This event called life.

  

One of the problems we face in the start of a new year is the knowledge that we have, in some ways to start again to re-engage with what we were doing last year as if it were new. The break from one year to the next is not significant in terms of time but it is in terms of the physiology that keeps us going doing the things which can seem alien.
Were we born to work at what ever job you are doing, is the role of parent or carer part of some pre-ordained package with our name on it ?
We undertake life naive and oblivious to what is ahead and whilst we follow confirmed social norms which tend to lead us to roughly the same place we are individuals who can place our own stamp on the outcome.
And yet we do largely follow on in the new year doing the things we did in the last. Of course financial and emotional commitments make our path clearer there are,to many, few alternatives or at least it is construed in this way because we sometimes substitute 'responsibility, for thinking.
If we were sensible we would do an internal audit considering, what we had done last year, evaluate it and decide if we wanted to do it again this year. Of course most people above a certain age are not individuals any more and have to take a collective view, holding the ring of many other opinions, each with their own desire for change in the new year.
Whilst substantial change is possibly out of the question,( selling up and moving lock stock and barrel to a new way of life is something few of us can do ), at least the analysis of things in general, rating the good and the bad would relieve us of finding, down the road that we have wasted so much precious time never realising what or where we wanted to be, in this, 'one time' event called life !!

Room for conjecture.

Its always difficult to appreciate what you have. It's difficult because, what you have is often hidden under a mass of other experiences which distort the singular benefit.
When I go visiting in Swansea and when I close the door on Swansea and return to my home in Bishop's Stortford there is the inevitable analysis which goes on as I pull away in the car. How had the visit gone. I had just spent a week or two,with someone who I had, up until twelve months ago rarely spent a day apart, in forty two years.
That in its self is room for conjecture, especially in so far as one had worked through those forty plus years expecting to continue right up to the final exit.
Complacency is a term which is decried as taking for granted, assuming that as one hunkers down in the every day, one is seeing life for both of you and that your prism is hers. In fact it never was and it's the realisation of this fact and whether you are prepared to make, possibly many, perhaps fundamental concessions on route to some sort of happiness. Of course if the concessions are such that you are drawn 'far away' from your own comfort zone to accommodate the other then a certain amount of hostility or at least dissatisfaction arises and questions the why are we different. I contend it's the man's position on these matters, if we are different at least recognise that difference is healthy and one must never try to change fundamentally the way a person is.
 But it's not the 'overall, which one comes away with its the 'particular'. The silly things that whilst not annoying are a measure of the otherness of life with another. The need to tip toe when using the toilet at night for "fear" of wakening, the inevitable complaint when getting up early and cooking bacon and eggs, "that smell is dreadful" . the sound of the TV, "too loud" and the program's "too boring". These in themselves are a poor case for setting against the continuous interactive communion that people living together give themselves in all kinds of little ways.
 This is especially so when one or other is sick, it provides an opportunity to show the other that, underplaying every thing, "you care". In some ways this is pivotal since after years of entrenched assumption and dis enhancement, the opportunity to show you care is forced into view and both the 'giver' and 'receiver' remember "back then" to how it was different.
We are rather like crustacean, like limpets solidly hanging on to what we perceive as our rights as the individual we still see ourselves to be and of course we are correct since, marriage, cohabiting, is not the natural order and requires much from the individual to subvert their natural inclination, into a form of "levitation" between where they would normally be on a subject but where, for the sake of the cohabiting state you are in, as you move away from, what is your norm.
Forty two years of suspended levitation leaves the foundations somewhat shaky but then having ones early years confirmed is sort of satisfying too.

