Brave Companion of the Road

Brooke and I have been together for fourteen years. She has been at my side as youth and vigour have slowly failed us both, and I have nursed her through the ailments that inevitably plague a classy French dame.

After all the years, the dents and the damage, the four times around the earth we have driven together, the overloaded trips to the tip which broke my back and her suspension, she is still willing and eager. Somehow there is no group of people too large, no burden too great for her to carry.

We know the end is nigh, we only travel a few miles together now at the weekends running errands and ferrying the kids. She starts up first time, every time. In deference to the spiders that live in her wing mirrors we don’t drive too fast anymore, but we remember all the speeding tickets.

She’s quite partial to Celine Dion, so for her sake when we are alone together I’ll belt out It’s All Coming Back To Me Now at the top of my lungs and she’ll accompany me with squeaky springs.

As for the name, well what else would you call a Blue Laguna?

Feeling My Way

Another from Leeds Castle: a detail from the gatehouse door.

Studded Door

and then in the cellar there were these, to which also put me in mind of “A Sowing of Seeds”

Recall the ancient wine presses
Stacked up against the wall
My fingers in the ruby grain
Stained by centuries of juice and strain

Ruswa Fatehpuri

although of course a barrel is not a wine press, there was a congruity to the image.

Marriage Material

Another hit for the law of unintended consequences. A dear friend, expecting to give my fragile ego a little massage, sent me a link to this article on Why Introvert Men Make Better Husbands. Regular followers will know I’m clinging onto the far edge of the introvert spectrum with my fingernails, so at first sight it would seem a playful and generous gift of reading.

It landed just in time to give me some material for the prompt on false assumptions, although this time not mine!

As well as being an introvert I am someone who gets infuriated by lazy thinking and sloppy writing. The article was so poor I began to think it might be trolling. I’ll deconstruct it point by point below, but overall it dwelt on the fantasy that all introverted men are some kind of Heathcliff / Mr Darcy amalgam: brooding, thoughtful, with deep currents of passion and intensity. The author (a man) was probably squirming in his seat in his self-projection as a dark haired, lantern jawed hero striding across the desolate moors while ladies in tight corsets mainline smelling salts and get RSI from fanning themselves.

It shouldn’t be worth my time or yours to take apart, but this kind of simplification and trivialization of personality types has consequences. There are implications for those of us who do not comply with norms, and do not fall into the soap opera stereotypes of easy relationships and instant friendships. Everyone needs to find their own accommodation with the stresses of expectation, and the requirements of their own preferences and personal strength and resilience.

The article also has a lazy interpretation of introversion. An introvert can with some concentration be outgoing, meet new people, show an interest in their lives, but at a cost of personal space and energy that will then require time in recovery. This is most likely to be alone. The point is not to look for the introvert dying of consumption in a lonely garret, but in the person who periodically needs to check out from company to recharge their batteries. And even that is a gross simplification. Introversion/ Extroversion are a range and continuum.

So now I get to indulge myself with some venting. Here are the supposed reasons introverts make better husbands:

He’ll know himself better than most men you’ve dated

Not necessarily. To be extrovert is not to lack self-awareness, and just because the introvert spends time inside themselves does not mean they find answers. Being locked in an echo chamber of thinking, without objective outside input is probably more dangerous, and leads to more self-doubt and unproductive worry, than being in an environment which provides feedback and grounding.

Because he spends more time thinking, he’ll likely spend more time thinking about you.

Possibly. But there is no guarantee the thoughts are productive and positive, they may well be a cycle of recrimination and examination that destroy a relationship rather than strengthen it.

He’s less likely to cheat on you

The logic presented here is laughable. Introverts meet fewer people, and therefore the chances of infidelity are lower. In fact introverts may also form deeper bonds with the few people they choose to get close to, so ask yourself this: in the wrong headed world of this article, would you rather have an extrovert husband with lots of friends, but mostly at a superficial level, or an introvert husband who forms a few very intense friendships?

If he does cheat on you then at least you know how he feels about you.

Only on the premise that he knows how he feels about himself, which was debunked in (1). The article presumes introverts are infallible.

They’re better in bed

By this stage I was convinced this was trolling. The logic is that introverts think more, and therefore think about sex more, and are therefore better at it. I think about Motorsport a lot but I can’t drive a F1 car.

