The Stray

Typing amid the tannoys.
Leeds station bound for London bound for Brussels. Starting to feel familiar, this.
It's been a bit of a bonkers 10 days in the UK, in truth.
Only natural, I suppose, to try and race about, to see as many people as possible, to catch up with family and friends...but it feels as if I've been moving too fast, a blur sweeping through towns and counties to meetings, lunches, a different bed every other day.

Some strange moments...
Going back to Chesterfield last week was uncomfortable, especially driving past our little house, now the abode of rent-paying strangers. I stopped outside. All was as it should be - and yet a tiny part of me couldn't compute that I was actually there at all. That I was ever there. Brain playing concertina with time again. Does that make sense?

 The town was as it always is - right down to the same traders shouting bargains from their market stalls - yet it was if something had shifted, and everything was the same...but different.

 It disturbed me, how little it felt like home......as if I were an outsider looking in. I sat there, at the wheel of the hire car, and I thought 'I don't know where home is any more'. Home was always where you were. And you were never here.

 A few days ago, visiting a friend in Halifax, we walked through the Stray at Lightcliffe; a pretty park - swathes of green grass, cherry trees lining the pathways, an ancient, tired little children's play area and a new playground being built near the site of some long-demolished, grubby old shelters.

 Let the time machine do its work here and you will surely find me at all the ages of my life.

 It's where I ran with the gang, swung on rusty swings right up to the bumps, went roly-poly down the grass slopes near the posh houses on Sutherland Road, ruined shoes climbing the low-hanging branches of the cherry trees with Sarah Ramsden.

It's where we played bicycle lamppost tig, hide and seek in the bushes, did cartwheels and walkovers, fell out, made up and all on a permanent diet of penny chews, sherbert dips, ice-pops and icecream screwballs.

 It was there where, on rickety roller skates fastened precariously with nut and bolt, we'd fly from the war memorial all the way down to those grotty urine-smelling shelters, screaming, veering and careering, only stopping by about-turning and crashing into a wall. Here, where we would wade through thigh-deep snow to the top of the hill and plummet to the bottom on rubbish wooden sledges, scraping knees and shins on the way.

 It was where I nervously, met my first 'boyfriend' after he asked me out at a Hipperholme Grammar School disco. Hardly a fairy tale first love...his friend fancied my friend and we'd had a clumsy, awkward snog to, of all things,  Joe Dolce's Shaddup-You-Face. Yes. Really.
So we met in the shelters. He gave me his scarf and then I decided, just like that, that I didn't fancy him after all. And I ran away. Literally. Silly girl. I never saw him again..and he never got his scarf back.

It was in this park where I got about as rebellious as I was ever going to get - splitting a packet of 10 Regal King Size with a friend, smoking five each, then scoffing a packet of Polos to try hide our faggy breath from our parents. We would sit, pretending to inhale, bubble-permed teenagers in stretch jeans and pixi boots, in the shadow of the war memorial, plucking up the courage to go to the phone box to ring whichever boy was flavour of the month.

Then, oh so many summers later, it became our place Thomas.
First, gentle walks with a pram - a new mum, scared to death, worrying, worrying; worrying if you slept, worrying if you didn't, just worrying.
But I found a peace and a freedom there, in the park.

You'd sit in the pushchair and shriek with a laughter punctuated by dirty giggles as funny mummy flew higher and higher on the swings pulling daft faces and singing nursery rhymes.
Then you had a go. Slow pushes on the baby swings, moving on to the big swings once you'd learned how to hold on.

As you got older I could heave you up the steps of the slide, sit you down and let you slide to the bottom by yourself. Remember when it was wet and you got stuck halfway down and got a soggy bottom? And other children and their parents watched as I clambered up the slide to free you, me laughing and crying, embarrassed but drinking in your smiley face as I scrambled towards you.

In summer, you'd wear your shorts, and I'd see from the corner of my eye how others would stare at your plastic leg splints.....noticing your difference.

It meant we almost always had the swings to ourselves. People would circumnavigate us, pretending to look the other way, waiting for us to leave, ignoring their toddlers straining and pulling. Mostly it didn't bother me, but sometimes it felt lonely.

We made them uncomfortable. I know it was because they didn't know what to say. I'll never forget the mortified woman who shushed and slapped her son when he asked why you had 'plastic legs', even as I tried to tell her it was ok and I was happy to answer his question. Stupid stupid woman, dragging him away, scaring him half to death.

None of it bothered you though, which was all I cared about.

 I would show you trees - how you loved the texture of the rough bark! I would pick flowers and tell you their colours and sometimes, on sunny, breezy days, when the grass was dry, I would lie down and try and pull you down with me on to our backs to look at the scudding cotton-wool clouds. You always sat bolt upright again though, as if you were worried about missing something.

 I would stand you under a cherry tree and shake it and shake it and shake it until the blossom cascaded and you looked and looked amazed as petals and sometimes whole flowers tumbled and showered around you, landing on your head, your shoulder...

 And sometimes we'd just take a picnic rug and a drink and a yogurt and a book.

 All this I remembered as we walked through the park towards the swings. And suddenly I am 10 years old again, swinging and swinging and swinging, higher and higher. And the tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes are caused by the rushing wind, nothing more.

 Every step I take I know you'd taken it before. I put my palms against the trunk of our horse chestnut tree and wonder if it still holds your imprint. The cherry trees are again full of blossom and I pull down a small branch and shake it. The wind catches the petals and lifts them into the air.

 I stand for a moment, feeling my own roots plunging deeply into the soil of this park where I played the games of a carefree child..and where you did too.

And I think, here's home...


xxxx

The Stray, Lightcliffe

Weeping Angels

When I was a little girl, my grandma - your great grandma - used to take me for walks in a cemetery near her home.
Nothing ghoulish or morbid in that - it was a pleasant place, full of trees, carefully maintained pathways and borders, and lovingly tended plots. Her generation had no fear of the dead, Thomas - they'd seen so much of it.

We'd walk among the statues and gravestones, looking at the dates, reading the names aloud, and we'd have our favourites. One in particular I remember: a cherub watching over the grave of a little boy, Rob Roy MacGregor, who died in 1899, just five years old.

