Living outside a village at the top of a rural lane, I feel more in touch with the seasons than I have for many years. This autumn feels like an adventure, and lovely with it. Although the summer keeps fighting back, giving us one, two or even a week’s worth of bright, dry days, autumn has taken hold and has been a severe one this year.
There are bare trees, thinning trees and trees whose leaves are turning, like the one in this picture, to display a palette of change, rich and beautiful. The wetness of the autumn, so disastrous for the farmers, adds to the sense of abundance for those of us who don’t depend upon good weather for our living. I wear my wellies to walk Hazel, and the smells of dampness and earth and grass and horse poo fill me with an awareness of the life around me, even though I seldom meet anyone on my walks.
I no longer live with Amanda and Hazel, but they visit three or four times a week, and I walk Hazel then. On the days when we have a carer in and I go over to East Cowes, I still take her on the local, suburban walk I’ve used for years,1 so familiar that certain turns trigger memories of audiobooks I have listened to as I passed that same point.2
Today, I made soup and rolls, and Amanda came over after finishing work at lunchtime. It is the wettest of days, the rain pummelling from leaden skies in ten minute bursts before becoming lighter, but not stopping. My mother finds the weather gloomy and needs cheering up, but I love the power of the dark clouds and the rhythm of the rain on the pond and the patterns of raindrops on the windows.
After lunch, we had a quick cup of tea with some of my mother’s birthday biscuits, then I went out to do some shopping while Amanda sat with my mother. Aldi and Morrisons were busy and damp, and I rushed through the shopping, which is always fatal for the household economy, but I wanted to be away from the eddies of people, milling around with our mouths opening and closing in resentful avarice, like the fish in our pond.
When I got back, I changed into my wellies and my big raincoat, and took Hazel out. Our walk is now well-established and Hazel trots ahead, seeking out smells in the verges and horse poo on the lane. At the bottom of the lane there is the farm which gives this place its name, a site that goes back at least a thousand years. Although the current building is mostly nineteenth century, there is, apparently, a cockpit in the building that dates back many hundreds of years. We turn at its gate and get on to the track that is in the picture at the top of this page, a rough path, often flooded, that goes between horse paddocks where angry women struggle with the the gulf between their dreams of horse ownership and the reality. Today, fortunately, the horses were unmolested, the chronically weird women not braving the weather.
The path winds downhill in two dramatic drops. On one side, the marginal land given over to horse paddocks banks up in small, bramble hedged parcels. On the other, new woodland, planted within the last couple of decades, many of the trees still wearing their plastic sleeves around their lower trunks, creates a barrier for the privacy of the two landowners in this isolated spot. From maps,3 I know there are two houses, each surrounded by a large amount of land, but you’d hardly know it. It is like an area of secret installations, where nefarious goings on are hidden by strategic planting: havens against planning restrictions. I often here the crack of shooting from this end of the path. That is the perversion they hide.
A steep slope from here leads through some thin woods to the lowest point of the path, that is raised only half a metre or so from wetland where the trees grow out of almost permanent puddles. A very light rise gets us to the cycle path; the Red Squirrel Trail4.
Some days, we turn back here. It is enough of a walk for Hazel, and the cycle path is a bit boring, being open and tarmacked and often quite busy. If I am in a full daydream, I don’t want to acknowledge my fellow walkers. However, today I was happy to wander further. I had a full poo bag to get rid of and there is a bin at the end of the section of path, where it crosses the road at the bottom of the village.
So, we hiked on, Hazel trotting ahead until she was distracted by some particularly interesting scent, when she would stop to investigate and I would get ahead of her. After a time, she’d come flying past me, having run to catch me up, and then turn around to get my approval of her return. The hedges on the side of the path are full at this time of year, but there are gaps enough to see into the fields beyond, and then into the industrial estate on the hill going out of the village, where the brewery has its distribution centre and the excellent garage has a large yard and workshop5. For a while, there are streams on both sides of the path, until a channel burrows under the path to unite them, with a strange anti-climbing device on the outside of the safety barrier making it look like a fortress below the path.
