Camping

When I was growing up, we used to camp every summer. It was what our family holidays were. I loved it. Then, when I was first married, Husband and I camped for a week-end two or three times, before complications like... babies... came into the equation.

Husband and I have always planned to camp with the kids. Philosophically, we're committed to the idea. It's just that it hasn't happened in practice. But... ta-da... we're going to go next week-end. We're borrowing a tent, and a lot of equipment, and I'm selling the idea to the children that it's a trial camping week-end. If it goes well, we'll buy our own tent and stuff. If it doesn't (ie if they bicker, fight, don't help with chores, irritate their parents), then it'll be their first and last childhood camping experience. So no pressure, then.

I like the idea of camping. I really do. Back to nature, away from the stresses and strains of daily life, no xbox or other modern evils. But then, when I stop to think about it, I can't help wondering whether some modern evils are actually not all that evil. The dishwasher, for example. The central heating. The hot shower in your own bathroom, a few paces away from the bedroom. The shower you can potter over to in your PJs, cup of tea in hand, rather than having to get dressed, trek across a rainy field, fiddle around with an unfamiliar and - one suspects - deliberately complex shower system, in order to stand under a tiny dribble of lukewarm water, while the wind howls around your ankles, and whips your nice dry towel off its inadequate peg into the puddle on the concrete floor, in which floats the detritus of the previous shower-user. D'you see my point?

I lay in bed last night, talking to Husband about our forthcoming adventure. "I'm looking forward to it", I said.  "Time with the children, without the usual distractions. We'll have to take a pack of cards, and some games, and books. We'll have to work out what food to take. They can get involved in the cooking. And the washing-up. Oh, I've just remembered what washing up at a campsite is like. Cold water, so you can't get rid of the grease. And then your hands smell all morning, but you can't be bothered to tramp all the way back to the shower block to wash them. And anyway, there'd probably be a queue at the showers. And they might not have functioning hot water in any case. And I'll be cold at night. I hate being cold at night. My feet will be cold all week-end. We'll all get smelly. I hate that. Sticky armpits all week-end. I need my bed. How will I be comfortable on a mattressy thingy? They're rubbish. I won't sleep. You know how grumpy I am if I haven't slept. The children won't sleep either. We'll all be lying awake at bedtime while they make jokes about farting in their sleeping bags. I'm definitely not cooking anything, either. We'll have dry rolls and water for breakfast and then eat out for lunch and dinner. Ohhhh...Why did I think camping was going to be fun?"

As you can see, there's quite a wide gap between the philosophical commitment, and the not-so-philosophical anticipation of reality. So if any of you seasoned campers out there have any tips, I'll gladly receive them.  The tip I've been offered most frequently so far is "it's lovely when the weather is nice, but don't go camping in the rain". Get real, Peoples. We're going to Northumbria.

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Unsettled

The weather is unsettled. Summer and winter in the same day, several times over. As I write, I look out of the window and it's hailing. Ten minutes ago it was bright sunshine, and the sky was blue.

I am unsettled. Two family funerals in the past two months. Two house sales in the next two months. We close on ours in May, and my mother completes hers in June.

We aren't going to be at our closing in person ("closing" is the term for the meeting, where the seller, the buyer, the two realtors, and the title company, get together, usually at the premises of the title company, to sign off on the deal). We have the necessary documents, which we are going to sign, next week, in the presence of a US notary at the US Consulate General in Edinburgh. I've made the appointment. I found the act of making that appointment disproportionately stressful, necessitating a phone call to the Consulate General and the careful reading of their website. Anyone who has been through the process of getting a US visa will understand why. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that as I dialled the number, my heart started pounding. It was the memory of previous trips to the US Embassy in London, huge stacks of paperwork, photos rejected for random reasons, dealing with lawyer-speak well beyond the understanding of mere mortals like myself, slightly humiliating medicals and endless vaccinations, all at great expense and all with so much at stake.