I loved going to see him (of course I confused the boy with the cherub)..and don't recall feeling any sadness as we stood before the little statue. Children have a far greater acceptance of things, don't they? I never once thought about his parents Herbert and Georgina...and how it must have been for them, how they must have stood there too.

I went back to the grave a few years ago. It was all so very different.
Rob Roy's cherub had a missing hand, his wing had been broken off and his grave was full of weeds. Some of the statues nearby had been defaced and gravestones had been pulled down.
It felt faded, jaded, tired...it felt unloved and I wished I hadn't gone back there. Some things are, after all, best left behind....

I thought of my walks to see Rob Roy last week when we spent an hour or so in Laeken Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Brussels. It was a book, 'Secret Brussels', that sent us there.

 I love old cemeteries - they have a different kind of peace, a serenity, a semi-wildness where nature flourishes and wild things roam; a quietness, a sense of long-trodden pathways, of ancient lives.....where the past is not such a foreign country after all.

We were met by a cat, a yellow-eyed, chocolate-brown, stocky fellow who seemed to welcome our presence and he stayed in step with us as we explored, padding alongside us, curling round and around our ankles every time we stopped.

It was a dismal day. The sky was a wringing wet, grey dishcloth, and it was chilly too.....but somehow it suited.
We walked, stepping over puddles, avoiding the muddy bits, and we gaped - there is no other word for it - at the funerary art around us.

A woman, a desperate grief-ravaged young woman, draped in flowing robes, arms bare, hair gently coiled, lies across a family grave as if she has hurled herself on to it. One of her bare feet is on the step of the grave, the other almost touches the gravelled path.

She is startlingly lifelike, like one of those high-street performance artists who dust themselves in pewter-coloured powder to resemble a statue.
I wonder at first whether she is meant to resemble a member of this long-dead family, though I think it more likely she is a symbol of a family's grief, mourning for all eternity, on their behalf.
I have never seen anything like it before.

They are everywhere, these weeping angels. It is Dr Who without the horror.
One  kneels at the foot of a grave, hands clasped before her. She gazes at the inscription on the gravestone and her bare feet, crossed behind her, are visible through the thin material of her robes.
Along from her is a third statue, her hair flowing free. A beautiful long leg exposed, she lies almost prostrate at the foot of a family grave. Someone has placed lilies in her arms.

Her goddess-like perfection, her grace, her ethereal beauty, are a stark contrast to the utterly ordinary faces in the black and white photographs on the gravestone she watches over.

We find a little boy and girl at one grave - the girl is sitting on the granite slab and her hand caresses the polished stone. Her feet are bare but the little boy (her brother?) standing over her, looking down to her, protectively, wears sturdy shoes and thick socks.
It is raining and drops collect, like clear, bright jewels, on his forehead and lips.

Not far from them, another statue - a woman standing fully upright leans against a tall, stone column bearing the bust of a proud-faced man. A hand covers her face. She is distraught. Does she represent the widow of this man, who gazes to the distance above her, oblivious to the grief around him?

And then, most poignantly, perhaps, we find the sprawled body of a young man, a soldier. He lies resting, exhausted. The grave is that of Max Pelgrims, aged 24 when he was killed on August 19, 1914, just weeks after the beginning of World War One.

And so we walk and walk and the cat follows us on soft paws, and the rain drips on us from the cedars and the yew trees, and blue tits and great tits go 'seep seep seep' in the conifers overhead..
We find ornate family crypts and altars, perfect dainty ceramic flowers and laurel wreaths, we find an original casting of Rodin's 'Thinker' and I vow to return because I need more time to absorb this place.

Before leaving we follow the instructions in our guide book to find the entrance to an underground crypt.

It is not a happy place. It is chilling in all senses of the word..and I find it difficult to imagine any family wishing this as their loved one's last resting place.
It is dank and gloomy and the odd vases of fresh flowers only serve to reinforce the grimness of the place.

One of the long galleries is gated off with a metal grill, but beyond it we see another gallery and another grill. Grainy, filtered daylight from dirty skylights only adds to the bleakness, and suddenly we are all very cold..
It could be a sci-fi setting, a cell, and it feels miserable, without hope and soulless..and it goes on and on. There are puddles on the floor and I hear a rustling and water dripping.

I know for a moment, though we never discuss it, we are all silently thinking with relief of your little place, high on a clifftop and of you flying free across land, sea and sky.

We walk back up the steps glad to emerge into the open, to the trees and the birds, and we head back to the cemetery gates with talk of cafe and coffee - leaving the weeping angels and their silent, anguished, eternal vigils, behind.


Laeken Cemetery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laeken_Cemetery

Max Pelgrims: http://www.bel-memorial.org/photos/PELGRIMS_Max_2882.htm

Brighouse Cemetery:  http://bit.ly/IRy31A

Rodin's 'Thinker': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker

Secret Brussels: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Brussels-Jonglez-Guides/dp/2915807965/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336382334&sr=8-2-spell

Picture Gallery

A Street of Dreams

I don't see your face.
But I sense that it's you, a perception of your essence, your being.

The weight of you as I casually sling you on to my hip, holding on to you as you lean giddily, heavily out and away, waving goodbye. Wearing shorts and no shoes or socks, a red t-shirt. It is a warm day and I can feel the heat of your torso.

Chubby hands.
Strange. Your hands were never chubby. They were elegant, long-fingered, people always said you'd have made a good pianist.

And when did you ever wave goodbye? Unless it was through someone else's actions, someone who loved you holding your forearm and swaying it: 'Say bye bye to mummy!' - your wrist waggling as you looked in the opposite direction. Ever the rebel..

But it was you. I know this.

And when the alarm invades I lie still as consciousness seeps in; those few muffled seconds, half awake, half still in a dream. For a while enveloped, cocooned, comforted by your presence and then..
...scrabbling, the mind flailing, panicking, grasping at remnants.

Birds. Traffic. A clattering from the kitchen. The woman moving around in the flat upstairs. All these things I become aware of.

