wrong

It's been a strange week, it's going to be a strange week.

In seven days time, I'll be in London.

Between now and then, I'll have part-presided over a cremation service - a new experience.

I'd like to adopt the swagger of, 'I'll try anything once, me', but it's not quite like that.

I think it was somewhere between being shocked and appalled at the original choice of minister - my brother knew what he was doing when he mentioned it to me, and my own upsetting of my mother and sister, that I may have said, 'I'll do it'.

Later, after I'd had time to think about what obvious alternatives there would have been to Minister Choice #1, I decided that some moderation, or negotiation, would be appropriate. But with this, sister spotted weakness, and the threat of back-tracking. Thus, I'm hit with a tirade that featured the term 'priorities'. That really pissed me off. For a moment, I simmer. Then I snap back - something about attitude and respect and being out of order, and about me being the only one to give voice to what everyone in the family was thinking and feeling, but that no-one had had the bottle to say out loud. Mother and brother suggest a calming, but by then, it's merely a question of whether I will actually foam at the mouth. A few seconds later, my tension is diminished, but the bite-back has seen my sister - and mother - depart the scene in different directions, both in tears. Not pretty, not a proud moment.

Days have since passed. I've written the speech that I'll be giving, and I've walked through it a couple of times. Though 'speech' is the wrong word. Homily? Tribute? I don't know.

The subject is, of course, the dead grandmother. But listen closely, and you'd hear that it's not really about the old bird. It is, as I guess these things often are, a not especially oblique tribute to the people who I'll be speaking to - mostly family, about how they sustained Elspeth.

My fellow presider, on Wednesday - He Who I'd Initially Recoiled At, well he's read the blurb that I've prepared. And he's provided feedback.

He seems like a decent sort - maybe my grandmother was wrong about him.

touch

Saturday 13.02.10

Elspeth is dead. She'd been in residential care for the past year.

The call came at 8:40am - the mobile said 'Dad', and I knew before he spoke.

'Bit of upsetting news, son.'

'Go on', I say.

'Your -', he wasn't clear - emotional, 'Y' grandma died this morning - died in her sleep - in the home. We were with her, like.'

A pause. 'Mm. You alright?'

'Aye - we came up in the night - Matt brought us.'

Bleary eyed in a Manchester hotel room, 'I'll be up later', I say.

'Y' don't have to come up straight away.'

'I'll phone you later.'

'Aye, do that. D' y' wanna speak t' y' mam?'

'Yeah.'

'Hello?' she whispers.

'Y' alright?'

'Ye-es, uh-huh. Died in her sleep.'

'Best way to go, really.'

'Oh yes - she didn't suffer.'

Didn't suffer. It's too early for me to hear the nonsense of that statement.

'I said I'll call later -', I say.

'Yeah, let things settle down a bit, here. Mind, y' don't have t' come up straight away.'

'I'll talk t' y' later.'

'Alright, son.'

Click.

I think for a moment.

'Elspeth is dead', I say. And I'm remembering September 2002 - walking round to Ashford Street, after hearing of George's death. I remember a feeling of love, and of touch, and the colour purple.


It is now 11 hours later, and I'm on my third train of the day, heading east through West Yorkshire, writing this.

morse

Online morse code translator.

Could be useful. You know, for when the revolution starts and all that.

In the mean time:

.-. . .- -.. . .-. -.-- --- ..- .-.. --- --- -.- .-- --- -. -.. . .-. ..-. ..- .-.. - --- -. .. --. .... -

onion

Derby County 3 - 0 Newcastle United.

Sitting amongst fans of the home team, I was the outsider within. Hoping to see Newcastle play a kind of football that would suggest pomp-approaching-glory, things didn't pan out that way. For all of Newcastle's 'clever' play, and their mazily tripping over of the ball, Derby played genius football - simple and effective. Very Clough. The scoreline did flatter Derby, but the honesty of their play, and the commitment of Robbie Savage, saw my non-partisan status become eroded.

Fumbly phoney photo-work, there. Fair to say, it was cold. The old lady beside me did not share her blanket.

It felt good to be lost in 90 minutes of utter nonsense.

On exiting the stadium - two minutes before the final whistle, I caught a note of burger van fried onions in the chill night air. It was a moment for huddling, for moving briskly, and for missing people.

On leaving Derby, I thought about canal boats and ceramics - traces of an earlier meeting, still occupying my mind.

And so it goes.

pride

It feels like quite a while, since I was 'myself'.

