SCREEN SHOT - Aftersun

Calum (Paul Mescal) is taking his 11 year old daughter Sophie ( Frankie Corio ) on a holiday to Turkey.  The holiday is documented via home movies and incidents viewed from Sophie's remembered perspective. Through it we see the adult Sophie's memories of her charming yet unknowable father. The film is peppered with a quickly edited slow motion disco scene where you see the Sophie looking for glimpses of her father in a crowded club, as an eleven year old, then an an adult. Her father coming suggestively in and out of focus. Quite often throughout the film Sophie sees her father slightly out of the frame, peaked at over or through something. These are just some of the visual beauties of this film debut by writer and director Charlotte Wells. Sophie is a girl on the edge of adolescence and is just awakening to being curious how older teenagers behave, and intimate relationships. The film expertly captures this halfway state between childhood and adolescence proper.

Initially this seems like just an ordinary holiday in a Mediterranean hotel. Calum is, however, not at ease with himself. There are hints of estrangement from his own family, that he never wants to return to Scotland. So much here is lightly suggested, because we are seeing things from teenage Sophie's recollection. Small things viewed from her adult perspective, have much more significance now. She has to ask her father twice what he did on his eleventh birthday, and begrudgingly tells her he had to remind his own family that it was his birthday. Sophie organises people to sing to him on his birthday, a scene followed by a back shot of Calum sobbing his heart out alone in the hotel room. A penultimate scene in the movie when they are both dancing to Under Pressure becomes unaccountably gut wrenching, as you can sense that this is a last goodbye. We are never told what happened to her father, nor why this particular holiday proved to be so significant. Its clear he has disappeared from her life at some point hereafter, we know not how or why and are left speculating. 

Charlotte Wells, is an extremely promising film maker, who was so fortunate to find a girl as naturally gifted as Frankie and obviously an actor of Mescal's caliber. Who does what he does best - suppressed emotion, staring self absorbed off screen, fleeting expressions almost thrown away, but all are tellingly significant. Aftersun is a movie with a quiet impact, unexpectedly grasping you and pulling you into its emotional undertow.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - No 3

Another edited selection from my gratitude journal from recent weeks.

• I'm grateful to a sense for time and the clock marking its passing, a constant reminder of how fortunate I am. That time, however fleeting, always offers you an opportunity to do things better or differently until the very last second or minute of your life concludes.
  
  
• Meditation can be challenging at the best of times, and it was today. When I'm tired or sleepy the practice becomes to embrace the tiredness, the unwilling heart that wants to settle or snuggle into itself. In those moments when focus and intention returns, however briefly, there is a sigh of recognition, as if to say - Ah! I remember you, I remember this. And you feel a short wave of gratitude, a bit like a reward for coming back to a different sense of oneself and your relationship with the world.
  
  
• Strangely grateful for being a bit of a grump this morning, it's a good teacher when read as an indicator that something needs addressing. I believe in finding a way to be grateful for feeling bad tempered and moody. You can't just be grateful for 'the nice cuddly stuff', which would be too one sided.
  
  
• Grateful for every thought, feeling, idea and experience, all are some form of gift. That these things may not be what they first appear to be. You can feel grateful for anything, you just have to find the right angle to approach it with. This can take some working out.
  
  
• There are insights to be had even from the most unpromising or resistant material. And, yeah, that can be something to be grateful for.
  
  
• To be fully awake to the world would in itself be a state of gratitude.

UNFINISHED READING - Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds - Various Authors.

I have found myself unwilling to finish this book, I've got two thirds of the way through, and abandoned all hope of it being as cutting edge and thought provoking as it likes to thinks it is. I gave up, because I think I have much better things to devote my precious reading time to.

Simple Comprehensible Illuminating Language is often replaced with Complex Hermeneutic Opaque Linguistics. Sentences compacted with closely argued sequences of specialist jargon, one compound term followed by yet another. If this is the densely tortuous language we are going to use regarding the meta crisis, then I do not hold out much hope for Pespectiva's work on - systems, souls and society - let alone humanity. 

This is the sort of thing the meta crisis really does not need, but unfortunately appears to be getting. Lots of serious over thinking, preoccupation with the minutiae and implications of words and grammer. Its full of ubiquitous special language for special people. Are they simply hiding their cluelessness behind a dense wall of words? Who is this meant for? Who will find this remotely helpful? Its the sort of thing only wealthy intelligentsia will say they fully understand, but probably are bluffing. 

