ISOLATION DIARIES PART 61: THE BALANCE OF NORMALS

It’s a funny time this, isn’t it? Some months ago I was excited about finding and defining a ‘new normal’; nowadays I’m craving the old one.

I guess we all are. I mean there was such freedom, pre-pandemic: you could get on a bus and still breathe without a mask on. You could just walk straight into a restaurant and ask for a table, or book a party of twelve where you’d sit so close that your elbows bashed. You could greet a friend of a friend with a super cool handshake outside the cinema, and not think twice about a two-armed hug for the friend who’d brought them. If you wanted to, you could even sing, way beyond 10 o’clock, while happiness filled your post-pub-party - and the most you’d get for your happy vocals would be a disapproving look from passing strangers and a cackle from your mates.

There was no fear of being in a group of seven, no lingering thought that the last person you high-fived might have accidentally endangered your grandparents. Family came first, and you could all plan the togetherest Christmas ever, without calculating the precise logistics of what needed to be where with whom by when. There were massive weddings, barn dances and discos. There were beautiful funerals and joyous Christenings. You danced with whomever you liked, you were comforted by whomever liked you, and it was all wonderfully free of worry and fear. We were free.

I felt it again today, that wave of fear and worry. Scientists at ICL say it’s possible that 100,000 people a day are newly infected in the UK. If that’s true, this dreadful virus will get close to impossible to avoid, and there will be no room for complacency at all. Lockdowns and circuit breakers, self isolations and quarantines will be the new normal.

We’re not in a second lockdown here; not yet, but if the acceleration of cases continues it’s hard to see how it’ll be avoided! Regions around us are going into Tier 2, soon Tier 3 will follow. It’s more a case of when.

And that has made me think. Am I already being too sociable? How do we find the balance between the old normal (which we need) and the new normal (which we must find)?

There’s another tricky balance for us believers too: wisdom versus faith. To what degree do we believe that God wants us to meet together? To what extent does He trust us to look after each other by staying at home? I can’t be the only one who feels bad either way! As much as churches put rules and policies into action (and ours have done a good job of that), the truth is that it is still scientifically dangerous to be in a room with that many people. Will God honour the faithful by surrounding our buildings with protecting angels? Or is it just madness? And if you feel judged either way (as either completely reckless or insanely spiritual I suppose), how do you deal with that? 

I think it might be wise if I can limit some social interactions. This wasn’t the new normal I was excited about, but at least it’s a step. Perhaps if I can spread them out, more than 48 hours apart, maybe more days than that, I can avoid the worry of cross-contamination? It is unnaturally difficult, like resisting a hug from someone you absolutely adore, or remembering to wipe your phone before you put it down on someone’s sofa-arm. But it isn’t impossible, I hope.

And then, on top of wisdom, there’s the faith bit: perhaps not either-or but both-and. Speaking out truth over yourself, prophesying Psalm 91 or 2 Chronicles 7, exalting and praising and celebrating and interceding every day, believing in honour and faithfulness and healing and hope. And not judging other people’s behaviour.

I don’t think there was only one new normal to find; I think there are several. This portion of history is changing fast, and it’s carrying us along with it. I suppose that I, like all of us, have to learn how to change with it, to find the best way through tomorrow, and leave yesterday behind. It isn’t an easy balance. But that’s this season for you. We should try to hold it together.

PLAYING WITH MATCHES

It's the end of October and of course, Halloween is in the air. This is where I get my most controversial I think, being less than a fan of the season.

It's occurred to me that approaches to Halloween vary, depending on how real you believe it all is. The overwhelming attitude of my colleagues, and by extrapolation, most people (I imagine), is that it's all just a bit of fun - rather like a ghost train at the funfair. It exists in a world of cardboard cutouts lit by torches, draped with plastic cobwebs: a world where nothing is really real but we'll all go along with pretending it is, and making it fun.

Then along come all the killjoys. They believe that behind those cutouts, lurking like a silhouette, is a very real kind of evil, waiting to devour our children. The ghost train, they warn, has real ghosts on the track. And if we all realised, we'd boycott the ride for good.

Work adds another interesting dimension. They've always enjoyed celebrating Halloween - I've written before about the ludicrous way the execs once dressed up to present a company meeting in ghoulish fancy-dress. Meeting rooms used to be turned into spidery grottoes and there were desk-decorating and pumpkin-carving competitions. This year it's all online with the 'spooky coffee breaks' already stencilled into the company calendar. All for fun, I assumed, though it does seem like rather a lot of effort for a thing that's essentially supposed to be for children.

As I say, I'm not a fan. I consider it playing with matches, only doing so in a world where you believe fire is a made-up concept.

And that brings me right back to this idea of reality and perception and how it affects our interaction with the world. It's why truth matters and the notion of 'fake news' is so dangerous - if only personal truth matters, if we're only to believe what we believe is true for ourselves, as so often is implied by our society, then logically, truth can't exist at all: we're all just floating round the universe in bubbles of our own reality, believing our personal ideas about whether ghosts and ghouls and God and gender and blackness and whiteness really exist.

And if you think that sounds dangerous, it's because it is. You can't pretend the ghost train is fun once you know where the track leads.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 60: PHIL COLLINS

"I live alone," I said, whimsically, "So it feels tough sometimes to get through the days."

