My Secret Garden

The Bates Motel

So don't say

That you haven't been warned!

Do you know the story of Orpheus?

He lost his love Eurydice and in his grief visited the Underworld where his beautiful laments melted the heart of even Hades and so he was granted the chance to bring her back from death as long as he didn't look back as he led her away from the land of the shades and back into the light.
But he looked back just once
And she was lost to him for ever.

And sometimes I feel that from eighteen years old I have been the reverse of Orpheus in that I have always looked back and because of that have not lived in full the life that I have had and because I always face towards the past I can never catch a glimpse of the future and what it may bring.

And time is slipping away......

Do you remember the advert for the Nationwide Bank? It was trying to show that while other banks were only after your money and used tricks to entice you, they were a model of integrity that only cared about the financial welfare of their clients. Now apart from the obvious unintentional irony of a bank that only cared about the financial welfare of their clients there was something else about it that stuck in my mind.

And that was that the central character was fat. Do you think that was intentional? Could you have imagined the lines "For brand new customers only." delivered by a slim, young black woman?
What really were the advertisers up too?

I think that they were using a rather nasty little prejudice and one of the few that 'nice people'are allowed to indulge in and that is against the overweight. By making the banker fat we can jump rapidly to a number of conclusions about him and hence the banks that he represents.
We can assume that because he is fat, he is greedy (like the banks he works for) and doesn't look after himself, his personal hygeine is probably suspect too and no doubt he spends too much time on the internet and has no real friends.

Now, I do not want to get all Susie Orsbach over this. Being seriously overweight is a health risk but what concerns me is that here being fat is used not to say that that such people are putting their health at risk but that they are actually carrying out an immoral act! This strikes me as body fascism gone mad and also reminds me of the similar treatment of the depressed nowadays as if feeling bleak and alone is a moral choice and something that we should choose not to embrace rather than a curse that we are born with and struggle with each day.

Now, I guess, from writing this you may assume that I am too somewhat overweight. Actually, I'm a very trim and still athletic 47 year old, my genes have blessed me here as I am sure they have cursed some people who are not so trim but I wouldn't be so quick, as others are, to condemn them. Maybe those that consider the extra pounds of others to be an immoral act should remember a very moral saying (and me an athiest an all!) which goes "Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone."

If elephants never forget,

doesn't that make them an invaluable revision tool

and shouldn't pupils be banned from bringing them into the examination room?

I read an article in the Guardian a few weeks ago that has stuck in my memory.

The husband of an English couple living in one of the Arab states had reported his wife to the police for adultery which is illegal there and so she has been sent to prison and has, obviously, lost all access rights to her children.
Now the author considered that, as do I, appalling but she then went on to develop approvingly other ways in which women, and it was always women, got some form of natural justice when their husbands had played away. You can guess the kinds of things, a variety of forms of criminal damage culminating in Mrs Bobbitt who 'hilariously' cut off her philandering husband's penis.

So, I guess the article was suggesting that instead of exploiting a repressive legal system to send his wife to jail the husband should have carried out a clitorectomy on his wife without anaesthetic.

Which really is appalling.

Well if authors can get writer's blog I can get blogger's block.
But it's made me think,
When I was a kid there was a television program called "Why don't you get off that television set and do something less boring instead?" whose title was not surprisingly shortened to "Why don't you?" The idea being that while you were watching telly you could be making a more genuinely interesting life for yourself and I guess the same sentiment would seem pretty appropriate to blogging too. Seriously, how much time do you spend here? Are there not other things you could do? I, for example have a letter to write to my brother, 'Something Happened' by Joseph Heller to read and I could even begin the long promised campaign to regain some modicum of fitness but instead I am here telling you that I sometimes spend too much time blogging! I think that defines 'irony' don't you?

I worry about blogging too and my motives for doing it. Now at first, I desperately needed some forum in which I could express my thoughts but that time is now past so why carry on? Am I addicted to the attention? I have a partner too who knows about the blog, how does she feel having to read my sad, rather lovingly crafted, little tales? How would I feel if the roles were reversed?
Sometimes blogging reminds me a little of a Philip Larkin poem, in which people live vicariously through the lives of other more 'dangerous' people that they hear about third hand and through doing that never, ever really live themselves. We can encourage them to take the risks that we dare not too without having to heed the consequences of our support. We do not get to meet the grieving spouses and their children, the silent figures stood behind the blogger.
http://www.bryantmcgill.com/World_Poetry/~P/Philip_Larkin/Philip_Larkin_Poetry_Of_Departures.html

