better at anticipating the moment when she will need to engage, but it still means that I am concentrating on my mother for most of the day and into the night. I have no attention for any sort of extended thought, whether it is reading, working on computer stuff, or writing a blog post. If I can’t fit an activity into a spare five or ten minutes, I am unable to do it.
I am the perfect candidate for the unfocussed, atomized flicker of social media addiction.
Last week, I deleted my Reddit account, because I had become too hooked on it. I don’t want to care about how some random musing of mine, on a topic I didn’t have any thoughts on when I logged in, has been received by a mass of anonymous strangers. It has its uses as a reference resource for computing, but the vegan subs to which I subscribed were childish virtue contests. I haven’t missed it as much as I expected. I have, in fact, been able to read again, fitting in a half hour at bedtime and, most days, some time while my mother has a nap after lunch. Until last week, I would have opened my book, but ‘just checked’ Reddit, and have ended up posting until my mother woke up. Since the great deletion, I have read a Jesse Stone mystery (utter crap and totally undemanding), and a Marjery Allingham mystery (shonky story but hypnotic settings) and two editions of the London Review of Books.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the possibility of social media, although I don’t want to surrender to the control of it. I have installed a Matrix5 server on my server box, and the chat application, Element, that runs on the Matrix framework. I haven’t really worked out how to use it yet, so haven’t invited anyone on to my server, but I hope to give it some time at some point. For now, if you’ve read this, feel free to leave me a message in this post’s room.6
This morning, the last morning of my weekend off, I was reading an article7 on the Guardian website about how Brazil has blocked Twitter, or X or ex-twitter or whatever. This appears to be quite a devastating move, as Brazilians are the fifth most enthusiastic people for ex-twitter use, and millions of them are looking for an alternative. The one an awful lot of them have settled on is, at first sight, a Twitter clone. It was even set up by the former boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, but, instead of sitting on a single entity’s servers, subject to their control and manipulation, it is, like the Matrix.org protocol, decentralized. At the moment, private Bluesky servers are only in beta, so I have signed up to the main server, bsky.social. Somebody had already nabbed my username, Danceswithcats (plagiarist!), so I’m dwcuk.bsky.social.8
I wasted a precious hour this morning exploring it and another precious hour this afternoon working out how to embed it in this site. However, it appears to be all set up. You’ll find a button at the bottom of each page of this website now, as well as a button to my Bandcamp page. If I can work out how to get Mastadon installed on my server and up and running, I’ll add a Mastadon button.
Four months ago, almost to the day, I didn’t feel right on a Sunday morning. Amanda thought I was faking it, because it was the day of her father’s birthday celebration tea, and I might have been a little unenthusiastic about the prospect. Her doubt was good, though, because it allowed me, after my blood test results showed I was having a heart attack or, more correctly, a myocardial infarction, 1 to text her from Accident and Emergency saying, “I told you I was ill,” which was a great, great moment, almost worth having a heart attack for.
The realisation that this was serious seemed to come in little slides, rather than a tumble. The first sign was when a nurse practitioner, a former learner of mine and someone I like very much, went from friendly to grave, about half an hour after my blood test had been taken. An enzyme, troponin, was seriously raised, and Russ’ manner became serious and cautious, and he began to choose his words carefully. Later, while I was sat in a crowded A&E admissions corridor, a registrar came to me after my second set of blood tests and said they’d be finding me a bed fairly soon. He didn’t disguise that there was urgency: they had a certain amount of time to prevent further damage to my heart. I felt as though I was on a cliff edge, the words “damage to your heart” hammering at my balance. I had visions of no more cycling, of oxygen bottles, of short, halting steps in slippered feet, holding on to walls.
“We don’t expect this sort of condition in a person as fit as you,” he said.
Besides the troponin levels, I had very high cholesterol.
“I’m vegan!” I said, and I heard what became a refrain: some people just have high cholesterol. That seemed inadequate, to me. I didn’t have high cholesterol ten years ago, when I had blood tests as part of my registration with my G.P. practice. I don’t eat a lot of processed food. Could it be stress?
There was no room in the Coronary Care Unit, so I was moved to the Acute Care Unit, which is the place where ambulance arrivals are seen. It is not a good place to be put: it means you need immediate help but the specialist ward is too busy for you. I spent a sleepless night in a cubicle as emergencies came in, and as crash teams saved, or failed to save, people much sicker than me. The drip they put me on raised my blood pressure and gave me a headache. I was on half-hourly tests, so couldn’t sleep, and the constant alarms of blood pressure and cardiac monitors made a peal of electronica, one always out of time with another, like a round sung by a soulless robot choir, singing without listening, staring blindly ahead, their brittle harmonies drowning out their desire to scream.
A robotic chorister, singing because that’s all it knows to do.
At dawn, a consultant, reassuringly middle-aged, Asian and bearded, with a smiling gravity, told me that the CCU was unlikely to be able to take me so they were talking to The Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth about transferring me there. I asked how I was to get there and he said they’d take care of that.
The night shift left. The man with COPD in the booth next to mine was wheeled off, every breath a fight to the death, exhaustion and fear warring in his own personal hell. The day shift came to familiarise themselves with their patients but otherwise the hours dragged on into mid morning in uncertainty and exhaustion. The tea trolley lady got used to my request for soya milk in my tea, and the health care assistant got permission for me to stand up so I could use a bottle. I had established a routine.
Towards lunchtime, they were suddenly there. A registrar came and told a health care assistant to get me ready, and then an ambulance crew, a woman my age, and a younger woman, appeared with one of those tank-like, high-tech stretchers. I was strapped on, my possessions were perched on my lap and we were off.
The older woman, a paramedic, was leading the stretcher, so I was looking at her. I asked her how I was crossing the Solent.
“Hovercraft,” she said. “We’ll be coming with you.”
I was loaded into the back of their ambulance and attached to the heart monitor. She checked that it was saying I was alive and then she gave her colleague the all-clear and we were on our way. We chatted as we travelled to Ryde, and she told me that the hospital would have commandeered a hovercraft and the passengers would have to wait for the next one.
“It’s quite an honour,” she said. I thought, it’s a sign that I’m not in a good way, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I said,
“How much do you think that costs?” and she said, “Less than the air ambulance.”
I told her that I was friendly with Russ and that he was studying to become an advanced practitioner and she said that she was lined up to do that, but had deferred because it was her son’s GCSE year. Then she told me that she dreads the hovercraft – she gets seasick.
