Planning

Theodroa, my mother, aged 10 months in Dec 1917

We are holding a memorial to celebrate my mother's life on 8 December. With hardly a fortnight to I was at a loss as to who might lead the service. In the loo at home in Birmingham. I picked up a paperback Digger’s Diary: Tales from the Allotment by Victor Osborne. Mum sent it to me a while ago. Out of it dropped the letter she'd included.

I searched William Mather in Fortrose on the Black Isle. Found his phone. He'd seen the announcement of Mum's death in The Times. He agreed at once to help. A few days later we'd worked up a service order - welcome, prayers, hymns, readings, tributes and music; our Richard to do the design and arrange printing.
Having read the service draft he asked me over the phone "Any reason why it's so Christian?"
"A letter dropped out of a book. Serendipity. William's known mum for years. It will not be a stranger speaking about her"
What had been strange was that the celebrant recommended by William T Fraser had not got in touch, despite a second phone call and an assurance he'd ring me back. I'd originally explored a humanist emphasis; had several phone conversations with a most pleasant sounding celebrant, but I even before I began to check family consensus mum's letter dropped on the floor. It wasn't an instruction from mum. She was too bored by the business of funerals to have left instructions on that score. William turned up as a godsend.  After we'd met at Brin Croft for a cup of tea i sent him an email:

Dear William. This is the man who was our Dad - John Baddeley CMG - who later married Maria Roussen with Bay and me and our half Greek siblings. And this is the man Mum lived with for the formative years of our upbringing - Jack Hargreaves OBE - who later married Isobel. I wrote about my stepfather for Wikipedia.And here are some films I made of our mother in the last 18 months. They may give you a flavour beyond what you already know of her life and character - A memory of the Blitz in London; and Mum's memories of coming with Angus Burnett Stuart to live in and love the Highlands - especially Mains of Faillie in Strathnairn
Those films were short. This one is longer and I’ve already overloaded you with things, but they are Mum's recollections of Clavering the village where Bay and I were born, of her leaving a cloistered nannied urban world to accompany her mother’s project of starting up Mill End Dairy Farm in the early 1930s. Kindest regards, Simon 

Part of William's reply: ...I went through all the marvellous films you sent me. I like them very much. Some wonderful insights and reflections. It was lovely just hearing her talk about the Blitz, about coming to Scotland and her joy at remembering so many very happy times at Mill End. It has helped me understand her much better, for which many thanks. The films are a wonderful resource for your family. I think overall my job at the service will be one of ensuring everybody who wants to say something can do so and to enable it all to flow smoothly. I will obviously say something too but it will be in the light of all the other poems, tributes and readings - and of course with an awareness of available time! All the best. William

Meantime the dire routines of probate continue. The inevitable certification, disassembly and temporal assessment of a life. The other morning in my hotel room in Hounslow, despite a warning notice, one foot slid out from beneath me on a semi-circle of hard line outside the shower. I fell backwards half in and out of the cubicle one leg bent under me. I cursed in fright and lay sprawled there for a moment as the shock dispersed, checking if I'd hurt myself. When I've fallen with my bicycle - so rare I recall each time - I've rest a moment on the road to check if I’ve damaged anything. Mostly it’s no more than a graze, if that, and I’m up and away - waking with an ache or two next morning. Now I feel more or less alright one moment; then I think of something from the universe of things and a pang wrenches me and passes like a word I can't remember.
*** *** ***
An email to friends my mother made in India in 2005:

Dear Martin and Annie. I thought you would want to know that my mum Barbara who so much appreciated meeting and knowing you and Annie died on 1 November’12.
She was in that happy group whose bodies gave out long before their mind, lucid until three days before she left us, holding mine and my sister’s hand in her own bed in her own home, she wound down like a grand old clock. As she said, irritated, by her difficulties getting about in the last year “Being old isn’t for the young. It’s ruddy hard work”.
We are full of grief. It is almost impossible - but thank goodness not quite - to imagine life without her here. She had a wonderful happy adventurous life. Enviable really and for that long life we’ll remember her far more than for her death - which although she was as brave as anyone I can imagine, turned up as an extremely vexatious interruption of her many plans. Her diary for 2012 remains replete with intentions as did all her previous ones - most of them realised.
I hope you are all well. I will forever recall mum on your roof at Tikli with her mobile having to pretend to her ailing husband Angus that instead of being in the centre of India she was with us in Birmingham for a week. She could be quite naughty but with good intentions.
We saw mum off at a small private ceremony on 9 Nov and I’m organising a memorial service for her with lots of help on 8 December in Inverness. Love S 