I wasn't looking for sympathy on the VCB* - I honestly wasn't - but the conversation had taken me there. I'd asked someone (very conversationally I thought) whether they miss travelling (they're in presales), and they'd told me they sort of did, and then they'd said: "Why do you ask, Matt?"

A conversation had then unfolded about missing the commute, breaking up the day with a nice walk, switching off at 5:30pm and demarcating the day into 'work' and 'family' time. And hence I ending up telling them about my 'single' life, where that demarcation might be harder to find, and how I needed to be more deliberate to keep myself sane.

It's not really as impoverished as it sounds though, this life. I do actually speak to people every day, and I honestly haven't felt lonely for months. I have what my colleagues might describe as an unnaturally large number of great friends out there, and I am grateful for every one of them. Straight up.

It was with a sense of irony then, that a few moments later I bruised my little finger while air-drumming to Phil Collins's In The Air Tonight karaoke version.

Perhaps a well-balanced mind would not have gone there, but there I was anyway, pretending to be at Wembley: eyes closed, invisible sticks pounding the imaginary toms for that famous fill, followed by a very real whimper as my little finger struck the desk.

"I've been waiting for this moment, for all my life," warbled the track, obliviously. You can keep the moment, Phil. It really hurt. I shook my hand in the air for a bit, as you do. I've never known why.

I wondered what my colleagues would have made of that display. I flushed, imagining I'd left my webcam on and was still somehow connected to the VCB chat, but of course, everyone had already left to do more important work. My camera was off. Thank the Lord.

I wonder though: am I really okay? Is this normal behaviour? Should I be worried about my 'state of mind' like the VCBers were asking? I mean it's not like I'm sitting here wearing a tin-foil hat, dipping bananas in marmalade - it was just a bit of karaoke, just a nice bit of classic Phil!

The thing is, next time someone asks me what I did to my little finger, I might have to be concise with the story and hope they don't ask me any questions. Oh Lord. 

*Virtual Coffee Break

WHEELIE BIN DRAMA

It's proper autumn now that the clocks have gone back. Dark evenings, rain-speckled windows, chilly round the knees - all we need is a frost to really get Hood's Real Autumn going.

Today's no exception. I woke up late and rushed to get the bins out. Every week it seems Monday night passes me by and I have to do the bins on a Tuesday morning. I raced out there, jeans over pyjamas, rumbling the bin towards its row of counterparts. My neighbours are clearly more organised than me.

It was barely a row today though - just a sort of sprawl of wheelie bins. I wondered at first, whether I'd missed the bin-men and they'd just left them higgledy-piggledy. But they don't usually do that; a quick flip of the lids showed black bin bags still stuffed inside, uncollected.

I'm no Columbo but it didn't take long to solve the mystery.

The 3-Car-Neighbours have taken to squeezing all three of their vehicles onto the two vacant parking spaces outside my house. It's a tale for another time about how challenging this is but I'll not go there today. One of the vehicles is a van, and yesterday (much to the annoyance of the lady who can't reverse down her drive), it was straddled half over the parking space, and half over the corner of the drive - exactly where the wheelie bins go every week.

So, I'm assuming that this morning, as the drizzle fell through the cold grey sky, Mr 3-Car-Neighbour couldn't get into his van because his driver door was blocked by a row of his neighbours' wheelie bins! So (I imagine) with a giant huff, he parted them like the Red Sea, climbed in, and drove off.

I closed the lid and headed back inside. There was definitely a part of me that wanted to move every one of those bins into a neat row, actually on the parking space the van had left behind. I didn't do that. I thought it would make me feel mean and vindictive, then guilty, when later I'd look out and watch him unable to park. You can call me old-fashioned if you like but I don't like doing mean things to people, even if they'd be mean to me without batting an eyelid. And if you think about it, these people with their trio of rotating vehicles are always going to ensure that I can't park outside my home.

A while later, I was working away when I happened to see Captain Tom slip out from Number 27. He saw the bins, still spread out like teenagers, so he shuffled through the rain and flipped open one of the lids. He, like me, was greeted with the shiny black of a drizzled bin-bag.

Then, very carefully, he moved every single one of them into single file, until a long row of soggy wheelie bins lined up like soldiers, right over the empty parking space. I chuckled to myself, quite unseen by the Captain of course, I gave him a cheeky salute from behind the net curtains.

THE RETURN OF THE PHISHER FOLK

I’m still being bombarded by “PayPal” who are insistent that there’s a problem with my “account” and that I should log in using the link they’ve sent. No thanks.

How did scammers work in the old days? Did they knock the door and ask for your bank details? Maybe they phoned people up with surveys about the ‘most popular mothers’-maiden-names’ or requested the immediate return of a carrier pigeon with your pin code conveniently wrapped around its leg. No. I expect they just hid in the woods with a mask and a gun, waiting for your coach to rumble on by. It’s the same thing. The personal touch; in-person scamming. Happier times.

These people, the Phisher Folk, are just insidious. They chip away at an inbox, eroding confidence in anything that’s genuine, building algorithms and running them through banks of underground servers. A computer creates a million strings of fake email addresses, giving them identities like “PayPal Services” or “PayPal Support” and then another computer sends the scam to a million other people, hoping that a small proportion of them will panic and click the link. And sadly, they’re right: it’s worth £4 million a year to them.

And it’s every day now! There’s a problem with my ‘account’ that needs ‘emergency attention’ while it’s ‘suspended’ due to ‘suspicious activity’.