We arrived at Ryde seafront and they opened the back, but the hovercraft was still disembarking the passengers from the trip over so I lay looking out of the back doors of the ambulance, feeling exposed. The ambulance crew were busy removing bags and equipment from their vehicle, piling it ready to go aboard as soon as they got the signal.
I apologised to the hovercraft crew, but it seemed they enjoyed these situations. A young woman among them had done the course on safe stowage of a stretcher, and directed two men. They worked with cheerful speed, and she checked each of the buckles before giving the pilot the go ahead. I hadn’t been on a hovercraft for many years – it goes to Portsmouth and I prefer to travel via Southampton – and I’d forgotten what an odd sensation it is. It feels like a horse that’s rushing ahead. On that day, it was a horse running over very rough ground, pitching up and down. It’s not like a boat, though: you don’t crash down, but can feel that you’re cushioned. I was facing the stern, strapped into a bed, but I’ve always been a reasonable sailor and I was quite happy, trying not to enjoy the poor paramedic’s distress too much.
We landed at Southsea, and I was wheeled out into a grey afternoon, to another waiting ambulance, with a new crew. These were two young women, and the one who stayed with me in the back was newly qualified, still excited by her job. After a quick debate, they decided they were justified in using the blue lights, and we edged and shouldered our way through Portsmouth’s permanent rush hour towards Cosham.
I expected another crowded ICU and another long wait to be admitted, but they wheeled me through the hospital, into a lift and straight on to a rather luxurious ward. It was a large lobby ringed by single-patient rooms. In the middle of the lobby was a large nurse’s station, looking like the flight deck of a very smart space ship. Two nurses, both male, both young, both handsome and bored, with an end-of-shift distraction, introduced themselves and took me off the ambulance crew’s hands.
The two nurses finished their shift within the hour, and were replaced by an African nurse. I wanted to sleep so badly, and seemed to fall into it, but I was still on half-hourly observations, so was dragged up to wakefulness by this gentle-faced carer throughout the night. It prompted a chaos of dreams, vivid as fever wraiths. To me, it was a relationship, lived out in the echo-realm of faery, sad and lovely.
In the morning, I had to negotiate to have my bowel movement in a proper lavatory. I was not using a commode. I was ashamed by the attention, and annoyed with myself for being so precious. I had a shower and some breakfast and felt better, the strange, distant, fantastical night melting away as I interacted with ward nurses, an angry cardiology trainee who took an echocardiogram – I managed to calm her a little and get her talking about her course – and the Latvian cardiac rehab nurse, who gave me lots of useful information about my condition and was keen to reassure me that I would be able to have sex again.
I thought she was presuming rather a lot, but it was fun listening to her say “intercourse,” in her lovely accent.
I spent a week in hospital, waiting for a slot in the angio lab to come free. After that first, busy day, I was moved to a ward with four beds, and greeted by the other occupants as a welcome distraction. Over the morning, we got to know one another, in that slightly exaggerated blokey way that British men adopt with new acquaintances. Opposite my bed was a man in his late thirties, squarely built and with the air of perilous affluence of a hard-working business owner. He turned out to be a kind, gentle man, though worried about his business, a furniture retail warehouse, which was in the hands of a less interested brother and a couple of staff. His wife, a lovely woman as rotund as him, visited every day and brought him heart-ruining Pakistani delicacies. I liked him at once.
On my side of the room, the other occupant was an older man from the Island, a farm worker, who was waiting for a bypass. This is the hard core patient. Our businessman friend and I were both waiting for stents, but if you need a bypass, you are in serious need. Southampton doesn’t do bypasses – they’re less common these days. He was waiting for a transfer to, I think, St Bart’s, in London. He’d been waiting for a week and was, it became clear, slipping into depression. He hadn’t had any visitors in all that time. The businessman was trying to keep him cheerful, but there was an air of gloom about him that felt dangerous.
Our final comrade had loads of visitors. He was a man in his sixties who, I gradually gathered, was quite autistic. He spent a lot of time colouring, and discouraged conversation. I never established what his condition was, but his sister, who spent every afternoon with him, seemed cheerful.
After two days, I was moved from there. I was, a nurse told me, stabilised. There was no more danger of heart damage and I was now only in hospital for a stent. Unfortunately, each day’s list got hijacked by emergencies, and as you stabilised, you became less urgent and were dropped down the list. The businessman had his and came back to be discharged at around the same time as I was moved to the Cardiac Day Ward. The name was out of date. It was supposed to be an outpatients’ ward but is routinely used for inpatients in the angiography queue.
This was a long ward with one row of beds, each cubicle curtained and separated from its neighbour by a high, narrow window. Somebody had missed a trick and the windows were rectangular, rather than arched, which would have made the place feel magical. I was in the first cubicle by the main door. It became a home, and I would have defended it if they had tried to take it away from me. Each morning I was woken by a tired night nurse for my observations. I would get up after that and shuffle along the dimly lit room to the bathroom, to shower and shave and clean my teeth in leisurely peace before it got busy. I hadn’t packed pyjamas, so I was in hospital P.J.s, using a gown as a dressing gown. I looked like a very camp jedi.
The tea trolley was my main delight. They were initially thrown into confusion by my request for soya milk but became used to it and made sure there was always a mini pack of bourbons (vegan) among the biscuits. I heard about relatives who’d had heart attacks, their recoveries or, hilariously, given the setting, their failure to recover. I shared dog pictures with one of the housekeepers.
I got used to taking pills and to being connected to a heart monitor. I became adept at removing the clips without disturbing the stickers when I wanted to go to the loo, and replacing them when I returned. I had bloods taken by lovely nurses from various African countries, from the Philippines, from India. I tried to befriend each one, treating the brief interaction as a challenge and a respite, surprised that in such a busy place, I could feel quite so lonely. I became a connoisseur of cannula inserts.
Each morning, the consultant, who did his best to be patient and nice, came round to tell us that we were number one in the queue, number two in the queue, etc. Above number three, you stood a chance of having the procedure that day. Otherwise, you would be stuck until the next day. I tried my best to not show impatience. I was still effected by the night in St Mary’s Emergency Admissions ward, where I had listened to people die. I didn’t want to be in competition with people on the edge of death, when it was clear that I would live, would cycle again, would be okay.