Dear Simon and Linda. Sad but true. It had to happen. Even God is dying.
And so, as you point out so poignantly, it is the life and not the death that is the measure of a person, and few have reached greater heights of intellectual, moral and social achievement and wisdom and stamina than dear Barbara, giving such pleasure to all who came in touch with her. Her memory still echoes round her courtyard and it easy to imagine her sitting bolt upright in bed in the pink room, having her breakfast. And then we read of moving house, by herself, at an age when most have gone. Those two memories are quite indelible. That hole will probably not be filled for a long time. One can only marvel at having known such people and be thankful and use them as role models to lift our modest lives in the daily round...We sympathise enormously with you in this inevitable loss and envy you your amazing experience with her. with love. Martin and Annie

****** ******
Friday morning was bright. I cycled along the canal into town with Oscar; wandered through the crowds milling about the German Market looking for my daughter and grandson. Then I saw them...

sunlit. I knew she'd turn her head and held up my hand in a waiting wave. I treated myself to Glühwein - ridiculously expensive at £4 a mug. I had two. Oscar wandered through the crowds, he keeping an eye on me, I on him. Amy's baby club were sat around The River - what's generally called the Floozie in the Jacuzzi.

I tried to remember the names of as mum's and babies but as soon as I'd got four names in my head the fifth introduction drove the first one out.
Later we strolled down to the Chinese Quarter for a late lunch with Richard and Emma; Oliver being passed between us. Oscar lay in the pannier just in sight outside, covered with a scarf and towel.

These autumn evenings. Indoors warm. Outdoors damp chill and often wet; long johns, wicking vests, thick shirts, neck warmers, jumpers, gloves, waxed cap and protection against rain. With dusk the city sky goes like Chiba's dead channel; sulphurous loom reflecting off the overcast. Oscar runs beside me along the Mainline towpath skirting the long shallow puddles through which I cycle until I turn under the West Coast line rail bridge onto the Soho Loop by factory walls precisely mirrored in the limpid waterway.
*** *** ***
Saturday morning I went to the allotment. It had rained through the night. The sky was blue again, bright sunny but everything well-soaked. Robin's plot was still pooled with water; rain trapped by the concrete edges of his plot.
"I want to give up this plot." he said "Take the one next to yours from which Imram's disappeared, after a week's frantic work in May."
"Good idea. We can help each other. Chris has given up his plot on the other side of our - Plot 15. he's sharing mine. Makes sense."
I started tidying, pruned back Buddleia, cleared stalks, cut and bagged some ragged spinach, dug out a depressingly small number of tiny potatoes, and picked two cabbages that looked fat enough to serve with a couple of meals.
"Imagine if we had to live off this plot!" I said "My god I've got a way to go."

Cycling along our road between allotment and home I pass yet another front garden being dug away to create a frontage for cars. I seethe with unspoken indignation but also some original thought spurred by my two years' learning about trying to grow my own.

