My Secret Garden

The house is empty now apart from the room next door which is full of cardboard boxes, bin bags and piles of plates, cutlery and books ready for the removal firm to pack tomorrow. It feels strange to be going but thankfully it is nothing like the pain of last time as then I was saying goodbye to the home that I had loved and now I am just looking forward to having somewhere which is my own again.
Packing is always poignant because you have constant reminders of the past and we have been pretty ruthless this time so treasured possessions from the past have ended up going on their final journey to the charity shop or the dump which brought back memories of

Saddest of all for me was disposing of the diorama that the children and I had made five years ago for my son to play with his Lord of the Rings figures on. He is no longer a boy anymore and this was a sharp reminder of this.

When I left Cardinham I felt that the whole house was alive with the ghosts of my past but this place does not feel as haunted, it has been in many ways a waiting room, the Wood between Worlds of Narnia with me preparing to begin life properly again though there has been much happiness here too. I think, for example, of my lover and her preparing a Burns Night supper for me when we had not long met and her joy as she danced for me.

So raise a glass for me tonight and wish me well for in two days I will be gone from here.

I looked back to the earliest days of my blog today and what a different world it described, a world that I barely recognise now. In fact, that there was once a time when I was married and would come home to a family seems within my mind at least just a story that I once heard and not something that was ever real.
http://sulkandpout.blog.co.uk/2006/04/01/my_son~695121/
It seems almost impossible to grasp that each night for seventeen years I would sleep with someone who now only ever joins me in my dreams as a figure to argue and fight with. How hard to imagine that there was once a time when I felt that she would be my companion until death.

Other Octobers drift into my mind, two years ago I was leaving behind the home that I loved, as I am preparing to move on from the big pink elephant that I rent now. But what a change, then I was grief stricken http://sulkandpout.blog.co.uk/2007/10/07/this_is_the_last~3100286/
and now I am simply glad to move on before this house fall in on top of me! I'm looking forward to having a garden that I can tend do and simply being able to declare that somewhere is my home rather than feeling that I am in a waiting room waiting.

Further back still and I am a child in a balaclava gathering chestnuts on Tilburstow Hill with my mother who is ten years younger than I am now, I am a teenager being sick at my best friend's party having drunk too much whisky, I am getting married and I have no-one to talk too about my worries, I am scoring my first try for the rugby club, I am breaking someones heart, all of them somehow me though each feels so different and so far away.

Time sweeps by, never stopping, always onward like some incurable optimist looking to the next challenge but I have always stopped and looked back though the tide always pulls in the opposite direction.

I know some of you visit the Secret Garden quite often but maybe for somebody today this will be there first time.
Whichever one you are, step through the wrought iron gate that marks the entrance, or if you are brave the scale the ivy covered red brick walls and follow the path through the autumnal trees to the jetty on the ornamental lake. At the jetty step into the boat and row across the now cold and leaf strewn waters of the lake to the island in the middle. Again, if you are brave stroke the giant golden carp that will breach the surface around you but take care as some of the creatures that live within this still bowl are not so benevelent. Moor the boat and take the stone steps up to the folly. The folly is a tall tower made just high enough for the island to be a mountain. Within the tower take the wooden staircase to the top.At the top is a room with one ornate wooden chest within it.
Open the chest and leave something behind that is personal to you and a note to say why you have left it.
The Garden will now always have something of you within it.

I got to thinking about what I would do if I decided to quit blogging. Some people simply delete their blogs entirely and all their own creativity, over months and even years, is sucked into a black hole alongside the thoughts of everyone who ever commented on their blog. It as if they never existed. Now I understand people's reasons for doing this, it could be that what you had written was something that could destroy a relationship or your career and guess under those circumstances I would probably think it a wise move.

Ohter people delete their blog because they no longer like the me that it represents. They are angry and want a new me to replace it with, as if they can only be reborn as a phoenix from the ashes of what was. Now I understand that also because I have done similar things with photographs and then spent years regretting the fact that I have very few photographs of me and my first girlfriend.

So what of my own blog if I cease to write. I think I would leave it be in cyberspace. Like a small star at the end of its life cooling down until it is just a black dwarf, an ember in the sky, a reminder of what once was. My blog after all is my own partial story of my life and so I have never deleted anything because it is a record of what I felt at that time and I find it quite comforting that someone sometime in the future will enter certain keywords into the search engines of that day and chance upon my life and my thoughts and perhaps it will entertain them or sadden them but in some way I, even if from beyond the grave, my influence will still be there albeit in the smallest of ways.

And if she still chances by my blog good luck to Anna ABE unlimited whose blog disappearing prompted this post. She wrote many beautiful things and always took the trouble to comment in full on my own and always corteously even when we disagreed strongly. I know she was troubled and I hope ending her blog was not in part caused by that.

