The Bodleian library is exhibiting items from the archive of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of positive/negative photography. This is the final week of the show, Bright Sparks. My visit inspired me, or perhaps provoked would be a more accurate term, to write a review, which is here. The exhibition is worth seeing, but does assume you have the intellect of Nadine Dorries.
After I had got past the ‘if onlys’ – if only I had not gone to that tedious reception, got my boots, soaking wet walking home in the rain, cleaned and waterproofed them, and not wiped the slippery spray off the floor. If only I had not been tired and distracted. If only I had not jumped up from breakfast to demonstrate a silly exercise. (And how odd it is that we never know all the disasters that we do avert by going a different way, arriving a little later, crossing to the other side of the road.) After I had spent a week feeling faint and sick and sore, worrying about my arm, my teeth, my black and swollen face, I started to feel grateful. It could’ve been so much worse, I can think of plenty of people for whom it is.
I’m grateful for the neighbours who brought flowers, books, arnica (‘you don’t have to believe in it for it to work’). I’m grateful for the generous friend who sent me an enormous box of chocolates as a surprise. For Morgan at the opticians who took so much time and care bending my glasses back into shape, for my skilled, straightforward dentist, for the ‘max-fac’ intern who called me first thing in the morning to tell me the face x-ray showed no broken bones. I’m grateful to Simon for doing all of my chores, all of his own, as well as tying my shoelaces, cutting up my food, making my hot water bottles.
And I’m thankful for all the small steps of getting better. On day 6 I managed to put on my watch unaided. On day 7 my face was less swollen when I woke up. On day 9 I wore some clothes that looked vaguely normal. On day 10 I went to my yoga class. After a week my teeth went from numb to hurting and what a relief that was.
But there’s something else too that I’m grateful for. I guess it’s a state of mind, or maybe of body. For the first two nights after my accident, despite the awkward cast on my arm, my bashed up face, my smashed up plans, I slept as if charmed. A delicious sleep nothing like my usual hot, wakeful, restless nights. Was this the body taking over? Wanting to heal itself? Pumping out endogenous opioids to hold me in that cotton-wool feeling? But even after that initial shut-down passed, I have not been the same, hectic person I usually am. I cannot multitask, hanging out the washing with one hand, while making soup with the other and talking on the phone at the same time. I have been able do very little at all, and what I can do takes time. When dressing yourself, or making a drink, or writing down a train time are slow, uncomfortable, necessary achievements, your life and priorities become different. If you believed in mindfulness, which I don’t, this is like an enforced mindfulness. Instead of cycling furiously round town, swearing at aggressive motorists and illegal souped-up e-bikes, I have to walk or take the bus. It’s slow, but it’s all I have, and why was I rushing in the first place? I’m supposed to be retired.
Before it went the way of all good things, I used to love Harry Eyres’ column in the FT, ‘The Slow Lane’. Of course I didn’t actually live like that. Spending a whole afternoon walking up the canal to do what exercise I can at the gym, and then walking home again in the sunshine, would once have been unthinkable, but in fact is far more pleasurable than my usual race against time. Maybe this is what I’ve needed all along. A chance to stop, to say no to those duties that aren’t worth spending time on. To worry less about what I can’t change. To feel grateful for the ability to put one foot in front of the other, to see and hear and speak. All those small irritations — the forgotten item of shopping, the missing sock — seem like nothing at all. It doesn’t matter. So many things don’t matter, and this is a reminder of those that do.
I post a novel to an old friend, and a birthday present to a 9-year old boy. Because I have a broken arm, Simon tapes up the parcels and sticks on the address labels. A few days later I get a text from my friend, surprised to have received an illustrated book about the International Space Station.