"You know" I say to myself "these houses are often bought by people on divergent trajectories. I'm metropolitan - urban to the core - for all my sentiments and experience of the countryside from childhood; my grandmother's farm where I was born; the long television career of my stepfather making Out of Town entertainingly preoccupied with the disconnect between men and the land that followed WW2 and the mechanisation of agriculture; my childhood enjoyment of riding, shooting and fishing over the most beautiful landscapes of Britain. It's only very recently I've begun to get a flavour - a mere soupçon - of the arduousness demanded of anyone who must grow food to eat; growing in a way of people who do it to feed their families and stay alive. It's been a horrid wet year. Everyone on the Victoria Jubilee admits to that; grumbling about the onion fly and the slugs and the enduring summer rain of June and July. No wonder those of my neighbours now making their lives in the city, but who are still rural at the core, who've descended from generations of men and women who've struggled to work the land, labouring with intractable soil, pests and weather, rents and landlords; no wonder they want to be free of everything that hints at the forces of nature  - trees, climbers, shrubs, grass! Nature sheds leaves, branches, twigs, clinging wetly to feet and walls, blowing into damp heaps that collect and rot in inaccessible corners, spreading dirt and the memory of rural oppression. There may be pride in forefathers, but there's not an ounce of sylvan sentiment. No wonder these descendants of farmers and peasants hire diggers, chain-saws, earth skips, weed killers and pesticides; defending their tidy homes from nature, taming her with pots and vases, ensuring what once sprung from the earth is dried, faked or portrayed only in decor; framed and engraved. Anything to do with soil and agriculture and farming carries displeasing memories; something to be forgotten and rejected with those sentiments of environmentalists who've never set a hand to a plough, raised an axe, hoed stony ground and watched the weather; rather the demonstrable achievement of a comfortable spotless reliable automobile; its scent of internal tidiness and security; a climate controlled interior of dogless carpets and hairless furniture; well-polished floors unsmirched by muddy shoes, and a walled garden of brick, concrete and decking with a patch of well mown lawn to keep the devil nature at a distance, better enjoyed on screens, admired in glossy magazines, and gazed upon from new and well-maintained roads. All the same I wish people would not get rid of their front gardens...

Royal Horticultural Society booklet on urban front gardens

Once home I continued tidying the garden, raking and bagging clammy leaves, cutting back more Buddleia and wayward foliage blocking the path to the composter. This is a scruffy time of year. Our garden's soggy with the teeming rain I heard as I read in our warm bed last night. Amy arrived with Oliver mid-afternoon. We had a good chat with Liz and the terriers in Scotland.

I'm getting used to having Ollie around, still opting out of my full contribution to constant care.  Some of the time he stood, other times sat and he even slept amid our incomprehensible comings and goings, in the large Koochi travelcot generously given by our neighbour Charles, that, when Guy had come round for supper and left with Oliver, easily folded into a dinky cuboid hardly more than 2' x 8", while Amy and Lin set to wrapping and boxing Christmas presents for distant relatives. The rain returned as I headed for bed, reading le Carré's Our Kind of Traitor.

News: Flooding across the UK ...torrential rain batters UK...at least 800 homes in England and Wales have been flooded in recent days...10,000 more at risk...Environment Agency has issued 490 flood warnings and alerts as rivers continue to rise and rain saturates the ground....

...and Lydbrook, our village in the Forest of Dean, is inundated, not just Lower Lydbrook from the Wye at its foot but from the Lyd overflowing its culverts as far up the hill as The Jovial Colliers in Upper Lydbrook. The irony, our neighbour up Bell Hill far above the deluge, has phoned to say they've lost their main water supply, and no-one from the water company can recall the run of the supply from the mains.

The Citizen ~ 26 Nov'12: An overnight deluge left a Forest of Dean village under 3ft of water as flooding wreaked havoc across the county. Relentless rain throughout Saturday night left businesses, homes and cars submerged in Upper Lydbrook. Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue were scrambled to the scene at 8am yesterday and 10 people had to be rescued by raft as the main road was transformed into a river. At the Jovial Colliers Inn water levels reached waist height. Jamie Woods, who lives there and whose parents run the pub, said: "We went to bed and there was about a foot of water, then I came down on Sunday morning and it was around my waist." Forest of Dean district councillor Bruce Hogan (L, Lydbrook and Ruardean) lives in the village.  He said: "The road was like a brook, it was grim. The water level just kept rising and rising by about an inch every 10 minutes. I've never seen anything like it before."

*** ***
Kathimerini 26 Nov'12: Eurogroup summit on Greek debt go to the wire...'The outlook for Greece receiving crucial rescue funding, and a solution for the sustainability of its huge debt mountain, remained unclear late on Monday after nearly 10 hours of talks between eurozone finance ministers in Brussels though officials indicated that an agreement was expected to be reached ultimately. At around 10 p.m., sources told Kathimerini that talks were expected to continue for at least another two hours but that a solution would likely be thrashed out “one way or another.”'