We passed the cyclists’ cafe6, and got to the road. Hazel is very good at sit and wait commands, and I leave her while I go to the bin then treat her when I get back. Then, we retrace our steps, along the cycle path, which always seems much longer on the return, and then up the lane, through mud and puddles, rain soaking her fur and pattering on the top of my raincoat’s hood.
Today was not a bad day at home. Being a carer, mood dictates everything, my mother’s and mine. Seeing Amanda, walking with Hazel, enjoying the drama of the weather, all helped to break the monotony of being stuck in a home that is not my home, with a mother who is no longer my mother.
Despite it not being home, this is a rural place, where beauty is closer and more constant than in our suburban home. Today, although we are in the middle of October, there was still a huge amount of colour in the banks and the hedgerows. I have swapped a life of hobbies and activity for the consolations of natural beauty and a sense of virtue. I hope I have made the right decision, but there is no backing out now.
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.
We had thunder last night, a huge storm that got trapped over the Solent, as they sometimes do, confined between Portsdown Hill on the mainland and the downs on the southern side of the Island. I went upstairs to check on the cat, who was fine, and sat on the table in our bedroom window, looking out at the flashes that lit the sky from East to West. I kept my eyes forward, in a meditative state, waiting for lightning bolts to appear within my view, and inside five minutes I saw several: beautiful, brutal, jagged lines of pure white, linking the night cloud to the horizon like ruptures in the sky.
This morning dawned clear. Last week had given us glorious summer weather, but Saturday had been dull and wet, culminating in the storm as night fell. Today is bright, summery, but with the fresh aftermath of the storm.
Amanda and I got up early enough to take Tia out before getting bogged down in the weekend obligations to family, house and friends. We decided to go to Compton Beach, on the south west of the Island. It’s a bit of a haul to get there, driving through Newport and then on out to the South Coast, but, at low tide, it is one of the glories of living here. Low tide was at 9:15 this morning: we got there at about 8:30, and the sand, peppered with seaweed, rocks and tide pools, and with the chalk cliffs of Freshwater as its backdrop, looked like a setting from a fantasy novel.
We walked eastwards, into the sun, the sound of a strong surf accompanying our lazy chat. Amanda has been taking dog training classes and Tia, despite her limitless capacity for excitement, is becoming more manageable. She sprinted ahead, but came back to us when Amanda called, and ran delighted rings around us when she had received a reward for her obedience. We went further than we had intended, because we met other walkers, and got talking, or Tia was playing with their dogs as we walked, but it didn’t matter. It was Sunday, the sun was out, and we live in a beautiful, beautiful place.
After a week of news about heavy snow, we finally got our turn yesterday lunchtime. The magic of a fairly heavy snowfall hit the Island and, by dusk, we had a good few centimetres turning East Cowes into a beautiful playground.
“Wochoo lookin’ at?”
Earlier in the week, I walked Tia in Firestone Copse and was checked out by this creature. He was unflustered by Tia’s presence and sat scanning me, hopping this way and that on the branch, until he decided I wasn’t very interesting, and flew off.
The weather then was bitterly cold but dry. The ground in the woods, which has been boot-ruining wet for most of the winter, had frozen to a crisp hardness. Puddles were like frosted windows and streams looked solid, unless the light hit them a certain way, when it was possible to make out the movement of a reduced trickle beneath the ice. My headphones gave up the ghost a few weeks ago, and I have been walking without music or talking books in my ears, becoming used to the sounds of the woods. In the eerie cold, even with the slight, distant reminder of traffic if the wind is in the right direction, I have heard birdsong, the creaking of trees, the breath of leaves and cry of birds of prey.
Yesterday morning, Amanda and I took Tia back there, and we had a walk of blissful cold. Work was in the process of being suspended: I was due to go to Ryde for my usual long Thursday, but the weather and travel warnings had made my boss worried and he had cancelled classes. While we were walking, the admin officer phoned and said I should work from home. Even though I had a lot of work to do, I felt as though I were on holiday.
