Just need to write this down. As part of my quiz revision, I worked out how to remember the 31 areas of the Shipping Forecast in order, and this is what I need.
Shipping Forecast
Very nice sea
For catching fish tonight
Don't forget God holds the deep
When pounding passions bite
Therefore fishing sees -
Love follows, insecure
So return my hallelujahs
By forever finding shore
I’m all kinds of tired at the moment. I think it’s down to late nights and early mornings. That is certainly how I felt as the sunrise lamp glowed in the grey dawn. I threw a corner of the duvet back, and leapt up to silence the digital birdsong that the alarm chirps at us every morning.
The room fell back into silence. My wife was sleeping. I yawned. A quick peek through the Venetian blinds and then it was decision time. Get dressed and start the day? Quietly climb back into the bed and sleep some more?
My body seemed in no doubt about what it wanted. It was as though I hadn’t been flattened out properly, as though I’d been suddenly jolted out of paradise and into the cold. What I needed was warm, horizontal comfort, the smooth folds of the duvet, the soft, sinking pillow and a long, unbroken blink at the ceiling.
I threw on a jumper, pulled on my jeans and slid my feet into a pair of slippers. Then I shuffled myself downstairs through the dark and flicked on the kitchen lights. Before long I was stirring a teaspoon of honey into a mug of boiling water - one for her, and a squelchy teabag for me. There’d be no return to paradise for me this morning.
I suddenly had a Christmassy thought. What if, I wondered, that was something similar to returning from Heaven? Bear with me - the day is good, and so is life. Dreaming is amazing, and so is heaven. If you multiply the goodness over and over and over and over again, what if heaven is so good that it’s like a dream you just never want to wake up from? Even if life is good down here, what if it’s agony by comparison? What if all our loved ones, all our saved ones, are so beautifully wrapped in the dream that they wouldn’t ever really want to come back to the grey Monday morning, not even for a moment. In fact, what if it was so good that to leave it would require strength none of us ever possessed, or a cause so huge that there was no force of love or reason that could make it happen? And what if only One of us, once, ever did it?
Happy Christmas, I smiled, clutching the teaspoon. I was alive to the day now, and the pink sky above the garden would soon burst into sunshine. Some people would probably have thought I’d gone too deep too early. But then others say that kind of thing when it’s too late, or if it’s too Monday, or too Friday, or too weekend for deep thinking. I always wonder what the best time is.
Sammy was stirring but still, asleep. I kissed her on the top of her head as I always do, then left her mug of hot honey-water on top of her ‘how to pray for your husband’ book. Funny, I thought. It’s probably working.
I've been posting short (sometimes silly) 'poems of the day' over on Twitter. I don't know; just thought it would be fun to do. Anyway, today's was a three-tweeter, which kind of means it's a bit more of a poemy poem than usual, if you know what I mean.
You know, I think you can get a bit too technical about poetry. I saw an article analysing The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats, and it went into astonishing detail! The poet had used 'regular iambic pulsation' and 'tetrameters ending in an amphibranch' apparently, which all contribute to the auditory effect of the poetry. Well good. I just like the poem; I've got no idea how it's wired up between its syllables.
I'm not even sure W.B. Yeats knew what he was doing to that level, did he? Were all the great artists obsessively nerdy about precisely what to call their technique and how to use it? Like many a GCSE English student, I can't believe it was anything more than just a skill crafted from a feeling! You're supposed to feel something, to shape some emotion from a lump of clay or a toolbox of words!
Well anyway. Here's a link to The Wild Swans at Coole, which I think is brilliant. And below, far less brilliant, is me dreaming of having my own meadow. You can unwire it if you like. It came out of my heart, which I think, should be exactly the point.
Buttercup Meadow
If I had a buttercup meadow
I’d wait for the springtime to come
Then lie in the grass
As the great billows pass
Through the sky with the fresh yellow sun
I’d dream by the delicate river
And sing in the tickling breeze
That music of old
In green and in gold
That softens the song of the trees
If I had a buttercup meadow
I’d leave all the world to its care
So sweet would it seem
To rest in a dream
For the buttercups wait for me there
I’ve hurt my wrist somehow. I think I must have slept on it funny or something; it’s hard to type.
Little aches and pains like these seem more frequent these days. I don’t like it.
And it’s tempting to peer over your spectacles at a young person, and wisely tell them to ‘enjoy being young, while you can,’ isn’t it?
It doesn’t help though. They look blankly back as if their inner monologue is saying, ‘OK, Grandad’ with a sort of disbelief that it will also happen to them. It’s also a bit awkward for them. How are they supposed to respond to that?
Someone, a Gen Z I supposed, posted a picture of a grey-haired, bespectacled man poking a smartphone with his index finger. He was wearing high-belted jeans and a checkered shirt and his expression was puzzled concentration. The meme (who knows if that’s a millennial term that’s already out of fashion) was: “When old people use smartphones it always looks like they’re trying to defuse a bomb”
I think it’s a bit disrespectful to be honest. Technology moves fast, but the more change you’ve seen, the harder it is to keep up. That’s the system. That’s how eighteen-month-old babies know how to swipe left and pinch to zoom. It’s also why boomers have landlines and why Gen X are all over flipbook. There’s no need to be rude about it.