My mother is leaving the house she and my father moved into, on 1st April, 1963. I was born in her bedroom. We gathered the family over Easter, to celebrate our family having been in the house for exactly 50 years (Easter Monday was 1st April, if you remember), and we had a lovely time: 3 generations, 16 people, 1 dog. But now it really is the final countdown. Contracts are being exchanged today (unless the solicitors come up with still more items to research), and completion is on 7th June. This really is it. Furniture will go to the local auction house. Belongings will be packed into a removal van. Items will disappear into boxes, to emerge in another house, in another town. Furniture, belongings, items, which I've known all my life. My roots are being severed. I don't like it.

It all makes me feel jittery. My hands and feet are permanently cold. I confess to spending more time than usual in a hot bath at the moment.

Where do I belong? I very nearly drove off on the right hand side of the road yesterday. It gave me a jolt. Don't I know which country I'm in by now? I couldn't find the spices in Tesco the other day. I looked up and down the "Homebaking" aisle where I knew they'd be, but I couldn't see them anywhere. I found the herbs, so I knew I was close. Then I saw them, and I realised why it had taken me so long. I had the wrong search criteria in my brain. I hadn't been scanning the shelves for spices in glass jars. I'd been scanning for spices in little red tins. Little red Kroger tins. Do I still think I'm in Dillons, not Tesco?

I suppose I'm like the spring. She has one foot in winter and one foot in summer. I have one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Blue sky and hail. That's me.

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Ah! and Aaaaaah.... (that's a shout of joy, followed by a big sigh of relief)

After the funeral, the nephews and nieces went to my uncle's flat, ostensibly to sort out a few things, but also, I think, because for those of us living at a distance, we knew it would be the last opportunity. We each took a few keepsakes. Working for the British council, he'd lived in Israel, South Africa and Tanganyika (as it was then), and as a child, I'd always been intrigued by some of the items on display in his flat. Bongo drums, African statuettes, beautiful wooden boxes. I am now the proud owner of a couple of small wooden wart-hogs, who have taken up residence on my kitchen windowsill, and a few trinket boxes. And the
P G Wodehouse paperback that my uncle was reading on the morning of the day he died.

It was moving, being in his flat. I came across a board tucked down beside the writing desk, on which was the seating plan for his 90th birthday party. So many memories, and I sensed a strong feeling of him. It was almost as if he was in the next room.

While we were all milling about, I took a phone call from Husband (who hadn't been able to come). We'd been negotiating with a potential buyer for our house in America, and they'd come up with another offer. Husband wanted my go-ahead to settle, and I didn't need long to think about it. It was the very figure we'd pre-decided would be ok. It was a wonderful moment. It's been a long year, with the house on the market, then off the market, then having a lot of cosmetic work done, then on the market again... trying to sell it, trying to let it, trying to sell it again. I ended the phone call, raised my arms in the air, and said "We've sold our house!", and my siblings and cousins rejoiced with me.

Looking round my uncle's flat for the last time, and that being the moment we finally sold our house in America, it felt that my uncle's spirit must have been involved. Had he somehow made it happen for us? Or perhaps he was just able to enjoy the moment with us, from the other side. Synchronicity and coincidence always get me wondering. I don't know how these things work. Who does know?

We've sold our house!

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A remarkable person

I attended a funeral last Wednesday, at 11.00am, in London. No, not THAT one. It was my uncle's.

He died on Good Friday, at the age of 96. He was a lovely man, and was one of those people who took care to live well. He hadn't married or had children, and out-lived his siblings, so his 8 nephews and nieces were his next of kin. But there were, at a guess, 75 people at his funeral service. He was incredibly sociable, and had spent his life making friends, both abroad, when working for the British Council, and then in retirement in London. I don't think I know anyone who made more effort to keep up with friends. He organised his own 90th birthday party, which he held in a marquee in his next door neighbour's garden. From the nursing home where he spent his last couple of years, he would phone people regularly, and insist that they visited.