He lies asleep in a patch of sunlight. I notice him twitching and wonder whether he is dreaming and if so what he is dreaming of. I hope that he still dreams of his youth and the adventures that he had then. For when he was young he left his home and travelled far afield. No-one knew where he had gone though people claimed to have seen him but there was nothing unique enough about the way that he looked for me to be certain that it was him that they had seen.
At first I called for him and worried that he had been run down, or killed by a fox or even taken by the Beast but after a time I gave up and hoped that he had simply found the wild more to his taste than domesticity.
His sister at first pined and then became used to being the only one for attention to be lavished on. He had always stolen her food anyway and now she could dine at her leisure without having to let him show his dominance by devouring the first mouthfuls.The wild had no charm to her then and never has, unlike him.
It had been a hot Summer, but it broke in a violent thunderstorm. The whole house shook and then the rain cascaded down onto the house and it was as if we were underneath a waterfall. My ex - wife woke me with a start. She told me that there was someone downstairs and I descended the stairs with jelly legs and a beating heart. As I came into the kitchen there was a flash of lightning and the whole room was briefly filled with an intense blue light. And in the corner sat a soaking ginger cat. He looked at me and I looked at him. "Is it you?" I said and his eyes looked briefly puzzled as if he was asking himself the same question.
And the answer to both questions was "Yes!" and I picked him up and danced for joy.
At first, his sister seemed rather put out at having to share her food again but with time they found an accomodation which meant of course that he gets first helpings and she gets the rest.

He is old now and sleeps such a lot but I hope that when he dreams he dreams of the freedom he had, the taste of wild rabbit and the fields and streams below the open Moorland and when it is his time to go I will take him back there and bury him there underneath the warm turf of the place that I love the most on earth and the place that was for him the setting of his own personal feline Odyssey. For me, as you know, there is no after life for humans let alone cats but there seems something somehow fitting that he should finally come to rest there, as I hope, will I.

My son, a teenager in shades, hurtles along the gravel of the drive and skids to a halt.
"Dad, I've got something to show you." He says.
I leave the lamb cooking on the barbecue and go with him. he cycles slowly as I walk beside him and we chat easily about rugby, guitars and the time that my best friend and I celebrated finishing our 'O' Levels by going on an eighty mile road trip on our bikes.
We are just outside the village and he points at the sky,
"Look Dad, isn't the sunset great!"

He has given me such a gift before. On our very last family holiday together he and I have stayed behind while my ex - wife and daughters have gone to listen to some traditional music being played at a local pub. I think that day the weather had been awful but all of a sudden, as it can in the Hebrides, it had broken while he was outside playing. Again he had ran in and again he had insisted that I followed him but then I had a camera to capture it with.

In the back garden of the semi detatched house in which I grew up was a small pond and at each end was a concrete slab, around the pond wound a path which led up by the lawn to the extension at the back of the house.
But this was not how it appeared to me as a child, for in my eyes then the lawn was the endless steppes of the East from which wild raiding parties of mounted barbarians would emerge to capture women and children and lead them off into slavery. The path was,of course, a road built by a powerful Empire for its disciplined armour clad soldiers to march along, and the pond, my favourite place, was an inland sea somewhat like the Black Sea and the concrete slabs,two cities like Colchis and Troy, great rivals almost perpetually at war. A war that constantly ebbed and flowed, fought out by their fleets during the Summer months but in Winter the soldiers would do battle on the thick ice. The weapons of their greatest foes were not the only threat that these people faced as within the water lived gigantic, golden sea creatures that could surface beneath the boats and capsize them before devouring the luckless mariners alive. To kill one of these golden sea creatures was a feat deserving of great praise and honours would be bestowed upon anyone so brave who achieved that. Perhaps the highest honour would be the hand of one of the King's daughters, a proud and haughty, dark skinned beauty who would need to be tamed.

So, I made a whole imaginary world, a mountain out of a molehill with the aid of my action men and airfix soldiers whose dismembered parts would be found for long years after I had grown up as my parents hoed and dug their vegetable patch which adjoined the pond.

And I wonder whether any of you had similar worlds in which you would escape. If so, what were they like and if you close your eyes can you picture them now?

Is it just me or are the wild flowers particularly beautiful this year?
Looking from my window here I can see the field opposite bathed in early morning light like a green, shallow sea with its own archipeligo of islands each made up of intensely coloured buttercups.
And the fields near where I grew up in Surrey were even more remarkable, oceans of bright yellow with cattle and horses wading through them feasting on sunshine.

And its not just the buttercups, we have had wonderful displays of bluebells too and I came upon a wood on the Moor by pure chance whose floor was just the deepest blue and it brought back a memory of leaving a bunch of bluebells tied to the entrance of a wood to mark where my first date was going to be. I was, at most eleven years old, and I can remember planning with a friend a ranking of what you might possibly get up to with a girl on a date and can you guess what was at the very top, our equivalent of going 'all the way'?

Taking her to the cinema!

Our naivete didn't prevent us from lots of kissing, we called it snogging, and leaving our own crop circles while we rolled in the hay together.