Though we may well baulk at the slippery nature of truth, in the hands of right wing authoritarian proponents. They do however, speak plainly, eschewing alienating words or concepts to enhance the clarity of their speaking, and to connect. The left, or any other alternate viewpoint, if it is ever to revive it's fortunes, must first rediscover how to convey its ideas without the need of a specialist translator in socio-economic theory.

Its true, that any compendium of essays will inevitably be uneven in style and tone. Each author tackling their issue in a structurally different manner. And that is certainly present here. Some writers try to be so open you struggle to locate what their precise point is. Others become so tightly obscure you struggle to grasp if there is a precise point at all. Either of these, all of these, and everything in-between, can be found in Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds. It's a brilliant depiction of the contemporary zeitgeist. We are fucked, but can't find any helpful ideas or words to unfuck us.

As an assessment of the meta crisis and what the issues are, Jonathan Rowson's essay Tasting The Pickle is hard to beat. But there is also a sense things should really have been moving beyond overall assessments onto specific propositions or actions by now. Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds was published in 2021, four years ago and it already feels terribly dated. The title itself is an adaption from Zach Stein's book Education In A Time Between Worlds from 2019, so prompted by six year old ideas. Time and the meta crisis wait for no one, and its moving on at a pace we are not keeping up with, let alone getting ahead of. Unedifyingly this book tells us we don't know what to do, even as we are not doing it. 

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8

READING ALOUD - Bluebird by Charles Buckowski

 

I think the most disarming thing about the sort of man Charles Buckowski was, is that he liked to let you know he really didn't need your approval of him, nor the life he led, nor like the poetry he wrote.  He wrote because he needed to. For a large part of his life he worked for the Post Office, he came home, started drinking and wrote into the early hours of the following day. Underneath his carefully maintained bar fly reputation, bad temper and fights, lay this deeply damaged man. Read his autobiographical book Ham on Rye, and you are shown what having fucked up parents in your childhood can do to you.

Buchowski was frequently defensive or guarded, but in his poetry something wiser and kinder would occasionally be allowed to blossom. In the rough hewn conversational style of them, a perceptive insightfulness catches you unawares.  Here in this poem Bluebird he lets you glimpse one fragment of the sensitive fragile bird of the man, held captive by the controlling, alcoholic, life coarsened persona.  It shows you something, not just about the psychology of Buckowski, but of most men.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal January 2025

January 10th wears a shroud of significance, another month has passed. We've crossed the invisible threshold into another year, and now its six months since the HA! I do realise this is a milestone, but not sure how I'm expected to respond or feel about it. God, I feel so glad to be still alive. Grateful for this further opportunity to delve deeper into the experience of being alive. I appear to continue to be on the mend. Well, how would I know? I keep taking the pills, nothing untoward has happened, I guess that's proof of success. 

At the moment all this is a bit hard to discern. I am emerging out the other end of 'The Plague' coda to the heaviest of colds. You know, the one where the nose might've stop running, but what your left with is a constant wheezing cough, that sounds like your throat is lined with an impermeable glutinous gel, which in fact it is. This shows sign of improving one day, then worsens the next. Anyone would think this were a conditioned event!

My life, such as it was before the heart attack, well, it feels naive now. I existed on a constantly onward rolling horizon built on the dodgy foundations of misguided optimism. Yet now paradoxically, there is still the remnants of desire to go back to that era of perpetual forgetfulness of life being finite. To put it back to the top of the leader board of blind priorities, I am reticent to do that. I have far from fully processed the experience of how close the quick beats of my heart were to stopping. I look on incredulously at the possible return of the sunny optimism. I shake my head and mutter - have you not learned? I offer up praise to the stark reminder. Warily standing guard lest delusion takes hold again.