Values

As General Samsonov rode around his troops on the hillside above Orlau he was saying his goodbyes and thanking the men for their effort. Instead of planning the break out, he had succumbed to nostalgia and recollection rather than action and command.
In Jane Austen's books the father is surrounded by adoring daughters who lisp adoration for his guidance and strength in their daily affairs. His was the centre of their world until they marry when another man would assume the part.
Partly because they were within a tight knit world where reliance was essential this tribe did what all tribes do they acknowledged the functions each was expected to carry out and performed their part in what after all was only a play on the formality of life when all are supposed to know their part.
Today's theatre is a far cry from the tradition of the Russian aristocracy and the 'noblesse oblige' of the army or the genteel dance which pretended to be life for the better off in England. Today the call is to independence and a fixation, almost an obsession to cut ties with everything in the past and concentrate only on the future.
The problem is, as we have discussed in the past "the future has no surety", it has little substance other than hope. If we throw away our past, as superfluous to our needs we enter troubled waters since the essence of 'who we are' lays in our past. Like cholesterol in the bloodstream represents too much of a poor diet, a good up bringing is a thing to value and fall back upon when things don't always pan out as one would wish. It's then that family and respect for what families have gone through to bring you to where you are today is important. It's also important to recognise that whilst roles change and power shifts the substance of your position today, any day, holds a debt of gratitude, especially towards the 'mother' for what went on yesterday. 
I must add that I am blessed with children who are full of love and concern, although idiomatic they are more likely to voice their views with vehemence rather than a simper but we put that down to spirit rather than hostility.
Of course there is a fair amount of frustration wrapped up in it all.  Frustration as they see their once strong, authorities parents reduced to needy old folk but the affection and the respect are never far away.

Moving home

Limpid blue, the pool shone out from the surrounding shrubby and high up on the seventh floor with the surroundings indistinct in the gathering dusk it looked surreal. From the balcony of their new home the yacht harbour lazily expressed the underlying wealth with boats only occasionally putting to sea, their owners content to use them as a luxurious camp bed for the weekend. The coast line swept around to where they had stayed. The sand virtually up to the front door, the turtles at night laying and burying their eggs before dawn, the trail in the sand setting out the path their endeavour to survive. 

From this hight the only trails were those of the cars making their way out to the suburbs, their headlights picking their way through the gathering gloom, a fairyland of twinkling light filtered by the cooling atmosphere into a shimmering display.
Sitting on the balcony on the recliners one had to catch ones thoughts as to the distanced travelled and the determination to be here. Back then it was all a concept, a slight of hand to convince ones self of the benefits of being away from the grey world of England. Far across the world, away from ones security blanket, taking on the crusty surveillance of the 'immigration authorities' with all their tricks and trips to find if you were up to becoming an Aussie.
It wasn't cheap. The advisor's to help you through the mountain of paper work, the cost of getting here, the cost of the cargo container to bring the things you couldn't decide to throw away. Finally the contract by which you would be employed for at least two years by someone who didn't know you from the ace of spades but has acknowledged he bought a gem.
One thing becomes clear no matter where you live, you work and work has to be something you are more than marginally interested in and feel confident doing. The more a job takes on an integral part of the way you think the more the effort is rewarded by a sense of satisfaction,(along with of course, suitable remuneration) and brings a wider appreciation of being in Australia.

New years eve

It's New Year's Eve. Late night telly tells me that there are millions of people out there "a hootin and a hollerin" busy partying and wishing everyone the best.
When I was younger the New Year dance was an event. Mary as pretty as a peach was there in her party dress, and Gillian with the dark green eyes who looked into yours with a terrifying come hither. Jill, the unapproachable Jill, was miss ice cool. "Can I have this dance" a dream rehearsed each time the music started but plucked away by someone more assured, you were left holding Sandra and wondering why.
The chance to kiss was what brought us here in the first place, and mistletoe proclaimed your right to a kiss, well at least in theory ! We were relatively naive in those days, no, compared to today we were very naive. A girl, we placed on a pedestal and the clever ones knew it !


Over the years New Years Eve went from being in the village hall to the town Mecca dance palace and then to the pubs and house based parties. The innocence of the village hall with its 'all seeing' community to keep an eye on affairs, to the inevitably 'over the top' boozy party which made the morning after a time of worried recollection.
Then there seems to have been a cessation of everything.
Going out became a family affair and one became subverted, undermined by the needs of others, only emerging from the drought when the 'focus of our existence' decided that they wanted their freedom and we looked around in vain for a place familiar to the ones we remembered.
Casual was out, your name had to be on a list, even in a pub, a pub you had supported all year.
The age of the contrived event, dressing up and by invitation only was here.
The mass displays of sentimentality, the passing of the old and the welcoming of the new has become a gigantic compulsive obsession, witness the global competition for which city around the world has the biggest and spends the most on the Hogmanay Firework Display.
The "arr" and the "oohs" as the pounds go up in smoke seem to represent our inability to prioritise any sort of value as we see cherished institutions taken apart and privatised for lack of money.
Like cattle we are complacent even as we are loaded to our final destination so long as the mood music is playing and the image of the MacBurger still lingers in our sight.