And inevitably, as fine as a spider's web, as soft as gossamer, the warp and weft and threads of you untangle and dissolve into air.

And it's not as if tears come or anything like that. But there's a heaviness, a weariness - I saw you, and now you are gone again.

In the early days I never dreamt of you. I think that was probably a good thing.
I think your brain protects you from yourself, if that make sense.

Or maybe it was just the pills.
'Take one when you need one,' the doc had said. I misunderstood, misheard, was perhaps too far away to listen, but anyway, I took one every night for two weeks and slept the sleep of the dead.

And in the weeks and months afterwards there were tortured, feverish, teasing apparitions with no sense or meaning, just colours, rage, anguish and confusion.
I kept a diary that first year and wrote, in a frenzy at times, all that I could, but there was no meaning in the dreams and little comfort.

Then, just after we'd marked six months, a dream of such clarity.
We were sitting next to each other at a church service, you calm instead of your usual fidgety, shouty self.
I remember a coffin. I think it was your funeral. But afterwards, after people had said goodbye, you and I were walking hand in hand, splashing ankle deep through bright water, so bright, glinting in the sunlight.

It was a terraced street; I remember a long row of houses on each side of us but the light was almost blinding, turning everything into silhouette. I was alongside you but at the same time I was behind you, watching us both walking up this street, going who knows where, splashing, holding hands. You loved splashing.

I remember thinking, when I woke up, rummaging for a pen to commit the dream to paper, how often I'd put out my hand for you to hold, only to find you not there, for my hand to close in on itself, fingernails against palm. How firm your grip had been in the dream.

People have put all kinds of meanings to it. I choose to believe all and none of them. You'd come back to me, that's all that mattered.

'The sunne may set and rise
But we contrariwise
sleepe after our short light
one everlasting night...'
                               Catullus

The Girl on the Train

She dropped into the seat with a heaviness that suggested utter exhaustion.
Her mousey, flyaway hair scraped back into a heavy, scruffy pony tail; her chin all teenage spotty.

She looked at no-one, not even with that out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye curiosity you use on the underground, just to make sure you're not about to sit next to a nutter.
She didn't care who was around her.

She buried her nose in her scarf, rested her head against her hand against the window, shut her eyes and shut out the world.
I think she must have been about 16, though impossible to say for sure.

She had bright lime green headphones on - the ones that cover your whole ears - and in the hand that wasn't rested against her cheek she was holding an iPod.
And that might have been that.

As you do on the tube, even a mid-afternoon one, you try not to preoccupy yourself too much with anyone around you. Just in case.
Simple rules. Try not to meet another's eyes, don't invade personal space, don't inhale too deeply when someone a few seats back sneezes...the usual stuff.

A jumble of humanity doing its best to disengage, to disappear, to pretend they aren't there...just until they reach their stop.
This girl was doing a cracking job of all that. But teenagers can can't they? We expect them to shut off, ignore, defy. Sullen-ness their shield - and some of them do it so well.

I glanced again at the girl.
She looked crumpled. Her face had burrowed deeper into the material of her scarf and denim jacket and only her closed eyes, cheek apples and forehead were visible. But part of the scarf material closest to her eyes had become a shade darker. Wet. And I noticed wetness on her cheeks too.
She was crying.

I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but I don't think they had.
The woman next to me was on her phone, had been for ages, high-pitched, shrieky and animated. The man in the seat next to the girl was engrossed in his paper and in the contents of his beer can.

Besides, the girl had done her best to make herself look as if she wasn't there. And just observing her, noticing her tears, felt instrusive, voyeuristic.
She was closed to the world. Eyes clamped shut. But now I come to notice it, there's an occasional but obvious lurch of the shoulders, a sob surpressed.

Seconds pass.

Maybe it's the music, I think. Perhaps she's broken up with a boyfriend. Maybe a row with her parents. Or maybe it's much, much worse than that.
And I realise I'm sitting there minutes later making up stories in my head for what might be the matter with the girl sitting opposite me instead of....instead of what?

I'm ages away from my stop, she's showing no sign of being near hers so are we to sit like this, this girl crying and me, opposite...watching her?
When does minding your own business become a failure of human compassion.
The thought of it.
Am I to do nothing at all?

Hardly aware of the decision I've made I lean over and lightly touch her elbow. I know she can't hear me because of the music.
At my touch her eyes flash open and for a second I see enraged, flashing soaked brown eyes, sodden lashes, not quite a snarl but something aggressive - attack the best form of defence, I suppose.

'Vous etes ok?' I ask. She sees instantly I am harmless but shrugs a shoulder away from me, fiddles with her ipod and wipes her nose with her scarf before hunkering down again and shutting me out.
Her music is classical, I heard a bit of it as she readjusted the headphones. Something searing, something soaraway. I'm surprised, though I don't know why.

I can't reach her and she doesn't want me to.
So I sit for a few stops more with her, not watching, but aware, as she snuffles into her scarf and then at one stop just as the doors are about to close, she moves, grabs her rucksack, and makes for the door, all flying ponytail, trailing scarf and ipod wires.

And she's gone.
And I sit for a few moments more, imagining and wondering... before it's my turn to get off too.

The Metro, where we see snippets of lives, and then they are gone.

A Life Less Ordinary

IT was her 90th birthday. And she had no-one.
But she knew we were coming so she'd baked a cake.
She had forgotten to add sugar though, and it had been in the oven too long.

She fussed and flapped and served it on a flowery china cake stand on a white paper doily. Then she cut us each a huge chunk with a long bone-handled knife and waited excitedly for our reaction as we bit into it. It was rock hard and tasted terrible.

'Mmmm lovely!' we said (of course we did)....but when her back was turned we scrunched telltale crumbs onto the plate and put the rest in our pocket.

We'd made her day, she said.

And then we got on with things. 'Let's start at the beginning,' I said. 'Tell me about your parents....'

I was a Brighouse Echo trainee journalist of just a few weeks and this was my first '90th birthday' interview. Coached to say little but listen, to encourage with a raised eyebrow here, a shrug there, a 'please go on' or an 'and then what happened?' to keep things flowing...I wrote down facts in over-large crude Teeline outlines in a spiral-bound notebook, putting an asterisk in the margin when a good quote came.