They’re usually more reliable and less self-absorbed.

This is in open contradiction to saying introverts think more and spend time alone. Spending time in solitude and self reflection is the most frequent reason why I am late for appointments. That and choosing a route that means I won’t meet anyone I know and be forced to have a conversation.

When an introvert enters a relationship, it’s because he believes he needs the relationship

Sigh. No. Not infallible. We get spoofed into wrong relationships just like anyone else, we misread signs (our own and those given by others) we make false assumptions, we have irrational responses. Lordy this man is an idiot.

They make better fathers

No. No. No. How crass a generalization is this? Every child and every parenting relationship is unique. My kids crave my attention when I get home from work, and I need time alone to reset from being working guy to dad. That first half hour home is a torture for everyone because I want to be the person they can jump on, and yet I need my space first. How does that make me a better father than the guy who can be present for his kids instantly? This point is offensively wrong.

And so we find ourselves back at the point of unintended consequences. The article was not the gentle ego massage my friend intended, it was the gift of incitement and inspiration for a writer whose blog has been sadly neglected for a while, and needed some new content. Bravo and thank you, a gift of incomparable value.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Zigzag

I wasn’t going to do this week’s challenge, and then I encountered this at Leeds castle:

and then suddenly I was seeing zigzags everywhere, such as this view from the centre of the maze:

The Snap of Leather on Willow

Summer means the cricket season, and although my body can no longer stand up to the rigours of playing I do still love to watch the game. On Thursday I was lucky enough to watch a NatWest T20 Blast game from the pavilion at Lord’s – the home of cricket. Both Middlesex and Surrey brought big international or ex international names to the fray, and the game went down to the last ball.

Eoin Morgan being bowled off a nick (grateful to good fortune that I got the bails flying up)

Eoin Morgan

Azhar Mahmood bowling (very tidily as it happened)

Azhar Mahmood

Tillakaratne Dilshan who didn’t trouble the scorers with his batting, but also bowled a tidy spell

Tillakaratne Dilshan

I also caught the moment he nicked the ball behind:

KP was there too, and with Alistair Cook’s woes who knows what KPs international future may be; here being bowled to by another ex International player – Stephen Finn

Australian Dan Christian is Middlesex’s overseas player this year:

Of course the star of the show was Lord’s itself:

Reviving Relics

London is a city that is continuously evolving, I love seeing old buildings being brought back into use, and also the glimpses of the past that remain painted on odd corners.

I used to look across the river everyday at Bankside Power Station while I was at school, it was a desolate sight. It is now the Tate Modern, and people throng the tree lined walkways around it.

Another view of this landmark from Travel with Intent here.

And if you wander round the slowly gentrifying back streets of Southwark, you can still see the signs of its previous lives.

2012 and all that

St David’s day tends to pass unremarked in England. Perhaps because England has had more vested in the concept of Union than the other constituents, the concept of Englishness has subordinated itself to Britishness, and there is no British holiday or date celebrating the United Kingdom entire.

I’ve looked on with curiosity at the energy that other people put into their national days. It does not sit well with a certain natural reserve, and the frequent tub thumping jingoism is actually distasteful. Here we celebrate the monarchy, and all the goes with it, as long as they sit quietly in their corner until called upon to open a hospital, and we celebrate our sporting successes, but those only because they are rare and we know not to be repeated within living memory.

All that changed in 2012 largely thanks to a man born on these shores of Irish parents. Until the opening ceremony of the Olympics most Britons, like me, were sceptical. There was no way we could put on a show like Beijing. It would be a limp, cucumber sandwich of an event. And then that show happened. Sometimes a little bonkers, sometimes a little macabre, but overwhelmingly just the right tone: warm but not effusive, celebratory but with dignity, honouring the strength that has been tempered through an inclusive and accepting culture. And the Queen parachuted in with Jame Bond. How fucking cool was that?

Suddenly we had a language with which to express pride, in our way, not with tickertape parades and fireworks, but with a modest opening of arms and remembrance of what it means to welcome.

We’re not the same since you hung up that mirror Danny Boyle.

We still don’t have a national day for the United Kingdom, because we don’t need one, the rich tapestry of colours and creeds get to do their own thing, in their own way, and frankly everybody is fine with that.

