The Presence of Absence

          Lately, I’ve been buying pink grapefruits from the local supermarket. I’m so addicted to them that I daren’t look to see the country of origin, lest it be too far across the globe for the carbon footprint not to prick my conscience. I take pleasure in juicing them on a vintage, electric Moulinex that is activated by pressing the halved fruit down on the rotary spindle, which alternates direction each time it is engaged. That is, until the motor packed up and my efforts to fix it came to nought. So, I trawled eBay for a replacement and saw the same model, in an authentic 1960s shade of custard. Nostalgia tempted me (and it was reasonably priced), but reason prevailed. Old electric motors die, don’t they.

          Thus, paralysed by indecision, the matter was put aside while we executed a plan to make the most of the mild weather. We went on an excursion in the campervan – the last, perhaps, before the clocks change and the days get shorter overnight. A previously unexplored section of the north coast of Cornwall was our target for a stint of hiking, sampling local produce and engaging with nature in general.

          I found a strategically located campsite at Delabole, a name that intrigued me because it sounded French. Norman, perhaps? Cornish placenames tend to have prefixes, such as “Tre” (homestead), “Pol” (pool or pond), “Pen” (head or end) and, of course, “Saint” (saint), but this place is different because it was named after a hole in the ground. (Not a Norman nobleman after all.) I didn’t know it until I went there, but Delabole is the site of a “world famous” slate quarry that continues to be productive, six hundred years after it was first excavated. As for the name, Deliou Manor, near the present site of the quarry, was listed in the Doomsday book. By 1284, it had become known as Delyou Bol – a translation of the old Cornish – “delyou” meaning flakes or leaves and “bol” a pit – which gives us the Pit of Flaky Stone.

          We did go to see it, walking past the vacant coach-parking lot and standing, alone, on the viewing platform (sightseers are more numerous in the holiday season, apparently). We watched an excavator poking noisily at the prized sediment and tried to imagine the time when more than a thousand people worked there. Now, there are five men and three machines, so there wasn’t much to see. We continued along the path to the coast and a café at Trebarwith, a placename more familiar, insofar as it is easily confused with a hundred others.

          There’s something sweet about seaside holiday places at the end of the season. There are few if any other customers, so staff are friendly and relaxed. You feel smug if the weather’s fine and privileged, as if you were in First Class. It was in this kind of bubble that we set off on a five-hour trek. Yet, there was also an eeriness, induced partly by the lack of a breeze, the stillness of the ocean and the absence of any other hikers. This might have been something to savour, yet we were not gratified by such exclusivity, especially as it applied also to the wildlife. During that walk, not once did we see any creature emerge from the sea. Apart from a few sheep and cattle, the only fauna we spotted were three caterpillars, three butterflies, two black beetles and a slug. Had the end of the world occurred since we left Trewhatsit?

          More likely, it’s just a quiet time for nature, but now that we’re back in the city, it’s business as usual. I was going to resolve the matter of the citrus juicer but, having opened the freezer and seen the gallons of frozen apple juice stashed within, I have put it on hold again – which, incidentally, gains me respite from the carbon-footprint anxiety.

Pressing Engagements

          It’s that time of year again: the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – and influenza. Actually, it’s been so long since I had the flu that it seems now like one of those childhood afflictions one no longer need worry about. I am, of course, not uniquely immune to the virus; regular vaccination has saved me from the dreaded lurgi. So, I was pleased to be invited this week to the local clinic for the annual flu jab.

          My appointment was set at 09.22 (which did strike me as being improbably precise) and when I arrived ten minutes early, I was perplexed to see a queue snaking out of the entrance and into the carpark. My first thought was that I could have stopped for coffee at that nice little café I walked past, but I observed the queue shuffling forward at a fair pace, so I took my place. Before long, I was inside, with just enough time to banter with one of the attendants, who told me they were doing 850 jabs that morning and that the reason it was organised so efficiently was because “the boss is ex-military”.

          ‘Military precision’ is one of those assumptions that, in my view, deserves to be questioned. I may be biased but, with a father who served in the armed forces, I was accustomed to hearing stories to the contrary. The terms ‘balls-up’ and ‘cock-up’ were familiar to me from an early age and, later, I learned the US forces equivalent, SNAFU. It was with scepticism, therefore, that I viewed footage during covid lockdown of army personnel taking charge of vaccine distribution. I took the cynical view that it was just a morale-boosting stunt. Nevertheless, here I was, rolling down my sleeve and being ushered out of the back door, with my phone displaying 09.23!