Always I have believed in secret worlds. To start with it was in books. Stories about places children went that adults could not (Never Never Land, Narnia, the Secret Garden) or that were hidden (the Borrowers under the floorboards). Those worlds that existed in parallel to the everyday, with a slight shift in dimensions, like the fairy kingdom of Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My own secret world was in my head, of course, a universe into which I could escape from the brutal tedium of school, the duties and rituals of home. The one place over which parents, teachers, bullies had no control.
In adult life there are other kinds of hidden world, many of them less savoury. Those are commonplace. I am fascinated, not by the secrets of bedroom, boardroom, or Swiss bank account, but by the hidden world of quality. For me, this is what lies beneath the consumption-driven, media-fuelled marketplace we are told will bring us joy. It’s not what the Sunday supplements, Amazon, Google try to sell us. It’s not markets dressed up as art — New York Times bestsellers, Classic FM artists, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions, the next big thing. The secret world is the world of authenticity, richness, magic. It’s college white cheese with truffles from the Oxford Cheese Company, a film by Agnès Varda, a jazz band playing on a sunny Saturday morning as you shop for food in a Paris street. It may take you by surprise, but you know it when you find it.
It does not have to cost you money, far from it. It is there in the public library, the art gallery, the forest. It is the world children inhabit as you walk down the road with them and they stop to wonder at a bright yellow car, a mark on the pavement that looks like a face, a snail-filled crack in a tree.
It’s there all the time, like the parallel universes of fiction, so close we could touch it. But so much else is thrown at us it is hard to find the real thing. We stumble across it by chance, through people we meet, often in our own backyard.
***
In my first job I had a colleague, Mick, who was so snooty about wine that he brought his own personal bottle to our Christmas lunch. This was in the early 80s, the days of Liebfraumilch and Chianti. Mick, who was as badly paid as the rest of us, introduced us to the idea of grape varieties, premier cru, wines to drink young and wines to lay down, how a wine should look and taste, where to buy it. He opened up this world to us and showed us it was ours too, should we want it.
There are whole secret worlds I know nothing about — gardening for example, antique jewellery, nutrition. Since I joined an embroidery class I’ve had a glimpse into the secret world of needlework — where to buy real wool felt, different grades of calico, scraps of vintage sari silk. Ethical producers in India who will post you boxes of hand-printed cotton. The best kind of invisible thread. Rotary cutters, beading needles, fabric adhesives.
Once you’ve glimpsed a richer world it’s hard to go back and accept the superficial. Who, after eating a sweet sun-warmed plum from their own tree, can make do with an unripe, tasteless, albeit enormous, specimen from the supermarket? It’s better to go without, wait another year for the real thing.
And so these bright openings into richness are dangerous. They make the everyday seem two-dimensional, grey, tasteless. Is it harder to sit through a meeting about GDPR rules if you think this is all there is, or if you know that this time could be spent walking on a Northumberland beach, listening to Schumann, staring out of the window at snowflakes falling on the roofs?
Anaïs Nin, at the age of 28, wrote:
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.…Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.…And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
Yes it saves them from a kind of living death, but what then? Is it better to know that you are not living? Or to carry on without ever realising?
***
On the Monday before Easter, three days after I smashed up my face and arm in a head-on collision with the kitchen floor, we have tickets for a concert of music for Holy Week. We almost opt out. I’m a mess, and I feel as if the woes of life are piled on my shoulders. All the grief and loss of the last three years, the sadness and struggle to survive we’ve shared with the Ukrainian families we befriended, the general sense that our lives are in the hands of self-serving monsters.
The programme is John Cage, Arvo Pärt, and Gavin Bryars. The church is not what you’d call packed out. But the music is spare, meditative, cleansing. It is a gift. The evening ends with Gavin Bryars’ ‘Jesus blood never failed me yet’, composed in 1971. I’ve heard this only once before, years ago, in London. It’s not performed that often. It consists of a recording, on a loop, of an elderly homeless man singing a part-remembered hymn: ‘Jesus blood never failed me yet, this one thing I know for he loves me so’. As he sings these words, over and over again, the recording growing louder, the instruments and singers in the room quietly join in. The singing of the old nameless man is heartfelt, shakily melodic, and peculiarly moving. The professional musicians are joined for this part of the concert by some local amateur singers and players, standing at the back in their everyday clothes, almost like passers-by.
