I give away the long, tailored, chocolate-brown work coat I wore when waiting on windswept train platforms. I feel as if I am discarding a buttoned-up going-to-meetings self. The DPhil student who now owns it wears the coat open, over jeans, flowing and free.
I dash into Waitrose to buy some cooked chicken. All the chilled food has been moved around the aisles. The shelf-stacker I ask for help says ‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die. I think that’s Tennyson.’
On Tuesday morning, an hour before we are due to leave for a short holiday in Sussex, Simon tests positive for Covid. As I unpack my bag, put my new walking boots back in the cupboard, text the three sets of friends we’d arranged to visit, I consider how much our lives are shaped by the things we didn’t do.
Not just the big ones — the job I turned down on the other side of the country, the children we didn’t have, the total relationship breakdown we managed to avoid by the skin of our teeth — but all the other choices we have made. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil doing Beethoven’s 9th, in the days when you could still buy tickets for the Proms, which we didn’t go to because it was raining. All the parties, weddings, community shindigs we ducked out of so we could sit in the garden and read. Everything (refurbished windows, complete rewiring, new kitchen) we haven’t been able to face doing to our house. The holidays we have not taken because we couldn’t abandon our courgette seedlings. The movies we were too snobby to see, the key Nairobi business trip Simon dropped out of when our house was threatened with flooding, that white trench coat I did not buy.
Something I have not done for almost all of my life is to like Charles Dickens. It’s not for want of trying. I have twice started and discarded Hard Times in a fury of disgust at the relentlessly overstated caricature that is Mr Gradgrind. Martin Chuzzlewit was just too dull, Mr Pickwick decidedly unfunny, Our Mutual Friend excruciating. I have managed to read the whole of Great Expectations and Bleak House with some enjoyment, but there is too much in Dickens of what I find hard to swallow: sentimentality, polarity of good and evil, and the kind of self-indulgent prose that reminds me of being trapped in a room with a verbose stranger telling endless anecdotes in minute detail. I struggle with anyone who cannot edit what comes out of their mouth.
Benjamin Britten apparently had similar feelings about the music of Brahms, but every few years he would read some of it to check he had not been mistaken. And so, following that admirable example of humility, I have been listening to an audio book of David Copperfield. I’m not sure I could actually read, for example, ten pages of the supposedly comic interview between Copperfield and his fiancée’s aunts, or an account of Mr Micawber’s fifteenth financial ruin, but I can let it wash over me while cooking the dinner, and whole chunks of the 36 hours 30 minutes are surprisingly entertaining.
I find that I do like Dickens, despite his relentless definition of character by one trait (Traddles’ unruly hair, Littimer’s condescension), overdone emotion and unfamiliarity with the concept of subtlety, because he can write. There is much that is shown rather than told, he is compassionate to his characters and appalled by social injustice. But perhaps most of all, as with any writer I admire, I like him because there are gems of observation that make me think, yes, life is like that, and I could not have described it so well. When Copperfield leaves the graveyard after his mother’s funeral and ‘Before us stands our house, so pretty and unchanged, so linked in my mind with the young idea of what is gone, that all my sorrow has been nothing compared to the sorrow it calls forth.’ Or the masterful and touching description of Copperfield’s wedding with Dora as a dreamlike series of impressions.
Some critics have said this is in fact a novel about marriage — not just Copperfield’s own but all the other relationships in the book. This is true of a great many novels — Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Persuasion — to name just the first three that come to mind. But David Copperfield does show a depth of understanding about relationships which moves well beyond Dickens’ more burlesque tendencies. After their marriage, when Dora proves a hopeless housekeeper and over-sensitive companion, Copperfield asks his aunt to advise her and shape her into a better wife. Betsy Trotwood, never backward in coming forward, in this case refuses. The advice she gives the husband could be the foundation of any good couples’ counselling today. She points out that Copperfield chose his wife because she was pretty and affectionate:
It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too…to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child…you must just accustom yourself to do without ’em.…This is marriage.
I still have another 10 hours of listening to go. I hope that Copperfield takes Betsy Trotwood’s advice and his marriage survives, that the odious Uriah Heep, possibly even more loathsome Steerforth, and perfect example of coercive control Mr Murdstone, get their comeuppance, and that Mr Micawber learns to take some responsibility for his own and his family’s subsistence. This, alas, is about as likely as me becoming a totally unprejudiced person. I may have warmed a bit towards Dickens, but I am delighted to discover, when checking my facts about Britten, that he like me loathed the music of Sibelius, who he thought probably wrote it when he was drunk, and ‘people liked him — because he went on and on and it was sufficiently like the nineteenth century [music] not to be upsetting.’
It’s the third day of our holiday before we notice the round white object plugged into the wall in the kitchen. It draws attention to itself by giving out an alarm bleep. Is it some kind of monitor for radon or carbon monoxide? Simon takes a photo and Google tells us its an Amazon Echo Dot 2nd generation. Who knew Alexa was lurking in our midst?