My desk at home faces away from the window, so I missed the start of the snow, but by two o’clock I had done a reasonable amount and got up. Already, the ground was covered with a couple of centimetres and the sky was full of swirling, windswept flakes. I rushed downstairs, put on my boots, coat and gloves and took Tia out for her first ever experience of snow.
It’s difficult to know what she made of it. I don’t think she’s very keen on snowfall, but she seemed amused by the snow on the ground. We walked up to the rec and round it, and I thought that I would take her along to the new estate where we had walked a lot over Christmas, and which had caught my imagination then with its unearthly, film-set desolation.1However, Amanda phoned and said she’d finished work and would come and join us, so we walked back to meet her. The cold got into us fairly quickly, and so we headed home.
I checked what our house looked like in the snow: I was interested to see how efficient our insulation is – not too bad, it appears. However, I took several photos and was pleased with the results. I have not taken many pictures of our house, and we have been here for seven years now. I put them here for my own reference, as much as anything.
The tosser-tank isn’t ours.Auto-focus is confused by snow.
The snow lasted until mid-evening, when freezing rain replaced it. This morning was noticeably warmer and, when I took Tia out at 9 o’clock, the freezing rain and slight thaw had made the footpaths treacherous: great patches of glassy rinks covered large areas. There was, though, hardly any traffic: for the first time since I have lived here, I could hear no traffic noise for long stretches, and I walked in the road, through slush.
We headed to the estate, and it was transformed. The snow had not made it any prettier, but it was alive. There were people everywhere, mostly in family groups, with sledges and tin trays, having fun together. I did not, of course, photograph people: that would have been weird, but I walked Tia through the estate laughing and chatting with people having an unexpected holiday.
It’s snowing again now, but lighter. I am going out in a while, to buy my Friday beer. I am hoping for warmth. It’s been nice, but I want spring to start.
I have been back at work for a month and, in any other year, I think Christmas would have been largely forgotten by this point. This year, though, even as we enter February and we begin to notice that nightfall is getting later, I am nagged by a lingering nostalgia for my Christmas holidays. I keep bringing it up in conversation, this sense of a break, not just from work, but from the dull trudge of life itself, as if some spell was cast around our lives for a fleeting, precious fortnight.
My parents had said that they wanted Christmas alone, to celebrate my father having had a year without needing hospital treatment. In the week before the Christmas holidays, my boss had cancelled classes for training and paperwork which, in the end, amounted to only one day’s compulsory attendance, so there was a lazy week running up to the break. Thus, time between my last class of 2017 and the first class of 2018 was, unofficially, my own. Best of all, the holiday itself was calendrically perfect. Christmas day was a Monday, so we had a clear week off: a weekend, followed by a week, then another weekend and a bank holiday Monday before I had to return to teaching. It felt like the ur-holiday: the holiday upon which all holidays should be patterned.
I did not read or write, other than a few (now deleted) blog posts. Instead, I listened to Harry Potter audiobooks as I cooked, or sat staring out of the window, or as I walked the dog.
Tia sniffing, as she does.
I walked the dog a lot. I loaded her into the car and took her to Firestone Copse, where I let her run gleefully through the woods as I ambled in an autonomous daze on the circuit round the main path, letting Stephen Fry’s beautiful reading of Rowling’s richly layered fantasy insulate me from any serious thought. I puffed on my vape and enjoyed bright cold or grey drizzle in the same steady happiness.
Amanda stayed busy, and was often out, buying stuff or meeting friends or family. When she had the car I took Tia through the new estate at the top of East Cowes, out of town to Whippingham village, and then along the footpath behind the church, and over the stile into the farm by the river. There I could let Tia off her lead and walk across the sodden meadow, staring down at the grey arc of the river Medina, while Harry, Ron and Hermione puzzled over the escape of Sirius Black. Tia ran great, delighted circles in the long, rough grass, stopping only to come running up to me, to collect a treat, before haring away again.
The sodden meadow and the grey arc of the Medina.