Baloney. And the worst of it is that it contributes more and more to this societal disbelief of anything authoritative. We’re being forced into not believing anybody out there - even the genuine people. Everyone, we’re led to believe, has an agenda: get rich, stay famous, keep power, whatever. It’s deeply cynical, like crying wolf in a village where the wolves run the newspapers.

Anyway. That’s all very negative. Phishing’s part of the modern world I guess, whether we like it or not, so it’s best to be smarter, more aware of the devilish tricks that get cleverer with technology. And then of course there’s the beauty of genuineness and sincerity - a thing we’re hard-wired to recognise in each other’s faces, not emails. I like to think I can trust my instinct face-to-face. As the tech makes us more remote, perhaps we should claim back a little more of that awkward human interaction stuff. Life feels simpler somehow if you can make someone smile, after all.

Not that that helps with the likes of Phishers Anonymous Pretending To Be PayPal of course. I just wish they’d stop it.

MOON NEWS PENDING

NASA are about to make an important announcement about the moon apparently. Cue the Internet:

"Is it officially made of cheese then?"

"They found the Clangers?"

"Don't tell me. It's actually much closer than we thought but just a lot smaller..."

Funny.

It's to do with their flying observatory, SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy), which is basically a floating 747. They modified a jumbo jet and they fly it at 40,000 feet, just above the atmosphere. It uses an enormous reflecting telescope to detect infrared radiation far out into space. It's super-cool.

Want to know what I think? I think they've found water - maybe a lot of it, perhaps locked into underground ice reservoirs. The dream for NASA would be to send people up there one day, to build a colony. That could only happen with a large amount of water, and ahead of the nextmost exciting thing (they're sending people to the moon in the next five years), this discovery might be a stepping stone to making a lunar outpost happen.

My brain went into overdrive. I love this kind of thing - it fires my sci-fi synapses. Suddenly I was putting myself in the shoes of fictional Jim Collins, Sector Engineer on the G-ring of Particle Accelerator B in Oceanus Procellarum. One day, just after earthrise, Jim discovers a body in the beam chamber. It's up to Jim to figure out the mystery of who, and how that unfortunate soul came to be there before somehow, slowly the accelerator begins to detoriate, threatening the gravity of the moon! Will he solve the puzzle?

I've no idea. Anyway, it's still pretty exciting to think that they'll be announcing the discovery on Monday. Yes, probably it will be something unquestionably dull to most of the world. Yes, probably a million tweeters will add 'is that it?' to some funny hashtag. Chances are it won't even make it to the news.

It's the kind of thing I like though. So, I'll keep an eye out.

I reckon the murdered person was trying to blackmail someone important who was hiding on the moon because they couldn't remain on Earth. Hmmm. Moustache-twiddling. That's not even the second in line for stories to write though. Oh well. Let's see what NASA says.

THE BEAUTY OF THINGS THAT CHANGE

I went to the park at lunchtime. The grass was covered in fallen leaves, blustering about in the wind. The trees were flame-red, orange and yellow, and where the tree-tunnel had been summer-green just a few weeks ago, weak sunlight now tumbled through a sea of brown and gold leaves.

There were acorns too - millions of them, blown into the corners of the paths and hedgerows. A squirrel darted out from somewhere and disappeared again. A small dog in a bright harness bounded across the grass, barking into the wind.

There are so many reasons to love this time of year! It's so alive, so vibrant with colours and feelings! The sun hangs low and casts golden shadows, and when it's overcast, the clouds race along with the wind and whip the leaves into a frenzy.

I stood under the old oak tree. It's one particular tree that stands on its own. It reminded me of a Chinese pagoda today, glistening gold against the sky. The bark was cold and firm and the shiny acorns crunched underfoot. I closed my eyes, maybe not quite like a Shaolin monk, but hopefully just as focused.

You can't control the seasons; they just happen around you. From the earth to the sky, the change is inevitable - leaves fall, crispy and brown, they mulch into the soil and the soil freezes. Snow covers the bare branches, then one day the nutrients flow up from the same soil, and new life buds into the sunshine. It can't be slowed down or speeded up, it can't be stopped or started; it just happens, old into new, new from the old.

I wondered whether there might be a lesson there for me: something about not trying to control things but just letting them happen, perhaps understanding that the only thing to do is pull a coat on, wrap a scarf around you, and enjoy the beauty of things that change - because it is always there, that beauty I think, if you look for it.

I thrust two hands into my coat pockets and headed for a cup of chamomile tea, some buttered toast and a warm home. Lovely.

A KNOCK AT THE DOOR

It’s late I know, but I’ve been poetry-tweaking. It’s possibly my favourite bit of the process! My idea is that once written, a poem should be left alone, left to brew like a pot of Darjeeling, and then eventually, tweaked. I do it often - change a word, refit the scheme, swap something out for something better. It’s a sort of a polish, where eventually you get a glint of something magical or deep. You can’t do it straight away; you need fresh eyes. You need to let the pot brew.

Anyway. I tweaked this one today. I wanted to create a picture I’d not experienced or known, but could still imagine - I know I run the risk of naivety there. I could tell you what I did imagine in order to write it; what I think is going on, but I think this is one of those ones that ought to be interpreted by you. Sometimes those are the best ideas, left open-ended, ready for the story of how it makes you feel.

It was fast to write (all my poems are preposterously short) but the tweaking of the thing took a whole lot longer. And that, like a fresh cup of well-timed, quickly poured Darjeeling, is absolutely fine with me. 