Eventually, on the Saturday afternoon, I was taken in to a cave-like room, part laboratory and part Alien-film spaceship bridge, and put on a weirdly technical chair while filaments were pushed up my arm and a stent was fitted into my aortic artery. There was rock music playing softly: the Spotify playlist of someone who is proud of their taste. Surgical lights lit patches of the room, while the rest was lit only by computer screens and video monitors that showed the inside of my circulatory system, but were angled so I couldn’t properly follow the procedure. The Consultant asked me questions, but was impatient with imprecise answers and did not answer my enquiries. I guess he was doing overtime and, I suppose, concentrating. I’m grateful, but that sense of estrangement from control of my own circumstances is something with which I have become familiar since then. At the time, it annoyed me.
I left hospital the next day. My sister-in-law, Jo, and her partner, Paul, very kindly came to pick me up in their comfy S.U.V. and we got the Fishbourne ferry back. I felt fine, but desperate for home. They took me to their house, where Amanda was waiting, and I was reunited with a joyful Hazel. She squirmed backwards and forwards in front of my legs, rubbing her bottom against me, twisting her body to look back at me, whining a high pitched squeal.
My reception from the humans had the feeling of fragile celebrity that surrounds the patient who has had a life-changing diagnosis. I think that was the moment when I realised I had entered the realm of the unwell, from which there is no real return. It crossed my mind that I was out of work, an invalid, in the eyes of the world if not in fact, and in the middle of trying to move my mother into a house for us to share. It wasn’t the time to think about these things, though. I wanted to get home.
Prior to my heart attack, I was feeling better about life than I had for some years. I had escaped the bullying supervision of my former “colleague” by an act of economic self-destruction, but I was ready to start looking for alternatives, and the extent to which my mother’s care was going to impact my freedom hadn’t quite hit me. I was volunteering for the cargo bike business, trying to write, with my usual progress, walking the dog, shopping, cooking, reading.
Why did it happen? I truly think that ten years of manipulative bullying by a chaos-queen, on top of my long grief for my father, both before and after his death, had a massive impact on my health. I thought, because I ate a decent vegan diet, had given up smoking and cycled a considerable distance most weeks, that I was immune from the ailments of middle age, but it appears not. The one thing I could not control was my mood of anger and frustration. Some of that was political, but my working life was, for a decade, like a toxic marriage, and I stayed because I needed the money. It had some good aspects, but it was all overshadowed by that fucking person. She has her own challenges and sorrows, but she is a past master at division, manipulation and keeping everyone on the back foot, and herself at the centre of things.
On the other hand, my diet wasn’t perfect, much as I have cooked from scratch for many years. I may have relied upon the bad vegetable fats – coconut and palm – more than I should have and I definitely developed a real instant noodles problem over the last few years. Also, I smoked for thirty years and drank for forty. These things aren’t good.
The genesis of this post was a review of my increasing sorrow: the loss of the optimism that had been my characteristic outlook since my teens. I didn’t notice when I lost my gift for happiness. There wasn’t a moment when I felt a whoosh, a gust of cold and a crushing sense of absence. The jolts to my cheery nature have been cumulative,34, rather like my realisation in A&E that what I felt in my chest was serious. I faced each event with the courage it demanded at the time, but, gradually, they eroded me until I had become rather darker than I have been for most of my life, and much sadder.
I’ve been aware of it. I shelled out for counselling for several months last year, and it helped me to confirm my need to ditch the job, and seek more control over my circumstances. And it comes back quite frequently, in moments of understanding, as it did two nights ago, when Amanda and I avoided an argument because, unusually, she let it go.
“You’ve got enough to be dealing with at the moment,” she said. It was dark. We were in the kitchen and I had only put the extractor lights on, so there were shadows surrounding us. I sort of slumped, and she crawled into my arms to hug me.
In her embrace, I remembered that I still have much treasure, a great deal to be grateful for. We will get past this. All will be well.
It seemed as though it would never come. Only a couple of weeks ago, in late November, I took this picture of blackberry blossom, the brambles fooled into a second bloom by the absurdly warm winter.
The warmth followed several weeks of heavy winds and rain, and the memory of the historically hot summer combined with each successive wave of extreme weather to build a feeling of apocalyptic disorder. The climate disaster we know to be true on an intellectual level is becoming a process we are experiencing.
Our garden this morning.
For the past week, though, winter has settled in, with sub-zero temperatures and a sense, when it is my turn to do the evening dog walk, that snow is an imminent possibility. And it is beautiful. We are unlikely to actually get snow on the Island – that happens only when the cold comes from the East, and this cold air is coming from the North, according to the forecasters – but we have had at least five days of cold, clear air, bright sun, and the most wonderful night skies that have given way to heavy frosts that make the mornings as beautiful as the moonlit, frosted darkness.
The rotting barge in the sun.
I rode into town late this morning to do some shopping, although that could have waited. I just wanted the ride. Yesterday, I’d done my first shift as a rider for the new cargo-bike delivery company on the Island1, and had ridden the Cowes to Newport cycle path for work. Today, I rode it for pleasure. The wintry, white sun dazzled me all the way to Newport, the late-remaining leaves coloured the barren-looking trees and hedges, and the rotting barge, that has sat in the Medina for as long as I have ridden that path, looked newly-reborn, as if she could heal herself and take to the sea again.
On Wednesday, I tried to take a picture of her on my ride home from doing my teaching prep at County Hall. The view had been utterly stunning then, lit by an almost full moon that reflected upon the water as an ivory glow, the air as still as the moon. A lone bird chirruped in the dark as I struggled to take a steady image. Alas, my Fairphone is a good phone, but not a great camera, and I could only achieve this blurred, but still evocative, picture.
“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.”John F. Kennedy
A joy I’d forgotten.
I have done very little leisure cycling for several years. I ride upwards of forty miles a week for work and shopping, and the habit of fitting a few hours’ riding into the week simply for the pleasure of the exercise has got lost somewhere.
My much missed workhorse, a great all-rounder.
A part of the problem is that I haven’t had a mountain bike I liked for some time. My last good one, a 2015 Voodoo Bizango,1 pictured left, was stolen in 2019. I replaced it with the newer model during lockdown in 2020, but it was a dog of a bike: badly specced, twitchy, overspecialised and yet ponderous. It was richly praised2 on various websites, which is a testament to the power of a large corporation’s P.R., I suppose: it was a Halford’s brand. However, the previous bike – the one I lost to a bike thief – had been the same brand, and it had been a beauty, both robust and nimble, as well as versatile.
