Another week

My life is not actually boring at present, but it is very mundane.  In the last few days I have been with my father, and made lunch and enjoyed the tremendously warm sunny weather.  I have done some tuition, and discovered that one of the girls is aspergic and finds it very difficult to imagine anything, and doesn't like changing.  I now find it very difficult to see how she can cope with the GCSE.  She may be helped by visual learning.

I had some social life, I saw Tara for a cup of tea here, and I had my hair done at Marion's and then we had lunch in the local - rabbit stew.  I was knackered on Friday, and drove straight to my father's, saw my sister C and tried to find some US agents.  I like the look of one, so I'll start with her.

M and I have been up and down, I went into "cannot stand it another day" mode - but recovered eventually, although when I left on Friday morning I wasn't feeling my most cheery.  In the next year or so we will get our "get out of jail free" card - in the form of money from our parents.  I am very aware that we should have a serious discussion about it, but as we don't know exactly how much we are going to get, we can't even sketch a back of the envelope idea of how to divide it up.

The other major excitement has been that I have booked a gite for a week - it is probably hideous, since there were no photos of it, but it is surrounded by vines and cherries on a flat plain near Uzes - and has a swimming pool. And it's not far from my cousin Rachel - so that should be nice.

I am just wondering why things are like this.  We've had some good news, and I have begun to lose my anxiety about things, but I feel so limited, so underwhelmed by everything.  Is this further repression of my emotions?  My whole life seems to be narrowing down, I am writing of course, but I wonder whether I have much to offer through it, since I have so little interest in anything much.   However, I have been reading a lot of books, so perhaps it's time for a Book of the Month blog.

How I nearly, almost, never quite met Tony Benn

When I was 8 and living in London, a new girl started at my school, the Fox Primary School in Notting Hill Gate.  She had 2 brothers and they had all left private schools, because their father had decided it didn't fit his socialist beliefs.  I liked her.  She already knew a couple of girls in my class, because she lived in a house on Holland Park Avenue, which was painted lemon yellow "Daddy's favourite colour."  I also felt a sort of solidarity with her, I think, because I seem to remember she had a Marks & Spencer's kilt, as I did, although in a different tartan.

Anyway, Melissa Wedgewood-Benn (they hadn't dropped the double barrel in those distant days) was friends with girls I was friendly with at school (although I didn't go to most of their houses).  I never went to Melissa's house, but one day, in summer1966 we were on holiday in Scotland - we went to the Mull of Kintyre a couple of times to stay in a house there - and a strange car full of waving children appeared in the "garden" (a green place, filled with bracken and grass and not much else).   It was Kate and Melissa and Kate's mother, summoning me to come and play.  Kate's grandmother was the local laird, Naomi Mitchison, the writer and socialist and African chieftain, who lived at Carradale House - I remember the house as a great early Victorian white house with a croquet lawn and a fantastic cedar tree and a path down to the nice sandy beach, that we normally accessed (except at high tide) by crossing the stepping stones in a fast-flowing burn, or in our Avon rubber dinghy.  My memories of the interior may not be perfect, but I think I visited a couple of times.  On one occasion we made cheese straws in the large kitchen.  I think there was an Aga, I hadn't seen one before.  On one occasion (perhaps the same one) my parents collected me and were invited in for drinks.

The adults gathered in a squarish sitting room, full of squashy chairs, smoke hanging somnolently in the air, but I didn't really notice or recognise any of them, except Kate's parents, whom I knew  (I'd been to a party at her house I think).  Amongst the smoking adults were Tony & Caroline Benn - but obviously I wasn't introduced.

It was quite a thrill going to the house, because Elena, the owner of the house we stayed in, was implacably opposed to Naomi M - I'm not sure why, but perhaps because Elena was a deeply opinionated, irrational and emotional person, it wouldn't have been difficult to find something to argue about. Elena was a dance teacher and I have some vague idea it was some disagreement over the use of a hall owned by NM where E taught (Scottish?) dancing.


Three months later I left that school, and my parents dragged me to the provincial misery of Slough - 20 miles away, and to Catholic primary school whose cultural distance from that of Fox cannot be measured. So that group of friends and connections became another "Lost Domain". Sometimes my life seems to be a series of minor train crashes, in which I become uncoupled by accident, and sent off into a siding, while the rest of the train moves on.