*** ***

On November 26, 1943, 118 Greek hostages... members of the local community in Sparta, were executed in German reprisals in Monodendri, Laconia. The victims were hostages already picked out by local hooded informants collaborating with the occupiers. Among those shot was the doctor and general surgeon of Sparta, Dr. Christos Karvounis. Orestes Varvitsiotes' wrote a poem to mark the event:



Οι 118
Παίζαμε στον κήπο με τ΄ άλλα τα παιδιά(*)
και την Ειρήνη που τα φύλαγε και τα φρόντιζε,
όταν ξαφνικά κοκκάλωσε η γης,
μαύρισε ο ουρανός, σταμάτησε ο χρόνος.
Τα τραγικά μαντάτα πέσανε σαν κεραυνός
και διαδόθηκαν σαν αστραπή,
περνώντας από στόμα σε στόμα,
από πόρτα σε πόρτα, από σπίτι σε σπίτι:
"Σκοτώσανε τους φυλακισμένους οι Γερμανοί!"
Κι ακούγονταν τα ονόματα αδελφιών, πατεράδων,
συγγενών, φίλων, γνωστών και αγνώστων...
Άκουσε ο Ήλιος τα φριχτά μαντάτα
και κρύφτηκε στα σύννεφα ντροπιασμένος.
Ο ταύγετος έσκυψε θλιμμένος το κεφάλι.
Ο Ευρώτας δάκρυσε σιωπηλός.
Ο Πάρνωνας ορκίστηκε εκδίκηση
(αυτός τους είδε από κοντά τους νεκρούς
σε μια πλαγιά του ξαπλωμένους).
Η Σπάρτη κουκουλώθηκε να μην ακούει
το κλάμα, τις φωνές, τον πόνο, τις κατάρες.
"Σκοτώσανε τους 118 οι Γερμανοί
στο Μονοδέντρι".

ΟΡΕΣΤΗΣ ΒΑΡΒΙΤΣΙΩΤΗΣ

Getting ready to leave the Highlands

Farewells said. The younger ones ready to leave

The other morning Amy and Guy left early to get south before there was more snow on Slocht summit or Drumochter Pass. Margie F, my mother's carer, drove in convoy with them for a while. heading on to London then a flight home to South Africa, having transferred her role to Fiona W. Abruptly we were two dogs less; my daughter and her husband gone back to work and Margie no longer here. The house seemed to empty. After I'd gone to bed, halfway through Kadare's The Three Arched Bridge, just after the builders had immured a man in their stonework:

The bridge ... demanded a sacrifice. Let someone come who is willing to be sacrificed in the piers of the bridge, the bards sang. The monk, sure that no one would volunteer, was aghast to learn that Murrash Zenebisha, an average local worker had been immured into the bridge's first arch in the night, his face still visible, staring out from the bridge, where his corpse could be made out beneath a veneer of plaster. It was something that violated everything we knew about the borders of life and death. The man remained poised between the two like a bridge, without moving in one direction or the other. The man had sunk into non-existence, leaving his shape behind him, like a forgotten garment.

I'd left the laptop up-loading a film I'd made with mum. I woke to the ring of a Skype call.
Lin "What are you doing in bed so early with your computer on? Watching porn?"
"Why should I when I'll be home soon?"
"Ha ha" We chatted about things, she smoking at the kitchen table in Handsworth, me in my nightie looking tired.
"My leg's swollen" I said "I bruised it tripping over a big flowerpot and the swelling's still there after a week."
"Yuk" she said when I showed it to her "Ibuprofin? It's anti-inflammatory." We can both play Carrie and Charles Pooter. "I've got us a flight for Easter to Corfu. When can you get away?"
"April onward. Do you ever think of saving the environment?"
"OK. I'm going now."
Boo-peep goes the Skype hang-up. A frog jumping into a pond. Awake again I read some more Kadare. I so like him but I don't think this tale of a bridge being built - an idea I like - can compete with Ivo Andrić's Bridge over the Drina. K's Broken April still has the strongest hold on my imagination and my thinking about Albania.
On Monday morning Oscar and I will take the train from Inverness to Edinburgh Waverley, and change there for Birmingham New Street, arriving at 1900 - eight hours. I've made myself a picnic - grainy brown bread sandwiches, one with hand carved ham and mustard, the other with cheddar and pickle sauce, plus some buttery shortbread and toffees. Fiona's prepared one for Oscar. I've the book to finish and then perhaps some DVDs - John Ford's cavalry series, extinguished myths of the west.
I managed to have mum make one more video, in which she speaks of how she and Angus came to live at Mains of Faillie forty years ago, creating such a special place for so many of us.