She wants to give us a notification, which is not a warning of the end of civilisation as we know it, but worse: a desire she has to play us ‘relaxing music’ when we wake up. The idea alone makes me want to vomit, but she is so disappointed by our rejection that we ask her some questions. She knows the name of the prime minister of Hungary (sadly) and can quote the first line of David Copperfield. So I ask her something we really do need to answer – what should we do about the brassica seedlings we planted out just before leaving home, not anticipating 30° heat in our absence. Alexa doesn’t get beyond ‘What should we do?’ She decides we’re bored and offers to tell us a story, or a joke, or ‘something a little naughty to help with your boredom.’ No, no and no. Then she wants to give us a ‘silly song’ to cheer us up. When we reject all her suggestions she says ‘I’m sorry I’m so boring. I’ll report myself to the boredom police.’ I didn’t realise AI had been taught to sulk. Why would anyone want to live with a device that was permanently disappointed in them? Isn’t that what parents are for? And what does she do if you are seriously depressed? Tell you to get a grip?
Boredom is not the problem I face. Finding the time and energy to do everything I want to – yes. Battling the endless list of ‘oughts’. And, here in particular, being able to let go of time past and time future and simply be in the present. The early morning sun glinting off a sea that is not blue or silver or pink or grey but some unnameable mix of all of these. The papery rasp of the wind in the reeds, the black silhouettes of swifts over the dunes, the adder hissing and slithering across the sandy path. I want to stop time so I can take it in, hold on to it, exist in just this moment.
***
On the last night of our holiday we follow an old tradition and go to the Summer Theatre. The show this week is Relatively Speaking. Intellectual snob that I am, I’ve never read or watched an Ayckbourn play. It’s almost as old as me and, in parts, hilarious, although I can’t see how it ‘made Ayckbourn a household name’ and won praise from Noel Coward. The 1967 West End cast (Richard Briers, Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson) may have given it something this repertory production can’t quite pull off. The plot seems a little wordy and obvious, there is almost no action, only two of the actors are funny.
The local audience competes with the play for type-casting. On the way into the theatre a man is telling his little group: ‘The yacht-club crowd wear linen’. He manages to make it sound like the worst kind of snooty fashion disaster. ‘But this is linen!’ his wife says, fingering her dress. A woman with perfect Anna Wintour hair, making her way to her seat, has topped her dressy outfit and enormous jewellery with what looks exactly like my floaty summer dressing gown. She keeps it on, despite the sweltering heat in the theatre, to the very end.
As we come out into the night air, I overhear another couple discuss the play. The man is complaining about the twists and turns of the plot. ‘I got completely lost,’ he says. ‘You did a better job of following it than me.’
It brings me up short. I’m not good at following complex plots myself, but this one seemed laid on with a trowel. How is that our experience is so different? Is it something learned or innate? I think of my grandma, who would have dismissed the play as dull and ‘highbrow’, who believed what she read in the tabloids, who had minimal schooling – and who could win any game, crochet on demand a tiny doll’s swimsuit, solve every kind of puzzle.
***
And what of our brassica seedlings, about which I fret each time I look at the weather app? We put a message in the allotments WhatsApp group, and Abha from plot 28A, who we have never met, offers to water them. A few days and a hot drive later we find our purple sprouting and cavolo nero looking rather more sprightly than us. I wander through the late-summer abundance of the allotments in search of 28A. Abha is a young Indian woman in jeans and T-shirt, clutching a bunch of golden beetroot, reassuringly real, with soil on her hands.
Pierre and Beatrice discuss an affair between two of their neighbours.
‘They’re not much alike,’ Pierre says. ‘He’s always out running.’
‘She’s not fat!’ exclaims Beatrice.
‘No, she’s not fat, but she has a dog with very short legs.’
The entrance to the Anselm Kiefer exhibit is a doorway draped with what appear to be oversized unspooled reels of film, made from lead. Inside, a dim corridor stretches ahead, down its sides industrial shelving piled with what at first looks like detritus. Parts of human skeletons. Trays of dead leaves, ashes, straw. Models of gigantic sunflower and poppy heads. Hanging racks of leaden clothes marked with a mould-like patina. Melted window frames. Snakes made from terracotta. Rusty metal objects.
My instant reaction is uncontrollable tears. In some visceral way this is my father’s garage after his death, its shelves of hoarded useless decaying treasures that filled my sister and me with sorrow and despair. Keifer’s racks of empty, unwearable ‘clothes’, his rusting tools, cubby holes filled with type, or bolts, or unidentifiable metal pieces, are like a brutal version of all those hours and days I spent sorting through the possessions of my dead relatives. I have to tell myself to breathe, I want to howl with grief. But Kiefer is thinking on a much bigger scale – what will be left when humankind destroys itself and its world.
There are rooms leading off this corridor of compelling wreckage. The centre of one is piled with a devastation of smashed up pre-stressed concrete and barbed wire, but on the walls are paintings of sunflowers. Kiefer believes ruins are hopeful – they hold the potential for something better to rise up.
