|
To the right here are the books in my current reading pile. From the top … PD James’ detective/Austen mash-up Death Comes to Pemberley. (A Christmas present from my sister and already read by Mrs SC – I have yet to pick it up.) Kathryn Stockett’s The Help about African American maids working in white households in 60s America. (Another Christmas present – this one’s from my mother. As yet unopened.) Bill Bryson’s At Home. On loan from my mum. I like Bryson in small portions so I’ve been reading this on and off for a couple of months now … Sometimes he’s very funny. Sometimes he hits the nail squarely on the head. But sometimes (when I happen to know more of the history of whatever he’s writing about than he he does – or than he’s chosen to express), I find him irritating and tiresome. In respect of this book, his focus is on social history using his house in England as the axle on which the book turns, but at some point in every chapter he remembers he has an audience Stateside too and (sometimes awkwardly I feel) wrestles his subject around to include an American slant. Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe is next. Another borrowing this, from Nigel Leech at Adel Publishing. This is a really well written historical study of the murder and the events, people and period. I’ve read it through but it’s still on the pile because I’m making notes from it for the background of Elin’s Story. Lawen Mohtadi’s Den dag jag blir fri is next. A biography – the first – of the Swedish Romany activist and children’s author Katarina Taikon. I’m a chapter into this now. An interesting subject and written in easy Swedish … a bit too easy to be honest. It’s very flat. Below that is Andrea Gillies The White Lie. I read this novel when it first came out about a year ago. I enjoyed it, recommended it to others and even bought an extra copy to give to my sister (who also liked it). I fully intended to write a review of it for Amazon … but I never got around to doing so. Another New Year Resolution: live up to your promises! The last three are thinner than the others, but still packed with enjoyment. Sara Granér’s All I Want for Christmas is planekonomi is a graphic debate book, a scream of protest against the triumphalism of the market economy in cartoon form. For dipping into.
And below that you can just see a copy of the latest edition of Forskning och Framsteg a magazine of popular science, Sweden’s equivalent to New Scientist. There’s an essay on the Black Death (Digerdöden) I’m looking forward to reading. And one more title, Hamlet made Simple and Other Essays – see left – which arrived by post the day after I took the main photo. This is a book of essays by a visitor to these pages no less. David Gontar is currently a Professor of English and Philosophy at the Inner Mongolia University of China and this book (with the exception of the title essay) was conceived and written not far from Xanadu. Yes, really! There’s a hubbub in the town With open mouths you’ll gaze On 14th January 2013 the Word of the Day on Artwiculate was hubbub.
Up here in the cold north, the wood anemone (vitsippa) is a looked-for sign of spring. I took the photo in April 2011. Anemone was the word of the day on Artwiculate on 10th January 2013. I may be going into business as a producer of inspirational cards.
Or maybe not
Colds. They’re not very fashionable. “Just a head cold,” people say. Most people seem to think that confessing to having a cold is a bit lame. The fashionable disease is the flu. Nowadays you rarely hear people say “I have a cold”, you’re much more likely to hear them say “I’ve got the flu”. I wonder how often it’s true? Feed a cold and starve a fever. Classic advice, and a way to distinguish between colds and flues. By and large if you have a cold no matter how bad you feel, you won’t have a fever. By contrast, if you’ve got a flu you’ve almost certainly got a fever to go with it. If you have a fever, one of the last things you want to do is eat. You just lie on your back and pray that it will pass. But if you’ve got a cold, in my experience, eating and drinking are both things you want to do and things that actually help because they lubricate your poor, swollen throat. The other way to spot a flu is if your joints are aching. One thing positive about having a cold is that it mostly stays above your shoulders. Your head throbs. Your eyes water and redden. You cough and you sneeze and your nose alternately runs and blocks, and you rub the skin off it with tissues, toilet paper, the sleeve of your sweater, the tail of your shirt, your hands, whatever else you have available. Your tongue tastes like the leather recycled from those hanging straps in public transport. Your sinuses fill, your ears may pop and your throat will swell and block and feel like someone’s got at it with sandpaper. But all of this is above the level of your shoulders. The rest of your body feels fine. Not if you’ve got the flu. If you’ve got the flu you have all of the above, plus a temperature well over 37°C, no appetite and aching limbs, which mean the most comfortable place to be is laid out in your bed. I feel sorry for people with the flu, I do. Just not very much. Because at the moment I’ve got a cold and I suspect most of them have too. They’re just calling it a flu. But are they walking around? Are they eating and drinking? Are they watching TV? You bet they are! “I’ve got a touch of the flu,” they say. A touch! I don’t call that the flu. I’m not even sure I would call it a head cold. It’s what I say, flu is more fashionable and sounds more serious, and they’re fishing for sympathy. I’m not fishing for sympathy – though a little fellow feeling wouldn’t hurt you would it?
