Change In the Air

          Last Sunday, shortly after I had swum a dozen, leisurely lengths of the pool, our local lido closed down for the winter. It seems premature, what with the sun continuing to beam down and the temperature still hitting 20 degrees daily, but the operator’s contract with the Council stipulates a rigid schedule, come rain or shine. Of course, the sea remains open but, before long, its temperature will fall below what I might be prepared to endure in the cause of aquatic exercise. Summer is officially over. However, its actual demise is gradual and tinged with sweetness. I returned to the orchards at Cothele at the weekend and was gratified by the plenitude of fruit ripe and ready for picking. Our fruit-bowl overfloweth and our freezer is stuffed with cartons of stewed apples.

          And, on yet another day of blue skies and stilled breezes, my OH and I took a hike on Dartmoor. On such a day, the moor’s reputation as high, bleak terrain, unwelcoming, dangerous and sometimes eerie, is hard to believe. The wide, quiet vistas extend to the coast and there are lush valleys that cut into the perimeter of the moor, anchoring it to the surrounding green, rolling farmland. For a while, we walked the disused railway, which runs past the disused Swelltor quarry, where a line of twelve massive, cut granite corbels are lined up, ready for consignment. They are left-over, surplus to requirements, after the 1896 widening of London Bridge. I was surprised that nobody had yet found a use for them – not even the American bloke who bought the rest of the bridge – but I suppose the lack of a functioning rail-track is something of a disincentive to shifting them.

          Further on, we encountered a lone hiker, talking loudly at his phone. Even at a distance of fifty metres, we heard him say that he was not looking forward to lunch because, although he had made cheese and pickle sandwiches, he had just realised that he had forgotten to put the cheese in them. Another of life’s mysteries. It reminded me of a Bill Bryson observation that ‘only the British could imagine they were having fun, crouching behind some windswept rocks with a Thermos flask and a cheese sandwich’. Still, our forgetful hiker might be consoled by the fine weather. We finished up at the prison town of Princetown, where the Visitor Centre now occupies the ground floor of the hotel that accommodated Arthur Conan Doyle while he was writing The Hound of The Baskervilles. He lived only fifteen miles away, in Plymouth, at the time, so I guess he wanted to immerse himself in his story’s spooky setting.

          Despite the sunny days, the nights are drawing in, which has prompted a return to the cinema. On Saturday, we saw Girls Don’t Surf, a documentary about the marginalisation of females on the professional surfing circuit prior to 2003. The story seems to have had an equitable, happy and lucrative ending. Moreover if, like me, you are puzzled by how livings are made out of such a pastime, the answer is revealed: more money than you would imagine is generated through sales of fashionable board-shorts.

         But there’s no getting away from it – these are distractions. Summer’s dream-time is about to give way to harsh reality. The long absence of meaningful or effective parliamentary activity is finally at an end, coinciding neatly with the burial of The Queen to draw a line under the political uncertainties of the past few months. Somehow, we must address the social and environmental devastation caused by a governing party that insists blindly on pursuing the discredited dogma of trickle-down economics. And, in the wider world, buckle down and deal with the humanitarian and economic consequences of Putin and all the other cruel, selfish regimes. It’s going to be a long, hard winter.

 

Not On My To-Do List

          I had better get it off my chest: I am not mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II. She may have done a “good job” as Head of State, but that assessment is as vague as the appointment process is arbitrary. There is no possible justification for a monarch inheriting a position that their distant forbears grabbed by force. And not all the Queen’s subjects think of her fondly. As one teenager commented when asked her opinion by a reporter, “It’s sad that she died, like, but she never did nothing for us.” Moreover, half-way through ten days of official mourning, I am aghast at the extent of the no-(public)-expense spared, fancy-dress ceremonies endlessly unfolding. Some people will not be complaining – florists and costumiers, for example. They will be able to use their excess profits to pay their electricity bills next month.

         Then there’s the dereliction of duty shown by a government whose absence of presence all through summer is now extended until after the funeral. If she were a true patriot, our newly installed Prime Minister might step up and sort out the mess, but I suspect she is sulking, miffed at having had her limelight stolen

          But concerned as I am about wasteful, delusional pomp and the lassitude of government, I am more worried by the latent threat to our right to dissent. Some of those who have been brave enough to swim publicly against the tide of popular sentiment have been booed, abused and even threatened with arrest for “disturbing the peace”. Calls for the abolition of monarchy are viewed as unpatriotic, but patriotism, famously referred to by Dr Johnson as, “the last resort of a scoundrel”, is all too often deliberately mis-defined (e.g., by Putin). The true patriot, “is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies” *, a more balanced definition of love for one’s country. The fact that filing respectfully past the Queen’s coffin is not on my to-do list makes me no less patriotic than the most fervent royalist.