Life, my appreciation and thankfulness for it, has blossomed in an unexpected way since the HA! There is an aspiration at least to do whatever comes next differently. All without completely knowing what that might entail. Whatever I do, I don't want to slip back into absent mindedness, of how brief my time may be, even now. I want to keep the window open. The HA! was a premonition, an oracle of demise. But the date or the time of day is forever unknowable. I'm unconsciously operating on the basis of it not being now, tomorrow or anytime soon, even though I regularly remind myself it could be now, tomorrow, yeah, really soon. And in my own way, the urge to constantly return to express gratitude is one antidote to this. Just so long as I am grateful, then I remain fully alive to the vibrant possibility of the present. For that is all there is..

QUOTATION MARKS - Genius by David Whyte

" Genius is the meeting
between inheritance and horizon,
between what has been told,
what can be told
and what is yet to be told,
between our practical abilities
and our relationship
to the gravitational mystery
that pulls us on.
Our genius is to understand,
and stand beneath the set of stars
present at our birth,
and from that place
to seek the hidden, single star,
over the night horizon,
we did not know we were following. 

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte.
Published by Canongate 2015.

ARTICLE - Moorland Methodism

My surname is Lumb, its a name with ancient origins. Probably first appearing historically in early medieval times. Though I imagine it could well go further back, before names were even set into their formulaic conjunctions. Surnames as we now  know them slowly established how they would be formed, around Anglo Saxon times. Based on parentage, an individual's skill, place of habitation, or the quality of landscape, these were intended as the primary building blocks of an individuals public identity. You came to be known through a group of associations, that told others something about you and your personal and ancestral origins. It's initial fluidity as an individual designation, gradually assumed a stabler structure carried down through the generations as the title for a specific family.

Lumb Bank

Lumb is a name not found much outside of the Pennine region between Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is even a village named Lumb on the borderlands of these two counties. Lumb has other surnames to which it is related, where the silent 'b' at the end has been completely lost. So you will also find Lumm, Lum. One particular variant - Lund, clearly reveals Lumb's linguistic origin as Scandinavian.  So whether Lumb or Lund, it is a word intimately associated with land. It contains within it a designation of a specific place. Lumb means a dwelling or dweller with a clearing by a pool or water source. Once upon a time an ancestor of mine took a piece of land, cleared it of trees and undergrowth with an aim to cultivate it. Its likely the surname Lumb is also linked to the word Lumber, as a term to denote fallen or felled trees. All this information is contained within one simple four letter surname, a word with origins in a time far beyond written history.

The Pennines as a landscape consists of craggy granite outcrops and coarse peaty moorland. Arable cultivation here would have been challenging, if not impossible. It's more likely my ancestor was clearing land in order to raise animals on it. All varieties of livestock, but mostly sheep and goats which coped better with the rugged terrain, the cold wind and torrential wet weather.

X is Uncle Brint taken in a workshop

My family inhabited the moorlands for centuries, either on a small holding or as farm workers. Only moving into the Pennine towns in the late 19th century. Within the living memory of my Father's generation, one wing of the Lumb family still lived on in one of the moorland villages. Everyone in the family referred to them as ' Uncle Brints lot' as though they were this entirely other species of Lumb. Which maybe indeed they were, an anachronistic remnant of a previous way of life. Brinton Lumb waa the brother of David Lumb, my Grandfather. The latter someone I never met because he died in his mid 50's before I was born.

Farm work could never be just the raising of sheep on the moorlands. It also meant butchering, selling meat and taking fleeces into the local market. And over the centuries they'd learned various bits of 'piece-work' - how to spin the wool into yarn, to dye and weave it into cloth, all done in house or within the village. A cottage weaving industry of this kind providing the only real possibility of gainful employment for women in the area. 

Halifax was the nearest large town to where my ancestors lived. In 1779 the town built a cloth hall, where all the local cloth makers, could bring their yarn or 'pieces' of cloth to sell to merchants. The Piece Hall, as it's now known, is a unique Grade 1 listed building. Much larger and unlike any other cloth hall in the West Riding. It is a vast classically colonnaded courtyard with small rooms on three levels that people could hire to trade from or trade too. 

The Piece Hall as it is now

As a building it represents the high point of sheep rearing and weaving in the Halifax District, and of the Agricultural Revolution itself. When new technology such as the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle loom arrived there had been local Luddite riots. Only wealthier farmers were able to afford to upgrade to these newer, faster machinery.  Setting up local weaving halls to make high quality woven fabric for half the cost and manufacturing time. With significantly less man power required. 