A Knock At The Door

A cup of tea in a bay window

Beyond the chiming clock

His footsteps up the path, I know:

That breath before the knock

A briefcase under the overcoat

Now over the sudden rain:

A trilby, sternly kept afloat,

Official, black, and plain

The cup and the saucer reunite

With porcelain redoubt

I move from the window’s summer light,

Breathe in and slowly out

The clock still ticks on the mantelpiece

As always, and before

But one world starts and one must cease

Beyond that opened door

EXPONENTIAL REFLECTIONS

I've been off sick today, so it seemed like a good opportunity for some writing and some reflection.

Time goes quickly doesn't it. A friend of mine, 28, remarked recently that it felt as though an accelerator switch gets flicked on when you reach your mid-twenties. Time's no longer a constant but a rapidly shortening wave that pushes you along its crest whether you like surfing it or not.

Meanwhile, I have other friends (my age) whose kids are 'flying the nest'. I thought empty-nest syndrome was a generation away from me, but here it is - old school friends will probably soon start to become grandparents, and I'll be drinking flasks of tea in the park and saying hello to the local dogs.

To be fair, I do that anyway, but it's not as 'old' as it sounds. Unless time has run away and I've not noticed.

My theory is that memory is all about percentages. When you're young, you haven't added a lot to the memory database, so there's plenty of room for all the data to stretch out. Five years of memory is 50% of all the information carried by a ten year old, but it's only 12.5% of that of someone who's 40. We have to work our computers much harder, much faster to remember further back - and so we process the passage of time quicker.

It's also worth saying that there are plenty of people my age who have younger children - tweens and teens mostly, and they're 'enjoying' that particular phase of parenting, probably sometimes with envious eyes of the 'carefree' life of the bachelor. There are also others (though not many) who are like me and live and work alone, day in, day out. Kudos to them.

Speaking of relativistic time contraction, have you noticed how reporters keep saying the virus infection rate is growing 'exponentially'?

This was my next reflection today. 'Exponential' means something specific in physics: typically that growth is happening proportionally to the value. Or if you like, f(x) = a^x, where a is some constant or other. In fact, it's usually a very particular constant that falls out of the unique way that the universe works, but we won't go into that. What I mean is that this situation can't be precisely calculated as classically exponential, and so 'exponential' has become a synonym for sort of 'rapid and out of control' - like a chain reaction in an atom bomb, or rabbits who can't stop reproducing. I don't think that's what's happening out there; it might be difficult, but it still can be controlled! We hope.

It's not what I've got. What I've got is more digestive than respiratory, thankfully. I mused once again though, that if I were a parent, perhaps if I were a single parent, I'd find this bit of that job extremely difficult. How do you keep going when you're ill? How do you bend down to tie up laces, how do you prepare a dinner that makes you want to be sick, how do you put the bins out, how do you deal with a fight or read a bedtime story? How do you even lock the bathroom? While I lie here, moaning like a World War II outpatient, I'm quite grateful that I'm reasonably well wired-up for the situation I find myself in.

And if time really does speed up as you get older, maybe this will pass much faster than I remember. Hope so.

ISOLATION DIARIES PART 59: THE SECOND WAVE

It’s a second wave then. The data is different but the seeping feeling is the same.

In March the virus was spreading its way quite evenly across the country; this time it’s more contained, more focused in the North for some reason. Liverpool’s on lockdown; Manchester, Bolton, Leeds, Burnley, Newcastle, the populous bit of Scotland, Birmingham, Leicester, and large areas of England are in Tier Two. There are, we’re told, currently more people in hospital with Covid than there were in the spring; it just so happens that they’re mostly up north. Which must be ever so worrying if you live there.

A lot of people I know are just bored of talking about it. The wave brings fear, anxiety, worry with it of course, and it might just be that to ride it out we have to do our best to adapt to this brave new world while it’s here. A stiff upper lip won us the war after all.

Others are keen to sound warning bells at the complacent. There was a video that did the rounds a couple of days ago in which a street in Peckham was packed with people who’d emerged from pubs after the 10pm curfew. Some were drunk, few were socially distancing, and there in the centre of the tightly packed crowd, were some young people playing street cricket. If we’re not going to talk about it, how do we prevent that kind of arresting stupidity?

I’m on the side of the talkers. This will get worse, and I think eventually, it will get worse here too, long before it gets better. It’s an unbearable mess: as though a tsunami has come flooding into our land and taken our homes, while our neighbours are still having street parties. ‘It didn’t take my house,’ they say. ‘I’m alright; it’s those poor people in Liverpool who’ve got it bad. Now stick the telly on.’

As grim as this second wave is though, there is also a place for living well and living through it. The war was life-changing for our grandparents and great grandparents: defining their entire worldview for generations - but many of them discovered a way to live it out, to be hopeful for the future, and resilient in the face of death, despite the cold-hearted enemy over the sea. What they clung to was something better, something distant - peace for all of us, whether they made it over the mountain or not. ‘There is a war on you know,’ they’d say to each other, reminding them of the stark reality of its hardship. But largely they all pulled together to win that war and create the world we all grew up in, like green shoots in the rubble of the bomb-damage. They didn’t let fear define them. Neither should we.

SHANKLIN AND HOME

It felt different this morning - autumnal, cold, crisp: the kind of morning when you walked to school and for the first time, you were glad of your coat, even though the sun was bright in the clear blue sky. It definitely didn’t feel like a holiday morning.