          What is on my to-do list is, in reality, quite mundane, rather like the one I found the other day on a path, where it had been dropped. It is written on the actual back of an actual envelope (just like the Government’s policies). It reads thus:

WEDS

Clean J + F’s toys + bathroom

Clean Washing mach + Dishwasher

Penny – date

Prue – date

Email Eric

Caroline’s email

Sue (phone number, redacted)

          From these scraps of information, I have imagined a character – a young woman, married, with children and an active social life. She seems overly concerned with cleaning, but the bold, elegant hand tells me she’s artistic, educated and a late adopter of notebook apps. Then again, my certainty that they are a ‘she’ is somewhat undermined by one thing in particular: no woman of my acquaintance has ever shown interest in cleaning the machines that clean stuff. Surely, that falls into the category of ‘maintenance’, which is more often associated with blokes? So perhaps they aren’t married – at least, not to a bloke who does maintenance – and they live alone with two kids and some grubby toys. They are somewhat obsessive about hygiene – on Wednesdays, at least – but I would need to see Thursday’s list to get a more balanced picture. I do have the option of calling Sue to see whether she can shed some light, but I realise that would be creepy and could land me in trouble, so the question remains open: is she/he/they a republican with whom I could share a pint or a monarchist who would grass me up to the police, to be handed over to the custody of Black Rod or some such other costumed relic of medieval feudalism empowered by King Charles to lock me up in the Tower of London?

* Sydney J. Harris, journalist and author (1917-1986)

Enduring Friendship?

          “If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.”

          (Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician, died 1662.)

          The other day, I went for walk with two of my old friends. That may not sound significant, but it matters to us because in the more than fifty years since we first bonded, our paths have diverged to the extent that we would never see each other unless we made a point of it. So, the walk has become an annual event (covid years excepted) and one that we look forward to. It also leads me to ponder the nature of friendship and the forms it takes, sitting as it seems to me, on the continuum of human interaction somewhere between acquaintance and love. And, like them, friendship can be fluid, fleeting and fragile or solid, serene and steadfast, Pascal’s observation notwithstanding.

          But first, why a walk? The obvious answer is that the three of us share a fondness for tramping across the country and – it has to be said – would like to keep doing it for as long as we’re able. Fortunately, we are still fit enough to manage more than a stroll through the park. On this occasion, we did an eight-mile stretch of the North Cornwall coast from Boscastle to Tintagel and back, climbing down into then up out of several inlets. It being the end of the holiday season, the young families with children had disappeared from the scene, leaving it to our generation to enjoy in tranquillity and with traditional pasties to give us succour. And while we walked, we talked about old times, new times, family, literature and politics (though we had no need to dwell on the last of these, as there has always been a consensus in favour of socialism). There will come a time when strenuous walking will not be on our agenda, so what will we do then? I would rather have a wheelchair rally than see the end of our reunions.

          Friends – and old ones in particular – are a part of me: without them, I would not be what I have become. The nature of friendship may be hard to pin down, but its value is evident. As children, we pal-up with playmates instinctively. Then, as we grow older, move schools, start careers and settle in new neighbourhoods, we begin to appreciate the need to make friends: they are the seasoning of social life, the key to our mental wellbeing and the means of navigating life’s difficulties. Hence, as adults, we make a more conscious effort to acquire and, if we’re prudent, keep them. They say that as we grow older it becomes difficult to make new friends, perhaps because of retirement and the subsequent diminished daily contact with others. If that’s the case, it makes sense to hang on to the ones you have.

          It seems anachronistic that friendships originating half a century ago can endure many long years of minimal contact, but maybe that is just why they do. By not being put through their paces – the ups and downs of everyday life, disappointments and disillusionments – they are never tested to destruction. Rather, they become idealised, elevated to a place they may or may not deserve. I shall see how this goes when I go to Australia later this year and meet up with more old friends of whom I am deeply fond but don’t see from one decade to another.

          So, while Pascal’s assertion explains why friendships may fail or, worse, turn to enmity, it also implicitly acknowledges the natural inclination to make friends in the first place. So, on reflection, it’s maybe as well to be insulated by time and circumstance from the eroding effects of intimacy.