At the far end of that field is another stile into another field and, at that one’s far end is the wood with the demolished factory site, fenced off because of contamination. The woods have a poisoned character; bewitched by their pollution, but there is a path through them that leads to the road down to the Folly Inn. On a particularly heavily-clouded, drizzly morning, I went through the woods with Tia and we walked down to the pub. Inside, the pre-Christmas weekday feeling was like manufactured cosiness: I bought a pint and Tia sat beneath my chair as I drank it, lost to real life.
One afternoon, in the week before the official start of the holidays, when my boss had let me know that I could work from home, I finished updating a load of student folders and took Tia out in the mid-afternoon, with perhaps an hour and a half of daylight left. We walked along the top of the new estate, and I intended to go along to the Whippingham field, but as I crossed the road at the far end of the estate, I looked back and realised that there was a path down the final street, behind the line of trees that marks the edge of the housing before the new road. A woman was walking a dog there, and I noticed, for the first time, that the houses, modern and cramped as they are, are built in the style of Georgian town houses, in a sort of model-village style. I was intrigued. I walked back and took the dog down the road that the woman had come from, imagining that there was a village, with life and interest here, rather than a dormitory development of off-the-shelf compartment houses for people who never interacted.
The bizarre sterility and isolation-in-a-crowd nature of the estate is belied by some clever but deceptive design. There is a fake village green, around which some fake-georgian terraced houses with attic room gables are painted in various ‘authentic’ colours, but the residents have already let the upkeep slide, so that mould is showing on the fascia and soffits, and the blue-painted houses, in particular, are looking weathered. And, apart from the occasional dog-walker, there is no one about. This is an estate designed for driving to and from. You have your allotted parking spaces and you lock your door, and you live your life away from the place where you live. There are no shops, no pubs, no church or community centre. The estate is a lot of bedrooms and TV rooms. The closest thing to a community facility are the construction business offices: Barratts, Wilson Homes and one other, whose name escapes me, maintain showrooms there, to persuade people to make their homes in this abandoned filmset of a non-community.
Harry Potter seemed to suit this bizarre environment perfectly. The place is the Muggle state in redbrick, render and wood-frame. It is even less life-enhancing than Little Whinging, in that most of the houses here do not have gardens. They have strips, with pots. There is quite a lot of artificial grass.
I became a little fascinated with the area.
The flatpack palaces of homo-Alexa
Further down the new road, as it bends back along the bottom of the estate, and follows the river back towards East Cowes, there is a small development of ‘self-build’ plots. These challenge the uniformity of the rest of the estate with an alternative conformity of cuboid grandiosity, all cladding and glass. At dusk and after dark, the lives within the ones which have been completed and are occupied are on display to every passer-by. You have to remind yourself that these are private dwellings, and it is rude to look, because their lights seeps out across the road, like pollution. Wall-mounted TVs of migraine-inducing vastness make it appear as though the flatpack palaces are inhabited by two-dimensional giants. The people within might be projections; a new Google project of a pixelated populace: Homo Alexa.
At the end of the self-build development there is one house, not yet complete, that defies the pattern, in detail if not in dimensions. Like all the others, it is a vast, three-storey cuboid block, occupying the entire space of its uniform plot, except for the obligatory multiple car parking space that replaces any garden. However, instead of the wall of windows, it is plain-fronted, with a long, Elizabethan-style gable of nine small windows. It is strange and rather beautiful, this defiance of the Grand Designs norm. It hints at a shadowed interior lit by reading lights and standard lamps, rather than LED spots: dark wood panelling and bookshelves rather than magnolia paint and flatscreen hugeness.
We walked on. The elite section, with the self build plots, is bounded on its far end by a large area of grass and woods, creating a break between that odd island of conformist cut-out creativity and the brick homogeneity of the rest of the estate. A drainage ditch that will probably be known as ‘the stream’ by generations of children who grow up in the area runs round the edge of the wood. There is litter in there: a plastic barrier section, and a fire extinguisher, barbed wire that the builders didn’t bother to remove trails through the undergrowth. I let Tia off and she disappeared into the woods. On my headphones, Harry, Ron and Hermione heard the execution of Buckbeak in horror.