Depiction of a 'Luddite' riot

This revolution in the weaving industry however, would not stay in the hills. The next stage of mass manufacturing developed in the industrialised northern towns. This brought about the collapse of an already fragile rural economy. Hand woven cloth could never compete, so moorland women lost their livelihoods. Rearing sheep was not enough on its own to make a living out of.  Farmers lost both their land and workforce, as both automated weaving machines and people moved into the towns. A little over a century after it was built, with the rapid decline of small scale cloth making, the Piece Hall was convert into a wholesale vegetable and fruit market place

Halifax in the late 19th early 20th Century

So my family, as moorland dwellers, were not alone in eventually moving into Halifax to find employment. This migration from moor to town began in the 18th century. ending in a late flourish in the last decades of the 19th. This displacement either to a more hostile urban environment, or poverty and unemployment for those who stayed trying to find work in the moorland hills, had a huge consequence. Increased job insecurity, being matched by harsh alienating living conditions, brought on depressive states of mind. In turn this meant men in particular took to drinking, opioid use and gambling to excess, in order to cope, drown their sorrows, or to numb the psychological pain. Industrial towns and cities became synonymous with drug addled destitution and riotous debauchery. 

That non conformist chapels began to spring up all across the West Riding of Yorkshire from the mid 18th century onward is not coincidental. It was in response to the perceived spiritual needs of an increasingly lost and dissolute generation. Most Christian non conformist movements emerged into prominence in response to this economic and spiritual crisis. 

John Wesley Open Air Preaching

John Wesley came first to the West Riding, and Halifax in particular, around the same time as The Piece Hall opened, the late 1770's. No longer a young man, in his seventies, he nonetheless made repeated preaching tours across the West Riding, until his death in 1791. It would have been quite a feat for a man of his age, to travel around the Pennines, a frequently steep rugged and unforgiving terrain.  The 1780's to 90's were a time where Britain was unsettled by the possibility of the French Revolution spreading across the channel. The West Riding was considered one likely flare point for social unrest.

The Methodism he preached was initially met with suspicion and sometimes hostility. The speaking tours did, however, progress from being held in middle of the street to local homes and meeting halls. Eventually small Methodist chapels, built by local converts, began popping up across the West Riding 

Heptonstall Methodist Chapel up alongside the moors

His message, whilst always a biblically inflected one, also preached prohibitions, of taking personal control of the drug, drinking and gambling habits that were plaguing communities, large or small. That this chimed with the zeitgeist of its time is evident in the growing religious predominance of Methodism across the Pennine moorlands and industrial conurbations.

Both sides of my family were chapel going Methodists. It's hard to establish how far back the Lumb family and Methodism went. Probably much more than the three generations I know of. What is certain is that things generally changed slowly in the moor side hamlets and villages. So once you became a Methodist you generally would stay loyally Methodist.

West End Methodist Chapel that my family attended

When you moved from the moors to an industrialised town, you'd have to initially take work where ever you could. If you had weaving or dyeing skills you might have found it easier to get work in the weaving mills. Otherwise it would be whatever work you could find. If you had initiative you might be taken on as an apprentice to learn an entirely new trade. 

My Grandfather supported his wife and eight sons and daughters, through his trade as a specialist painter and decorator. Applying surface effects such as wood grain onto doors and Anaglypta. I imagine this would have required him to be taken on as an apprentice, in order to lean these skills of the trade. Because through this he would eventually be independent and self employed. 

This desire was informed by the Methodist ethos of self education and improvement, benefits requiring hard work and moral rectitude. Instilling an imperative to take the initiative, to control and drive your own future forward. The firm prohibitions of Methodism's earlier days mellowed over the centuries.The strength of the strictures on alcohol and gambling no longer required to be so severe. The gross consequences of the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution were becoming settled, more bedded in. People began to feel more accustomed to urban life and relatively affluent. Hence this more liberal and tolerant tone emerged, that instilled an 'everything in moderation' principle. 