Good then perhaps, that this would be the last morning before we went home from this out-of-season ‘summer’ holiday. The shadows fell long from the low sunshine, the air condensed around me in tiny puffs of chilly white fog. We loaded the glinting car and headed, as improbably as ever, off to the beach. It felt wrong somehow.

It’s not our fault that this pandemic shunted our summer holiday, I know. And in terms of consequences, this was a very minor effect on the big wide world. I still felt a bit sad though. We’d made the best of the situation, like British people so often do; it just so happened that October isn’t July, and this was what it was.

We had an eight hour gap between the checkout time and the ferry, so once again we rehashed the blueprint for the day - Shanklin. Close enough to stop anyone worrying about actually missing the boat (never in doubt, but it needed to be addressed anyway), nice enough to give everyone at least a bit of a cheery time on the last day, and varied enough to change the plan based on the ever-shifting weather forecast. And so, as the sun sparkled on the sea and the cold wind hurried the ocean to the shore, we sank our camping chairs into the sand, wrapped ourselves in our jumpers, and told each other that this really was ‘the life’.

Shanklin, just down the road from Sandown, is another delightful seaside place on the island. Like the others, Ventnor and Ryde, the esplanade runs along the shoreline in front of tired hotels and boarded amusement arcades. The paint is chipped, the woodwork blasted by salt and sand, but there’s still a sort of a sunlit charm about Shanklin that erosion and time can’t really shake.

The cliffs are higher here. Vertical walls of red clay soar above those frontward properties, with delightful houses and bungalows perched on top. At some point, probably in the 1960s judging by the design, someone built a ‘cliff lift’ - a square shaft of grubby concrete that rises 150 feet from the esplanade to the top of the cliff and the town centre, for an elevator. It is of course, out of action.

Shanklin is also famous for another feature, one that turned out to be wonderful. From the top, not far from the ‘cliff lift’ a stream of water carves out something of a glacial path through a wooded valley, down to the beach. It’s known as a ‘chine’ and as far as I know is quite a unique thing to the Isle of Wight.

Shanklin Chine was magical. The ferns and bracken and greenery have grown so abundantly in the vertical valley, that following the chine was like stepping into a make-believe fantasy world. Steps and zig-zag paths lead you down the steep cliffside, all to the happy burbling sound of the cool, fresh water tumbling into dark, shady pools, cascading its way to the shore. I’d have barely blinked if fauns and dryads had peeped out from the leaves.

What’s more today, the sun, still bright, painted the trees and translucent leaves above, leaving the gorge in quiet shade as we descended. If you ever go, it is well worth a ramble - and in the summer apparently, they illuminate it all with fairy lanterns in the evenings.

-

So. Anyway. All of that leaves me with only the thought of the things we didn’t do this week. En route to the ferry, we found a viewpoint overlooking Brading Down, the bay and the ocean. A puff of white steam chugged into the air towards Havenstreet.

“Ah!” I snapped my fingers, “We didn’t get to go on the Isle of Wight Steam Railway!”

“I doubt they’d have let you stand on the plate and shovel the coal in,” said my Dad drily, somehow reading my thoughts.

“Always good to leave something for next time,” replied my Mum. The white steam thinned in the air above the hills.

I’d also wanted to walk on Tennyson Down. The Intrepids thought it might not be as appealing an idea for them, so I let the thought of being moody and poetic on a windy hilltop go this time.

And with that, we were on our way to Fishbourne and the ferry. It was nice to see the evening sun sink between the trees. It had altogether gone by the time the ship churned its way into the Solent. All that was left was a burst of colour through the sky, a swirling sunset of purples and blues and deep pinks and reds. The island, stretching out beneath it, looked like a long, narrow cut-out: a silhouette of undulating hills and steeples that gradually faded into the distance. We had had a great time. Out-of-season, sure. Chilly and wet at times, and melancholy too in lots of ways. But there was lots to enjoy, and lots, I reflected, leaning on the aft railings of the ferry, to come back to someday.

IF I WERE YOU

I had a little more time to walk along the seafront tonight, and in the stillness of the evening, an idea for a poem occurred to me and made me chuckle. It’s one of those ones where I don’t feel as though I’ve explored it well enough, but it captures at least something of where I was going.

I thrust my hands into the comfortable pockets of my Fatface jacket and whistled to myself some words I feel like I’ve heard a thousand times. If I were you. Ha! Isn’t that a silly phrase? There’s no physics that will ever let that happen so why are we hypothesising it as a possibility?

If I Were You

If I were you

And you were me

I bet we’d do things

Differently:

I bet the me

That would be you

Outdid the things

That you would do!

And would you do

What I would do?

If you were me

And I were you?

And who would know

That you were me?

If I had your

Identity?

So let’s prefer

To ponder twice

When giving

Unprovoked advice:

I think I like

Consistency,

So stick to you

And I’ll be me

A MUSEUM AND AN UNEXPECTED CHRISTMAS

The Museum of Island History was indeed a short walk from Newport bus station. The lady explained:

“So normally we close at 1, but we always love people coming so please do take as long as you want.”

I checked my phone. 12:52. Probably just as well she had said that. Eight minutes would have been a disappointing time limit.

“Through there and to your right,” she continued beneath her mask, “The dinosaurs are just round the corner.”