Over the following week, I explored the estate. I tried to get out of the house by about half past three, although I was not putting my watch on most days, so got it wrong sometimes. Some days I took Tia out on my own, and on a few days Amanda was free and would come with me, and we might go up to Carisbrooke Castle or to Firestone Copse, but I kept drifting back to the estate. Darkness fell by four thirty, and I often walked in the dark, although I liked to be home by five, ideally, to start supper, with Stephen Fry transferred to the bluetooth speaker in the kitchen.
On New Year’s Eve, Amanda and I took a walk and I tried to explain my fascination with the place. We walked around the estate on the route I had taken on my first exploration, then, as I had done on that first occasion, we let Tia off her lead to run in the woods. Amanda became nervous when Tia didn’t come back after five minutes, so we walked around the edge of the woods, to the top, where the bottom of the main estate reaches. Tia appeared, bounding ecstatically up to us, her ears flying behind her and, instead of going back down to the bottom road, along the Medina, through the new road that is as yet undeveloped, we walked up through the middle of the estate.
Amanda’s not a Harry Potter fan, and is amused and slightly embarrassed by my enthusiasm for it, but, in the gathering dark, she listened sympathetically to my explanation of how the events of the audiobooks had laid themselves into my memories of the estate. I was close to the end of The Goblet of Fire by now, and the wonderful sense of time passing, and events piling up like lived memory that is such a strength of the series, had taken full hold of me. We held hands, in thick gloves, and our conversation drifted. We were gearing ourselves to go out for the night, which we both knew we would enjoy, but which felt like hard work just then. Neither of us was eager to get home, to get dressed and ready to go out, or to be sociable. We were savouring one another, reflecting on the lazy week we had shared and wishing that life could be like this all the time.
It was, though, a wonderful evening. Several of our friends were planning to give up alcohol for 2018. I had drunk steadily through the holiday, usually having a first whisky as I cooked and drinking a couple of cans of beer through the evening, so I was planning to do dry January. New Years Eve was, therefore, a blowout. Amy, a dear friend of Amanda’s and the wife of my friend Andy, was on particularly fine form, her gift for acerbic comedy at its sharpest. We had planned to get home early, because we were worried about fireworks disturbing Tia and the cat, but we stayed until two, playing a card game1 that I had not heard of before, but which suits the sort of vulgar humour we enjoy with our friends.
In the morning, I was hungover. Not blindly, agonisingly hungover, but low-battery and grateful for Amanda’s painkiller stash. We had arranged for Amanda’s parents to visit for lunch and so I cooked and she cleaned and we had a very nice lunch. In the afternoon, Amanda’s sister and her partner came round and we all sat in the sitting room, drinking tea and chatting. The afternoon drew on and we realised Tia needed a walk. I got my coat, scarf, hat and gloves on and left the warm family gathering to take her out.
We walked up to the rec, by the old estate, onto which the new one, which had been my weird stomping ground for the past week, has been grafted. Harry Potter was in the maze, on the final challenge of the Triwizard Tournament, still trusting the fake Mad-eye Moody, being drawn towards his nemesis and the final destruction of his childhood innocence. Half in Hogwarts, half in East Cowes, I pulled Tia into the old estate, finding my way through streets that I hadn’t visited yet, of well-established houses, with some tidy front gardens, some messy; with cars on blocks and bicycles leaning against front walls; some litter, some mess, but the clutter of an established community. I got a little lost, finding my way down a street that ended in a communal car park and a wall and retraced my steps, passing a Victorian house outside which a discrete noticeboard advertised that it serves as a residential home for people recovering from substance abuse. There was a brightly lit kitchen with posters and artwork tacked all round it, but no one there. All the same, it looked warm, protective, loving.