Mum's memories: coming to live in the Highlands from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
****
As well as pointing me towards the nicest news from Corfu about the long long awaited new hospital at Kontokali, and a web diary by the Prime Minister's brother, Nick Papandreou - from which I jumped to Dreams in time of Greek Austerity - Jim Potts has left me two poems - one 'more like a haiku' - he wrote about Sotiria Bellou in the comments at the bottom of my previous entry - 'The greatest voice in Greece, for me' he writes...

      Greek Music

      The salty tang of sea-ports;
      The belle-laide voice of Bellou:
      Rebetic.

** ** **
John Martin in Bendigo, who when I first visited Brisbane with him in 2009 about the catastrophic floods that struck the city in 1974, mails:

Morning Simon, more rain overnight, all along the east coast of Australia to add to the floods in Qld. Brisbane will have flooding the next few days. Your time in Scotland with your mum and Amy and Guy sounds delightful. Good on you for asking about your mother's history. I am sure your attention is much appreciated. Delighted to have your video greetings on your blog. It was a nice short summary, very appropriate, and generous. Thank you. Not long before you are back in Corfu. I imagine February would be an interesting time being colder than when we have been there. Lots of time to explore the island, read some good books and just take it easy. We are off to Adelaide later this week. When is a good time for a chat via Skype the next few days? Cheers, John

Source: BOM December's rainfall deciles for Australia 2010

Hi John. Have a good visit to Adelaide. I missed it this time and recall how much I liked the place – especially the hills and the pier at the end of the tram line. I do like a return trip to a destination on an edge. Climate dislocation, sovereign risk...I’ve been seeing it. Bizarre to think that last year this time you were concerned about fires – and may yet be. By and large the UK is without weather extremes or earthquakes, which is why even small variations from the average cause us such problems stirred by superlatives frenzy in the media. “Terror of vicar’s wife after Oldham earthquake worries her carp” “I was woken by it” says Wolverhampton plumber “I had to call in sick.” “After the loose tile dropped off my neighbour's roof I became agoraphobic claims another quake victim” “Quake failures. Coalition government must go” etc. I’m back in Handsworth tomorrow night and could call you around 0930 your time or the next day. In Corfu January is famously the wettest month, but February can be too. I got lots of firewood ready last October. As I scan the internet – not just mainstream media – it seems there are an enormous number of unique separate initiatives to enhance sustainability. Something emerging not easily recognised amid the confusing landscape of the immediate.

...and via Global Voices,  (and here up to 12 January '11) came to Christopher Joye's Aussie Macro Moments, oh, I commented on the removal from the mouth of a white southerner of over 200 n-words in a small school's edition of Huckleberry Finn in Alabama brought to my attention by Corfucius - my favourite blogger ever.

That there's an argument to be made for Alan Gribben's action speaks to our times. Looking back in another generation or two, if we really have come to live in a world where color of skin means less than the content of character, we will be as puzzled by this censorship as we are now by those Victorians who draped the legs of their pianos with frilly lace.

...and as brilliant Chris Rock famously asks and answers "can a white man use the word...not really"
*** ***

Me and my Amy in the Highlands

I took a final walk with Oscar, before leaving in the morning, in the woods near, and figured the way the path though mildly sinuous had seemed straight yet led me the way I'd come; an undetectabed curve in what seemed direct. I walked slowly to spare my ankle, stopping to  hear the soundlessness of the woods, though my tread was muffled by snow. Two people, one a child, had walked ahead of me in the day, also with a dog. Their prints guided me where the path was unclear.