I remember a dark living room but sunshine through the window, antimacassars, a silver tea set brought out 'for best', a bobbled couch and an Engelbert Humperdinck LP.

I remember a cat, dusty silk flowers with cobwebs in them, veined, shaking hands, bingo and the Waring Green Forget-Me-Not-Club of which she had once been a member.

I remember a 14-year-old in the cotton mills, bobbins, aprons and headscarves, a cluster of friends and neighbours around the only TV in the street watching the coronation, a husband long-dead, and much-wanted children failing to be born.

I remember the garden was her pleasure and lavender her favourite.

And I remember her knotting her hands and looking out of the window as she spoke about a teenage brother who lied about his age and went to Flanders fields and never returned. And how she still had picture of him in a large, oval, silver locket at her wattled, wrinkled throat. And how she still wept for him, after so long.

And then the interview was over.

All these things I remember, yet I have forgotten her name. But when anyone asks what I found most satisfying about being a reporter, I tell them her story....or rather, my story.

You see, I had thought I would do the interview on the telephone - it was 'only a 90th birthday' after all -  but my editor, Stephen Firth*, had insisted...'no, you must go see her, it's important.'. And I didn't understand why....

And then I did. Not just because of the cake palaver (though I knew I'd never forget that moment!) or because of the joy we'd put into one person's day by simply taking the trouble to turn up.

But because the rapport we'd built up over the cake and over the admiring of the garden meant that while she was posing for pictures under the gentle guidance of the photographer, she told us something she hadn't shared with anyone else: she had cancer, she said; she hadn't got long and she was planning, in her final months, to make her first ever trip 'abroad', a first and final pilgrimage to visit to her brother's war grave.

I got my notebook out again.

She was a bit nervous but the hospital had said it would be ok for her to go and an old and trusted friend would be her guide. 'I'm going to see my brother again, after all these years'.

I don't buy the phrase 'hardened hack'. I never did. Even now the memory prompts a clearing of the throat.

An ordinary life, is what I remember thinking as we left, the photographer and I, and we walked down to the canal in Brighouse town centre to feed the cake remains to the ducks before going back to the office.

An ordinary life. Yet extraordinary. And goodness I worked hard at that piece, trying to do it justice, to do right by her.

She never made the visit, the dear lady. The cancer claimed her before the journey. But the light in her eyes as she spoke of her impending adventure has stayed with me.

It was an interview that made this naive, awkward, wannabee journo see that it's not only the 'big' stories that are worthy of time, effort and dedication - and instilled in me for the first time a knowledge, that no matter how seemingly insignificant, everyone has a story that wants to be told.

Wishing good luck to my inspirational editor as he prepares for life after the Echo. He taught me all I know.

* http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2012/news/weekly-editor-made-redundant-in-yorkshire-shake-up/

A Forest Walk (and bear hunt)

It is impossible to tread quietly in the forest.
Every step is a giveaway.
The crack of twigs, the crunch of dry leaves, a squelch through the mud - we are undercover elephants in crusty, dusty walking boots that still carry the years-old muck of a Scottish isle - so long is it since last they were worn.
But so be it. And as my mind plays over and over 'We're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one, we're not scared!!'*, I think it has been too, too long since we last ploughed through long, wavy grass (swishy swashy!), thick oozy mud (squelch squerch!) and crumbly woodland (stumble trip, stumble trip!).

We are in the Foret De Soignes**, a tiny part of the 4,000 acres or so that sweep across south-eastern Brussels, the part which borders the parks and lakes of the Bois de la Cambre, the part that is a 20-minute walk from our flat. And the need to get out of landscaped ornamental park into the thick, dense woodland is overwhelming. To be where the wild things are!

We set off along a narrow mud path, trying to adjust the eyes; binoculars - more recently used to spot the moons of jupiter than spotting a bird - slung round the neck, and we look for a giveaway flash in the peripheral vision, listen for a telltale rustle.

On one side of the path it's as if the forest is playing a magic eye trick: almost identical, slim, tall silver birches, parallel to each other, long, lean and vertical - you can almost be convinced there is a shape you're missing among the tree trunks.

And on the other side a giant, a great, wide-girthed, trunk stretching up and up and up and I'm wondering have I just not seen trees close up for a while or are these really extraordinarily tall. They are the kind of trees you can't just pass by. You have to touch them, to draw your fingers across the bark and wonder what histories they could recount.

Everything is becoming green. Not a thick, dark canopy, but a flittering of millions of tissuepaper-thin leaves, barely emerged, fresh, uncontaminated. And as a stronger breeze gusts up the delicate unfurling leaves of the silver birches rustle, witter and chatter. There are bluebells..only a first few, giving parts of the woodland floor a gentle blue hue and here and there are sprawling clumps of bell-like flowers (campanulas?).

High above there is the harsh 'shkaaaaaak' of a jay - its wings a flash of white and azure - and everywhere there is the almost-synthesised sibilant 'tsirrup' of  nuthatches. They are a grey-blue blur as they fly from tree to tree but, through binoculars, are stunningly beautiful creatures with their bold eyestripe, and deep orangey-pink buff bellies.

If you stop and listen it's easy to hear them at work.
Tap tap tap.......tap tap tap.

There's no confusing them with the rapid drilling of the greater spotted woodpecker we'd seen earlier.
This is more gentle, you really have to stand still to hear it.

Follow your ears, almost pin it down and then it is on the wing, and, as it lands on the next tree, you catch it at last.

It explores tree trunks in a jerky, fidgety gait, hopping with head up, then head down digging out invertebrates, nuts and seeds. It's a clever little thing - able to wedge tougher nuts into cracks in the bark to hammer them open.

And then, on a neighbouring trunk, a treecreeper, a tiny brown bird with exquisite delicate bow-curved beak, flitting, batlike, from trunk to trunk. Unlike the nuthatch which can go in both directions, it heads ever upwards.