Happy New Year to you all and I hope that the coming year will cause us all to reflect on the importance of the small and the attainable, since each is still within our reach !!
 

French cinema

Cinema is very descriptive in the way it resembles the society in which, and for whomever the film is made.
We see a surfeit of Hollywood with its churn of unending trauma, of a turbulent and makeshift society. From the gangsters to the glamour it seems that to make a movie they reach for a format that is as far way from the balanced society a nation should strive for.
We in our grubby way seek to emulate Hollywood by producing movies to shock, with story lines made up from the dregs that fester in many of our cities. We either portray the drug and the brutality associated with people off their heads, or we go for the kitsch and the vulgar.


Two French films come to mind which are as far removed from this sort of base depiction as it is possible to get. 
Amour was the first. It depicts the moving story of two people, a man and his wife growing old in an apartment in Paris and revealed with great simplicity the tragedy of old age.
The story line was simplicity it's self, there was no attempt to embellish the unfurling and ever so moving descent of two people into a situation where he ends her pain wracked life by smothering her with a pillow. This description of what happened does no justice to the pace and the simplicity of the acting. Here the actors simply enmeshed themselves in their respective characters and the story became real, very moving and very memorable.
The other film I came across by chance was the "Mr Morgans last love". The principle actor was someone I generally dislike since he always seems to play himself regardless of the script. Michael Cane played the part of an 80 year old retired philosopher living in Paris having lost his wife three years previously he is marking time waiting for his turn. On the bus he engages the eye of a young women, a simple flash of acknowledgement leads after disembarking at the same stop into a conversation. What she sees in him is a father she never had and a need to feel a belonging. On his part no doubt enchanted that he has been seen and not discounted it awakens in him the flame of not desire but of love, somewhere between paternal and the full blown effect (so wasted on the young).
The film has not quite the beautiful timing of Amour but it gets close. A look says more than a hundred words and old world charm of a lovely French apartment with views across the city with its opening and closing of doors, the courtesy, the faded elegance of another more leisured era. The image of deep compatibility based on respect and admiration was demolished when the Philosophers grown up children burst in on the scene, fresh from the plane and America. Their take on the situation was what you would expect from a money crazed society, they labelled her a gold digger. The daughter was here in Paris to shop the son was hurting from a marriage recently broken and he couldn't conceive of his fathers savour faire.
His demeanour, his assumption that life owed him something and that he had been wronged was trumped by his youth and good looks and the young woman falls into his arm in a fever of desire. The wrong man got the gal' and nature had its way but never the less a beautifully made film.

Confidence in their birth right.

Down on the sea front, seated on the narrow restaurants frontage which last winter had seen high seas flooding onto where we sat, it couldn't have looked nicer. The broad swath of firm sand was the scene of children scampering about in their own world of sea and sand, of dogs, all breeds, shapes and sizes fetching the stick their owners resolutely threw as if taking part in some sort of ritual which for why neither the dog or the master knew.
Coffee or tea sir, are you having a sausage with your bacon ? The sea side usually brings the best out of people. There is that open aspect to the sea that land across the water unseen. An adventure in the offing. The boat out in the bay seems idyllic, cast off-shore sufficient to be independent and yet close enough to engage, it offers the romance of travel without a crowd.
The houses clinging to the shoreline or perched, up out of harms way have the glazed look of having seen it all before, nothing out of the ordinary for them, the scene is their stock in trade, it keeps their value up and the riff raff at bay.
The air is fresh off the water, full of ozone and other goodies it drys the skin and makes middle age seem old as the small group of ascetics take daily plunge irrespective of water temperature, and remember we are mid winter, is a routine never missed. "Isn't it cold I ask, no not a bit" as he towels down to plod off down the beach and home for a lunch of lettuce and the finest welsh water this side of the black rock.
Out to sea the coast guard have launched following a practised save and rescue routine and we see them heading back in calm tranquil seas. Never ones to sing their own praises we don't come out when in 20 ft waves with a force 8 blowing we are safe in our houses and they crashing to rescue someone who should have known better.
All around the lilt of the Welsh ascent greeting and sharing their experiences. Not boastful, but mater of fact, not wishing to draw attention but confident in their birth right.