I am a sucker for a bargain, though, and the new Bizango was even more widely promoted3 and not, this time, just by dodgy, fly-by-night bloggers.4 I looked at the details a little more closely this time. The previous one had an internal bottom bracket and clunky Sram gearing, and the saddle and grips were unusable, so that I had to spend about a hundred more pounds just to make the bike rideable. The 2022 model has Shimano Deore gearing, the updated, single chainring version of the gearing on the late lamented first of my Bizangos. It also has a Deore bottom bracket and the saddle is pretty decent.
Interestingly, my search for Voodoo Bizango reviews5threw up an illuminating situation: the 2015 Bizango – the one I loved and lost – appears most frequently on the stolen-bikes.co.uk site, while there are dozens of the ropey orange-coloured later one for sale on Gumtree, Pinkbike and Shpock.com, whatever that may be. Coincidence? I thinks not, indeedy.
A couple of weeks ago, Halfords advertised a trade-in offer on their own brand bikes. I could have got more for it by selling privately, but I am not confident with ebay and all that stuff, so I took the unloved bike in, received a gift card and ordered the new model. I also ordered a dropper seat post – I’ve been meaning to try one for ages, and the prices have been coming down, so this seemed the time.
Originally, I was to have picked it up this Saturday, but I got a phone call on Thursday telling me they were understaffed, and asking for my forbearance and I got my new bike on Sunday. I rode it home and was a little uncertain, noticing a couple of snags. The cable for the dropper post was far too long, creating a potential noose to catch on branches. Worse, the rear brakes were out of line. When I got home, I tried reseating the rear wheel and centering the brakes, and I fiddled with the handlebar alignment: I don’t blame Halfords for that, as it’s one of those things you just have to fiddle with until you get it right. All the same, as I put the bike in the shed for the night, I had the uneasy feeling I might have, once again, bought a dud.
So, today, I rushed through my various household duties to make time to take the bike out and get a proper feel for it. I left the house at two and was still feeling quite uneasy as I got towards town. The seat post cable, in particular, bothered me, but the rear brakes were still rubbing.
In increasing irritation, I cut short my ride and headed into Halfords to have a whinge. In contrast with the chaos of Sunday, when a small gang of staff were struggling to cope with a horde of customers, it was quiet and peaceful, the cave-like building glowing with the light of a sunny day. I found Sean, who I think is the bikes manager, although they seem to keep their roles obscure, at the bike mechanics’ station and bent his ear for a minute. Sean is a calm character, and effective. By the time I’d run out of steam, he’d sorted out the brakes and was ready to discuss when he could refit the dropper post. As a temporary measure, he folded the loose cable back on itself and tied it with a cable tie. I felt stupid for not having thought of that. He also helped me to get my handlebars sorted out and revived my enthusiasm for going for a ride. By the time I left, I was full of a renewed sense of well-being.
The weather was hot and bright, fairly windy with scattered cloud. I hauled through the Carisbrooke housing estate and turned up the Carisbrooke Road. I had thought to go left at the Castle turning, up over the Castle hill and out to the bridle paths that climb around the hills towards Brightstone Forest. The bike was feeling better though, as if I’d found my fit, and I wanted to get off-road quicker, so I climbed the hill through Carisbrooke, over the horrible Forest Road roundabout, to Nodgham Lane. It’s a hard climb, but the bike is so light and easy that I was quite fresh as I turned off the paved road on to the Tennyson Trail.
The path up to the down is a beautiful, rough, technical climb. Over the years, I’ve done it on full suspension bikes, hard tails, cheap bikes and high-end bikes, but I don’t remember enjoying it more than I did today. I was using my SPD trail pedals and had the mechanism set tighter than I like for off-road riding, so I was a little worried that if I needed to put my foot down fast I would just topple over, my feet still locked into my pedals. It’s a long time since I’ve done that.
Instead, I seemed to be able to find the perfect peddle turn with every stroke, judging the pressure I needed to use for each rut and rock and root. I realised, after having read a hundred bike ‘reviews’ over the last month or so, what a well-balanced bike feels like: I felt the ground through the bike, and found my way forward as an instinctive action. Cycling journalism might seem as though it’s splitting hairs for the sake of finding something to say, but it’s rooted in some real experience.
One of the deeply-channelled paths that are common on the Island.
The path, for its first half-mile, steep climb, is thickly hedged on both sides, often with high banks enclosing it. It is one of the deeply channelled paths that are common on the Island. Eventually, the left hand side clears and the path emerges into the edge of a bank of meadow flower, overlooking the valley across to Carisbrooke Castle. The path levels out here, and I was able to catch my breath and snap up a couple of gears, gaining speed. The gearing is not as smooth as my old 3 x 9 Deore setup, and that may be because it has a clutch on it, to stop chain slap, or it may be because the single chain-ring, with such a wide gear ratio on the rear cassette, forces the chain to make much higher jumps across a much tighter space. However, the range of gears was definitely much, much more comfortable than the orange Bizango.
I was beginning to really push the bike. The path runs through more hedged banks, but is wider here, and undulates between gentle descents and moderate climbs. We’ve had a quite dry summer and the ground was hard and the suspension fork, being new, was transmitting a fair bit of judder into my arms. It’s not the cheapest of forks, but it’s only air sprung in one leg, so there’s a coil that will take a few hundred miles to bed in and become properly supple. However, I didn’t feel that the wheel was bouncing unduly. Suntour fork though it is, it was doing a decent job of keeping the front wheel in contact with the track. I would like to buy a better fork, but I’m not sure it’s a financial priority, and the fork on my much missed first Bizango was also a Suntour Raidon which, in time, became softer and more biddable.
I came to a gate at a crossroads of two bridle paths: the one I was riding – Down Lane – crosses the one that goes to the South, down towards Gatcombe and to the North drops down to the Calbourne Road. I have never turned off here, as I usually continue on to Brightstone, at least, but the path to the right, towards Calbourne, was looking beautiful. I turned right, nearly tipping over as I hit the steep slope up onto the other path, then climbed the steep path to the highpoint shown on the map here: 134m elevation.
Here, I stopped. I’m going to embed the video I took, crap audio and all, because it captures the sense of excitement I was feeling, as evidenced by my incoherent jabbering.
What I’m babbling about is the sight of a bird of prey, plausibly either a buzzard or a red kite, having just floated over me, circling around, checking me out, before it disappeared over the edge of the down. The sun was hot on my skin, the dust blowing in the stiff wind, and I felt as I haven’t felt for many, many years. It’s the feeling that cycling first gave me when I got back into it as an adult, about fifteen years ago, and which I had allowed myself to forget, in all the struggle to keep life going, to do my best at it, to be a grown up. It’s the feeling of what it felt like to be a child: happy, excited, engaged with the moment, in love with life.