Last time I heard this piece, I was a little afraid of its strange endlessness. I’m a different person now, and I don’t want it to end. On the recording loop, you can hear birds singing in wherever that old, long-dead, man was sitting, and it seems, although I can’t be sure, that the birds in the trees outside this half empty church in East Oxford, in the twilight of an evening so many years later, are joining in.
On Friday morning, I jumped up from the breakfast table, slipped on a patch of floor where I’d been spraying my boots with waterproofing, and smashed headfirst into the ground. After we’d called 111, my generous friend Anna had driven me to the minor injuries clinic, I’d jumped the X-ray queue by fainting, and my right arm had been put in plaster, I started to come to terms with a new world. It could be a great deal worse than a black eye, a bloody mouth and a snapped radius. But life without use of your dominant arm is challenging. It’s a good lesson for me, Miss Impatience. I’m reminded of an exercise in which school kids were made to navigate the world in wheelchairs or with splints strapped to their limbs to show them what it’s like to be old.
In between worrying about what I have done to my teeth, whether my glasses can be straightened out and how I avoid losing all my fitness, I’m trying to look on this as a learning opportunity. One thing I already knew is how hard it is to do simple things for somebody else. This morning Simon put my watch on upside down.But I’ve already learnt to put in earrings with one hand (an essential task, even on days when I look like Boris Karloff). I’m not sure about showers, but having a bath with your arm in a plastic bag is not so bad. I have realised that anything with a lid is a problem, and this is where good old-fashioned soap comes into its own. You can use a bar of soap with one hand. Wielding a bottle of shower gel is tortuous.
This is only day 3 and I’m trying to kid myself it will get easier as the weeks go on. I’m lucky to be living with a partner. But he wasn’t expecting to become a carer quite yet. I don’t like asking anyone to help me wash, dress, or open the toothpaste tube. I can’t do any of my favourite activities. Yoga, embroidery, gardening, baking, photography, cycling to the gym, or even those satisfying tasks of hanging out the laundry or folding the clean clothes, are beyond me. But most of all I miss writing. Notes, lists, diaries, reminders, ideas. Writing is how I think. The faint and painstaking scribble I can manage with my left hand is as legible as the writing of the least dexterous four-year-old in the Reception class. Yes I can type one handed a little faster than that, but typing is not writing. It uses a different part of the brain. I’m dictating this with the help of Siri, a moron formerly banned from my devices. In the commercial world of Apple, brand names seem to be the most recognisable words, and everything is turned into the language of a social media post, often producing total gibberish. On the other hand, Siri doesn’t stop me slagging her off, just as she never seems to tire of children asking her to tell jokes.
At a time when writers of all kinds are worrying that they might be replaced by ChatGPT, the opportunity to battle with AI is interesting . What Siri tends to do is to dumb down what I’m writing, to break up long words into a series of nonsensical short words, to add cliches, to turn things into questions?, to insert references to favourite topics like the weather and what you are doing at the weekend. Siri does not like any remotely creative use of language. I can’t see her writing Ulysses, although interestingly, she did recognise that proper noun. She’s obviously read the classics. Punctuation, on the other hand, is a weak point. Commas go in all the wrong places, destroying the meaning. ‘Let’s try an example’ comes out as “ let’s try and example“. And she hates me starting sentences with conjunctions, apart from the vastly overused ‘while’.
So what happens if I don’t correct what she’s decided to let me say? Does it turn into something totally incomprehensible podcast Siri should I seem to like the sound of her own name. One trick I have learned is to speak like a robot one word at a time to try and stop her rewriting what I am saying. What does she make of I would like a conundrum , hate word like conundrum, I would like a conundrum, a a a a a a word like conundrum. Almost right fourth time.