I often see Melissa's journalism, it's very good, and we seem in broad agreement, as feminists of a certain age often are.  Tony Benn went on to be a dominant British figure, someone with whom one could often agree wholeheartedly.  He was obviously much loved, and seems to have been a pretty good egg on the whole.  Often when people die I feel a sense of loss, that I wish I'd met them, had a conversation with them. Now, as I get older I don't, I shrug - another one bites the dust, he was 88 (I think) it was going to happen. What I feel sad about is a sense that a whole swathe of people is going, with certain values that are no longer cherished.  This I expect is also a feature of old age.  As well as old socialists dying off, it's academics, people with the sacred classical knowledge, ancient values and understanding now considered irrelevant - I feel like one of those Romans trying to maintain standards at the end of the Empire, surrounded by Goths and Lombards, but still speaking perfect Latin. 

Under water

I had an extraordinary experience today.  We were driving across the lowlying area of Thanet where the Wantsum - an arm of the sea like the Swale - once flowed, separating Thanet from civilisation.

We saw a sign saying Road Closed - but didn't take much notice, because it said we could still have access to where we were going.  However, when we arrived at a place called Grove Ferry, beside the River Stour, where there is a great marshland, which is chiefly bird reserve, the road was closed again.  We drove past, wanting to see why - because we could see that the marsh had become a vast, glittering shallow lake.  The wind rippled it, the sunlight broke over it and it was a completely different scene.  This area is criss-crossed with a series of ditches, the earliest ones created in the middle ages by farming monks.  There was another phase of Dutch land reclamation in the 17thC - with a corresponding increase in the number of houses with elaborate gable ends.

As we drove down the road we saw that it really was closed - because it was under water.   The water was not tremendously deep, but the road dips down there, and may have been undermined by soil erosion.   This is unusual, because I noticed today that most of the road in the area are actually slightly raised, like causeways, on an agger of clay - which covers the chalk here.  We got out of the car and gawped - there were assorted waterfowl swimming on the surface, including swans, so it must have been a foot or so deep I guess.  The road curved away behind a hedge, so we couldn't see where or whether it emerged from the deluge.  It created a really magical effect, as M said "it's like a totally different place" - and even the odd traffic cone and field gate protruding from the waters couldn't destroy the eerie feeling.

Infuriatingly I did not have a camera with me, so cannot illustrate the scene.

Prior to this, our peak experience had been in the churchyard at Chislet - where we noticed that the West wall of the church was probably late Saxon (IMHO) or early Norman (Mark's view) and contained a fair bit of Thanet sandstone, a seam of now "extinct" local building material that probably ran out by the 12thC to judge from where and how it's used.  Further up the wall were some very fine bits of lintel and ashlar - M thought they were from Richborough - but I wondered if they would really bring stuff all the way there... they might have of course, it was easier when there was so much water for transportation purposes.  I imagined they might be from some local villa - he said they wouldn't use such high grade materials - so I am visualising some sort of tiny precint/shrine/altar that might have been used by the locals.  We couldn't get into the church, sadly.  I would like to know more about it.  It has a rather appealing tower - truncated.

Lots of violets in the graveyard, and we saw hibernating butterflies.  We had lunch outside a pub - in t-shirts.  I am feeling a lot more sanguine about the prospect of spring.

Rollercoaster 3

Feeling remarkably positive considering.   I have come to the conclusion that all I need to keep cheerful is modest injections of laughter and wine and decent conversation.   That way sanity lies!

I have been tutoring 16 year olds, and that has been a learning curve in all sorts of ways.  After a few weeks of it, I am beginning to see results, that they will produce work, which can then be critiqued... they don't understand about planning though.  The money is good, but the hours are few and have been curtailed by my having been very ill with an utterly miserable flu that lasted a week or two, followed by a chest infection which is still lingering.  Additionally, the kids have mocks, so I'm going to lose a bit more money in the next fortnight.  No matter, I have enough to be going on with.

However, the real roller coaster event has been that my father has fallen and broken his hip and had a hip replacement - and is now raring to get out of hospital again... he has also decided to sell his home, as well as the London house - so there will be enormous changes for the next year or so, and of course, a big influx of money.   I am a little afraid that all the dosh will go to repay debts, leaving us with nothing.  But at least we will have got out of debt.   Alternatively, if we downshifted a little to a smaller, snugger house, we might have enough money to buy another house for income... which seems rather dreary - but what we really need is income... Mark has had a couple more prospective jobs - hurray!  But has to tender for some of them...so nothing very certain.  He certainly hasn't got enough work to sign off yet, just a day or so, which he has to declare when he does it..

At least the summer is coming - with the prospect of a bit of income from students.