Anyway, my wrist hurts.
While trying to book a table for tomorrow night (we’re going out for dinner) we were halted by the automated phone system when we tried to ‘Enter the number of guests, using your keypad…’
I pressed 3 very firmly. It bleeped into the system. Pause. Click. Pause…
‘Sorry,’ said a voice, ‘We can only accept a maximum of… zero… guests.’
Interesting system. I wondered what a ‘negative’ guest might look like: a minus diner. Presumably they pay you to eat there? But only as long as you start with dessert and coffee, and end your night with a sober starter.
And there’s no looking at the menu! No! They bring food out to you, and then make you guess what it was afterwards by pointing it out for them on the menu. If you get it right, you’re allowed your coats and they show you the door.
My phone won’t let me enter negative numbers. Otherwise I might have actually booked a table for minus 3 people just to see what happened. As it happens, all three of us currently exceed that maximum number of zero (even on our own), so unfortunately we won’t be getting paid to eat our food backwards tomorrow.
It’s this kind of thing that makes me think the world is much easier to navigate with real people at the end of the telephone. It’s the John Lewis rant all over again, I know, but I don’t care if it makes me sound old-fashioned! I want Charlie (let’s call him that) to flip open a big black book on a wooden lectern (somewhere near the restaurant door), wedge the chunky receiver between his head and his shoulder and tell me down a crackling phone line that ‘everything is going to be okay’ while he scribbles my name and my telephone number next to a big number 3 he’s pencilled in.
“Looking forward to seeing you,” he used to say with a welcome smile.
“Yes us too, thank you, Charlie,” we used to reply without any thought that this routine would ever be any different. Gosh I miss the Charlies.
Anyway, we’re taking Sammy’s aunt out for dinner tomorrow and I’m hoping it will not be a negative experience, even if we have to turn up on the door minus a reservation. I’m pretty sure even the robots don’t much like the idea of a minus 5 star review.
Call it coincidence if you like, but Sammy’s and my birthday are two days apart. We celebrated over the weekend, somehow fitting in an excellent balance: friends, family, down-time, food, and two trips out. It was great!
My favourite thing was stepping on board HMS Victory at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Victory was commissioned in 1765 and was Vice Admiral Nelson’s flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar. On the 21st of October 1805, Nelson fell on the quarterdeck having been shot through the back. There’s a small brass plaque to mark the spot.
But the thing I liked most was the smell. Old wood; the kind you only really get in creaking sixteenth century pubs. It was the smell of the past; the great timbers of oaks, square cut, varnished, joined and bolted into the hull of a truly magnificent ship. Everything about it was evocative, intoxicating. We patrolled along the decks and stood by the gigantic guns that were poked from the square windows. We ran fingers along balustrades and ropes, perhaps just as the admiral had done all those years ago. We stood at the bow, looking out across the city of Portsmouth and we clambered over ropes and barrels, each carefully positioned. And the smell of the past pervaded it all.
I breathed it in. That’s what you’re supposed to do with the past I think; close your eyes and imagine you were there. I could almost hear the cannon fire and the cries from nearby ships. The wind could so easily have been billowing and flapping through the sails under a cool October sky. Well. She has no sails at the moment. No rigging, and only half of two of her three masts while conservation work takes place.
The past eh. The next day, we went to Lacock, the place where photography was invented. There’s a particular window, one that William Fox Talbot captured on film in what’s thought to be the world’s earliest photo. I stood outside it with my iPhone, thinking about silver nitrate and dark rooms and pinhole cameras and how far we’ve all come since the 1830s. The past is just the present really, but sort of sped up.
I think Sammy had a great birthday weekend. I hope she did. It’s sweet that our birthdays are so close together, but I do worry that mine being first, hers could easily be a bit of an anticlimax. I did my best to make the most of her day. I started it by falling out of bed - for some reason she finds things like that extremely funny, especially when they happen to me. It’s probably the memories it makes. I hope so, anyway.
I certainly did enjoy it. It was a great opportunity to make some new traditions, to celebrate in a slightly different way. I really liked it; it felt like the way of things to come. I wonder if Nelson pondered the intersection of past and present and future as he was taken below deck. The story goes that he was still giving instruction about the tiller, while being carried below to the orlop deck. England expected him to do his duty, I suppose, but that certainly showed some dedication. He knew he was dying, he knew that the battle had already been won and the French were rounded. He knew the circumstances that had led him to a musket ball. Yet still, the great admiral remained focused and conscious of the present moment.
I really like that. Especially when birthdays remind you that you’re on deck. I think it’s the best way to be at the intersection. Present.
I got to the office today to find Pedro drinking Christmas tea. Cloves, cinnamon, a little wooded spicy scent, and pine, floating out of the cup into an aroma that’s like being hugged with tinsel.
He gave me some to try. It was awful.