It felt like being ten again.
The hill down to the Calbourne Road was insanely steep, and I rode my rear brake for most of it. Nevertheless, I felt in control. It was brilliant to discover that what poor mountain biking skills I had ever had weren’t entirely lost. At the road, I had the choice of heading back towards Carisbrooke on tarmac or hauling myself up that steep hill to head home via the off road route.
No contest. It was a hell of a climb, but I made it, without running out of gears, and reached the peak with some strength still in my legs. When I got back to the gate, I stopped for a drink – I don’t have a camelback at the moment nor does the new bike have a bottle cage fitted, so I had to take off my backpack to get one of my water bottles out, but the rest was welcome. Then, it was back along the Down Lane, heading downhill this time, for a long, bouncing, mile-long descent. The dropper post did its job perfectly: it’s easy to push the seat down with your weight and then stand up on the peddles, and with the saddle out of the way, peddling while standing is much easier. Where the way ahead was clear, I hammered it, but I had to slow where the path wound out of sight, in case of walkers coming the other way. I met no one, though, and made it back to Carisbrooke Road feeling like one of the Athertons.
It was a day of days. A fine way to spend a couple of hours. I will DEFINITELY be doing that again, very soon.
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Today was a beautiful, late-winter morning, as clear and still as any day in the past few weeks. This was in contrast to yesterday, a Sunday, which was stormy and intermittently wet. Yesterday’s gloom gave me and Mrs DWC the excuse to have a do-nothing day: she stayed on the bed, reading, with the cat and the dog competing for the cosier spots, and I, having given Hazel a short walk, sat at my computer, planning the renovation of an old bike.
The fruits of my labours are contained in the document below. In fact, a good part of the document is redundant already, as I decided this morning that I would pay a professional to do the headset, but it was a pleasant day’s research which led me to muse on my bike ownership and the fact that, after a decade and a half of using bikes as my main transport, doing up even such a simple bike as the TIE Fighter is a major challenge.
This is the TIE Fighter. When I got it, I kept up the affectation of naming my bikes after spaceships from Star Wars, and she is the oldest of my bikes that, a) hasn’t been nicked and, b) is still in some sort of working order. I want to lay out my plans for this much-loved, but very tired, little beauty in this post, but, first, I’d like to return to point a) and indulge myself in reminiscence of all the bikes I’ve loved and lost, or neglected.
She may not look like much, but I’ve made a lot of special modifications…
It is, as you can probably see, a Boardman hybrid, of the sort that really became popular at the turn of the millennium: a road bike with flat bars and aggressive gearing, designed for whizzing around towns rather than for long journeys. Surprisingly, though, it has always been a comfortable bike, and a powerful workhorse: for several years I used it with a trailer, and carried up to thirty kilos behind it, doing up to fifty miles a week in that state.
Not a spot of rust.
Its original owner hadn’t used it very much and it had the gloss of newness. Compare it with the picture at the top of this post and you can see the years etched upon it.
In many ways, like a well-read book, I prefer a slightly battered-looking bike. However, the TIE Fighter has got beyond battered-looking, to just battered. Since I got it, I have tended to commute on whatever mountain bike I had in the winter but revert to the TIE Fighter whenever the weather was reasonable, as it was simply easier. I still used my mountain bikes, but as leisure bikes, not on the roads.
The A-wing, in her glory days.
However, around 2013 or so, after a succession of rough winters, the Island’s roads had got into such a state that using a road bike, particularly on my night-ride home after teaching evening classes, had become quite frightening. When the Millennium Falcon was stolen, in July of 2013, I used the A-wing for a couple of years, but that was overkill, and, in 2015, I bought a 29″ Voodoo Bizango; a Halfords mid-range bike which was absolutely perfect for long commutes with a laden trailer over pot-holed roads.
Gone, gone, and never called me Mother.
Alas, the East Cowes bike thief – may he (or she) suffer a thousand chronic saddle sores – struck again, in 2019. I’d forgotten to bring the bike into the back garden after cycling home one night and it was gone by the morning. In some ways, that was the more annoying theft, although I didn’t have the same affection for that bike that I had for the Falcon. I don’t have any pictures of it, for instance. It was, however, a superb tractor of a bike. I’ve since replaced it with a later model, and it is not nearly as good. For a start, the new version cannot pull my trailer, as it has stupid, smart-alec chainstays that mean you have no room for the extended quick release that secures the trailer’s bracket. The 2015 Bizango was a sturdy, capacious bike with a superb gear range that was both an enjoyable off-road ride and a useful and reasonably fast on-road commuter, able to cope with potholed roads.
At the time of this theft I hadn’t the funds to replace it and the A-wing, to my shame, was in an unusable state at the top of the garden, needing a lot of money to bring up to scratch, a situation that has only got worse in the intervening years. So much for leisure bikes. The TIE Fighter, on the other hand, needed some work, but it was within my means if I was careful for a month or two. So, I got it done up by a nice mechanic who works out of an industrial unit at the other side of Cowes. Understanding that I couldn’t afford to have everything that needed fixing replaced, he tightened the exhausted headset, managed to force a little more life out of the knackered hydraulic brakes and only replaced the cassette and chain, which were beyond repair.
It did the job. It felt a little sketchy with the trailer and it was odd to ride a bike with road wheels after several years of riding a 29″ wheeled mountain bike, but it was a bike and it got me to and from work. In the years since I’d bought the Voodoo, the Island’s roads had been resurfaced, so my reason for giving up on the TIE Fighter had been resolved. Nevertheless, I was saving for a new bike.
Then COVID happened. Suddenly, I didn’t need to drag folders and laptops around the Island and, in fact, I thought for a while that I would be out of work, so I volunteered to redeploy and was roped into two days a week of voluntary work at a retired people’s respite centre and short-term care home in Ryde. I bought a new Voodoo – a mistake, really, but I’ll discuss that at another time – and began to use that as my everyday bike and the TIE Fighter was consigned to the shed, and to an apparently permanent place on my rolling to-do list.
In this month’s Cycle Magazine, the excellent freebie sent out to members of CyclingUK, there is an article arguing that restoring an existing bike is a far better option than buying a new one. It sounds obvious, I know, but it inspired me. In particular, the following quote got me dreaming.