There are red squirrels here. They aren't red. They are rusty. And it is a joy to see them unthreatened by their boistrous, bully grey counterparts.
They bound along the ground, flick, flick, flicking their tails, easily identifiable by their tufty ears, even high up, in silhouette, when you can't see their colour, and we watch one with a pine cone, hoping to see it stop and eat or bury it, but it moves too quickly - now you see it, now you don't through the tree trunks - and then it is gone.

There is a song thrush calling, its loud repetitive song unmistakeable, and there are many, many great tits and we can also hear chaffinches, wood pigeons, and, suddenly a melancholy 'peeeeeioooooo' I've not heard here yet - a call I first heard on the high crags and moors on the Isle of Mull many years ago...a buzzard.
We scan the trees and there it is, perched on high, all talons, beak, brown speckles and pale breast. It takes off again quickly, disappearing from view, but we hear it for some time afterwards and I think it is one of the most beautiful, most desolate calls.

It feels a healthy forest - the cracked, gaping crooked limbs and trunks of long-dead trees are left to lie where they fall, for the moss to blanket and for fungi and insects to consume, perfect habitats among which woodmice bound and chipmunks duck, dive and chatter.
Yes, chipmunks. Siberian ones***. This was a surprise. Bright eyed and bushy tailed (literally), we spotted them darting between fallen trunks, over stumps, pausing, observing before ducking into sandy burrows.

One in particular allowed us to get very close. Too close. As if it had forgotten its wildness.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that his great great great great grandfather was probably kept as a pet before making his bolt for freedom and starting a colony. They shouldn't be here. And on learning this I'm unsure what to make of their presence. What has had to make way for their arrival?

The rain falls lightly at first and the wind strengthens. Somewhere close by wood is creaking against wood, that eerie sound that suggests timbers shivering at sea or rusty hinges in haunted houses.

Then it comes all at once. No shelter here! Raindrops gather and congeal on high branches and fall in great plops down the back of the neck and, for the first time, what with the bending and scraping of wood, the insistent wind and the driving rain, there's a slight and sudden fear of taking the wrong path, of plunging in deeper. Too much reading of Wind in the Willows, perhaps.

We turn around and yomp back, retracing our steps and eventually come to the forest edge, then tarmac, then park, then home... thrilled to have found a great outdoors on our doorstep.
A fruitless bear hunt though Thomas.
If we'd been here 1,000 years ago or so we might just have been luckier..and found one hiding in a narrow gloomy cave. They were here then you know.
Now there's a thought...

* Credit and thanks to Michael Rosen (author) and Helen Oxenbury (illustrator): 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. For the memories of happy times reading a fabulous book. In your top 10, Thomas, definitely...and your mum still knows it by heart.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonian_Forest
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_chipmunk

Banging a pan lid for Easter

An Easter time, a spring time that seems so long ago.
A sunny day in the garden. Daffodils, a picnic rug, frogs in the little pond, birdsong, you.
For once you seemed really aware of the camera and in the pictures you are looking, really looking, into the lens. There's a curiosity in your eyes, but also such a settled contentedness.

Why so happy? Well, you've got your noisiest toys, a pan lid to bang and your juice.
You're sitting on the lawn of our place in Halifax and are taking great care to make sure your feet don't touch the grass - you never liked the feel of it between your toes. Sometimes, when you'd rumpled the rug and nearly bottom-shuffled your way off it, you'd have to bend your knees and crinkle up your toes so only your heels were touching...until one of us grabbed you under your arms and hoisted you back on again.

I can't see the helium balloon on the photo but it would be there somewhere, unless you'd already burst it during over-exuberant bashing! You always got a helium balloon for Easter because you didn't like chocolate - something about the texture perhaps. Funny boy, who preferred grapes and satsumas to 'proper' sweet treats any day.

Remember we went to church once one Easter Day morning?
No idea why we thought it might be a good idea....but we were full of the joys of spring and, I suppose, felt it would be a good family thing to do.
It didn't go well. You were extra happyshouty that day and, even though it was a family service, they came over and asked wouldn't it be better if we took you away into a side room.

I refused. Mortified that they had asked. They were probably being kind but all I could think at that moment was that they didn't want you in their congregation, that your difference was an obstacle to their worship. And all my embarrassment, shame and rage at your rejection vented itself in hot, quiet, tears.
Thank goodness for you who, oblivious, and no doubt relishing the wide open echoey spaces of the church, shouted all the louder. That showed them.

The picnic rug pictures were a few Easters later.

Thinking...you had started turning blue then.
Barely noticeable at first.
Like a scudding cloud briskly sweeping across the sun, a shadow would touch your lips, your fingertips, the apple of your cheeks... and be gone as quickly as it had appeared.

I'm recalling that first time in hospital: when they had to take you off the monitor because your oxygen levels dropped so regularly, and every time they did an alarm would sound and ever time it sounded a whole team of medics would race to your bedside...to find you alert and beaming.

No doctor was ever able to get to the root of what was happening to you. The heart doctor referred you to the chest consultant who sent you to neurologist and, at the end of it all, they shook their heads and said: 'see, how little we know...how little we know'.

So with puzzlement in their eyes and a summons for regular check-ups they sent you home - and off you went, striding out, your thin little legs in their plastic splints, along the polished corridors of Leeds General Infirmary's Clarendon wing.

And so those 'blue do's' as we came to call them, simply became part of you, your make-up.
They didn't appear to be harming you, but I worried that perhaps one day they would. And sometimes it got in the way of enjoying our time together.

Easter always seems a difficult time somehow. Everything blooming, colourful, so full of life, of renewal, of promise.

And these pictures well, let's just say sometimes, just sometimes, it's hard to stand before them.

They're showing Mary Poppins on the Beeb today, the Easter Sunday afternoon film. Your absolute favourite. So we know we'd be doing, don't we, if you were still here...