I beamed. That could be my new favourite sentence. I’d not been expecting dinosaurs! Of course the island itself has only been an island for around 8,000 years. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose and the Solent valley flooded, separating the island from the mainland. Before then it was all part of a Europe that had once seen dinosaurs just like everywhere else.

There were the bones! A neovenator and an iguanadon! At least part of those animals - a foot and a fractured pelvis. The blurb said they had probably died together and been washed downstream, disconnecting their skeletons until they tumbled into a mudslide. The artist’s impression of the carnivorous neovenator looked angry! Well he would, wouldn’t he?

The rest of The Museum of Island History was just as interesting. Bronze Age artefacts, pottery and coins, island rulers from the past, the geology and history of this ever-sliding landscape. There was Henry Beauchamp, one time ‘king’ of the island under the Westminster fist of Henry VI. Later Queen Victoria’s nephew who’d been its governor. Richard Worsley, a baron who’d collected antiques, and David Seely, last of the governors who handed it back to the crown in 1995.

There were histories of shipwrecks too! The Varsissis which had crashed into the Needles in the 1940s, shedding its cargo of tangerines and Algerian wine, the HMS Pomone, a naval ship from the 1810s that sank when a crew member mistook one lighthouse for another and accidentally ran it aground. It was all very well described.

Newport itself is the county town of the island. It’s not the largest town, but it does serve as something of a provincial capital. We found the square of land where the Queen alighted for her first visit. Ceremonially, and maybe geographically, it’s very much the heart of the island.

The minster rises peacefully above the streets of shops and tea shops. The guildhall too, in its deep grey stone, stands soberly between jolly streets leading down to the quay.

It had stopped raining by the time we came out of the museum so we sat by the river a while, then found a charmingly labelled ‘God’s House of Providence Tea Rooms’.

It irks me that we didn’t ask them in there, just why they were celebrating Christmas. But, joyfully, perhaps unbelievably now that I think about it, they really were! I thought of all the people I know who would have been enraptured, and then of all those who would been outraged. It amused me that that divider might be 50-50.

A gigantic Christmas tree sat in the stairwell. Fairy lights spanned around its green branches, intertwining with the wooden bannisters, spiralling up to a flashing gold star that looked like it was pointing the way to the toilets. A choir of voices were singing ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ somewhere, and halfway up the stairs, a red-faced, plastic Santa beamed a joyless greeting to absolutely nobody. There must have been a reason. We never asked.

And that was the Newport Plan. I took a quick detour to Costa (planned and done before ratification could be discussed), we waited for the bus with two teas and an earl grey, and now we’re pootling back across the middle of the island again, though this time the rain has cleared and there’s a bit more to see.

I’m very tired, even though I’ve done no driving and no navigation-management today. I suggested a plan for tomorrow, our last day on the Isle of Wight, but I don’t think it will get the full-backing of the council. I might float it again later at the inevitable cup-of-tea review of the day.

To be honest though, I might be asleep.

A RATIFIED PLAN

For reasons that we landed on some time ago, we’re currently on a bus heading for Newport. It’s raining, the bus has steamed up, the journey’s inland, but the Intrepids have still made a beeline for the upper deck front seat.

“So,” I proclaimed, clasping my hands together last night, “We get off the bus in Newport; it’s grey and wet, how does the plan unfold from there?”

This is another bit of learning by the way. We need to have articulated, confirmed and ratified a plan, not just thought of it. Then we need to remind ourselves what it is, just in case a modicum of uncertainty has crept in somehow and woven in a crossed wire.

That’s how we’ve wound up bouncing across the Isle of Wight to a major conurbation, with a view to stop in at the Museum of Island History, which is, we’re told, just a short walk from Newport Bus Station. That is okay for a rainy day.

Beyond that, it’ll take some innovation to stay one step ahead of the plan. Hopefully, a lunch stop and a bright idea might help with the next iteration of the blueprint. I also think a little burst of afternoon sunshine would do the world of good, but we’ll see. The bus trundles through dripping trees and green hedges. I will keep you posted...

VENTNOR

The secret-satnav routine might have a flaw. It’s not Google’s fault, and neither is it the fault of the good people of the Ordnance Survey circa 1976 - nope, this one’s human error. By which I mean me, and my flawed emotional ways.

To recap, I’ve been secretly listening to Google directions in my in-ear headphones while my Dad’s been directing from the wisdom of the ancient OS map, opened out like a broadsheet on the back seat.

I had to give in today to an enormous (and unnecessary) diversion because the signposts and the old paper map both suggested a route that was neither the quickest nor easiest. Google knew better but to keep the peace I had to ignore her. I ended up gritting my teeth as we chicaned around the steep, 45-degree hairpin bends of Ventnor.

“It’s okay!” I cheered unconvincingly from the driver’s seat, “I’ve got my Nigel Mansell shoes on today!”

My Dad laughed at the reference anyway. Google whispered of sweet left turns in my ear. I said nothing.

Ventnor is hilly (noted), and also beautiful. We arrived to the sight of a glistening green ocean tipped with white horses. A line of deep brown beach was being kissed by waves behind a smart esplanade of parked cars and railings. The road descended past a winter gardens - ferns and palms, and then ran along between sunlit hotels and the sea. We parked.