Cherish the bike you own. It’s easy to be distracted by the siren call of the shiny and new. Yet the fact that there’s a new bike that’s better than your old one doesn’t make your bike any worse than it was when you bought it…Recapturing that warm glow is partly mind games…I like a bike with what Grant Petersen of Rivendell Bicycle Works calls ‘beausage’ – a portmanteau of ‘beauty’ and ‘usage’, which means the former comes from the latter. In other words, a well-used bike with some scuffs and scars looks better than a pristine, unridden bike. But if you prefer a polished bike, shine that frame! Want perfect paintwork? Get a respray…The more your bike meets your ideas of how a bike should look, the more you’ll like it.
Dan Joyce, Editor, Cycle Magazine
I have never been a competent mechanic. I have tried and, more than once, got myself into a real muddle. My chin bears the scars of an accident caused by my not being meticulous enough in re-tightening a wheel after having a disheartening go at sorting out some brakes. That was a decade ago, and now, though I can beat a deraillieur into submission, given an hour or so, I still quail at the idea of bleeding hydraulic brakes. I did, in a moment of inspiration, manage to teach myself how to change brake pads, a task that costs £50 for just one brake if you pay a bike shop, so that’s a win. All my working bikes use Shimano – or Shimano rip-off – brakes now, so the pads are cheap on ebay. However, I suspect that fitting new brakes on the TIE fighter will be beyond my powers. There are some seductive videos of the process online, that try to persude you that it’s easy, but the variables in mechanical processes are what catch me out. What’s easy for Rod of MTBWhizzo’s YouTube channel (“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!!!”), who spends his days tinkering with bikes for which he doesn’t have to pay, is an anxious, fiddly, potentially ruinous mystery for me, nine times out of ten.
The Star Cruiser, unladen.
Fortunately, I’m in no hurry. I have the starcruiser, a heavy, pannier-rack laden wonder that I spent far too much money buying in 2020, and which is relatively maintenance-free, thanks to its internal hub gearing and carbon belt drive. It is my main bike now, for work and for shopping. The new Voodoo, though a chore for getting around, is lovely off-road, but I don’t have much time for that, so it stays in the shed, mocking me. I’m also not crazy about the slightly questionable brand name, so am thinking about getting the frame resprayed at some point, but I digress. The purpose of the TIE Fighter is to be a quick hop-on when I only need a couple of things from the shops, or when I don’t need to carry too much to work. It’s reverting to its original purpose, of being a fast, zippy runaround.
Walking Hazel this morning was a cure for the post-Christmas malaise.
The fog was thick even as far up the town as our house. In Whippingham, it was like a veil, and St Mildred’s looked like a fantasy castle. I was listening to The Sword of Destiny, by Andrzej Sapkowski, beautifully read by Peter Kenny. The weather suited the story telling, and I could almost picture a dragon gliding up from the Medina, the mist making swirling vortices at its wingtips.
Down in the woods, across the fields, the cobwebs were silver with mist drops. The mist settled on my beard and on Hazel’s muzzle. I wanted to go on, through the woods, down to the Folly Inn and along the path to Newport, walking all day. It was a workday though, and I had to be at Westridge by midday, to do paperwork and then teach an evening class: as prosaic a use of a day as the morning was poetic.
All the same, for an hour, I felt free, and my spirits were lifted, and work was a little less oppressive because of the beauty of the morning.
Last Friday, the day after the election, in a fog of tiredness and sorrow, I went to work, where I dragged learners through English mocks, and fought to believe that anything can make any difference now.
One learner, who manages an incredibly demanding life of balancing the needs of various dependents with a zero hours care job, was late. When she came in, she was, as ever, flustered. She offered her apologies and said,
“I had to get on to the Universal Credit. They’ve only paid half my rent.”
I sympathised and pushed her work in front of her. She completed it in her habitual rush, with her usual betrayal of her intelligence, because her way of coping with a life of overwhelming economic and familial responsibility at too young an age is to do everything in a hurry, avoiding dangerous reflection. We discussed each answer, interpreting how she hadn’t read the questions fully or considered all the options in the multiple choice section, and how, with a few minutes’ care, she is perfectly capable of passing what should be, for her, the formality of this exam. She promised to be early next week, and to take a few minutes to become calm, but I expect she will rush in to the exam room late, pre-occupied by another crisis that she will bravely cope with, as she tries to make the space to better her life.
In the afternoon, she came back for the maths class. I had been preparing for this class for several weeks, laying the ground for nervous learners: it’s the one in which we move from basic calculation with decimal numbers to working with fractions. This is where people give up: they believe that ‘fractions are hard’, and that they have some innate inability to ‘do hard maths’ and this section of the course is always as much an exercise in boosting learners’ self-belief and reflecting on how much they have already achieved as it is about introducing new skills and understanding.
She and my other learner who had turned up – there’s a wave of colds and stomach bugs keeping children off school, and two other women were at home with sick offspring – have developed a friendship that is still at the stage of curiosity about one another. Off-topic discussions, pleasurable as they can be, are a headache for me, as I only get two hours each week to teach a demanding curriculum. I had given them their warm up task – a few questions on what we had covered the previous week – and checked that they knew where they were with it, and I left the room to go to the loo while they completed it. By the time I got back, they were discussing the election result.
I groaned inwardly, and cautioned myself to be like a fly fisherman with a bite: to let it run until I could feel they were tiring and then take control again. A few weeks before, as part of my duty to ‘promote British values’, I had used a voter registration poster in our English class for an exercise on identifying presentational features in a text. At the time, the learner of whom I am writing had asked me my politics and I had explained that I wasn’t allowed to say, and she had responded, after a discussion of why that was sensible for a teacher, that she reckoned I was for Corbyn. At the time, I’d congratulated myself on remaining neutral. Now, as I sat quietly, waiting for my opportunity to get them back on task, she said,
“I was right about you.”
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
She’d seen a photo on the local newspaper’s website, in one of the few articles the openly Tory-leaning rag had bothered to publish on Labour’s campaign, that had a picture of a group of Labour supporters gathering for an event in Ryde, smiling, comradely, happy, optimistic. At the back, peaking over the shoulder of the shorter man in front, grinning like a hungover idiot, I was clearly visible.
“You know I can’t talk about it,” I said, shaken.
“Yeah,” she said, “I voted for Boris. I’ve never voted before, but I voted Conservative.”
It was as if she hated me. I know she doesn’t, but that was how it felt.
I haven’t blogged about this election, beyond changing my homepage to a trite meme and linking to a couple of posts I’d heard about through the news. I haven’t blogged much this year, of course, but I did expect that, when the longed-for election campaign happened, I’d be leaping into prolix action, as I had in 2017.