That life principle and moral prohibitions were certainly still in the air of my parental home during my childhood. Plus a respect and tolerance for difference, another quality that is perhaps of more cutting edge importance when living in an urban context, than when subsisting in small close communities on a moorland edge. Methodist chapels in the Pennines are often simple solidly built, unfussy buildings. There is a part of me still that appreciates the pared back essentialism of a Zen Buddhist interior, because it bears echoes of the Methodist chapels of my youth. Another part reacts against it, by wanting its more extravagant catholic baroque opposite. I love bleak wild countryside, the moorland heaths of my childhood, which has echoes in the broad flat salt marshes of North Norfolk. All of these may be examples of ancestral flashbacks to a landscape and long forgotten lifestyle. One that my ancestors thrived in for countless generations. Until, of course, they no longer could.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 122 - The Pernicious Arrival of Slimy Goop

 After a couple of years of forgetting, we finally had our chimney cleaned. Hence we have been enjoying the intimacy of a real fire over the Winterval. I have had a lot of wood off cuts to burn, so there has been much rifling through shelves and bins in my workshop. Come the Spring I want to have an almighty clean up and chuck out in my workshop. By the end of which I'm hoping it will be less congested with a much simpler layout. In the meantime I've been indulging in a bit of therapeutic arson.

I have not been in my workshop much this year, for the obvious reason. All of which has meant I was quite surprised recently to discover a rat was in the process of setting up its winter home. Every time I opened the workshop door I saw it, fleeting in a relaxed scurry disappearing into the eaves. Its nonchalance, made it all the more alarming. I could see where it was getting in, so I bought a small bag of ready made cement and blocked up all visible points of entry. It appeared to be nesting between the eaves and troughing, venturing into the workshop to use it as its appointed poo and pee palace. Rats, they are such fastidious creatures.

Next year I'm planning to step back a bit more from Cottonwood Home. I'll continue being Hubby's general pattern cutter, but reduce what I personally make. I want to concentrate more time on developing an art practice. I'd like to work at breaking a few personal conventions my creativity has got set in. As it is, the progress of osteo-arthritic inflammation in my hand joints has meant I can no longer execute work requiring fine brush detail. So I've been forced by this handicap to become looser and less controlling of my finish in execution.

A recent small experiment

Another One

All of which is I believe is good. I'm also moving away from using gouache, which has been my chosen medium for decades, and gradually getting to grips with the possibilities of acrylic paint. All of which means there's been a need to improve the quality and colour range of acrylics I have. I've acquired lots of student grade acrylics over the years, which are not that great once you actually start to work with them. Unfortunately with artist materials the cheaper they are, the less you'll be able to do with them. Quite often when folk say they don't get on with a particular artist medium, paint quality is often, in my experience, a major factor.  So I'm in the process of upgrading mine. There have been Christmas present requests for particular Liquitex colours. Its many years since I ran my own art shop. I was I thought, used to how expensive artists quality paints are. However, its nearly thirty years since I had my shop in Diss, and prices have inevitably dramatically risen. Some quite basic colours are now over twenty quid a tube, which is phew, wipes brow of sweat and hyperventilates. 

recent purchases

Christmas has been spent at home with Hubby. We've tried this year to reduce the heart unhealthy quality of some aspects of Christmas food consumption. Pudding and cake this year were the smallest we could buy. Reducing salt and fat content whenever we could. All of which I think we did quite well with.. Just before Christmas the car sprang a dramatic coolant leak, so went into the garage for its remedy. We didn't really need it over the Christmas break, picking it up from Holt the day after Boxing Day. Thankfully it wasn't too expensive a repair

Holkham Church in the mist

So we were able to go to Holkham Hall for a walk on the Saturday. We were wandering in the mist and dank fog that hung over the country during Christmas. It was dam cold, but bracing shall we say. The fog so thick buildings and churches were not visible until you were almost upon them. The North Norfolk coast has a particular evocative quality when shrouded in mist. It reminds you of the creepy atmosphere of a M R James ghost story, shadowy and ethereal.

I also start out the coming New Year with a replenished book stack, which should see me through to the Spring. My early morning routine I've changed recently. I'm trying to read more, and view You Tube less. Currently I'm reading a poem by David Whyte, and a short chapter from his book Consolations, everyday. After meditating I usually write in my Gratitude Journal, which I'm finding particularly beneficial. I've also set a time limit on my smart phone use of two hours a day, which I am finding is a good discipline.  

