Bliss it was, indeed

The novel is finished (for the moment!), revised right through three or four times, sent to Amazon as a Word document, transmitted back to me - converted - so that the italics show up on Kindle, emailed to Plutarch for structural assessment. The opening chapter is too tight, too brusque (two Americans talking to each other) but I cannot presently tease it into relaxation. A lifetime’s conviction that all articles are too long leaves me deficient when asked to add rather than cut

I am under-employed. Wrote a post this morning, here’s another. Nobody’ll read them when they are jam-packed like this. But this is different, this is bliss.

Bliss means music, the greater power that leaves prose – even poetry – rocking in its wake. Nothing high-flown, just the sea-shanty/lamentation, Tom Bowling, where lines like

… lies poor Tom Bowling
The darling of our crew;
No more he'll hear the tempest howling
For death has broached him to….

Thus Death, who kings and tars despatches
In vain Tom's life hath doff'd
For tho' his body's under hatches
His soul is gone aloft

are matched to a simple, unsimple, desperately sad tune. Which I faintly know but have never learned. I listen to tenor Robert Tear, boy treble Lewis and a school band and – oh joy! – ensnare and hold the first eight bars. But the next eight rise gently, subtly. Just the first two notes - that’s all I need! Got them! Can sing them. On to the keyboard and – ah! – that’s it, the song’s heart laid bare, it’s mine damnit. And now I can take it with me to the kitchen, fill the coffee percolator, sing it confidently in the sharp acoustic and snuffle at its sadness.

Alas, I cannot claim to be limitless

A question arises: is Rouchswalwe a toper? Definitely not. Toping is drinking to excess and although beer flows through her blog like the Drac flows through Grenoble, she remains clear-sighted – even starry-eyed – enough to produce vigorous, allusive prose, and poetry, unaffected by alchohol.

Recently I scientifically tested her consumption and she cheerfully responded. See http://5fingerplatz.blogspot.com/2011/09/me-gustaria-una-cerveza.html

I now return the favour.

Until recently this itinerary was bi-annual. My companion, C, is fifteen years younger, physicist turned website designer, creator of a web-based library, a fairly extreme left-winger, enormously articulate, widely read and a forensic conversationalist. Since the mountain must go to Mahomet I turn up at Lewisham (SE London), we taxi to Greenwich and order a meal at Davy’s Wine Lodge. An absorbent meal with a mature zinfandel. I choose the wine since for all his abilities, C lacks a retentive palate.

We then stroll past the Cutty Sark to The Trafalgar, the best pub in London. Which at 2.30 pm, is empty. In a bow-fronted window overhanging the Thames we may look upstream to the heart of London, across the river to the financial skyscrapers and downstream to The Dome (which we watched being built). We then each drink five pints of real ale, The conversation is broken only by increasingly frequent absences at the Gents but a graph of consumption resembles the discharge rate for a capacitor (ie, one sharp peak followed an endless visit to the plains). Drinking ends at about 10 pm.

This is my limit since beer turns me into one of those maths problems involving a bath, a tap and a plughole. A mere conduit. The conversation is demanding, stretching me like Peter Rabbit to bursting point. It is an admirable justification for boozing.

Non-flying fragments from Brittany

TOO MANY cheap French restaurants have become pizzerias and no longer offer family food (daubes, blanquette de veau, rillettes) as Dish of the Day. So when I saw a chalkboard in Paimpol announcing choux farci (stuffed cabbage) I dived in and started stuffing. “What is the cabbage stuffed with?” asked an Englishman longingly at a nearside table who thought he’d ordered it but got something else. Visited by those twin eroders of the intellect – nostalgia and a full belly – I handed over a €10 tip on a €29 bill and addressed the muted staff of three: “You run an efficient restaurant. You have an extraordinary menu. And I am happy to be in France.” Methinks they talk of Justice Shallow yet.