Ventnor’s on the South of the Island - facing sort of South East I suppose, towards Normandy. With its southerly latitude and its direction then, it claims to be the sunniest place in Britain, a declaration that might well be true! Today, a day in October, we sat on the beach while the sun played peepo with the clouds. It was lovely. And it was warm, mostly.

It’s not sand though. It’s tiny stones like gravel. Our camping chairs dug into the beach with a soft crunch. Conversations followed about which way the tide was flowing, where the pier used to be, how many waves had to crash in before a big one seeped towards us, and who had been responsible for packing the sweeteners for the flask of tea.

I found a feather and stuck it into the pebbles, half way between us and the edge of the ocean. The sea roared towards it. Once again I found myself captivated by the rhythm: crash, seep, rattle, roll. The white water coursed over the stones towards my feet. I love a beach day.

-

Our next stop was up the hill: the Ventnor Botanic Gardens. Its temperate climate made Ventnor very popular in Victorian times. Like much of the Island, there was a lot of influence from the Royal family and regal styles, that still make it fashionable today. The architecture is a classic example of this. Another was the very Victorian founding, and enjoying, of a nice public gardens.

I described VBG as ‘uplifting’. There’s something about the splash of colours, the neatness and the variety. We saw sunflowers and hotlips, hydrangeas, red hot pokers, penstemons, camellias, bursts of life still sparkling in autumn. There were even bumblebees foraging in the flowers of one rainbow coloured plant.

Also uplifting is the sight of the gigantic trees and foliage! They grow palms and banana trees in Ventnor! There was an archway of intertwining figs and giant fern fronds from a plant that would have swallowed my garden back home! Even the tropical hothouse had lilies, Victoria Lily pads we thought, that were the size of bathtubs.

It was all so delightful! As the evening sun poked through the clouds, I found myself wandering through archways of green and orange and yellow: the colours of autumn.

I liked Ventnor. It had a genteel elegance, an old-fashioned, unhurried sweetness about it. Squirreled away there on the far side of this island, it must have retained that niceness for a hundred and fifty years! It was a winsome town of life and colour, untouched by the pace of modernity and progress. In some ways the epitome of much of this island, cut off from the mainland by the steep hills of Boniface Down on one side and the great green sparkling ocean on the other.

I’d come back to that.

BUTTERFLIES AND PALACES

We came to the Isle of Wight in 1992. My sister was six; I was fourteen.

I remembered today that l had flatly refused to leave the car in 1992, and that my parents took my little sister around Butterfly World while I stayed in the car park.

Silly. Butterfly World’s amazing! I can see why my sister loved it. In the hothouse of a tropical warehouse, hundreds of butterflies flutter around the exotic leaves, nibble on fruit stacks, and land on you while you walk around the carefully organised paths. Some butterflies were gigantic - the size of your hand! Others were tiny and bright and colourful. As a fourteen year old I was indifferent; in this century, I was enthralled by the biology and variety.

Caterpillars turn into soup inside the chrysalis. I mean they literally dissolve into a gloopy mess of proteins before nature reassembles them as butterflies. Of the 24,000 species of Lepidoptera, they all do this - driven by the urge to push through this incredible life cycle from pupae to insect. It’s incredible!

What impulse makes a caterpillar do this? What’s so built in to their innate circuitry that one day they attach themselves to a leaf, spin a membrane, shed their skin and let this otherworldly chemical process take over? As humans we have to learn how to adult, how to react to our tricky adolescence, and how to function as grown-ups, despite our own weird chemical impulses, and definitely not because of them! We need help from adults who can communicate that stuff! Seems butterflies have it sorted - a lesson I might have learned faster as a fourteen year-old, had I not been bored in the car outside Butterfly World in 1992.

Meanwhile, a hundred years before, Queen Victoria was probably gazing out across the terrace at Osborne House, just a few miles up the road, wondering about transitions of her own.

This was our next stop today: the enormous grounds and palazzo of Osborne, East Cowes, in which the Queen and her Prince Consort, Albert, (not to mention their nine children) lived.

The estate is enormous - from the house, we walked down to the beach where Victoria’s bathing machine is still stationed. The walk took half an hour, and the land still stretched as far as we could see in all directions. Cedars and elms and oaks and firs whispered to each other as the late summer breeze rippled through them. You really could imagine the Royal Family and their very prim entourage there.

The house itself is a huge palace, designed by Albert in the Italianate style. The story goes that the view of the Solent reminded him of the Bay of Naples, and inspired the sandstone brick and the Belvedere towers, not to mention the wide Mediterranean terrace. It really is elegant! We were there on a day when the sun continuously fought with the showers, so sometimes the house seemed dark and imposing, other times as brightly lit as a Tuscan monastery or a Spanish villa. My favourite thing though, was of course the way the shadows interplayed and the sun beamed from the rain washed stone, all the brighter with the dark receding clouds behind it. Against the rich green velvet of the grounds and the trees, the autumnal blue of the sea and the glistening white of the wave-tops, it was a delightful landscape.

Inside, the furnishings are no less opulent than you would expect from a royal palace. There are wide hallways with grand staircases, there are drab paintings in faded gold frames, and there are corridors and arches and porticos and alcoves showing off the very finest Victorian idea of art, statues, curios and marble busts.

A living area is resplendent with glittering chandeliers and mirrors. In front of a fireplace, a low-seated gold-upholstered couch in front of a precisely carved mahogany table - two piano stools, deep red fabric in front of a highly varnished piano, embedded with tiny inset paintings and motifs. There are velvet cloths on small round tables, and a much larger dining table set for nine, with a handsome chair at the head, just in front of a splendid bay window of tied-back gold curtains.