After celebrating New Year in Nottingham, we decided, on the spur of the moment to come back via Lincoln. To break the journey home, but also to check out what new fabrics Fat Quarter had. We came away with three which we are keen to try this spring in our craft business, a couple of mid century modern designs and a seaweed inspired pattern called Tides. I love the Cathedral Quarter of Lincoln. Its the only city I know whose retail hierarchy is banded according to its topography. Top end retail and tourist perch on the escarpment around the cathedral, national chains at the bottom of the escarpment, beyond the railway bridge nail bars, tanning salons, Asian supermarkets and more scruffy and dubious looking tertiary retail outfits. 

This time we didn't venture far, only half way down Steep hill. I didn't want to push my heart never mind my luck, by doing more. Since our return we have been trying to chill out, in full knowledge that at the beginning of next week we will need to start pulling out self assessment tax together. It is one of those time consuming but essential tasks we spend a large part of January sorting out. 

Whilst in Nottingham I picked up one humdinger of a cold, which was well on the ascendant by the time we'd reached Lincoln. Since then, I've had the full flood from my nose of murky ponds of greenish phlegm. Today, this same phlegm is forming a semi occluding value around the top of my wind pipe, which has kept me awake coughing most of the night and during the day. I've been coughing so much all the muscles in my torso ache every time they erupt into the air from my throat. This is clearing up, but slowly. In recent years since Covid, its been more typical for me to have a very persistent viral chest cold. Which are harder to treat by virtue of them not being a true cold. This is the first really old fashioned cold I've had in a long time, and my god I don't remember producing such vast quantities of slimy goop from and orifice before.

WATCHED - The Listeners

Claire (Rebbeca Hall) is a teacher, she's married with a teenage daughter. Her life appears to be well organised, content and enjoyable. She starts to be aware of a background hum that is persistent and distracting. No one else she knows appears to hear it. She has a lot of tests to try to ascertain what is causing this, yet nothing appears to fit the bill. Believing there is something psychologically wrong with her, her previously stable life begins to start spiraling out of control. Then one of her pupils reveals to her that he hears it too, and has found a group of folk all having the same experience

The Listeners, manages to navigate some pretty tricky subject matter, like teacher pupil relationships, without you losing sympathy with its central characters. As the story progresses it cleverly wrong foots your expectations where its taking you. The way the group gathers together because they all hear 'the hum' moves from providing support, to counselling, to spiritual guidance, eventually forming into an independent self supporting 'Family', separated off from the outside world, was very credibly handled.  Providing an almost textbook example of how a 'cult' could form around a shared experience.

Over its four episodes it subtly cranks up the stakes. It did appear to lose its grasp on how to conclude the story, how open ended did they want it to be? Is Claire over it, or merely pretending she was? Was 'the hum' a spiritual thing or just a geophysical phenomena? The ending felt a bit fractured and wavering until finally it settled on a surprise twist.  All in all a very satisfying well written series.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

Currently available to stream on BBC I Player.

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - No 2

This one is a longish edited entry from a recent gratitude journal. This came out in one extemporaneous flow.

" You know I would say today I'm feeling gratitude for my life and experiences. Looking back at the whole cornucopia of it. Its full of my interests, doubts, successes and mistakes, the opportunities taken and missed. It's all a bit of an exotic melange. One I would not have missed for the world. I'm grateful for it all.

Any human life, according to Buddhism, is 'a precious opportunity'** And this morning I'm feeling the fragile delicate nature of that opportunity. The only coda I could put at the end of that would be gratitude - for everyone I've ever met and had contact with - have loved and fallen in love with - have worked or crossed swords with - have exchanged ideas with - have worked creatively with - have appreciated, idolised and been a huge fan of - if only for five minutes - the toys both childhood and adult I've enjoyed playing with - the hearts I've broken - the hearts I've lifted - the one's I've let down and the one's I've made proud - the one's I've admired closely or from afar - the rush of my enthusiasms - the chasing of wild dreams - the despair of the last bus home after a hopeless evening - the tender ending of an affair - all the learning and the seeking for knowledge - and through it all a sense for the history of it all - of past lives lived - the complex inheritance of our humanity - these can only instill a sense of gratitude.