90 Minutes in the Furnace

Beads of sweat are rolling into my eyes and I can taste salt on my lips.
The heat is unbearable.
There are two large fans on one wall belting out hot air and placed around the floor are those small, white, fan heaters, all set to level three, to the highest, hottest setting.
Together all these fans make for a thunderous noise.
I had imagined dainty Indian bells, some kind of Yoga-appropriate music, oh I don't know, scented candles. This is the very opposite of everything I had in mind.
I can't breathe. It's a simple as that. I can't breath. My chest feels tight and my mouth is full of hot, dry, sweaty air.

I am stunned, appalled and nauseous in equal measure. It is like walking into a furnace.
I look about me.
Everyone else appears serene. I venture up to one woman - we'd exchanged 'Franglais' pleasantries in the changing room - and I crouch down next to her. 'It's hot isn't it?' I say, stupidly. 'Is it meant to be this hot..I mean it's too hot isn't it? Isn't it too hot?'

The woman smiles sympathetically but I'm aware of hard stares from others in the room. The Englishwoman needs to shut up, I'm thinking.
Ok then. Feign nonchalance.
And while feigning, consider options for escape.

But I don't know what to do.
I am 'in the room'.
I am not allowed to leave 'the room'.
The sign on the door had been ominously clear. "Do not leave this room for the next 90 minutes".
And I'd had the no-nonsense brief from the woman on reception: "For first time you might feel dizzy, you might need to rest, you can kneel, you can sit, you can lie down...but you must not leave room, we don't leave room.'
All I can think of is the cool air in the real world on the other side of the door.

The plan, well, what passes for a plan, had been to take the opportunity during this time out to get more exercise, to improve health, wellbeing etc etc.
So I started running again (for cardiovascular!) and today is yoga (for serenity, wisdom, flexibility and general at-one-ness-with-the-universe type stuff). My first ever class.

I should have done the research.
I should at the very least have taken the trouble to read the detail on the website instead of merely noting that the Bikram Yoga studio, being just a few hundred yards from where I live, would do as much as any other sort of yoga studio. And drop-in classes too. Perfect.

'Blimey...you've gone for hot yoga!' my brother emailed when I sent him the link.
I thought he meant 'hot' as in 'trendy'. I know.
He meant 'hot' as in 100 degrees.

It's a horrific, unexpected, nightmare...
But if I leave this room now, thinks spiritual me, I will have stumbled off the path to inner peace before even making a first step. And anyway, says rational me, I've paid 25 Euros for a week's trial membership. That did it.
I look for somewhere to sit - at the back, obviously.
I roll out my rented mat, pop my towel on it and sit down.

Even the slightest movement, from standing to sitting, brings out droplets across my hairline and I can feel sweat running down my back. I try a few tentative stretches and stop when the rooms starts swimming and spinning.
Lots of the people here are extremely bendy. And they are hardly wearing anything at all. One man wears just swimming trunks and the women are in those bikini-type outfits you see on Olympic athletes.

The woman I'd spoken to earlier stands upright, lets her head loll back and the rest of her body follows, folding in on itself, until she is a crab, she..er..scuttles about like this, left to right, but then, extraordinarily, she walks her feet even closer to her hands until her hands can grab her ankles. She is running with sweat, it is falling off her in heavy droplets on to her small, blue towel.

The class hasn't even started yet. Some people are lying flat on their backs, eyes closed. Others are sitting cross legged facing the wall, meditating...presumably, garnering strength for what is to come.
Everyone is wet through. The smell is not pleasant.
I dread what's about to happen.

The door opens and a diminutive woman walks in, much, much younger than most of us. 'Stand up!', she says loudly, firmly. 'Class begin'.
And what happens after that is the most gruelling, most challenging workout - and the heat, designed to enable deeper stretching, while reducing stress and tension, makes even the slightest movement a huge trial.

We begin with a deep breathing exercise, standing tall, hands together, fingers intertwined, clasped under the chin. We talk a long, slow, measured gulp of air, raising our elbows, keeping our fingers clasped, holding breath, then throwing our head back and loudly exhaling. My shoulders start to ache, my head is already swimming and dreaded black spots start to gather in the peripheral vision.

This is the first of the 26 poses* that make up a Bikram yoga class. I am conscious of fabulous bodies doing incredible things all around me.
I work very hard, so anxious, I suppose, to restore that suppleness I once had and I push and push and despair at my lack of flexibility and it hurts and I am suffocating.
The instructor barks across the room: 'Beginner, sit lower...good beginner....beginner focus, relax your face....beginner stretch higher...'


It's the 'focusing' that does for me. I stare hard into my own eyes in the mirror trying to perfect the 'Standing Bow Pose' and I stare so hard at my beetroot-red face that I feel like I'm falling into the mirror and I realise that I am going to be sick. My face, my vision, is obliterated by black spots and I keel over - a self preservation thing, stopping the faint before it takes hold.

I am on my hands and knees on the floor, sweat is dripping from my chin and my nose onto my towel.
I break all etiquette. I put my hand up.  'I'm sorry, I need to leave the room. I feel sick,' I say to the instructor.
She doesn't let me. And she is very firm about not letting me.
 'Lie down. Lie down now! Do not disrupt class. What you are feeling is perfectly normal. Just lie down and take deep breaths until you feel better.'
I do as I am told. I can't believe this.
I can't believe I don't walk/crawl out of there. But I turn over and lie flat on the mat, waiting to throw up all over myself in front of the whole class.

I stay there, while the others go through 'balancing stick', 'separate leg stretching' and 'triangle' poses. And slowly the spots fade and the nausea abates ....
Something in me - the fear of being the ridiculous English person, mainly - tells me to crack on and I slowly roll over, haul myself back to my feet and try to join in again.

But I sit down a lot now, backing off at the least feeling of discomfort and I move at a snail's pace, reflecting, as I watch these amazing, supple, super-beings, that I haven't exactly excelled in the 'wisdom' stakes so far. I should have taken it easier instead of ploughing in as if I was still the teenage ballet dancer of so many years ago.
There are people like me at the back who sit down too. I realise, unlike in a ballet class, there is no disgrace in giving in, in resting.

The last 13 poses are much more floor-based with relaxation time in between and so it's manageable, though barely.
And oh, the best bit, the very best bit, when the instructor comes down from her podium and 'flick, flick, flick' each of those monster fans is switched off . And we lie there and there are gentle tendrils of cool air.