It’s funny how Christmas out-of-season seems so wrong. I think you’re supposed to forget it was Christmas by February, then barely mention it in March while you’re busy concentrating on pancakes and Easter eggs. You get away with bringing it into conversation in the summer, so long as you’re also horrified by shops putting a small selection of ornaments out in the heatwave. It makes it okay to talk about it you’re horrified about it, apparently.
Then again in our house, Whamaggedon might as well be running all year round; my wife loves Christmas. Before the leaves turn we’ll probably have Mary’s Boy Child and ‘a ray of hope’, echoing and glistening in the sunlit kitchen. So I don’t know why I’m complaining about Pedro’s Christmas tea.
It tasted a bit like liquid air freshener. Or the pulp of a pot-pourri. All the zing of a herbal infusion jabbing you in the back of the throat as though you tried to inhale a cinnamon stick. I didn’t say anything. I just thanked Pedro for letting me try some.
I did wonder though, whether I would have liked it much better if it had happened to have been December. Perhaps that warming blend of home comfort would have eased me in like a cosy jumper, or Mario Lanza singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ over the crackle of an open log fire.
I gave it one more sip. I doubt it.
I was ‘in office’ again yesterday - not for any specific reason other than needing to be around people. And by people, it turned out I meant three people, who are all very quiet, and very clever.
I drove this time. It’s not a pleasant commute to Oxford. Ten minutes of motorway, forty minutes or so of the A34 and then needling around petrol stations and confusing road signs. Everyone was in some sort of massive hurry yesterday - a kind of collective grouch settling on the roads, weighing down the tyres, the metal, the concrete, like heavy blocks of despair. I got honked at a few times. I nearly crashed twice. Never mind.
12pm. Pedro, tallest of the three, swung his chair round and whipped off his headphones.
“Shall we do lunch?” he beamed with a hint of Brazilian flare. He’d been working away to himself, tapping and humming for what must have been several hours.
“Sure!” I said. Anand agreed. Moments later, the three of us were striding down the street, in search of the local Lebanese bakery.
“You’ve been here before?” I asked, carefully.
“Oh! Many times!” They said. Anand, the kind of chap for whom exaggeration would be rare, said the food was ‘good’ and that he ‘liked it’ while Pedro enthused about the cuisine of the Levant in general, in a way that I thought was encouraging.
I had never been to a Lebanese bakery before. In my provincial English manner, I sort of expected it to be food I had never had the wit to enjoy - spices and flavours, hot, dry falafel and kebabs - I didn’t think it would be my kind of thing, but I was, I admitted, willing to give it a try.
-
“Yes, what do you want please?” said the gruff olive-skinned man behind the glass counter. He had white hair, a square jaw, and eyes that were like beady black buttons. He wore a green t-shirt, covered by a thick, ivory coloured apron, and he was taking no nonsense.
On Anand’s advice then, I quickly chose the chicken shawarma sandwich. It went under the grill while my two colleagues ordered. Moments later it was wrapped in crisp white paper, stashed inside a coat pocket, and on the way back to the office.
-
Now. I cannot describe the chicken shawarma sandwich. I’ll try, but the problem is that I feel as though my limited vocabulary is buffeting up against thousands of years of evolution - slamming into a recipe so old, so carefully preserved, so extraordinary, that my Twenty First Century waffle-words bounce off it like blunted arrows from a sprawling cedar.
Nevertheless, the sandwich was simply, the BEST sandwich I think I’ve EVER tasted. The chicken, the lemon, the herbs, the hint of spice, the garlic, the sauce, the mystery, the magic! Wrapped up in a pastry so delicate but crunchy - so tasty and so light that it could only have been made out of wonder and of joy.
It was incredible. I thought of the man in the bakery, dolefully dishing out these slices of afterlife, surly and straight, focused and intent, grounded in earth. What was his secret? How could a delight like that have come from such grisly hands? But there it was. The miracle Lebanese sandwich.
Anand was neither impressed nor repelled by my effervescence for the chicken shawarma sandwich. He remained cool and calm about it. Pedro knowingly smiled, as though I’d just caught onto something, and was secretly pleased - or perhaps bemused that (obviously) the food everywhere else in the world is better than English fare and so this discovery was something like a man stepping out of the muddy river onto a frozen bank with no idea that there are such things as warm houses and soup.
I, overawed still, said it was like history had gathered all the ingredients that work together and combined them into one glorious moment. Unlike my more placid friends, it seemed I was prone to hyperbole.
I thought about that sandwich on the way home. If I go back, what would it be like a second time? Was it a one-off? What about the rest of the menu? What of the kibbe or the hommos or the labneh? And isn’t it joyful that there’s a new world of things to try?
The A34 stretched ahead of me. The traffic rushed past at an average that was clearly higher than the speed limit. I didn’t. Everyone’s in such a hurry these days, aren’t they? Everyone trying to get somewhere, trying to get home, trying to get ahead, trying to pursue the next thing. Why so? There’s so much out there, so much in the slowness of time, the collision of ingredients that wisdom passed down through generations! So much joy you could miss if you blink.
I got beeped at the roundabout. I didn’t mind. I’d been daydreaming about a sandwich. A chicken shawarma sandwich.