This morning I am sensitive and emotional, to the enormity of what I've written this floods me with feelings of love for it all, and not wanting to let go of one moment of it. To hold life to my chest tightly like a bunch of bright fragrant flowers. Simultaneously knowing that flowers fade and my memories die with me. And though I do not fully understand why, that forgetting, that fading away is a good thing. Nothing is permanent in this life, it is changeable and fickle, yet that is what makes it also unpredictable and offers up surprises, happiness and joy, in unequal measures. That it's something to feel grateful for, that nothing lingers for long, whether good or bad. Whatever I do, I should never become indifferent to it. Never stop trying to be better at riding the roller coaster."


** Human life is 'a precious opportunity' because through it you can wake up, be enlightened to what the 13th century Zen monk Dogen called 'the dream within a dream'.

QUOTATION MARKS - Friendship by David Whyte

"But no matter the medicinal virtues 
of being a true friend or sustaining a long,
close relationship with another,
the ultimate touchstone of friendship
is not improvement,
neither of the other nor of the self;
the ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness,
the privilege of having been seen by someone
and the equal privilege of being granted
the sight of the essence of another,
to have walked with them
and to have believed in them,
and sometimes
just to have accompanied them
for however brief a span,
on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte,
Published by Canongate, 2015 

MY OWN WALKING - Journal Winterval 2024

Many bells rang with me whilst watching the film All of Us Strangers. One was a comment the central character Adam made about having become 'reconciled to living a lonely life'. I certainly held a view similar to that in the 1990's, when I was living in Diss, Norfolk. I might've be tempted to assign that view to history, as though it held no influence on how I am presently. It has, however, an air of being significant that there was still a residual relevance. 

During the mid 90's recession I was running my own art shop in Diss, and it wasn't going too well. All the effort I put into it appeared not to be resulting in any financial improvement, which was disheartening. I also wanted a relationship, but had yet to find one. After all, I'd moved from London to Norfolk, to a small conservative Norfolk market town, where there was no 'scene'. In this context being more reconciled to a solo lifestyle, perhaps then felt like a relatively sane response. Maybe it was just not the right place or time.

I was simply trying to be realistic, to save myself undue suffering by not continuing to hold out a hope for there being a life where I was not on my ownsome. As a strategy it limited emotional stress. Though it also alienated me to a degree from the truth of what I desired, by pretending I could be just hunky dory living on my own, when I clearly was not. This was a delusion I self perpetuated. But it is also one that our society encourages us to believe and follow. That our individuality is a primary need, over and above any collective relationship. 

Once I became a Buddhist, I spent a lot of time and energy opening up the psychological pits where I'd buried feelings in. Camouflaged behind noble sounding motivations, of being a person in full control of my independent destiny, a self directed lifestyle, willfully purposeful. Where 'override and move on' had become a survival mode whenever turbulent wilder emotions escaped their confinement. 

Buddhism itself is often misinterpreted on this issue. The Noble Truths states that our desires and attachments are the cause of our suffering and by ceasing those desires we can end the suffering. Though ultimately this is true, being completely submissive to your every desire is unhealthy, but so is suppressing or attempting to eradicate them. You are meant to closely observe how impermanent our desires are. Use them as means of insight via the constantly hungry nature of them, and how fleeting or elusive satisfaction can be. We have to be careful not to be premature in our renunciations.

Back in the 1990's my own premature renunciation proved not to be an effective one. Though it had a practical reasoning behind it. When you run a business on your own, you can't allow yourself to fall ill, let alone fall emotionally apart. It felt like there was neither the time nor the space for any of that. That was the frame I chose to look at it through. Meanwhile the undertow of discontent continued to rumble away.

Post that shop closing, these habits proved hard to let go of. Buddhist friends would often remind me that I was not now working on my own, I was not alone anymore. That there were other people to help, if I were to call upon them. After decades of having dealt with everything in my life myself, that way of behaving was totally hard wired. 

Unpicking habits is similar to when you go wrong in knitting a pattern. You often have to pull back many rows of intricately wrought stitch work to get to the ones that need correcting. Its slow work, can be tricky and not always completely resolved. So even to this day, much to my husbands occasional annoyance, I can still find myself slipping into operating as if I am working alone. It may be my northern upbringing plays its part, where not making yourself 'unduly beholden' to anyone was extolled. Habits often have origins that have wider and deeper roots than you remember.