The context for this is simple and clear. It has become the norm, for me to put others' interests ahead of my own. Or to imagine those others' interests to be my own - which, in part, they are. Fine lines. But I've known, for quite some time, that I have to re-take Shane (what foul foul wording), if I'm to content myself. And so, small steps though they are, I've let Emma know that I'll not be joining her and Alex at a festival in late August - a festival that I'm sure would be good, but one that would also become lost to me, as I'd end up being far more occupied with other peoples' children, rather than the much more interesting adults who'd be on hand. So I've said 'Thanks, but no thanks' to that. Alex' Dad will also be around, along with various other friends and relatives, so there'll be no shortage of bodies.

And I've booked in a trip to London, end of the month, when I'll be getting to the Riverside Studios (Fool for Love) and Soho Theatre (A Life in Three Acts).

Oh, and I've not done anything like enough football over the past few months to keep me spiritually right. So tomorrow evening, I'll be at Pride Park, Derby, for the visit of Newcastle United.

And just in case you're wondering, I haven't gone all dip trip fantasia - 'spiritually right?'. I mean happy. It's simple stuff, that just happens to get waylaid sometimes.

boobs

I am being befriended by a DadAtTheEdgeOfThePlayground - only occasionally AtTheEdgeOfThePlayground, truth be told - he works in sales, 'away a lot'. The man's son is Alex' best friend - both boys bright and quirky.

For practical reasons, it's been necessary for DadAtTheEdge' and self to have one another's phone numbers for quite a while. But today, I received a 'comedy text message'. It read:

BREAKING NEWS: John Terry Update - Fabio Capello has released a statement clearing the England captain, 'I don't know what all of the fuss is about... Everyone knows if a full back leaves a hole, it's the job of the centre back to fill it!'

That was it. The comedy text message.

I'm feeling a bit intimidated. Might have to make up some joke about boobs or something, next time I see him. You know, all laddish and that.

I

(With updates, below)

From a very young age, I had a sense of 'power relations'. Whether concerned with big public institutions - schools, police, family, or with social microcosms - teacher/pupil, mam/dad, copper/youth, I had an interest in how and why things were the way they were. In common with this, I found any kind of serious debate engaging - as much for the way in which arguments were substantiated, as for which way they were won, lost or left undetermined. Remaining the case, I would go on to read of rhetoric.

At school in the mid-late 1980s, I sat in a year group assembly, with around 150 of my peers, and began to listen to some bloke (not a teacher) talk about 'politics'. I imagine that he was an officer from some ill-thought-through local authority scheme - through which young minds were to become switched on to matters political. Over the course of the man's talk - thirty minutes at most, I found myself becoming more and more engaged. This was countered by a murmur, that became a rumble, that became outright disruption, from at least 100 of my fellow audience members. At the time, I realised that the speaker's task was thankless, and his approach - reasoning with us - ambitious. These were the days before drama and dance and hip-hop were taken to be the way to reach errant youngsters. I also guessed that the man at the front was 'the kind of person who didn't shout at children'. During what was probably a fairly grim half hour for him, he lobbed a few questions at our braying mass. Some fell into no man's land, others didn't get that far. I still don't know why the bystanding teachers left it until after he had departed to berate us - their own kind of theatre, perhaps.

That day, the point at which I noticed the background noise came a moment after I'd answered a question that the visitor had called out. To have answered at all was a bit out there, but to have to repeat myself felt a bit much.

'Tony Blair', I repeated, for he was our MP at the time. Fresh-faced, ambitious, going places.

As irrelevant or as dull as such talk may have been to so many of us back then, I'm minded to wonder about how many of that assembly were later touched, destroyed, or otherwise supported or ground down, by decisions and alliances forged on Tony Blair's watch. I'm also wondering what became of that day's guest speaker - people don't plan to go in for that sort of punishment, surely.

Tomorrow, I'll listen to Blair's evidence to The Iraq Inquiry. And later, I'll listen to the maintream fall-out from it.

----- ----- ----- -----
UPDATE (Fri, 11:35am): I found myself recalling being examined for the Ph.D., this morning - something to do with semiotics and seating arrangements. The Inquiry panel seemed to be more visibly nervous as today's session began. Blair also very tense to start with - seems to have relaxed into it. The pre-session Five Live phone-in was predictably grim. I sometimes wonder whether they sift out those callers who might seem to be possessed of balance and articulacy (...regardless of their bottom-line position).