The very last thing we are instructed to do is lie on our backs, legs stretched, heels together, feet relaxed, arms by our sides, palms facing upwards, eyes open, gently breathing, for two minutes, without moving.
The 'Savasana' or 'dead body' pose. Appropriately enough.
Then 'Namaste' and the teacher is gone.

There is little conversation in the changing room. I'm not surprised.
And as I look at myself in the mirror (the horror, the horror!), I have to decide whether I can face it again - or am I jacking it in...

Later I do the research I should have done before the class.
I was foolishly unprepared and, while a quick Google search reveals there is as much to be said about the negatives of Bikram Yoga as the positives - lovers and haters seem to be out there in equal number - I know I cannot judge on that one experience.

Those 90-odd minutes in that room were, without doubt, among the most physically challenging I have ever encountered.
So all-consuming was the experience, there was no time for thought, for worry, for preoccupation with anything other than what was happening then and there.
A big change for someone who's never been good at 'in the moment' stuff, always thinking ahead, always planning, working out the next step, always fretting about something or other.
It's a flaw, I know. And it drives me to distraction that my brain will not be still unless I'm asleep.
But in today's 'hot yoga' session I was incapable of thinking about anything. And I think that was probably a very positive thing.

And it's for that reason, above all else, which means I'm going back for another go tomorrow. I know...I can't believe it either..


* http://www.bikramyoga.com/BikramYoga/TwentySixPostures.php

Sunshine, planets, stars and birdsong

This morning I watched the sun rise.

It was quite something.

After a sleepless night in our new flat it seemed the thing to do.

I stood at the windows of our east-facing living room seven storeys up. Everywhere the sky was that clear blue-grey, the last stars had blinked out and the dawn chorus had quietened.

It was obvious where the sun would emerge - one patch of the horizon a dusky purple turning pink, orange, brighter and brighter - and then a flash of gold between chimney stacks, just a peek at first, but as soon as it appeared the whitewashed walls of the room turned rosey and I could see my faint shadow.

It always seems that the sun speeds up when it rises and sets. The rest of the time we barely notice its progress across the sky. As I watched, beams tentatively fingered their way across the rooftops rendering all into silhouette and suddenly, wrenched free of the horizon, it blazed and it hurt to keep looking.

Such a scene! If only I could paint!

The nights of course hold a different wonder. Anyone glancing upwards can't fail to notice the triangular conjunction of our moon and the planets Venus and Jupiter in western skies.

I wonder how this unusual, stunning, happy circumstance of orbits - all science, gravity and physics - would have been received long ago when people turned to the heavens for portents or omens.
What would they have read into this spectacle that so dominates the sky and generates wonder now even in those who have previously taken little interest in things astronomical?

You know I always loved gazing skyward, have always taken comfort from the great wheeling heavens, the vastness of space a reminder of our utter insignificance, of the miracle that we are here at all. Even more so now, I think, since you left. That old saying, we are all made of star dust...not just some romantic phrase to me any more.

And so I spent yesterday evening, restlessly hopping from the living room where Mars rose in the east, all pinky hues, to the back bedrooms where through one window Orion stalked the skies, its angry red giant star betelgeuse glittering while, through the other, Luna, Venus and Jupiter hung low, odd, almost unnatural decorations, before dipping beneath the horizon once more.

That's the fun of a new place...working out where everything goes, not just on the inside, but outside too. Perhaps little wonder sleep wouldn't come.

After the sunrise, and a glorious day beckoning, trying for shut-eye seemed pointless - so I sit here on the terrace, watching and listening.

I can hear a chiff-chaff - a true sign that spring has arrived. Also a great tit (they seem to have a different song here - instead of 'tea-cher, tea-cher' they go 'tea-cher-cher, tea-cher-cher - collard doves and wood pigeons, a dunnock. And joy, a blackbird.

I can't see waterbirds but I can hear geese honking like they do, from the nearby Ixelles ponds and two ducks fly overhead.

The parakeets are, as yet, quiet. Late risers perhaps. My enchantment with these new, bright flashy red-beaked creatures has turned to irritation of late - their harsh shrieks drowning the gentler notes of the native songbirds.

There are crows here too, strutting the roof tiles and I'm struck by the glossy creature perched on the roof opposite whose caw is exactly the same as a mallard! It's doing it again! 'Quaack quaack' - it sounds a bit camp, a bit foolish, and I'm thinking he needs to gruff up a bit if he wants to attract a mate.

Some birds are such impressionists and he reminds me of the starling who thought he was a curlew, who fooled us for so long with his burbling, bubbling spiralling call; who had us scouring the fields near our Hipperholme house with binoculars until we saw it on our roof, giving an exact impression, there in suburbia, of a bird of the wide marshes, the salty shores, the desolate moors.

It's not all birdsong here though. There is, of course, the constant background roar of the traffic and the sirens - always the sirens. And the planes weaving contrails across the sky always heading right to left, right to left, parallel to the rooftop horizon. Tiny, slow moving, like toys.

But at least here, in our new pad, I can hear the birds and from this terrace I see trees and green parks and blossom and buds and forsythia and magnolia.

And I can see the stars at night and, best of all, I can watch the sun rise from our living room.

I'll be window-hopping again tonight, never, never able to get enough of the wonders of our skies...

On the Buses

Thinking today how you made the ordinary extraordinary.
A bus ride, for example.
To see the excitement in your eyes, your barely contained delight as you stepped up, strode along the aisle; your giggles as you were bounced back against the seat as the bus pulled away...and all those nice metal bits to bang!

To you it was an adventure. And we'd have to pull you back to the seat, time and again when you leapt to your feet like a jack-in-a-box, unable to contain all that energy.
Your joy was so evident that even though your unfettered, gleeful yells turned nervous heads, people couldn't help but smile.

This past week ferrying suitcase-loads of stuff from old flat to new flat I've been averaging around three bus rides a day.
I'm thinking how much you would have enjoyed them.