I've been in a stable loving relationship for a long time now. Yet that 'lonely life' viewpoint lingers on in the recesses of my being. If I were feeling more charitable, maybe it has found another purpose after the  HA!  I have obviously been unsettled by experiencing a closer proximity to death. I sense an existential type of loneliness. Your significant other will not always be there, as likewise you won't always be there. All of our relationships, lovers, husbands, wives, partners, friends and acquaintances, might salve the basic existential loneliness and fragility of our general human condition. They do not solve it.

Certainly the experience of death appears to be a singular phenomena, even when surrounded by family, our last minutes will be experienced alone. And whatever the depth of your love and emotional attachment, no one else can ever fully know what you wiil be going through. Being separated by death from a partner you've loved and cherished for a substantial part of your life, must bring a very particular sense of loneliness to those left behind. Left alone with a solitary grief, that others might genuinely attempt to empathise with. But no one else can truly understand the specific nature of yours. That type of loneliness must cut real deep.

SCREEN SHOT - All of Us Strangers

At the beginning you meet Adam ( Andrew Scott ) he's living in a penthouse flat in a high, but largely empty new tower block. He's a script writer. The fire alarm goes off, its always going off. He goes down to the ground floor to see if its real or yet another false alarm. He notices there is a light from another flat and the shadow of a figure staring down. Later that evening Harry ( Paul Mescal ) the occupier of that flat, turns up at his door drunk, wants to come in, charmingly and casually propositions Adam. Adam, a bit taken aback, says no, which he later regrets saying. 

From these mundane unpromising incidents eventually blossoms, not only a romance, but a film that explores in purging emotional depth themes of childhood loss, death, grief and loneliness. Whilst on the surface this might appear, with its central gay romance, to be another queer relationship drama from writer and director Andrew Haigh, similar to his equally wonderful film Weekend from 2011. But All of Us Strangers themes are largely universal one's and will cut to the core of everyone's human experience. At one point Adam says that he's reconciled himself to living a lonely life and later on that he's done nothing of any significance with it either. Who hasn't thought either of those things at some time in their life? 

Its hard to write about the movie's story line without giving too much away. But let's just say there are more than a couple of surprise twists in it. I watched it first on my own and a day later with my husband. During the first viewing I was more emotionally distracted by trying to work out what was really going on here. During the second viewing, because you now know the lay of the narrative, you pick up on all the foreshadowing, premonitions and musical clues that are scattered across the movie. Speaking personally I found it packed even more of an emotional punch, because the second time you understood the reasons for certain aspects of it. They resonated more in a way that was gut wrenching. And whilst it has its universal themes, if you are gay, then this film has tons of things you will find deeply resonate with your specific experience. Also, as someone who had a heart attack this year, it has a lot to say about having a good life and a good death, with as few lingering regrets as possible.

Haigh makes great use of eighties music and sometimes puts the words of songs into the mouths of his characters, the song lyrics allowing them to speak what they really want to say. He also has assembled a fantastic ensemble cast. Aside from Scott and Mescal, he also has Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in career best form. I've not seen Paul Mescal's acting before, and he is quite a revelation. I want to see more.  A solid northern accent and eyes that speak of what is going on inside with such yearning and fleeting delicacy. And here he's paired with Andrew Scott so renown for being an actor of huge ability, playing this chronically damaged man with such affecting tenderness and gritty realness. He must have been so inspiring to act opposite.

Inspired by a novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Andrew Haigh has woven lots of his own personal experience into the script which brings it this telling ring of authenticity to the painful truths being revealed. This is my favourite movie of the year, its just far too good on so many levels it could not fail to be anything else.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

READING ALOUD - Kae Tempest - Europe Is Lost

If any artist caught the zeitgeist of the UK in the time of 2016 - post financial crash, post Brexit, at the dawn of First Term Trump, the pandemic not even dreamed of yet, it was this poem by Kae Tempest. As ever, they write accessibly and yet at the same time surprise you with the sophistication of the imagery they use. It's both ancient and modern, both of the street and of a tradition. Tempest never forgets where the poetic form originated and where they want to take it now. Its political, personal and punchy.

This live recording on KEXP captures the ongoing rolling syllabic momentum of Tempest at their performing best. There is a central character, there is Tempest there too observing, there is the world outside barren, hostile and alienated from the humanity it houses. And then there is us watching, caught up in the listening of it too.