The road bent round, but an unpaved alley led up to the main road, Beatrice Avenue. I took the alley, which was lined with winter-bare trees, and Tia sniffed her way along it, pulling at her lead, enjoying the rich stench of litter and leaf moss. As the view ahead cleared, I could see across the field beyond, up towards Osborne House Park and, slightly dimmed by a streetlamp, a glorious moon dominated the sky. Remus Lupin leapt into my thoughts, but so did the love by which I am surrounded and the sheer luck I enjoy, to be alive, housed, married to Amanda, free to take the time to daydream and waste my consciousness on a silly fantasy like the Harry Potter books. The awareness that I would be returning to work the next day had been playing on me, but it suddenly seemed less of a hardship, and more like a privilege. I stopped to take some photos, struggling with gloves, pockets, and Tia’s excited rummaging, and these were the shaky results.
Last night, a Saturday night, the night after the first full moon since New Year and a month into my back at work routine, I made soup. I had finished the Harry Potter audiobooks in the second week of January and resisted the urge to go back to the beginning or start reading the books again. Instead, I was listening to a recording of The Daughter of Time, by Jospehine Tey,2 from iplayer, beautifully read by Paul Young.
The soup was just about ready, the bread baked. I was tasting and seasoning and I grated some nutmeg into the pan. As I do with spices, I sniffed the nutmeg pot as I put the clove back and something about the smell seemed to stop time. I was a month back, and the Christmas holiday flashed across my inner eye like a tapestry suddenly lit up: the memory of discovering the strange estate on the edge of my hometown; the precious comfort of Christmas Eve, decorating the tree with Amanda, the smell of a glass of whisky and a lit fire; the peace of walking home from midnight mass3 at one o’clock on Christmas morning; watching the new Star Wars with Iain and Jo and enjoying their friendship; the feeling of wet clothes and waterlogged ground underfoot as I trudged across the field behind Whippingham Church.
I had tears in my eyes. I thought to myself, “I’m happy,” and it seemed like a weird condition, although I do not think of myself as an unhappy person. I took the food through to Amanda, but couldn’t find a way to tell her what had just happened to me. It didn’t matter: it was good soup, and to enjoy a meal with her, in front of the fire, with the dog sleeping in the corner, was enough.
I’m not sure I really have the time to maintain this blog any more. The part of it that matters to me most, the book reviews, take a day to write, at least, and, lately, a spare day has not been available.
Work, like a noxious gas, expands to fill all space. My job is supposed to be part time, twenty-four hours per week but it is not. I gave up the memory group work last month, so that I had more time to keep up with admin for my teaching job, but I seem to have even less time this year, with large classes and an enrolment and assessment system that demands huge amounts of repetitive paperwork.
Nevertheless, I am keeping up with that, and my learners seem, for the most part, happy. With the first half term over, my classes are making progress: we will be entering the English learners for reading exams for the end of term and I am optimistic that it will be a successful round of assessments. In maths, my classes are progressing well through the basic calculation material and we will be able to get on to application before Christmas.
Besides work, however, I have started an Open University course in Science, Technology and Maths. I am hoping to progress to a computing and IT degree next year. I wanted to improve my maths knowledge to underpin my teaching, but am also thinking ahead: I don’t want to be trapped in this job until I drop, as it is quite physically demanding. I have to cart large amounts of paperwork, books and a laptop around to different venues, put out tables, and am on my feet for two hours at a time as I teach. Even the act of crouching beside a desk as I guide a learner is something that I will not be able to do for many more years. I am fit enough, but my feet aren’t great and the aches and pains of middle age are beginning to catch up with me.
So, I thought that an IT degree, finished before I’m sixty, might offer me a few options. It is a sort of interest of mine: I am dubious about the mainstream methods of communication and would like to be able to set up my own channels. Not being on Facebook1 and Twitter2 is a major impediment to participation in some things, particularly politics and social events, but I sense that their high water marks may be about to pass. I would like to keep up with the tech, but not be dependent upon having to pay through the nose for new machines every time things change. For that, I need better skills in open source software, and for that, I need training.
So far, the OU course is only two weeks old and is, mostly, about study skills and a bit of environmental science. It’s an access course, so it’s about preparing learners for degree study. I’ve learnt a little bit, but not been seriously challenged yet. However, an upcoming task is to master a scientific calculator, which I am both dreading and looking forward to.