I was listening to 'The News Quiz' on friday and one of the questions concerned the two police women who were told by OFSTED that they coouldn't look after each others children on a recipricol relationship because they would be 'benefitting' from it.
But for once I'm not going to bang on about OFSTED but instead the reactions of the panellists to an item about the police.
Mark Steel proceeded to launch into a tirade about the police which seemed interminable, though probably lasted only a minute and a half and included the word useless at least twelve times. Apparently nowhere else are there such useless public servants with such a low success rate, though perhaps Mark is missing the point here as criminals don't want to get caught making them substantially different to you and I when we go to the Doctors with the symptoms of Swine Flu.
Taking on the baton from Mark was Sue Perkins who referred 'hilariously' to the two women police officers as 'Filthesses'(Female version of filth Tee Hee). Now Sue clearly considers herself to be edgy and dangerous for making such a comment but to me she was playing to the prejudices of her audience in a way that Tarby and Bruce would have been proud of back in the Nineteen Seventies but sadly she is, if that's possible, even less funny than they were.

And I wondered if it would be possible to refer to any other public servant and compare them literally to dirt? Personally, if I had been a copper on duty at Broadcasting House that night I would have let the local criminal underworld know that the car park would be fair game for the next half hour and turn a very blind eye and deaf ear to the cries for help from the braying multitude who considered me and my colleagues so useless.

Does Mark Steel really consider that the police are so useless. For me the Left in this country consider them rather as the public treats the Tommies in the Kipling poem

And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out the brute,
but it's saviour of this country when the guns begin to shoot.

Now I am not naive enough to believe that the police are all noble and utterly public spirited but I do believe that they do an incredibly tough job that I would not wish to do and an entirely necessary one as this quote from Steven Pinker reveals.

As a young teenager in proudly peacable Canada during the romantic 1960's, i was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parent's argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8.00 a.m on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal Police went on strike. By 11.20 a.m the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting .... By the end of the day six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty car loads of store front glass had been broken and three million dollars in property damage has been inflicted before city authorities had to call in the army and , of course, the Mounties to restore order.This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters

When I was a little boy I had a friend who I would play with and one of our favourite games was to explore his attic. First we'd make sure that all the lights were off and then armed only with a torch we'd climb from his landing into the attic using a knotted piece of rope. Once in the attic we would crawl through the junk and boxes squeezing our bodies through tiny cracks and then through the hardboard partition to the rafters. At times we would switch the torch off and sit in darkness the only sound being the water in the cold water tank and the sounds of our own heartbeats and breathing . My friend didn't seem to possess much of an imagination but for me I would make up endless stories about where we were and why we were there and what might happen if we were caught!

So let's play now, imagine we are in the attic together.

You find a box full of letters, who are they from and why were they sent?

In an old trunk is a photograph. Who is it of? How is that person connected to you?

If you were playing with me what would the attic be in your imagination? Who would you be? Who would I be?

Who might be trying to catch you? What would happen if they did? Do you secretly want to be captured?

In the corner is a favourite childhood toy that you thought had been long lost. What is it?

You find a small door in the end of the attic. Behind the door is a passage. Where does the passage lead?

You hear a voice calling you home for tea. Do you ignore it and pretend you never heard it or do you leave the attic?

It's your turn to pick a place to play with me. Where would it be?

This is my first weekend on my own for some time so as I have been rather neglectful of my photography and I thought I would return to a beach on the North Cornish Coast that I particularly love and see if I could recapture some of my creative spirit.
The beach is called The Strangles and is found below Cornwall's highest cliffs though they are a strange tumbled down sort of cliff made from loose rock, great slabs of which fracture and slide into the sea. Within the rocks hardy plants like heathers and brambles grow unaware that at any moment they could be pitched downhill as the earth that they are rooted in subsides.
At low tide there is a large expanse of sand but it is not a beach to swim at as the currents are dangerous and the waves often huge, but it is a special place and because of the long walk in it is one that you can often have to yourself.
But yesterday, I was somewhat shocked that there were five people also there and three of them were naked!
At first I could not get my eye in for photography, I always say to myself that today 'I cannot see' but I've been doing this long enough to just be patient and wait for the picture to just tap me on my shoulder and say 'look I'm here' so instead I sat on a large slab of slate and read a book about Annie Darwin while intermittanly checking the vast waves that were crashing closer and closer to where I sat. Eventually, the tide forced me to retreat and then in the corner of my eye I caught two figures tentatively picking their way along the rocks on the far beach already almost cut off by the surging waves. Now I swim like a brick and the nearest life belt is 200 feet up the cliff (with a nice little sign that tells you that in an emergency the nearest phone is a mile and a half away!) but even so I began to get anxious for them and set off towards them picking my way across the rocks with a real sense of urgency.
When I got to the far end of the beach I noticed that they were two older men, one about ten years older than me and the other in his, I guess late seventies. I asked if they were ok and they told me they were fine so I walked back with them to the steps up the cliff making polite conversation as you do at which point the younger of the two set off up the cliff leaving his older companion behind who continued to engage me in conversation. After a few minutes I start to feel that the conversation is taking a rather strange turn which is not helped by him producing a plastic bag containing photographs of him with not a stitch of clothing taken, apparently, by a member of the House of Lords!
And I wonder how it is always me that gets into these sort of situations when I have just tried to be helpful? Fortunately, I have a great conversation stopper as I have photography of my own to do and I head back onto the far shore of the beach with the thundering sound of the waves echoing of the cliffs to accompany me.