Whose woods these are

Rain and floods in Victoria

The Loddon river overflows

On Saturday morning we woke in the soft home bed of John and Annie’s home in Bendigo – their guests. Late Friday night Melbourne Domestic had teemed with midnight arrivals. Our flight out of Brisbane landed at 9.15 to be held an hour on the apron without an exit tunnel to the terminal, weather having delayed preceding flights. By the time we were at the carousel awaiting our bags, travellers bound to Sydney had missed that city’s landing curfew. Stuck in Melbourne, their bags already loaded on departing flights, an apologetic announcer offered them taxi vouchers and A$220 each for a local overnight hotel. We were headed for the carpark and John’s car, the freebus was packed first time round. Catching the next we were at the carpark by 11.15, plonking luggage and ourselves in the warm car and on our way north through driving rain. “One thing goes wrong... the smoothness of the system makes for a bigger mess,” I said “Yeah” said John “As Fred used to say, there’s no redundancy of parts.” Now and then through the wet dark I glimpsed the rising tail lights of planes departing on international journeys. In an hour and a half we were gliding through the empty wet streets of Bendigo, past the floodlit statue of Queen Victoria, familiar buildings, then dark again towards Junortown and home for cups of tea, Annie fast asleep already, and Lin and I to bed. Next day, after a night of further rain John and Annie went to vote in the state elections, we spoke to some of the party workers at the polling station. Labour, in power for three elections is likely to be displaced by voters moving rightwards in favour of the Liberals and the Nationals. "It's more a vote against the incumbents than a vote for their replacement" said John.

He drove us south from Bendigo past surging creeks, overflowing brown rivers, streaming ditches, noisily through long puddles across the road, to Daylesford to a delightful BBQ with friends serving local wines, tasty steaks, fried chicken and well dressed salad with juicy camembert to follow. We debated and agreed that we’d eat al fresco despite the rain and sat in happy conversation, almost dry, beneath a sloping awning that we took turns to lift to release the gathering pools. It was all strange, having visited at the same time for the last two years, to see the land like this after twelve years of drought.

Lunch at Daylesford

***** ***** So we’ve completed five workshops in Queensland – all successful with almost uniformally excellent evaluations. The state local government association had done a great job advertising our work and recruiting a level mix of senior local politicians and CEOs to share experiences with us and each other as they’ve digested our thoughts and examples of negotiating the overlap of political and managerial responsibilities in government. A remark on the final seminar in Brisbane has set us thinking: “You focus on just two people – the Mayor and the CEO. What about the others involved in the overlap?” Good question. My answer has been that the CEO-Leader/Mayor relationship models the others. Get that right and you’re positioned to ensure that the rest are OK. There’s the methodological point – that it’s tricky to track the dynamics if you have more than two in camera. John and I discussed this at the depart gate at Brisbane, and then at greater length this morning; questions coming to mind:

• How do elected politicians share out, if they do, different policy tasks among political colleagues?

• What’s the division of labour between councillors in relation to maintaining political oversight of the work of the council?

• What criteria apply to the selection of elected members to these roles?

• Who decides and how?

• By what procedures are delegations shared and organised among councillors?

• What forms of accountability are applied to the work of councillors in these roles?

• What form of language – titles, briefs, portfolios – is used in referring to the organisation of separate responsibilities?

• How is the organisation of political leadership matched to the organisation of managerial leadership?

“You know where this fits,” said John “in the content and focus? We’ve got ‘learning’, ‘negotiating’ and ‘governing’. It’s the last of those. Let’s ask people about this next seminar.” The work I’d done in UK a few years back with Michael Lyons on ‘cabinet-chief officer relations’ could apply here, indeed a twenty minute discussion at the end of the last Brisbane seminar had been all about how the Mayor and his or her political colleagues organised ‘portfolios’. There’s little or no party politics in Australian local government, and no reference, as in UK to a ‘cabinet’ or before that ‘the group’ of senior members who the officers, and other members in many councils, looked to for steer. I realised, with excitement, that we didn’t know enough, or in some cases, anything about how local government politicians were organising themselves collectively around the task of government. ** ** ** I’m rereading The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I read it first when I was still in callow teens and was disappointed at finding it so unfrightening after all I’d been warned. I guess I’d have had the same experience with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness which I read much more recently. Neither of these novels have their full effect on an innocent reader. They're not revelatory and for that reason can leave the young reader – that I once was – hoping for more literal terrors as in Poe or even the brothers Grimm. With the awful knowledge of human depravity, not, thank god, experience, that comes with time’s education, these two works written not far apart at the turn of the 20th century, are landmarks in the documentation of evil, of things unthinkable in kinder times or among a more blinkered generation. Conrad pretended to be speaking about Africa’s stereotypical ‘darkness’ but he was, through his fictional interlocuter, Marlow, sat quietly on that vessel moored in the estuary of the murky Thames where the yarn was spun, referring with awful prescience to us in Britain and Europe. In Turn of the Screw James’ circumlocutions, once opaque, are now read as what he intended, an adult’s increasingly frightened search for internal fiends; ones she thinks may be figments of her imagination, hopes they are, but which she gradually realises have possessed the children in her care, inveigled them into innocent collusion in the crime against them. There has always been child abuse, but only in the last half-century, or less, have we opened the furnace door, exposed its banal frightfulness. James uses the diversion of unreality – the supernatural - to tell a story about a hideous reality. When I first read this book, like a million others who didn’t acknowledge or even believe in such things, I couldn’t make out what was so scary about it, nor did the films of the book help. Now I fully grasp the famous dying quote from Heart of Darkness - ‘the horror, the horror.’ ** ** **