THIRTY years ago, on another holiday in Brittany, I bought myself one of those indigenous white and blue striped shirts called marinières. It hung loosely and I imagined it made me look dashing. When it mysteriously became tight I discarded it. This time in boutiquey Paimpol I decided to buy another and Mrs BB did the honours. However, she also bought one for Zach and he definitely looks dashing.

I AM grateful to Lucy for several reasons. With Plutarch she encouraged me, by example, to start blogging, she reacted constructively (again with Plutarch) to my stillborn verse-writing, and when an intellectually posh website rejected my Shakespeare-into-French article she recommended another site where it was accepted. But it was a different matter when she spotted the device I lashed together for mounting satnav on my car dashboard. “Hmmm,” she said as she ran a finger along its rough-hewn edges.

Beware the acne'd Northerner

Apropos nothing Rouchswalwe disapproves of computer dating. And I have a little story.

My adolescence was a mess and I howled at the moon a lot. My worried mother – off her own bat – enrolled me in an international male/female pen-pals scheme, a written precursor to RW’s antipathy. Surely, my mother thought, there was one young woman in the world who could convince me that being male was bearable.

It sort of worked. A trainee teacher from Essex sent a photo with a gentle note (“I should add I normally wear glasses.”), we corresponded and I met her on a couple of visits to London. The second time I was so horribly rude I cringe at the memory. If in the afterlife forgiveness is possible, she will be my first supplicatee. I devoutly hope she married a millionaire and now owns Madagascar.

Typical male crassness, but Jahway was lurking. I tried another pen-pal and received a photo of a handsomely brutal woman in Johannesburg. I sent off a photo, discreetly chosen to hide my acne, and she immediately broke off the correspondence.

Johannesburg was merely a deep wound. Essex was different. I wasn’t then ashamed of my behaviour - that feeling grew with time. Rather I regarded myself a poltroon trawling such a system. I became adult (I hope) by moving from Bradford to London and quickly meeting Miss T who became Mrs BB.

What is inexplicable is that while still yearning, futilely, for a woman’s company I was able to act so badly when temporarily granted this blessing. Does this deserve discussion?

CHEERIER NOTE I’m told I won an unofficial award for responding to others’ blogs. Does anyone know from whom? Or is Jahway at work again?

Not original but unexpected

How do love affairs start? Jana Nordmeyer, disfigured by naevus flammeus, has made do without love for much of her life until… well, that’s for those who want to read the book. And it’s been for me to solve. A more difficult task than you might imagine given that I’ve been her dominant, if unrequited, lover for the last eighteen months, finding it hard to let her suffer.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture proved a useful handbook. Sixty-two poems, meant to be read in sequence, cover the beginning, middle and end of an affair, Sapphic but that’s beside the point. Love is love, although I wonder about CAD’s former lover, now engaged elsewhere (one hopes), yet able to read this monument to their shared passion at any time of the day or night.

They were modern lovers:

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
Your second, your third

look for your small xx
feeling absurd.

They were, thank goodness, uninhibited:

…We undressed,
Then dressed again in the gowns of the moon.
We knelt in the leaves,
Kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.

And when it went wrong:

Learn from a stone, its heart-shape meaningless,
perfect with relentless cold; or from the bigger moon,
Implacably dissolving in the sky, or from the stars,
lifeless as Latin verbs…

Not that I wanted to poach anything from these powerful, unique reflections. Other than the idea that poetry and love might co-exist in A Stall Recovered. Not exactly an original idea but one which I could never have foreseen when I started writing. The first time I’ve felt grateful to a Poet Laureate.

BB returns WW to its roots

To fly in a light plane along a coastline that evokes WS’s “swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean”. To do it in France. To do it in good company. Our pilot Louis Kervoaze, who mediated terrestrial and celestial regions on our behalf, was our secular priest. I couldn’t fail to ask questions.

LK solo-ed after fifteen hours. Jana, hero of A Stall Recovered, did it in nine but she’s imaginary. A quick solo doesn’t guarantee a good pilot and LK remembered a youth who seemed ready after five hours. “But he never came back,” LK added. My rotten French turned this into a horror story whereas LK implied “for further lessons”. Fear was the reason.