I intended to do that yesterday, but Ubuntu3 released its new version on Thursday and, like a fool, I set my desktop computer to upgrade on Friday. I should have remembered that every upgrade means I am dazzled into tinkering with my set-up.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.A search for my first ever blog, listentopete.blogspot, about which I had completely forgotten. The gmail address is long-deleted, so don’t get excited.Ubuntu 2014ish? It’s the Unity desktop, still with BUUF icons. I was having a jazz phase, as you can see.Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.2015. I bought one of those phones: an absolute disaster.
That is particularly true of this upgrade, which is quite a fundamental change. Ubuntu has reverted to a Gnome Desktop,((http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/06/latest-ubuntu-17-10-update-ditches-unity-desktop-installs-gnome)) which is a shame in some ways. I have come to like the Unity desktop, but its rationale has been superseded by developments. The huge advantage of Gnome is its maturity and its integrated applications. Yesterday, I spent most of the day changing applications: I have, for instance, removed Evolution email and Calendar, because Gnome comes with a lovely calendar app and works beautifully with the simple but superb Geary email app.4
I also set up back ups, for the first time. I have relied upon an external hard drive for keeping copies of things, but it is old and becoming more of a risk than a safeguard. Last year, in a fit of optimism, I bought a 1TB hard drive and a caddy in which to run it. It is now almost full with a full set of Deja-Dup files and, if my six-year-old desktop suffers a catastrophic failure, I should have some recourse. I’d like to set up a Nextcloud server to be a secondary backup, but that takes time, resources and knowledge: all in short supply. Without those qualities, it takes money, and I really can’t afford to rent a cloud service: I’m already paying nearly £200 per year to keep this site running.
So, work and computers are my main time suckers. What else?
Well, Amanda, very skillfully, has organised the renovation of our kitchen. We went over to Ikea in Southampton on a couple of beautiful days this summer, and bought nearly two grands worth of boxes, which are currently piled up in our dining room. Last week, a very nice electrician did the wiring of the kitchen, although I think he’s done one fewer sockets than we asked for, which could mean I will be stuck with making a choice between the kettle and music when I’m cooking.
So, this half term break has a task hanging over it: assembling and installing kitchen units, getting it finished off by various trades people who know what they’re doing, and decorating the kitchen. I loathe DIY.
The other time killer is the bloody dog. She is a sweet enough animal, and I do have moments of adoration, but, Oh God! What a fucking palaver owning a dog is! As dogs go, she’s not that noisy, but there’s just that constant inquisitive presence, demanding attention, whenever I move around the house. The house smells of her, and the carpets all need deep cleaning because she whines so much in the morning that we don’t know when she’s whining to go out for a piss and when she’s just whining because we’re not in the same room as her.
Amanda and Tia in Firestone Copse, September 2017
Having said that, the walks are nice. We went to Firestone Copse on Friday and had a really good wander. She can be let off the lead now, which means Amanda and I can talk, when Amanda’s not trying to turn the whole thing into a ‘training session’. On days when long walks aren’t possible, we are lucky to have two recreation grounds within five minutes’ walk. Also, I have got into the practice of taking Tia up to Osborne House if Amanda wants a sleep in the afternoon and I’ve finished work. Dogs have to be kept on leads there, but Tia’s happy enough sniffing around. The grounds are beautiful and I get an hour of daydreaming. We wander along the valley walk path, through Prince Albert’s landscaped park, down to the beach, and then back up through the woods, past the cottage and along the top field. We have had quite a lot of good autumn weather this year, although it has been punctuated by extreme bizarreness, and it has been lovely to have a reason to get out and enjoy it.
So, yes, I am busy. Having laid it all out here, though, it sounds less awful than it has seemed. I have a lot to be grateful for, really, even if it does include a bloody dog. The cat’s adapted;5 so shall I.
Update December ’21: I was wrong: Geary was a nightmare and the Gnome Calendar sacrifices flexibility for beauty. I now use Thunderbird for both functions. [↩]