I spoke at the funeral service, and shared childhood memories of the uncle who was very much a part of our family life. What I said was echoed by others. He was always so interested in people. If he visited you by train, he would arrive with a story about the person he'd sat next to, and sometimes their entire life story. His interest crossed barriers. He was once asked by a teenager (and this is years ago) for a light. He responded by telling the youth that - speaking from personal experience - if he only knew how hard it was to give up smoking once you'd started, he wouldn't be lighting up that cigarette. The youth came back with "I asked for a light, not a lecture". My uncle was tickled pink, and lived off the story for ages. He wasn't offended at all, as many of an older generation would have been. He thought it was hilarious.

It wasn't just people that my uncle was interested in. He had a natural curiosity about anything that came his way. My brother told the story of how he had taken my uncle to Mcdonald's in Paris (there were small children involved). It was my uncle's first visit to a Mcdonald's. He chose the Filet O'Fish. He unwrapped it, opened the bun, peered inside, and returned to the counter, to ask which bit of it was the fish. Not to be rude, or clever; just because he was genuinely interested. It was The Emperor's New Clothes meets 21st century fast food.

Funerals bring out the lesser known, or at least lesser talked about, elements of a person's life. My uncle had served in Burma in 1944 with the Special Operations Executive. I knew very little about that. He had once told my brother, in detail, how to sabotage a steam train! He had also studied History at Oxford, but left without a degree. I think these days he would have been diagnosed as dyslexic. The irony is that these days, so many people leave university with a degree, but having gained relatively little from it. My uncle left with no degree, but with a lifelong interest in History, which he read widely about for the rest of his life. At the time, the family had treated his lack of a degree as a cause of great shame and embarrassment. I hope he knew, at 96, how proud we all are that he was part of our family.

With my uncle's death, Britain loses its longest operating heart pacemaker. He had it fitted in the 1970s, when it was a new and astonishing thing. I remember visiting him in hospital, all wired up, but cheerful and cracking jokes. It has served him well. It has lasted him all these years, with occasional changes of battery, and regular check-ups at which my uncle enjoyed the doctors' and nurses' interest in the oldest pacemaker of them all.

For me, the funeral event was a swirl of emotions. I was so sad, of course, but so very, very glad to be there. It's something that expats deal with so often. Would you fly home for a funeral? A wedding? A christening? To see a new baby? If someone is ill? You can't return for them all, even if money and time are no object - which, of course, they are. How do you decide whether to go or not? It's agonising. We missed so many family parties and gatherings, and each one was a loss. I was so deeply grateful to be at this funeral, (and the funeral of another uncle a month ago). Although a funeral is a sad occasion, it can be a very rich time. This one was particularly so. I loved it. I loved being part of it.

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My Postsecret - Part II

It was the summer of 2007. We'd been in America for a few months, and I was through the honeymoon period and into the classic low dip that typically occurs 6 - 9 months after you move to a new place. But I didn't know about that dip and its timing, so I was just miserable and couldn't see an end to being miserable. The children had started their 12-week summer holiday - and no-one had told me about THAT. I had no idea how to manage TWELVE WEEKS at home with the children. We didn't know many people well enough to invite them over - I'd have thrown myself into playdate exchanges in the early days a bit more if I'd known about the 12-week vacation to come. It was over 90 degrees every day, and I'm never at my best in the heat.  I felt trapped inside the house. I was paranoid about the children getting sunburnt, and there were mosquitoes everywhere. I asked people what they did during the long summer break, but no-one really seemed to have any answer, except "the pool". The children were 10, 6 and 3, and, though I came to love our neighborhood pool in future years, it didn't hit the spot at all for us that year. I had to be with 3-yo in the small pool, and I wasn't confident about the two older ones being on their own in the big pool, so I hovered at the gate between the two, trying to watch all three, feeling hot, worrying about sunburn, and longing for Scotland. And there still remained several hours of the day, long, slow hours, each day, every day, before and after our trip to the pool. Husband was rewriting his PhD into a book, and we'd set aside the summer weeks for him to do that. It was a very lonely time. It was when I started blogging.