Instead, I’ve been involved, ‘on the streets’, and through the Constituency Labour Party’s own systems. I’ve been the assistant secretary of the CLP for nearly two years, but that has, until recently, only meant being the keyboard monkey for the secretary and chair, both of whom have become friends. Just before the election started, however, the chair withdrew himself from consideration for the position of candidate, having been subject to sustained vilification, including threats to his family, since the last election, and the secretary got himself locked out of the Labour comms system for a mistaken breach of the opaque rules, which have more to do with internal politicking within the national party structure than they do with making the system work.
Thanks to these circumstances, my role became, accidentally, central. Over the last six weeks, I have probably written more words than in the previous twelve months. They just haven’t found their way here. The chair, who had become the new candidate’s campaign manager, told me, late on in the campaign, that his role was taking the fight to the Tories, and my role was galvanising the troops. I hadn’t been told that before, but had simply adopted the job that I didn’t see anyone else doing, or being in a position to do.
Each day after work, once I’d done enough to be sure that I would know where I was for the next lessons, I turned off my work laptop and went straight on to my own computer, where I would often be trapped until after midnight. If the next day wasn’t a teaching day, I would be out with the Cowes and East Cowes branch, delivering leaflets door-to-door, or helping with the distribution of garden signs and posters to people who had contacted the party, asking how they could help. In the evenings, there were many events, most of which were a pleasure: I have spent more time in pubs over the last few weeks than I have for many years.
At first, it was exciting. I was surrounded by people who believe, broadly, in what I believe: that humans are only of any account if they serve the group; that selfishness is a moral and intellectual failure; that the dominant political and economic system is, without question, evil; childish, rapacious and evil, but that elation had, after the first couple of weeks, begun to compete with exhaustion. I did not, however, lose hope, but I began to feel a little let down by comrades whose belief in the coming victory of justice and good sense was tempered with caution.
Two things gave me a different outlook to the majority of people fighting for a Labour victory in this election: my Christianity and my disavowal of social media.
I am not an ardently practising Christian, but I came, through the nineties and noughties, to realise that I cannot escape my faith, and that the arguments against faith that were trendy in those decades, were, in the words of Terry Eagleton, a process of Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching against a system of thought that the neo-atheists wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented. Earlier this year, I joined Christians On The Left. Through the election they have been sending out a daily email, the 2019 Prayer Diary. Written by a theologian who only introduced herself as Hazel, they were wonderfully welcome at a time when I didn’t have the space to read my normal blogs and news for which I receive update emails that, through the campaign, I simply had to delete, to be able to keep up with my inboxes. Each day, though, I read her prayers, and then got on with whatever needed doing.
As for social media, I think my absence from it since July 2017 has given me the clarity to think for myself and to avoid the political panic to which I am prone and which, I think, guided many people in this election. The Tories are crisis capitalists: they thrive on the established P.R. tactic of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). I suspect, without being in a position to offer evidence, that this was the election in which the capitalists realised their technological dream of controlling people’s reactions from within. I may expand upon that at another time, but I think that, accomplished as we in the Labour Party are at using social media to make ourselves feel effective, it means nothing unless the people who own the media are on your side.
Actually, I did rejoin Twitter for the duration of the campaign. It helped me to keep up with events in the CLP, where a disparate set of groups, spread over the largest constituency in the country (by population), were arranging their campaigning efforts semi-autonomously, and were not always brilliant at communicating outside their social media bubbles. I tried to join Facebook as well, but was frustrated. I think my use of Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, coupled with a disposable email address and a phone number linked to a burner SIM card I had no intention of using again, tipped the creepy capitalist bastards off. I’m rather proud to have been blocked by Facebook before I posted a thing!
A facile pretence of utility and ubiquity have made social media essential in politics, and have, I believe, handed the reins of power over to a capitalist hegemony as completely as any other factor in this election. I had set up my home server, after two years of study and trial and error, less than a month before the election was announced, and would have been lost without the calendar, to-do lists and contacts server it hosts, but I was still obliged to use a Google calendar for shared calendaring with the CLP. We need to look at owning our infrastructure, but it’s a hard sell. People who automatically accept the ‘services’ to which they are tied by their choice of computer system and mobile phone have a hard time understanding that they are being used, when they have put so much effort into just mastering the technology that seeks to control them. The idea that it is escapable defeats them, as the idea that all politicians are not the same defeats people who are struggling to survive in an economic system that is tightening around their lives. There is a simple answer (simpler than the route of learning and self-building that I have used), but how many people will make the effort to do it?
Earlier this year, I read Democracy Hacked, by Martin Moore. A couple of months ago, I read, almost in one sitting, the Edward Snowden autobiography, Permanent Record and, just before the election was called, I bought The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which I will now have the time to read fully. If you want to understand what has happened to democracy over the last decade, you need to read these texts. You do not control your data, and, consequently, electronic communication does not, any more, give us a full say in our democracy. We’ve overthrown one tyranny of informational cartels to replace it with another. We need new mechanisms of resistance.
I’m not keen on going into mainstream media’s role in this election. Enough people are already examining that, although I will add a couple of personal observations. Firstly, the full emotional crash of the exit poll was pre-announced by about twenty seconds, for me, by the smirk on the face of Andrew Niel as he talked over the countdown to it. Rattling through his bland script, he looked as though he had a hand stuffed down his truss, so excited was he by the predicted result to which he, I assume, had had early access. If you believe in democracy, honesty or truth, the BBC is not your friend, any more than Facebook is.
Secondly, it dawned on me, as I angrily skimmed The Guardian’s website each morning, that the key figures among its columnists and editorial staff are probably on a lot more than £80,000 per annum and, while they cling to the pose of being ‘of the left’ as their journalistic USP, very few of them will have voted for a party that wanted to raise taxes for the richest 5%. I think their utter betrayal of democracy is a good enough reason to not “support independent journalism” for another year. Let them take comfort from their massive wealth, their second homes and their positions of quisling influence.
There is a lot of commentary on the election leaping out and I haven’t had the heart to try to keep up over the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, we met other Island Labour members in a Newport pub to have a bit of a thank you session, with the candidate, Richard Quigley, a gloriously happy, funny, clever and warm man, bringing his wife and daughter so he could say his personal thanks. Richard has been a pleasure to support in the campaign, as Julian, his manager, was in the last. In the pub, many of us were talking about how we are now facing the very real dread of the last restraints being released from the Tory plunder of our country’s assets. We’re thinking about the fact that we will not be able to afford ‘health insurance’ when the Fascists pocket the bribes from the Yank money and drug industries; we’re thinking about the fact that those of us who are in public service jobs will probably endure a continued slide into deeper and deeper working destitution, if we are lucky enough to keep our jobs. We are finding it harder to think without real, urgent horror of the fate of disabled people, homeless people, people who cannot find legal redress for rape or harassment and how soon it will be our turn to join them. It’s personal. Dying, untreated, of some wretched cancer, or living with pain that would be treatable if we were part of the 5%, now seems like our common fate.