‘I’m not very anthropocentric,’ he says in an interview. ‘I think the Earth will go on and life will go on, perhaps not with us, you know, because we are too stupid, or so, but there will be a new evolution.’
The title of the show is Finnegans Wake, a book that has fascinated Kiefer since his schooldays. The only words to be read in the exhibition are handwritten quotes from Joyce: ‘best intentiones’ is the label on one high shelf that holds rusting sheets of metal, ‘doubtful eggshells’ is another. An overturned shopping trolley full of bags of rubbish is decorated with the sign: ‘the daisy days of buy and buy’.
Part of the power of the show is that it is in a commercial gallery, with none of the usual trappings of ‘art’ as we are served it today. There’s no café, no gift shop selling Kiefer fridge magnets and tea trays, no public engagement events at which you can make your own little book with pages of electrolysed lead. No security guards to peer in your bag with a torch. Hardly any staff at all in fact. No explanatory texts on the walls, no ‘don’ts’. There is just the experience, which is, Kiefer says ‘about all my life until now.’
It is busy, with people of all ages, nationalities, colours. And you can buy this work if you have a hangar in which to keep it. ‘Enquire’ the website says discreetly, listing the dimensions of the work in the corridor (Arsenal) as ‘390 x 5200 x 520 cm’.
***
‘Are you recently bereaved?’ a form asks, and I want to tick ‘yes’, even though its more than 3 years since my father died. I’m still the little girl who thought he knew everything, who loved him best of all, who did not know how to please him. It hits me at odd times, in dreams, in places where I least expect it. I can’t work out if I am feeling more sad for him – for the transience of everything he valued – or for myself.
I still struggle with the fact that all my parents’ accumulated knowledge, skill, experience, as well as all the material possessions they cherished, is as nothing. It will be so for all of us. Even the best of humanity, the stuff that really seems worth passing on, will be lost.
Is awareness of loss a state we reach at this time of life? So many of the pillars of our world are not as they were. The BBC, the NHS, the high street are vanishing before our eyes. Human decency isn’t getting much of a look-in either. On a personal level, as someone who’s never been ill, my broken wrist is taking an eternity to recover, I’m still trying to get my fitness back after my fall 5 months ago, I’m worried about my bone density. My life seems to have turned into a series of medical appointments. I’m appalled when I see photos of myself. I can’t pretend, as I have for so long, that age is merely a matter of mind.
***
A week after the Kiefer show and I’m in the running shop. I have no intention of running anywhere, but it is the best place to buy comfortable, properly fitted trainers for walking. The assistant gives me a blank look when I explain this, and I want to apologise, to point out that I did at least cycle up the steep hill to get there.
He produces a pair of lime-green and black shoes which he appears to think are the ones for me, then turns away and starts rearranging shelves. This wasn’t the service I expected. I question him about arch support, pronation, sole hardness. I make him video me running in the shoes. ‘Have you used a treadmill before?’ he asks (do I look that useless?), then leaves me running for a remarkably long time. When he tells me I can stop I stand beside him to see the result. He fiddles with the machine. The screensaver is a runner with long shapely legs and perfect gait. I wait for it to switch to my lumpy body and wobbly stride. Only when the assistant starts pointing out the position of the ankles do I realise that the running figure I’ve been admiring is…me.
I buy the shoes, even thank the man, sail back down the hill in the sunshine, thinking about going for a swim after lunch. Maybe I’ll even take up running.
Anselm Kiefer, Finnegans Wake, was at the White Cube Bermondsey until 20 August 2023.
Cyclox, the group that campaigns for safe cycling in Oxford, has a weekly blog. This week it is by me. The article should also appear in Saturday’s Oxford Mail (29 July).
A Spanish summer-school student stops me on a leafy residential corner and asks if the sign she is photographing means this is a dangerous place to hang around in. It says ‘You are entering a Neighbourhood Watch Area’. As I walk away I realise the flowers that she and a friend are holding are hydrangeas they have picked from a nearby front garden.
Just around the corner from where I live is a billboard, long unused, on which mystery posters began to appear a couple of years ago. The first one showed Santa, and since then we’ve had a dodo, various Oxford scenes, and most recently a black and white photo of kids playing on Brighton beach, decades ago.
The latest poster is a portrait of the photographer who took the Brighton photo. Some of you will recognise him as Paddy Summerfield. The slightly seedy urban background of the billboard seems appropriate for a man who spent years wandering the Oxford streets with an unlit cigarette between his lips, photographing things no-one else would have noticed. Paddy is and was an exceptional, compulsive photographer whose images of even the most banal subjects – a grass verge, a truck wheel – have a form, energy and feeling that makes you want to look and look. Words cannot do it. Look at his work.
Being confronted by this unexpected picture of Paddy on a rainy walk home made me feel very sad. He is not at all well, and I long to meet the old Paddy, wandering down the road, camera in hand, stopping to tell me ‘It’s the work that matters.’
I walk up the towpath to visit a friend, carrying a bunch of roses and peonies from my allotment. Everyone I pass smiles at me.
janebuekett 