‘And it’s now day 4’ just turned into ‘Audi GT4’ and then into ‘iPhone’, in other words my niece’s Christmas list. With time will Siri learn to love me, to believe in real pencils, vinyl records, proper dictionaries? Will she ever learn to use commas, to recognise that Bach is not bark, and it really is okay to start a sentence with ‘but’?
In the meantime, I look increasingly like Nan Goldin after Brian beat her up, Simon is learning some new skills, mostly to do with laundry, and all the fun things in my diary have been crossed out with a wobbly line and replaced by medical appointments. On the plus side, I’ve abandoned responsibility for several things I didn’t want to do in the first place, and it’s stopped raining.
Watch this space. Or as Siri would have it “what is this? Space“
It is only when I read the ‘A–Z of Guest Information’ in our ‘boutique’ hotel in a sleepy Devon village that I find out the purpose of the tall narrow metal cabinet in our room, with double locks, empty but for a piece of foam like a giant toe separator. It is a gun safe.
In the documentary film a young photographer is saying that it’s no longer possible to take pictures of children like those in Picture Post because kids don’t play that way any more. Just at that moment two children, returning to their seats from the toilets, scuttle on all fours, in perfect formation, across the floor in front of the cinema screen.
Joanne and her husband go to the London Palladium for a night of prog-rock nostalgia with Rick Wakeman. She is one of the few audience members who is female and under 60. Halfway through the evening Joanne becomes aware of a powerful and familiar scent wafting from the group behind her. It is Deep Heat.
Like all self-respecting women of her generation, my mother cut out dress fabric – our garments and her own – on the dining-room table, her heavy dressmaking shears crunching through the paper pattern, the layers of cotton or crimplene. When she’d folded the fronts and backs, collars and facings into a prickly pinned pile, what was left were the shapes in between. Narrow curved outlines of armhole or waist, scimitar-shaped slices and odd little blocks, too small even for dolls’ clothes. Always I had the urge to gather up these wasted fragments, like the curls of pastry left when the pie crust was trimmed, to squash them together and roll them out again into something whole and useful.
Today this is how I feel about time. If only I could collect all the minutes of my life spent shivering on train platforms, clock-watching in meetings, waiting for the lights to go down and the movie to start, could squeeze them into a ball, stretch them out again all joined together, and have another couple of years.
María Branyas Morera, the oldest person in the world, has already lasted a good 50 years more than me. She supposedly puts her longevity down to order, tranquillity and positivity, contact with friends, family and the natural world, no worries, no regrets and ‘staying away from toxic people’. All with a peppering of good luck and genes. Tips on how to live with tranquillity through a couple of world wars plus a civil war, and all the bereavement, loss and social change of 115 years, are absent from the article. It sounds suspiciously like denial and a stiff upper lip to me, even though she is Spanish. But I agree with her about avoiding toxic people. The question is – how? What about those you are related to, work with, or live next-door to?
I am walking down the towpath with my neighbour Anna when I see coming towards us the one person I least want to meet. A woman with small-minded Thatcherite beliefs who I fell out with when she wanted me to support her own callous behaviour towards vulnerable families ‘for their own good’. Short of throwing myself into the river there is no escape from passing her. I hope for nothing more than a nod of greeting but she comes beaming towards me, full of self-righteousness, and tries to bludgeon me into approval and agreement. How I wish that, in situations like this, I had the presence of mind of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Confronted by the bullying narcissist Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who demands to know whether Darcy has made her a marriage proposal, Lizzie effortlessly produces such responses as: ‘…the arguments with which you have supported this extraordinary application have been as frivolous as the application was ill-judged.’ Why is it that I, instead of coming out with an elegant and knife-like put-down, can only mumble something irrelevant and furious, and walk away?