          Anyway, now that I’m jabbed, I can relax and enjoy autumn’s delights, especially as the weather is clement and there’s plenty of sunshine to enhance the colourful, turning foliage. The bumper harvest has already given us a freezer full of stewed apples and there is no end in sight to the season’s plenty. Now there is apple juice. A friend, who lives in a farm cottage next to a small orchard, invited a group of pals for an afternoon of sharing both the labour and the produce of an apple-pressing session. She had hired, or borrowed, the equipment and we were required to bring suitable containers. Glass-bottled juice can be pasteurised and kept, plastic-bottled juice can be frozen and kept, but untreated juice will soon ferment.

          Had I realised the scale of the abundance, I would have brought a wagonload of vessels. She has no more than a dozen fruit trees, but they were loaded with fruit. Even so, there was no need to reach up for them. Heavy winds had deposited so many on the grass that we could barely cope with the gathering. I soon became expert at throwing them into the hopper that chops them into a mulch that is then then put into a screw-press. The juice flows from the base and is collected into buckets for bottling.

          At the end of the afternoon, each of us took away our filled containers, leaving sacks full of unpressed apples, the fate of which may be to rot. I put plastic bottles in the freezer (in the spaces next to the stewed apple), gave glass bottles to neighbours, took some more to a workshop next day and put the remainder in the fridge, where they will turn into cider if I don’t drink them pronto.

          But I can’t help worrying about all the surplus left languishing in orchards around the country. All that nutritious produce going to waste, for lack of a viable distribution system. Perhaps we could call in the army.

Wakey, Wakey!

          Last night, I dreamed that the house in which I was living, and with which I felt smugly satisfied, began to disintegrate around me. If this was a classic case of subliminal insecurity syndrome, who could be surprised? I might feel safe and sound in my present circumstances, but life is a pitfall waiting to happen – and that’s before you factor in the steady progress being made by authoritarian tyrants and their billionaire accomplices making short work of capturing power via wealth, limiting political freedom and destroying the ecosphere with their extractive, destructive economic policies.

          So, now that’s off my chest, and notwithstanding the slough of despond into which I am trying to avoid sliding on account of foresaid doom scenario, I want to make it clear that I live in an apartment, not a house, though my point is somewhat pedantic in that respect. Whatever the form of dwelling in which one happens to reside, the important thing is not to confuse it with ‘home’. Is it just me, or do others shout at the telly when politicians promise to build new “homes”, when what they really mean is habitations? A house is not a home. Home is where your heart is – or where you hang your hat. Just ask anyone who is homesick. What’s more, it is misleading to refer to people as homeless, when what they really lack is shelter. It is perfectly possible to be at home, i.e. on the street, in the town of your birth, yet without a residence.

          If you happen to visit the Tate Modern, London, you will be able to see exhibitions by two artists that illustrate the difference. Aboriginal Australian artist Emily Kan Kngwarray painted her home, whereas South Korean artist Do Ho Suh reconstructs the houses he has lived in.

          The traditional lifestyle of the Aboriginal Australians did not involve the building of permanent dwellings, therefore in referencing her home pictorially, Kngwarray had no problem of definition. She painted the landscape and the flora and fauna that inhabited it; in other words, her homeland and that of her kin – which included its non-human inhabitants, whose spirits are revered. This was the sole subject of her work. She hardly ever left the Northern Territories (her region is called Utopia, so named in 1978 as a result of aboriginal activism) and she certainly never travelled abroad.

          Do Ho Suh, on the other hand, has lived and worked in three cities that he has, at one time or another, called ‘home’ – Seoul, New York and London. By his own account, all three have shaped his experience of life and deposited memories into his subconscious mind. His ingenious re-creations of the houses he lived in contain these memories and illustrate his point that ‘home’ is not necessarily a fixed place. It evolves over time and is redefined as we move through the world.

          This last point might be contested by those who have experienced the trauma of forcible expulsion or who have become refugees from war and other disasters. Their experiences have nothing to do with lifestyle choices. The visceral pull to one’s home is not simply geographical; it is tied up with community and tradition as well. It is also surprisingly local. Studies of statistics in the (relatively small) UK indicate that the average UK adult lives 25 miles from where they were born, only a slight increase on the 19 miles that was recorded in 1921.

          So, as I sit comfortably in our well-maintained apartment, in the city of my father’s ancestry (though I spent my entire working life elsewhere), I feel at one with the statistics, though uneasy about the latent, snugness-induced tendency to smugness. Perhaps my dream was a wake-up call.