End

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Clair by Ruswa Fatehpuri

Clair

by Ruswa Fatehpuri

We make a seamless join
From knee to hip, shoulder, armpit
Your fragrant herbal hair
Against my cradling arm
A buttress arch reaching
To clasp a window frame
As we seek warmth and comfort
Upon the chapel pew

A romance in G minor
Orchestra chasing violin
In acrobatic leaps from wall to wall
Flirtation, conversation
Without words. Illuminating
Thoughts unspoken

Light scatters on the shadows
Where the buttress meets the window
Where the music lifts and leaps
Your knee. Your crossed, your uncrossed knee.
Your hand, my hand, our ungloved hands
The dancing strings;
The ringing chapel walls

A line where our lives meet;
An unforgiving pew
Your ear upon my heart
Tympanic, inarticulate.
The join, the perpendicular,
The buttress to the window frame.
Shadows reclaim the corners.
An exchange of warmth unvoiced

You can find more of Ruswa Fatehpuri here

If you are interested in my storytelling look here

More memories from college collated here

You May Be Shakespeare But…

“You may be Shakespeare, but get yourself a job first.”

My mother’s advice has guided and bounded my life since I first told her I wanted to write for a living at the age of twelve. The advice was born out of her own experience, the curious mix of aristocratic and working class sensibility with which she was imbued.

During my childhood we were proudly, honourably working class folk. My mother had a clerical job in a bank, and before that had worked in a factory, a green grocer’s stall and a dry cleaner’s shop. In contrast my mother was born in a palace in India, which at the time still retained some vestiges of the wealth and influence of her family’s glory days.

She watched as the diversion of wealth: the fascination with language and poetry and lifetimes spent indulging it, was retained long after the wealth had gone. She saw indolence and inaction fritter away the estates and her uncle fighting a desperate, lone rearguard action to slow the inevitable decline, while the rest of the family looked on unwilling to believe that what had taken centuries to build could be so rapidly lost.

More of decline and fall, and indeed that ancient heyday in other posts. Suffice it to say that my mother’s sentiment was borne out of watching orchards being sold off while her elders discussed Persian poetry, and her own experience of knowing what it took to secure financial stability.

I started full time employment at the age of 21, and worked until I was 40. In between my brother and I managed to convince our mother that she should retire, despite her protestations. Marriage, house, children followed in that order, and then I hit the age milestone and my elder daughter said “We only see you when you are tired.”

I’m not sure I can explain how strongly that statement affected me. As a child I would wait by the window of our terraced house and watch out for my mother coming home from work. We forced her to retire so she could enjoy the livelihood she had worked so hard to secure. Yet here, with the benefit of that security all my daughter would take away about me from her formative years was seeing a tired man at the end of the working day.

It made me realise I wanted to be more than the breadwinner, I wanted to spend time being a father, I still wanted to be a writer, I wanted to build a treehouse for my kids to play in.

I stopped work in June of that year with modest savings and no plan for how the world would work in the time to follow, other than trusting in my experience.

I took over the school run in the mornings to give my wife a break from the routine, and spend those precious chatty morning minutes with the kids. I’d frequently do the pick up as well, walking home with each daughter holding a hand and listening to the stories of their days.

I built a treehouse. It’s actually a platform on stilts because the pear tree in the garden might not be strong enough. It took weeks, I had no plans, no tutorials other than the DIYing and carpentry I had picked up over the years, and a whole load of ambition.

I wrote two books. I have given away more copies than I have sold, but I wrote them, they exist. My name is on more than just a few emails on an office server somewhere.

And things worked out, I’m back in a job, and if money is a little tighter than it was before, at least there is something to show for the time I took off.

If that is a little smug, a little not about the regret of not doing, but the pleasure of finally doing it, well I’ll say I earned it. And as the royalty cheques haven’t been rolling in, I’m glad I did it Mum’s way.

Contrast and Glass

I took my camera gear into my office yesterday hoping to do some shots across London but the engineers weren’t available to get me onto the gantry. On the plus side I got to play tourist in my home town and snap some contrasts on my walk through the City and West End on the way home.

Sometimes it would be rude to refuse the shot just because it is obvious.

The walk started with this near St Paul’s, it pits earthly love in contrast with heavenly love. I’m now toying with this image as an alternative cover for Older Gods.

Young Love

Ali Abbas

The Literary, the Photography and the Joinery

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