Good pilots become old good pilots by remaining aware. As LK taxied from the hanger to the runway his head moved continuously, a series of tiny, jerky sweeps repetitively covering the whole of his visible world. The trick is never to be satisfied by not finding a menace or a discrepancy.

Immediately in front of me was the GPS display, quite unlike the Disneyish toy I use in my car. Serious kit with a flashing capital M. Standing for? Message, LK said, but he’d checked it ages ago.

As the Cessna 172 took off (A delightful French word: décoller, to unstick) the aerodynamic exterior needed changing from one which gave added lift to one which encouraged drag-free forward flight. A quick touch on a wheel labelled Flaps.

We approached the landing at right-angles to the end of the runway. LK took us in on a smooth descending turn with the wheels finally straddling the dotted line down the centre of the tarmac. I said Parfait. but it sounded cheap. What I meant was beautiful.

Cursed flight ends with great lunch

Finally! I watched Louis Kervoaze crank the Cessna’s yoke anti-clockwise against a port side crosswind and we were airborne in about ten metres flat for a 45-minute round trip between Lannion and Paimpol along the north Brittany coast. On the back seat sat Mrs BB and Lucy (with her ever-clicking Lumix).

Disappointment had seemed inevitable. I was misinformed by a tourist office and an aero-club, got the air strip muddled and had been threatened by strong winds that were whisking super-tankers out of the Channel and dropping them into the Place de la Concorde. On that very morning Lucy’s Tom came down with the lurgi and the phrase Le vol maudit (Cursed flight) was born.

But here we were inspecting the mussel beds from 1000 feet (yes, French aviators do use imperial terms), overflying an island acquired by a supermarket magnate and appreciating tide-out contours undetectable at sea level. The landing was a special treat: a deliberate stall whereby the plane in effect drops the last few metres on to the runway to the muted blare of the stall horn. I couldn’t remember the exact word to describe this experience other than it started with an e. Useful having Lucy around; she knew I’d undergone an epiphany.

Tom had recovered thank goodness and we met up with him for lunch at one their favourite fish restaurants in Erquy. Humdrum stuff like coquilles St Jacques, half a dozen oysters and a piquant white number from Gascony – almost a canteen meal you might say. Afterwards we were ushered into the presence of the famous Mol who I believe conferred her blessing. Oh, I should add: we did talk a bit.

Below: Lucy, Louis, Mrs BB with Cessna 172.

I don't remember the square buttons

All being well, as my Granny used to say, Mrs BB and I aim to take a little holiday in a foreign country, starting tomorrow. To mark this I intend to put up a post stuffed full of philosophical potential, something knotty which will leave passers-by testing their intellect and mourning my temporary absence. Trouser flies are my chosen subject.

Recently I ordered some casual trousers online and the world of fashion seems to have turned full circle. No zip, just four buttons. Access to what needs to be accessed is much slower due to the stiff new fabric. Luckily the country we have in mind is quite forgiving about accidents in this area which is just as well.

I was born into a Britain where all flies buttoned. Far more buttons than four, too. Did accidents occur? My lips are sealed.

I am also old enough to remember the buttoned-fly watershed. Starting during the war when Britain was invaded by military personnel whose flies zipped. Americans, of course. Weren’t they capable of a little patience? Hilarity ensued after a spate of medical incidents in which Arizonans and Vermonters had to be separated from their pants. Condign punishment for an unnatural desire to speed things up.

I had no sympathy – until it happened to me. Surely the most hideous male dilemma of all time. Metaphorically speaking, being required to retrace one’s footsteps. A double whammie in the lingo of those who suffered first. Ah my dear member: I envisaged a much better future for you than this.

Thereafter awareness of the zip disappeared. Down and up and one was done. Except for a final stage. Lack of awareness leading to forgetfulness. The gap that is the stigma of old age. There, something to chew on.