But then we have fiction not only to reflect, with a clarity we rarely possess, just what life is like, but also to show us what it might be like if it was not ‘raw, flawed and asking more than we could bear’, as Adrienne Rich puts it. In a well-known radio soap opera, which has morphed from an ‘everyday story of country folk’ to ‘contemporary drama in a rural setting’, a current story-line is the death of a beloved matriarch who has been in the programme for 72 years. Following Jennifer’s sudden and unexpected heart failure, her husband, siblings, children act out the apparently universal battles of the bereaved – jealousy, blame, regret. No tranquillity in sight. But never fear. Jennifer may have died without confessing that she was ill, without any comforting reconciliations and farewells, but she has, we now discover, left a journal, in which she explains, forgives, tells her life story and expresses her deep love for all her warring relatives. If only. In the year I spent emptying the houses of my father, my aunt, my godfather, of course I searched for answers to all the questions of who they were and what they felt. And all I uncovered was further mystery, all I learnt was how little I had ever understood about them, along with the impossibility of now knowing more. I found fragments of beauty, like the letters written by my grandfather to my grandmother when she was in the maternity hospital, and I found things I would rather not have known about, like just how much money my father gave to the family of his girlfriend, but nothing consolatory. I can no more jigsaw together the descriptions of my father as ‘one of the good guys’ and ‘a real gentleman’ with his cruel will, his 500 pairs of socks, his sad end than I could roll up those snippets of fabric from my mother’s dressmaking and create something new.
Maybe all I learnt from those long locked-down days sifting through the remnants of other people’s lives was that life is what is happening now. Their lives had their great riches, of friendship, of kindness, of creativity. All we can do is to make our own.
In the church of St Mary Magdalen the choir is reprising the ‘Byrdathon’ it performed in 2017. All the Latin settings by William Byrd, sung in 24 hours, in liturgical order. We go along for the start, Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices, and return later to hear some of the Lenten settings. The ‘choir’ is an ever-revolving group of Oxford singers, from professionals to undergraduates, all singing the music by sight. Audience members arrive and leave, the conductor hands over the baton to the next in line, the music goes exquisitely on. As we walk home, our heads full of Renaissance polyphony, I say ‘What would Byrd think of this? How could he have imagined anything like this 400 years ago?’ ‘He’d have loved it,’ Simon says.
I am in my room at the top of the house, trying to work out how to use Cretan stitch to embroider a tiny leaf shape on a little square of what was once a shirt. Simon brings me a glass of wine and asks ‘Will it disturb you if I listen to some music downstairs?’ I expect something twenty-first century, with no apparent structure and a lot of twangs and bongs. But what drifts up the stairs is almost unearthly, exquisite, a soprano voice so high and pure it might be a boy, woven around with an instrumental accompaniment that is as complex and dancing as the voice part is simple and direct. Anything that feels this right, this crystal clear and life-affirming, is usually Bach, but it doesn’t sound anything like Bach. I go downstairs to find out, and it is Buxtehude, Bach’s teacher. Cantus Cölln singing the cantata ‘Herzlich lieb hab ich Dich, o Herr’.
This evening, this room, this music, is my life, my world. On a visit to my house several years ago, my sisters asked me ‘Why don’t you live somewhere normal?’ ‘This is normal for me,’ I replied. I’m not even sure what they meant by that question. Somewhere less urban, where you can park outside your front door, have a wheelie bin or three, and where a nosy peek into your neighbours’ front room does not reveal walls lined with books, and more often than not a piano? Since I retired I have realised that I spent the last 10 years of working life believing that if I could only be different — more resilient, less responsible, more cavalier in my approach — I would cope better with the slings and arrows of corporate life, the inbox full of spite and demands. And all along what I really needed was not to change into someone else, but to be more myself, take notice of what I felt and what made me come alive.