We'd already done the museums and other attractions in the city. Several times. In fact, I decided that if anyone said to me "There's a great zoo here. Have you checked out the zoo yet?" I would decapitate them on the spot. Yes, I had taken the children to the zoo already. Full of maternal initiative, me. I'd been more than once, actually. It was hot and dusty and full of sad, enclosed animals. "But thanks for the suggestion", I always managed. 

I decided I needed to get out of the city. A trip or two. That would raise morale. Part of what I had anticipated would be the fun of moving to a new country was the chance to explore. What I hadn't realised, and what I was finding out slowly, was that truly, there wasn't very much to explore where we were. I don't know if I'd envisaged a few little Cotswold villages, with tea shops and play parks, in the middle of the Great Plains, or what, but I'd expected something, anything, to go and do and see. I mean, wherever you are in the world, you can get to know your surroundings. Can't you? Surely? There's always something to go and visit, isn't there? Well, not so much in the middle of the Midwest. And especially if it's very hot, and you have three small children in tow, and you really don't want to make stopping at McDonalds the treat of the day. And you're sad and lonely and low on internal resources.

I had a great aunt, who was a big traveller. She used to say, if you're in a place and don't know what to visit, go and look at local postcard stands. You'll discover what's interesting nearby. Well, there weren't any shops with postcard stands where we were, but I asked in Wal-Mart, and a rather surprised assistant showed me a very small rack. I realise, now I understand the place and the way of life there so much better, that to find a postcard at all in Wal-Mart in that city was rather amazing, but at the time, amazed is exactly what I was not. I nearly cried. The selection couldn't have been more under-whelming. They were mostly jokey ones about cattle, or tornadoes. Great. There were a few pictures of fields of sunflowers, and yes, you could have a nice day out looking at sunflowers if you were in Tuscany and there was going to be a pretty little village snuggling against the hillside where you could order pizza and San Pellegrino and enjoy watching the waiter chat to your bambini, because everyone knows the Italians love children, but trust me, you can't really do the same kind of thing where we were. Unless you want to end up in a McDonalds, and my kids had already had way too many McFlurries that summer. Anyway, I had 12 weeks to fill. A day of sunflower-viewing wasn't going to make much of a dent.

Then I hit rock bottom. There was a postcard of a grain elevator. Do you know what that is? No? This is what they look like.

                                                                                                                      Photo credit: walkersquawker.net

They're big, made of concrete or steel, always white or grey, and not interesting. At all. The caption on the back of the postcard said "sometimes known as 'the Cathedrals of the Plains', these majestic structures can be seen for miles around". That was the final insult. Cathedrals of the Plains. I had swapped King's College Chapel, Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral, St Paul's, for these brutes? The beauty, history, design, and interest of cathedrals for the modern utilitarian ugliness of grain elevators? How could anyone dare compare them?

I bought the postcard.

I wanted to write "I hate living here" in huge, bold capitals on it, and send it to Postsecret. It felt really good, just to think about doing that. Perhaps I'd make it "I really, really, really, REALLY hate living here". But I didn't write that. First, in that irritating way that life has of laughing at you and debunking your most intense moments, the first couple of biros I tried wouldn't even make a mark on a postcard (and I obviously hadn't discovered Sharpies at that point). More significant than the biro issue though, was my pride. I was committed to making a success of our overseas adventure, and I had decided that the foundation of that commitment was the "Not wrong, just different" approach to life that was the title of my blog at the time. To send an "I hate living here" postcard would be to let myself down, and to let my blog down.

The modified version that I came up with, and I think this will make you laugh because it's so very Iota, was "I can't believe I'm living in a place where they make postcards of grain elevators". But I didn't even send that. I don't really know why. I kept the card, though. It lived in the desk drawer, and I used to take it out and look at it, and think how much I hated where we were, and how homesick I was for the land of my family and friends and cathedrals and tea shops.