What we are supposed to do, if we follow the advice that we have told ourselves since Jeremy Corbyn first gave us hope, is to pull together, look to one another, and begin to support those people already jettisoned by the Tories’ campaign of exclusion and abandonment. Some people are talking about it, but we all know that the Blairites will try another deluded attempt to drive the party into impotence by reopening the insane whinges they’ve been picking at since they were crushed in 2015. And, pathetic as their positions are, they have The New Statesman and The Guardian behind them, so they don’t have to be right, just shamelessly persistent.
So, I’m looking at my position. If infighting does get a grip, I may decide to not stand for local party office at the next AGM. Over the election, I have made new friends, or deepened existing ones, and the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that, while it is not as powerful as political office, is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics. And, if I convince a few people to see through the lies of the capitalist hegemony on the way, all the better.
One other thing is troubling me; an issue that is like the ticking bomb that fascists love to use to justify their cruelty. If, by some miracle, the vile Bozo Johnson manages to hold together a government for five years, the timeline for installing a government that will meet its responsibilities to the climate emergency before the deadline that scientists now say is the very latest chance to save human civilisation will be halved. We have to stop the Tories before then. We have to. I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Let’s get back to my Tory voting learner. I can’t discuss her much more closely than I already have, but I can make some guesses about those things that drive her. Not ideologically racist, she has, I suspect, suffered humiliations at the hands of people whom she perceives as different, and came to the Island, partly, to get away from communities that are in turmoil and have been turned against one another by poverty and poorly resourced and led policing, social structures and political leadership. For her, Brexit seems like a triumph of the poor over the powerful – a reversal of the truth, as it turns out, but if your information comes from social media and tabloids, you can continue to believe that.
For her, also, they are all the same. It’s the FUD lie of lies, that says that politics is pointless and the safest and bravest response is to follow the herd. Political voting is confused with voting for a Love Island contestant, where the outcome is similar to a bet: you win if you back the winner.
In truth, of course, backing the winner in this election has guaranteed that the phone calls she gets, when she says, “Someone after money: they can jog on,” will increase. The waiting time for her Universal Credit will lengthen, the amount she is entitled to reduced, so her debts will deepen; the inadequate working protections she has at the moment will be removed one at a time, until she will be paying, not only for her work travel, but for her uniform, her equipment, and, finally, for the privilege of being employed.
She hasn’t yet noticed, I suspect, that the NHS has been privatised. The fact that ‘Boris’, as she calls him, lied about putting more money into the NHS hasn’t got through to her. They all throw figures around, don’t they? They’re all the same.
When she told me that she had voted Tory, I stared at her for a moment, taking in her beauty, her nicotine-stained front teeth, her bravely well turned out appearance that is testament to her courage, given the hours she works, and then muttered that I couldn’t get into it. It was an uncomfortable moment.
She got on with her work, doing well, grasping lowest common multiples and then comparison of fractions, but the moment must have lingered for her, as well as for me. I realised that, for her, I am part of the body of authority that keeps her working and working and working, denying her the right to gain full realisation of her talents and potential and, by confronting my politics, she was asserting herself; laying claim to a dignity she doesn’t realise I already see in her. She’s not to know that I earn less than her, and that, for all my education, I am as constrained and limited by the political and economic system as she is.
Finally, as we were summing up the learning at the end of the class, she brought it up again.
“It bothers you, don’t it,” she said, reverting to her mannered London speech, which is not how she usually talks to me.
I wanted to channel Jonathan Pie, and descend into a rant that would contain all the frustration and pain I had been feeling since ten o’clock the previous night, when Huw Edwards and Andrew Neil had gleefully pronounced my country’s doom. I stared into her eyes for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. Nothing came.
In my struggle, I remembered Christians On The Left’s prayer email of that morning. I hadn’t absorbed it properly: I’d been too tired and too sad, but one line had jumped out at me:
Be still, and know that I am God
Psalm 46:10
I stopped searching and words came.
“Your vote is your own choice,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you voted. The fact that you have voted, for the first time, is a really good thing. The more people who vote, the more powerful all our votes are. I celebrate that.”
I doubt I fooled her. I suspect that, given the struggles she has and the job she does, she is a perceptive person, who saw how much pain I was in. However, she smiled, packed her bag, and went on to her next obligation, her courage and dignity undamaged by our exchange, knowing a little bit more about maths than she had when she came in.
Well, here she is, the new dog, to fill the aching void left by Tia, the Golden Dog,1 who was killed in a road accident on 15th December last year, after only thirteen months living with us. I can’t believe it was so short a time.
The new dog was named Buttercup by the rescue charity, but I wasn’t shouting that in the park, so we’ve renamed her Flora. Don’t let the look of innocence fool you; she’s a terror. The picture also gives the impression that she can read and is therefore a doggy prodigy: nothing could be further from the truth. I am fairly convinced that we’ve taken on a canine cretin.
In fairness, it is still only about four days since she left Romania, was transported hundreds of miles, separated from her litter mates and dumped in a house with two strange humans and a cat. She’s entitled to be a little disorientated.
I was working on the day she arrived and had an evening class as well, so wasn’t home until about half-past-nine. By then, she’d bonded with Amanda, and wasn’t about to spread the love. We’ve had a difficult weekend of adjustment. Flora hasn’t got the hang of me yet, and howls whenever Amanda goes upstairs, or pops out of the house. I’m supposed to completely ignore her and let her come to me. She’s shown some curiosity about me, but hasn’t decided I’m her friend yet. I don’t take rejection well, and am finding it quite difficult.
Amanda is working this afternoon, so I’ll be in the house with Flora going spare for her favourite human. To remind myself that it is worth it, I have made a gallery of pictures of Tia, to which I linked in the first paragraph of this post.
For now, I just keep thinking that I’m a cat person. Yes, since Tia died, I’ve missed the walks, and the devotion of a trusting dog, but I am finding all the adaptation a real headache.
Flora is quite pretty though, and I love the way she hasn’t quite grown into her paws yet. I’m sure we’ll be best buddies before long.