Now, in the non-working life, there is more space for all of that — for what I always wanted, but which seemed mostly out of reach. It was never the big stuff I yearned for — a new notebook or a solitary morning has always been enough for me – it was richness, creativity, authenticity. I made a list once, of what I wanted, starting with walking by the sea at night, moving on through Pina Bausch and Aki Kaurismäki, and ending with clean sheets and the view from Waterloo Bridge. All of this was already there. I just wanted more of it, and less of small talk, spreadsheets, traffic jams.
***
In that strange non-time between Christmas and New Year, neither holiday nor normality, those days when people eat up the huge glut of food they shopped for a few days earlier, and go for slow walks in large groups, we visited Simon’s father. I approach these trips with the best of intentions — the right kind of gifts, food he will like, safe topics we might talk about. And then we arrive, after hours of motorway driving, and before we are in the door I want to disappear, be beamed back into my own world. The shrubs in the front garden, trimmed to brutal neatness, the blinds at all the windows, the impossibility of talking about anything real, make me feel as if I am suffocating. He can’t be the only elderly man in the country who refuses to wear his hearing aids, talks incessantly about himself and his weekly routine, fails to recycle his rubbish, sprays everything with weed killer, fears foreigners (even white ones) and uses stubbornness as a blunt weapon with which to beat his children, but he is possibly the only one who, in response to the energy-price crisis, has turned up his heating to sauna-like levels. There were two good things about the visit – the rainy hour in which I escaped at dusk and walked frantically up the nearest hill until I found a long view, and the feeling of euphoria with which I returned to my own chilly, abnormal, light-filled house.
The day after our return, New Years Eve, we got a cab across town in pouring rain to the Ultimate Picture Palace (of which we now own a tiny share) to see David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, made in 1990. Why is it that this film’s crazy plot, its soundtrack of Elvis and Richard Strauss, its slapstick gore, not-so-subtle references to The Wizard of Oz, and fantastically over-the-top fairytale ending, send you away feeling as if you have had an injection of life? We walked home up the High Street, wind in our faces, Christmas lights shining, smell of fried onions and roasting lamb from kebab vans, in our own life again, breathing it in.
***
At the end of Colm Tóibín’s novel about the life of Thomas Mann, The Magician, Mann returns to the town of Lübeck after the war, and stands outside the house where he grew up. He remembers one of the stories his mother would tell when he was a child. It is the story of how J. S. Bach, as a young man, walked the 400 km to Lübeck from the town where he lived, through wind and rain, cold and hunger, to visit Buxtehude, whose reputation he had heard. The ageing composer, desperate to pass on the secret of how to write the greatest music in the world, had found no-one suitable to tell. He believed that someone would come, a man he would recognise, with whom to share his secret. He would know this man by a light in his eyes or something special in his voice. When Bach, handily lent some clean clothes by a kind woman, arrived at the Marienkirche where Buxtehude was playing the organ, something in the young man, an inner glow, told Buxtehude he had found the person to whom he could tell his secret.
‘“But what is the secret?” Thomas asked… “It’s called beauty” his mother said, “the secret is called beauty. He told him not to be afraid to put beauty into his music. And then for weeks and weeks and weeks Buxtehude showed him how to do that.”’
***
One Sunday afternoon several years ago, when retirement was still a terrifying prospect, my father was alive and kicking pretty hard, Covid had never been heard of and weekends were two sacred free days, we wandered across Oxford to a concert in the Holywell Music Room. The audience was ancient and pompous, the quartet played Brahms with so little feeling and energy it wasn’t recognisable. Where were those stomach-dropping changes in tempo, that sensual sorrow? It was like auditory wallpaper. Of the audience members I could see, five were asleep. At half time I asked Simon if there was something wrong with me, and he said he felt exactly the same. We walked out, with a feeling like sloughing off something vile, into the sunshine. Outside the Sheldonian an old bloke was playing the saxophone with glorious ease. Coming towards us was a tiny boy wearing butterfly wings, backlit by the sun.
janebuekett 