This, I noted, felt like it might have been the very beating heart of Victoriana in the middle of the Nineteenth Century: the epicentre for every well-to-do home in the realm, with its miniatures, its marble finish, its ornaments on stands, and its sober-faced portraits. Perhaps it all started here. Perhaps every Victorian home in London wished it were Osborne House.

There was a billiards table - huge, with faded brown baize and an ornately painted frame. I imagined Albert bending tightly over its polished edges, lit by candles, swirled in smoke, as the balls clicked and clacked between the cushions.

It’s always seemed strange to wander around someone’s house without them there. I felt no doubt that Queen Victoria, who’d kept the place precisely as Albert designed it, even after his death, would not be amused at all that it was now open to what, the real public, or that it would be owned and run by an independent organisation, English Heritage. But there it is - her own son, Edward VII hadn’t been quite so attached to Osborne, and had been quick to gift it to the nation in 1902. I guess he saw more shadow than sun.

Anyway. I’ve gone on about it too long. We had a lovely time there dodging the showers and taking in the scale of the place. Somehow my Mum walked over 3km around Osborne House and gardens, which is incredible, but also exhausted her to the point where we were forced to (actually it was my suggestion) get fish and chips on the way back.

So butterflies and palaces. It’s been a grand day of taking in the finery of nature and the ornateness of finery. I am extremely glad that this time, on either occasion, I was wise enough not to insist on staying in the car park.

SEASIDE TOWNS AND MODEL VILLAGES

Sunshine! At least for the morning anyway. The sky was a light, hazy blue colour and there were scattered clouds and a warm sun. I slipped a headphone into my ear, fired up Google Maps, and we set out for Sandown.

This is a bit of learning I’ve picked up over the years: always have the satnav on, but never in a way that’s obviously going to contradict the map. What I mean by that of course is that my Dad sits in the back with the ordnance survey map spread out, following the route inch-by-inch; I have Google Maps directing me silently while I drive. If ever there’s a conflict, I can easily take the most diplomatic route and no-one’s any the wiser. Trust me: too many of our family holidays were tense moments of rustling maps and sighing noises. This works.

Sandown is a classic seaside town - steep streets of old-fashioned shops selling nicknacks and ornaments (mostly all closed in October) parallel to a long promenade along a wide bay of sand, stones and ocean. Large-windowed hotels look out over the view, and an old-fashioned pier extends its way out into the sea.

Piers were the classic Victorian idea for seaside towns vitalised by the new railways. For an old penny you could step out with your intended, treading the boards and promenading over the sea for your entertainment and pleasure. With time they became more and more elaborate, with whole theatres and funfairs and arcades.

Sandown Pier must have been one such a draw. Today, lit by the bright autumn sun, it looked quite tired. The tall shape of a helter-skelter stood at the end of the caged walk, just beyond a large roofed building marked ‘Dodgems’. No-one was out there; it was deserted.

After Sandown, we used the map/google system to drive to a place called Godshill. There was some debate about what’s actually at Godshill but it turns out that it’s a village that runs entirely on toasted tea cakes. That’s what I concluded anyway - there’s a frightening statistical conglomeration of tea shops at Godshill offering every kind of toasted tea cake, scone, cream tea, beverage, cake and biscuit you can imagine.

It’s a chocolate-box village. Thatched roofs, quaint cottages, trailing flowers round short, wooden doors - it is pretty, and old-fashioned. At the top of the hill, an old church overlooks it all very peacefully, very quietly between the trees. It’s delightful.

For me though, the real star of Godshill is not the tea-cake village itself, but rather the village within the village. What I mean by that of course, is the famous model village of the actual village, inside the village.

I like a model village. Simultaneously there’s a cricket match, a dog show, a wedding outside a church that still contains people singing hymns for some reason, biplanes taking off from the local aerodrome, a 1940s ball, spectators peeking out of a hotel window, netball in the local girl’s school, a baker carrying pastries on his head past gardeners arguing with each other, a football match near some scouts setting up wigwams, a train carrying tigers for the local zoo, and some people checking their tiny watches on the platform. A lot goes on in a model village!

I was also intrigued to see one of the freight carriages on the railway included an iguanadon, a triceratops and an ankylosaur. They were really going for that ‘village of yesteryear’ when they thought that one up!

It is so well done though. Bonsai trees complete the picture, neatly crimped and cut, planted between the 1/10 scale buildings. It was actually one of the most delightful things I’ve seen.

“So wait,” said a man behind us on the path, “If this a model village of this village, shouldn’t there be a model of this model village inside the model village of the village?” His girlfriend chuckled while she worked out what he meant. Then she pointed around the path to a part of the model village they hadn’t seen yet. I knew what was coming.

“There it is!” she said, proudly, “And in it, there’s, look there’s...”

I smiled to myself. I’d already seen that the model model village also contained a tiny model village. So there was indeed a model model village in the model of the model village in the model village of the actual village. He told her his head hurt trying to work that out.

Sunshine really did help it all feel a bit brighter today. It’ll continue to be showery I reckon, and sure, on the way back from Godshill, rain scattered across the windscreen. I think it’ll be okay though. Tomorrow the plan is butterflies and palaces: a bit of a difference to old piers and recursive villages. Hopefully a bit more indoorsy also.