UPDATE (Fri 4:19pm): Getting towards the end of the session, and I'd say that there's little that hasn't been heard before being aired. The nature of the questioning and answering has made me reflect upon contrasting styles of interrogation - the hard-headed, in-your-face journalist versus the stealthy, catch-you-with-defences-down approach, versus something that is a bit more zingy - something purely about fact-finding, rather than generating news, or a peformance, or a political blow. That's about it.

UPDATE (Fri 6:03pm): Early summaries and reactions - 'analysis' would be an overstatement - as broadcast on Five Live, have been fairly narrow in their focus. Despite close to six hours hours of contextual description, and accounting for the political and diplomatic balancing act that led to the second invasion into Iraq, the detail that gets the featured coverage is the lack of an apology from Blair. Predictable, not something that offends or bothers me personally, but it's easy to appreciate how and why others have reacted as they have. There seem to me to be three main sources of anti-Blair sentiment, namely: the Tories (Blair having upset the blue apple-cart, and led government, as the Conservatives navigated dire straits); the grieving (in the absence of a sense of hard, unequivocally clear evidence of attempts to avoid military intervention); and the old left (when Labour got New, others became old/grey/disenfranchised, by default). And so it goes.

H

Short film on the panart hang (musical instrument), and one of its players (a thoroughly nice chap who I met a couple of months ago).

[Upon first embedding the film, it wrecked the formatting of the blog, hence linky link link.]

O

The early part of a new year beckons a bit of a clear-out.

Shane: I got rid of all those black bags.

Emma: Where d' y' take them?

Shane: Samaritans.

Emma: Did they start rifling through them before you'd left?

Shane: Yep.

Emma: (amused) Treasure-hunters, those old ladies - they knows gold when they sees it.

Shane: Mm. They asked if I knew how to open that old jewellery-box-type-box, as I was leaving, but I didn't - didn't seem to be a key with it - must have fallen out in the bag.

Emma: Jewellery box?

Shane: Mm. Like a small shoe box size, kind of off-white, with a small floral motif - pretty ugly really.

Emma: You sure that was from our stuff?

Shane: Yeah. She had the black bag on the counter - it was the first thing she took out of it.

Emma: (confused) (thought lands) (eyes widen) You didn't take all of the black bags, did you?

Shane: Ye-es. All of the black bags that were from the clear-out.

Emma: Oh no. Oh no! (seems horrified) (begins to laugh)

Shane: What?

Emma: Two of those were for the rubbish.

Shane: What?

Emma: To be thrown out. Oh no-

Shane: What?

Emma: That box was... it was in the same bag as that nasty old toilet brush that I'd thrown out.

Shane: I just donated a toilet brush to the Samaritans?

Emma: (laughing) And a knackered vibrator.

Shane: (winces) Oh-, not good. Not good at all.

One did one's best. For a good cause.

Q

I had a really good day last Friday, I mean really good - exhausting, exhilerating, massively affirming, and the kind of day that will stay with me for quite a while. It was also all about work - although it was really about the responsiveness of the people who I was working with, to my work.

Apart from getting a few dozen grown-ups to go on a longish walk in icy woodland conditions (they suffered, but they enjoyed), and to later gad about various eateries and drinkeries (they enjoyed), I got them to take on a seriousish photographic task (they enjoyed), but more interesting to me, I had them tackle a couple of playful but tricky questions - one from the archives, plus a new one (for me). Those questions were:-

Q1. [From the archives] Think of an occasion when you took a risk. What was that risk?

Q2. [New] You may be aware of the TV programme, Come Dine With Me. (If not, someone will explain.) You are to host a most amazing supper, at Le Chateau Imaginaire. Your guests are to be three famous/ish people - all from different walks of life (i.e. no trios of any particular professional or source of notoriety), plus one non-famous person, who is neither an existing friend or relative. So, who are your guests?

The final part to question two (the non-famous person) had the potential to unseat a few of our riders, but no, they played and they played fair.

And after that, I had them return to Q1. But this time, I asked:

Q3. [New] Think of an occasion when you avoided taking a risk. What was that risk?

This was a question that relied on my players to already be working well together, as it would require some teasing out - its meanings and possibilities. But you know what, they were fantastic. I gave them a good time, and they delivered.

So good, so very good.

If you've any thoughts on any of the above questions, feel free to share (I am interested) - whether you're a familiar to the comments box, a one-off wanderer, or someone somewhere in-between.