And now, I get my eye in and picture begin to reveal themselves as the sun falls and becomes golden revealing the texture and form of the rocks and the sea that is crashing against them. I am alone now on the beach and this is how I work best, I cannot 'see' when I have the distractions of company but need to lose myself in where I am and return to the child who would have been terrified and awe struck to be here.

But actually, I am not alone as just beyond the breakers I have been joined by two large grey seals and you know what I am always thrilled by the sight of large, wild creatures. The sun now is almost setting and reaches a bank of clouds on the horizon, the warm glow of its light is replaced by a cold blue light that suits the dark, wet slate of the shingle. One more picture as the waves crash in and recede leaving trails of foam and then its time to pack up and begin the steep climb back up the cliff.

PS The photographs described may in fact be pants as they were taken on slide film and will have to go away for processing. If they are any good they will be uploaded here.

Thank you to everyone who has written to support me in recent weeks. I promise I will reply to all of you at the weekend as each of you deserves a full reply to your kind and thoughtful comments which I have so appreciated receiving.

I hope you don't mind but I am going to let you read something that one of my ex pupils from over twenty years ago wrote for me when he heard about what had been happening to me in the last few weeks. I have kept it with me and during a particularly awful meeting yesterday I had it in front of me to read when I felt particularly bleak.

tim,
it was lovely to see you even if you havent aged one bloody bit, and it was lovely to meet ______ (excuse spelling) what a lovely lady and you make a lovely couple.
BUT
i wanted to let you know what a fantastic not only person i think you are but as a teacher and as a human being you inspired me to give a shit at a time when i didnt and the passion you share for things is infectious you tought not only science photography and guitar!! you tought life skills love art passion and even thou i might not be the most academic person youve ever had the misfortune of teaching i wanted to tell you what you mean to me and so many others. The thought of you not teaching anymore and inspiring other kids, like you have done for me is terrifying. school isnt all about exams its not all about having fun its the starting block for life i just hope when rebecca and benjamin are older they are lucky enough to find a teacher who they admire respect no fuck it love as much as i do you(no i dont want a date and its not a cheesy chat up) i just thought you should know that with out you and your wisedom my life would have been very different and i am honoured and priveliged to call you a friend.
love
stewart
(sharon taught me fuck all in english no spelling no punctuation!!!!! lol)

You may have noticed that I have changed my main picture from Forest Palace to one taken from one of my favourite stories of the ones that I read to my children and that is, 'The Monster Bed'. Basically, it is the tale of Dennis the Monster who lives in a cave in a dark, scary wood and who is terrified of humans who his Mother reassures him don't exist. Eventually Dennis comes face to face with a boy who is equally terrified of monsters as Dennis is of humans. The story is beautifully illustrated and as it is in rhyme I can still recite whole chunks by rote much to my very grown up now children's amusement.

I also remembered the last story that I read aloud to my son and that is Tolkein's 'Smith of Wooton Major'. Now a lot of people find Tolkein a little ponderous but this is delightfully written and understated, I won't describe the plot in detail but in brief concerns a mortal man who can vist when he wishes to the land of Faery and how eventually he has to relinquish his gift and pass it on to another child. We also discover that perhaps the King of Faery lives amongst us in a guise that would cause most people to pass him by.

And I was wondering which children's story that you most love reading to your children and why you hold it in such affection?

Our rabbit!
But let me start at the beginning.
My son and I decided to let Fluffy,(look I didn't name him I just inherited him!) have the run around the whole garden as we are likely to be moving soon and wherever we go there won't be as big a field for him stretch his paws in. He sets off across the grass at a canter and then skips in mid air before haring (can rabbits hare?) in a completely different direction. There are two entrances he can wriggle through and we have to herd him away from them but he is very smart and teases us by making little feints towards them before dashing off again. He hasn't had so much fun since we lived in Cardinham and he and his partner in crime Blackjack used to have the run of our garden there terrorising our cats if they ventured near them and 'innocently' escaping to our next door neighbours and their prized flowers and vegetables!

Fluffy makes a rush for the entrance and escape, like a good rugby winger he fixes me before executing a series of sidesteps that Shane Williams would be proud of. I turn swiftly, I will not be beaten by him, but he has planned ahead well as I trip over a grassy bank and fall headfirst into our pond!

So Dear readers do not be deceived by your rabbit, he may be called Fluffy but in reality he is a most cunning beast that knows your measure.

Excuse me must go casserole au lapin to prepare.....