I read somewhere on the net that one thing you can be sure about with a head cold is, if you treat it, it’ll last for seven days, but if you try to ignore it’ll drag on for a week. Ha ha. (Wipes tears of laughter from his eyes.) When I was a kid my mother used to say that colds were “Three days coming, three days staying, three days going”. Well, this time round I’ve been keeping count and let me tell you that net-borne witticism about colds lasting a week and my mother’s folk wisdom are both wrong. I’ve been fighting this cold for at least 10 days now, and it doesn’t show any signs of packing its bags. On the contrary, it feels as if it’s settling in for the winter. I’m into the catarrh stage now. I’m not sneezing, but I’m certainly still coughing, and both coughing and nose blowing produces copious quantities of thick, yellowish phlegm. I know, I know. It’s disgusting. It really is, and you don’t want to know, but I wake in the night from dreams of choking. I take myself to the lavatory and cough into a towel to smother the noise, then bend over the toilet bowl to try to retch up the gobbets of phlegm that have been blocking my throat and threatening to slime into my lungs. Yes, I’m taking cough medicine against the catarrh and yes, I’m spraying stuff up my nose to reduce the swelling and clear my nasal passages. And that’s how I can lie down and fall asleep. But during the night the effect wears off, and the phlegm builds up and runs down my throat to catch and build up on my vocal chords until finally I wake choking. The cycle runs about two-and-a-half hours. So for the last four nights I’ve had between three and five hours sleep each night, and spent more time awake – or half awake – cradling cups of hot tea laced with honey or whisky. Or both. It’s no wonder I don’t feel sharp enough to be writing creatively, or inspired enough to take part in Twitter’s #wordgames, or really interested in anything much at all. Although I suppose you could say the fact that I’ve managed to write this suggests I’m actually getting better. You could say that… let’s hope you’re right. The creatures of the world debated which of them had most right to the title Prodigious. I am the greatest beast of any on the land, said Elephant. Who is as prodigious as I? On land, grey-skin, replied Whale, but I am the most prodigious of all. Man said, I live in every corner of the world, which I change to suit me as I choose. There is none so prodigious as I. Said Cockroach to her children, Multiply prodigiously. I have seen the future and it is is ours! Prodigious was the word of the day on Artwiculate 7th November 2012 Come somnambulate with me Come somnambulate with me Come somnambulate with me. The word of the day on Artwiculate 6th November 2012 was Somnambulate. Last March when I was over in England to celebrate Mum’s 90th birthday, she surprised me by asking if I’d like to interview her about her life. Ninety years is quite a milestone and she’s lived through interesting times, no doubt, but while she’s happy to tell tales, she’s never been happy with the idea of microphones and systematic recording. There’s a history. Twenty odd yeasr ago when my grandmother Debbie, Mum’s mother, was in her eighties I sneakily recorded her talking about the photos in a family album. When Gran realised what I was up to (and it was after I’d recorded more than half an hour) she made me go back and erase a couple of minutes when she’d said something critical or disparaging about Mum, but then let me carry on recording to the end of the tape. (It was a C90 casette, 45 minutes on each sides and I still have it.) Later, Mum demanded to hear the recording and then tried to guess what her mother had said about her that she made me wipe. They were going through a difficult patch. Gran (as we discovered later) was slipping into an Alzheimers haze – though she was pretty sharp when talking about the family photos – but for years Mum not only couldn’t accept it, but was convinced much of Gran’s behaviour was motivated by spite against her.
I couldn’t start interviewing her in March. I was on my way back home to Sweden, and besides for once I had no recording equipment with me. So I flew home and thought about it and every so often when I was talking with her on the phone I would ask if she still wanted me to interview her. “Yes, of course,” she replied. OK then – fast forward to the tail-end of October. At the time of writing I’ve interviewed her in two afternoon sessions and recorded about 3½ hours. Her earliest memories, her childhood, her parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts and one or two friends. She was born in Manchester in 1922 and grew up alternating between Manchester and the East End of London. Her father was a philanderer, every sprng he’d take up with a new young thing and her mother, in protest, would decamp to her parental home in London till wooed back by promises of a “new start”. So far the story’s reached Mum’s 15th year. She left school at 14 to begin working as a clerk in a mail order company in Manchester. She’s had her first kiss (she didn’t enjoy it) and her first boyfriend (he was 20) and now her parents have just become wardens of the Youth Hostel in Ivinghoe in Bedfordshire. Big changes ae coming – it’s 1937. I may publish a few extracts here later in the year. Can’t sleep. Can’t sleep. Can’t sleep. This is the time when all my failures come back to me. The Black Dog wants its due. |
|
Copyright Note © 2013 TheSupercargo Log in Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
ince getting back from England a couple of weeks ago I’ve been on the edge of my seat about plans to improve the frequency with which I write blog entries. I just haven’t been able to put any of them into practice. Instead I’ve been struggling with a head cold.
I’m not trying to pretend that a head cold is worse than – I don’t know – cancer, AIDS, or any of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. I’m just saying that it goes on too bloody long. 
Gran died in February 1992, and in March 2012, twenty years down the line, it may be that Mum had been thinking of my tape. I know she has been slowly going through her papers and her own photos and “sorting them out for you for when I’m gone”, though, so her sudden decision to volunteer may simply be a part of her campaign of tidying up and tying off loose ends. (Or a way of making sure her perspective on the family’s history is recorded.)