They can be a bit perilous though, to put it mildly. If you don't hang on tight you can be in big trouble and I've seen passengers tumbling and crashing into each other, caterpulted onto laps, people tottering helplessly from front to back as the driver puts his foot down and the bus leaps from a standing start.

Most journeys pale in comparison however, to the one I've just stumbled off.
How to describe?
Well, there's that long scene in one of the Harry Potter films when young Harry is on a bus, a magic bus. It leaps and it veers, it sweeps and it swerves, it careers into traffic and, at the moment when collision seems inevitable, it veers again, avoiding calamity by a hair's breadth.
Being on this particular bus was like this. Only no magic, just madness.

It was clear the driver was in a mood. He'd already speedily left the terminus having briskly shut the doors  ignoring the pleading cries of several people running to catch it, hoping to be let on. A lot of people do this and most drivers are more than tolerant.
Then, next stop along, 20 or so businessmen (I think they were Russian) got on.

None of them had the required tickets or permits and, as they coppered up and loudly debated among and themselves, minutes passed, the tension grew and the driver fumed.We feared an explosion.
Anyway, they all paid and ambled on board, smart suits, identical folders, and they lined up in the already-full aisle, grabbing the hanging safety straps above them and the bus finally lurched away.

The driver clearly felt the need to make up lost time and stepped on it...and braked hard, sounding the horn at some helpless motorist who'd got in his way....and put his foot down again. They looked comical, these businessmen, all standing together, all in a line, and as the bus speedily swerved its way up-town they lurched first one way and then the other, then forwards and back again, all in rhythm, all in time, exchanging 'can you believe this!?' type glances.

Two stops later, break slammed on, a final lurch and the doors opened. The men let go of the straps, one rubbed the reddening weals on his palms, and they stumbled off, a bit dazed by the look of it.
At this stop two women got on; one of them much, much older than the other. A frail mother and her large, in charge, daughter.

The daughter positioned her clearly-confused mother near the front in one of the few spare seats. She shouted a few commands at her and then lumbered towards the back, scrappily, bad-temperdly nudging people out of the way.

I lost track of them for a while. But suddenly the daughter was in front of me again. She was pressing the 'next stop' buzzer and gathering herself and her bags, readying to get off.
But her old mum was still in her seat.
The bus stopped, the doors opened and the woman looked about her, possibly as if she'd just remembered she'd forgotten something.

Then loud, shrieking panic. She whipped round to look at her mother, bags flailing and, like rounds from a machine gun, rattled forth a series of commands at high-pitched top volume. Her mother, dazed, startled, began to slowly lift herself from her seat.
The driver hadn't heard all this...or had he?

Anyway, too late. Too late.
As the old lady staggered towards the exit, the doors closed. Mother inside, daughter outside and the daughter thump, thump, thumped on the door and shouted and someone on the bus shouted at the driver....but he was on his way.
The woman left behind loudly howled. It was quite distressing.

 A woman moved to reassure her and another passenger said he was getting off at the next stop (fortunately just a short distance along the same road) and said he would make sure she found her daughter again. He helped her down, put his arm around her...the kindness of strangers....and we saw no more.

Relief on the bus was short-lived however.
For then came the next batch of passengers and now the bus was heaving. Among them was a woman and children: an older girl, a smaller girl and a baby in a pushchair. The woman, their mother presumably, though who would know for sure, pulled a shopping trolley.

It was the eldest girl who got our attention.
For 'eldest' read about 11 or 12.
She got on last and was trying to manage the heavy pushchair and a huge bag of shopping and, as mum pushed her way to stand at the back, it was clearly also down to the girl to sort out payment with the driver.
She struggled valiantly, speaking in a language the driver couldn't understand and he was quite aggressive with her.

The shopping, in a large, full-to-bursting plastic bag, was heavy and she staggered and dropped it, groceries spilling out.
The driver made no allowances for this. When the bus sprang forward, the pushchair - no brakes - lurched with it, dragging her down to her knees across the aisle, one hand scrabbling for the shopping while the other hung on to the pushchair.

The baby began bawling and she tried to shush it, tried to pop the dummy back in its mouth, still on her knees, feeling under chairs for tins and packets.
When she finally righted herself, pushing her long mousey-brown hair away from her face, there were large dark bags under her eyes. She was pale and clearly a very tired girl.
I thought about your average 11 or 12-year-old and how they would have reacted with all this going on. With anger? Upset? Tears? Embarrassment? A plea to mum?

None of these things happened. Her eyes though suggested a weary resilience far beyond her years.
Each time the bus lurched she lurched too, struggling with shopping and pushchair and baby, hands full, unable to use the hanging handles above. Indeed, unable to reach them.

The woman ignored her; her little sister, all blonde curls and snotty nose, clung to the shopping trolley.
Then, after the bus veered so wildly that she almost toppled again, a young man a few seats away, stood and offered her his seat.
The girl looked awkward for the kindness, but then made as if to manoeuvre the pushchair towards it. Her little sister was faster though. She got there first and plonked down, defiant. Thumb in mouth.

I was enraged by this. Waited for mum to say something. To do something. I caught the eye of the man who'd given up his seat. A shrug. What could we do?
The girl stayed standing, dead eyed, exhausted, and a couple of women near her held on to the pushchair to try keep it from rolling away again.

When the bus reached their stop, spilling the family on to the street - the girl to a future unknown - a small squad of burly, uniformed men leapt on to the bus - I genuinely thought for a moment it was a police raid.
One of them spoke loudly and everyone began rifling in pockets, handbags, rucksacks.

It turns out the ticket inspectors operate mob-handed here. The driver, suddenly quiet, lingered at the stop as the seven-strong team, navy-blue uniforms, large ticket scanners resembling old fashioned brick mobile phones slung from their belts, moved through the coach. No-one escaped the inquisition and I don't think anyone was found wanting...this time.

And then I got off Thomas.
The whole adventure made me remember that funny story we used to read of the Naughty Little Truck that caused chaos 'with a rattle and a rumble and a jangle, screech, vroom!'.

I know, I know. This was a bus, not a truck! And it was hardly fun, this journey. But it was a story all of its own, all the same....