In our hotel in Brisbane

It's not as if we aren't kept pretty well reminded of Europe's currency while noting how well A$s and NZ$s are performing against the pound. Poor Greece and Ireland too... "default" say the people - and then I learn from a piece in an Australian newspaper that Europe tried monetary union in the 19th century and failed. I didn't know that. * * * In Brisbane’s Art Gallery we came across a striking picture - a surrealist painting by James Gleeson - Structural emblems of a friend; – one in which I recognised across the length of a large gallery a startling likeness. Lin came over as I gazed at it. “So like your Dad." He died in 1972 the year before she and I met. “I’ve seen photos - that one of him with your brother.” She meant the one of him taken with George in 1969 in a caique off Aegina, but I was thinking of an older portrait, taken about the time Gleeson painted his self-portrait in 1941.

*** ***
Meanwhile the local shop at Inverarnie in the Highlands is almost snowbound. Margi Fleming, my mother's carer sent photos of the weather and mum, when I skyped her from Sidney, spoke of temperatures of -20° "Worse than last year and much earlier!"

More wet weather from the west

More rain spreading from the west

The sun was shining on Thursday morning. The house painter dropped in first thing. "I thought you were coming on Monday". "Have you seen the forecast? Better do it today."
We hadn't tidied where he needed to go. "I could kill you, Baddeley" said Lin. Showing Dannie the windows that needed repainting I said "My wife's angry with me for you seeing our mess" "Don't think about it" he said "We're Irish. We live like this." Such ingenious politeness almost placated Linda, while I felt complemented at being honorary Irish for not helping with housework.

By evening it was raining again. Then came an hour of thunder and lightning. I unhooked the WiFi until it passed. Rain continued through the night. This morning the surface of the ponds in the garden vibrate. The bird feeders are popular with a family of blue tits fledged from Amy's bird box - seldom fewer that five little birds at a time pecking away at the nuts, seeds and fat balls hanging outside our kitchen window, sheltered by the overhang of a Japanese quince, topped this time of year by the foliage of our venerable wisteria. Well aware that Oscar is across the road a baby rat comes out for the food dropped from the feeders.

Danica in Serbia tells of temperatures above 45 degrees in Belgrade. Our Met Office warns that Birmingham is the likely centre of the heaviest of today's severe weather. On Usenet Forums climate change deniers clamour with instances of past weather peaks to prove that out of the ordinary isn't, and all who disagree are 'commie freaks' and Al Gore supporters speculate on why 'these toads' have crept out from under their stones. I tell my students adversarial debate is part of democracy, quoting Churchill's maxim that 'jaw jaw is better than war war', but I dislike arguers who hurl abuse at each other from behind the hedge of cyberanonymity.
[Back to the future ~ 5 Nov 2008: see Keyboard Warriors on YouTube]

My class on politics includes pondering ways of using wit in the rough and tumble of public arguments, whether canvassing the public or in encounters outside the relative safety of a regulated debating chamber. A discussion last week, arrived at street escapology - getting out of sticky situations on buses, trains, sidewalks and other public places. J recalled how a man with a knife grabbed him from behind and whispered "I'm going take all your money and I'm going to slit your fucking throat". J replied "Why?" turning himself, for an instant, into a question mark. This, we surmised, for J was with us and I'd no cause to doubt his veracity, created a conundrum for his assailant. In the pause for reflection that followed J escaped.