Time passed. I grew to love my life. I never loved the place, but I loved my life in it, and we found ways of making it work, even though it wasn't Tuscany or the Cotswolds. A highlight was our annual Thanksgiving trip to Colorado, when we would drive for 12 hours across the Great Plains, in search of mountains. I loved those journeys. We got to know the route, and found places to eat on the way that weren't McDonalds. In one cafe, they even recognised us from one year to the next, and opened up for us once when we arrived a few minutes after closing time. I grew to love the Plains, and to cherish the opportunity that life had given me to experience new things in a new place. It would be stretching it to say that I grew to love the grain elevators, but I made my peace with them. You need landmarks to place your eyes on, as you drive across the flat landscape, and there's something about them that's large, solid, and comforting, like lighthouses. "Majestic structures", I suppose. They survive when nothing else does, when a tornado passes through. And actually, if you look at the photo you'll see two grain elevators, an old and a new. So I suppose there is even a historical interest to be found in grain elevators, if you look out for it. 

When we were moving back to Britain, I got the postcard out. I was going to write on it "I used to hate living here, but now I'm really sad to leave", and send it to Postsecret. I didn't, though. As I said, Postsecret has changed. Brash sex revelations have replaced the weekly feast that I used to enjoy, of the tiny, sometimes whimsical, windows into the lives of strangers. It was no longer the right place for my secret to be aired.

I can't even remember what I did with the card. (That isn't a very good ending to the story, is it? It's the truth, though.) I vaguely remember ripping it in half and putting it in the bin, bidding it farewell and telling it "you've served your purpose; I don't need you any more". But I also vaguely remember tucking it into a pile of papers, thinking it would be fun to see it again. I hope it's the latter memory that's correct, because when that picture postcard surfaces, it will be like greeting an old friend.
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My Postsecret - Part I

Do you follow Postsecret? For those of you who don't know it, it's a website which invites people to send in their secret, anonymously, on a homemade postcard. Every Sunday, a selection are posted, sometimes randomly, sometimes on a theme.

I liked Postsecret better in its early days. Now, it is a phenomenon (isn't that what we call these things?). It's spawned books, and lecture tours, and events at which people occasionally propose to each other - which surely is the definition of being mainstream. It's done a tremendous amount of good. It's become a torch bearer for suicide prevention, raising money and awareness.

I miss its early incarnation, though. When I discovered Postsecret, back in 2007, it mirrored a couple of the elements that I found important in blogging. 

First, the need to share of oneself, and the opportunity to do that anonymously. Postsecret tapped into something that bloggers at that time would recognise: the way the internet can be a place of conspiracy, a place where confessions can be made, a strangely safe place for that. 

Second, the fun, the creativity, that can come with digging up a confession and airing it. Oh yes. The creativity that Postsecret unleashed was striking. The secrets were imaginative - many of them  sad, some thoughtful, some just totally random. I liked the card that read "Why are everyone's secrets on Postsecret so sad? My secret makes me happy!" I love the creativity behind the design of the postcards. Arty, jokey, brash, subtle, rude, startling, beautiful, disturbing... you name it, it's there in a Postsecret postcard. 

I don't like Postsecret in 2013 nearly so much. Now, most of the secrets are about sex. (Why does everything gravitate towards sex, given half a chance?) Many of them are designed to be shocking. Reading the cards used to be like whispering with a friend in the corner of a party, and now it's more like being trapped in a conversation with the party bore. Some of the fun has gone out of it, for me. I still read it, though, for the gems that are still to be found there.

Back in 2007, I made a postcard for Postsecret. I'll tell you about it in my next post. 

PS. Do you prefer this big typeface? Is it easier on the eyes than my previous minuscule one? Is it too big? - and if the answer to that last question is 'yes', then can anyone let me in on the Blogger secret, of how to have a typeface that is between 'normal' and 'large'. It seems like a big jump between the two. 
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