These stories link wit to wisdom. Some last. "Tell us Lord, should we pay tribute money to Caesar?" How did the Naz get out of that one, in the glare of waiting reporters, not to mention those emissaries from the local theocracy seeking to have him arrested - if he said "no" - or discredited - if he said "yes"? 'And they could not take hold of his words before the people'. [Matt. 22:15-22; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26] We spent twenty minutes unpacking the exchange and the escape phrase "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" Theologians have raked this ever since, using it to define a disconnection between sacred and secular, though that'd been invented in Athens rather earlier. The actual crisis - trap set, sprung and evaded - lasted what? A hundred seconds? Wit is swift. It comes from the whole body not just the knowing bit. It is not - unlike joking - formulaic. It relies so much on the moment. If I'd said "Why?" to J's attacker it mightn't have worked at all. I've long wanted to be a fly on the wall when JC's questioners reported back to Caiaphas. "What did he say? Go on, what did he say" "Er well er um he said 'render... etc"" "What the heck's that supposed to mean? Look - let me think - right - yes - go and find a woman who's committed adultery, get the stoning ready, then ask him what's wrong with carrying out the Law of Moses. He'll never get out of that."

I just remembered I was talking, long ago, with a American Professor of English at Michigan - my son's late godfather James Gindin - about this particular street crisis. Confronted with the dilemma, a woman awaiting death, a crowd hefting stones and a pointed question about respect for the law, J bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. Jim suggested Christ was letting them know he knew his scriptures too. I also needed to understand how deep in Judaism is respect for the law. Didn't it, he was implying, have some bearing on the precise conduct of a judicial stoning? His scribbling gained time to survey the crowd, to note the actual witness who must, in law, cast the first stone. As a communal act, any one stoner can evade the unpleasantness of being the one who started the killing. There was a click in my mind, as we chatted, about the three blanks rounds allotted at random to a firing squad, so each man with the vile task could hope his might be the rifle with the blank, and obey his orders and conscience easier. J looking up from his writing in the earth made hiding in the stoning party impossible. It was not the words "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" that, of themselves, saved the woman. How many times since has an equivalent plea fallen on stony ground? Jim said "He could have been writing anything - maybe just scratching". It was the gesture that mattered and the fact that what was spoken was to an individual not a crowd.

So what happened this time when the questioners went back to the High Priest? "What! Something about procedure? What on earth are you talking about? Who told you that?" "Well no-one as such but ..." "Fools, there's nothing but nothing about an actual witness having to throw first, you total idiots!"

[None watched with Christ. Though Peter tried, his courage failed him. None stepped to the mark when unesteemed, Christ faced his crucifiers.]

* * *
E-mail to staff: Electric Storms

Dear All. The inclement weather brings with it the risk of lightening strikes and as a result of this possible loss of service across campus. Last night the links between Edgbaston and Selly Oak campuses were lost due to hits on the Telewest exchanges and today the Conference Park was affected too. Both services are now active again with the problem last being rectified within a couple of hours.

Another e-mail:

For info – for those with a car there is a huge amount of water/fload on Egbaston Park Road at the level of the Vale and it is very difficult to pass though there to go to the City Centre

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And another:

WEATHER CONDITIONS - FLOODING Importance: High
Dear Colleague. The University has been informed that the following roads are flooded: Bristol Road/Bournbrook Road Junction, Vincent Drive, and Edgbaston Park Road. I would be grateful if you could circulate this information to your staff in order that they can make alternative plans for their journeys home at the end of the day. Jonathan Nicholls

The Rector, Brian Hall, in the Parish Magazine of St.Mary, Handsworth for 7 July (delivered on Saturday) reports his return from a Greek Island holiday; his fifth visit to the same place:

What was unexpected (and for which I couldn't prepare) was the 'snowfall' of ash which, for three days, gently descended on us, carried on the wind from forest fires we could see driving across the mainland. At one stage there were 130 such fires raging out of control in the heat.