Two weeks ago I read through the blog posts I have written this year and assessed that roughly 75% of them were about Gaza, or mentioned Gaza. This isn’t surprising when I have been so upset about the Israeli slaughter of civilians - children, women and men - and the insouciance and inaction of political leaders who could have had some restraining influence on Nethanyahu.
The thing is, though, that this blog did not start out to be one that included politics. Politics has snuck in and taken over, and I’m not altogether happy about it. The blog was originally somewhere to share thoughts and ideas and tales about my everyday life.
But I don’t feel as comfortable these days telling you the kinds of things I have in the past. This may be because the world is such a dark place these days, and I am often beleaguered and I really do not want to burden you with my gloom. But it’s not just that. For some reason I want to be more private. This might be because the things that I ruminate on are family matters, or ones concerning health.
I learned something else from reading this year's posts: I do not write as well as I did. Perhaps that’s because I am no longer a writer: I think of myself as a painter. The fact is that the heyday of the blog, and the best writing, are captured in my book DAYS ARE WHERE WE LIVE, which covered 2010 to the end of 2019. (10 years.)
This is available to buy on Amazon, either in a hard copy or, for the price of a cup of coffee, on Kindle. You could read the reviews and consider buying it.There were also some cracking posts during the Covid years, such as this one. Now not so much, and I really don’t want the blog to trail off into a lesser, diminished missive. That’s why I am considering laying it down. (This is a Quaker term for moving on from a specific post in which you serve the Meeting, such as Elder, Pastoral Friend, or Clerk.)
Before I decide definitively on the future of the blog, I wanted to write a few more posts. And today I want to share a couple of posts (plus a reader's comment) that I wrote in February 2016 - almost ten years ago OMG.
February 26th 2016
In praise of...
“Twice a week I go to a beauty
salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and
much more uplifting.” Nora Ephron
I went to the hairdresser
yesterday. When I arrived, I was tired and slightly anxious about something.
Nicky came over and sat down on the sofa next to me and looked me in the eyes
and asked me how I was, and I don't know I responded, but she, being a sensitive
woman who has been cutting my hair for 25 years, could tell anyway. Then she
asked me what I wanted her to do to my hair, and got a minion to wash it before
the cutting began.
I have been going to Nicky for all
this time because she is such a good cutter, but also because she is sensitive,
fun, and I can have a conversation with her that isn't about meaningless
trivia.
At the end of the trim and the blow
dry, when she'd shown me the back of my head in the hand-mirror, as they do,
she put down the hand mirror, stood and looked at me in the big mirror with her
hands on the back of my chair and said “Right.”
And I found myself saying - without
thinking – “I've got to get up, now, haven't I?”
I said this because it seemed like
such a shame to be leaving the company of someone so amenable (as well as
skilful) whom I only see for 45 minutes, every seven weeks. And also because I
felt so much more cheerful than when I'd arrived.
“Yes, you've got to get up,” she
said, laughing. “You're done.”
Oh, these wonderful people who are
trusty landmarks in our daily lives. Dave and I have a local optician and a car
mechanic, both of whom we like and rely on, and it fills us with mild
panic that they are both on the brink of retirement.
When I was 15, I remember a
friend's mother asking me what I wanted to do when I left school and I said “Something
useful.” She said “Every job is useful if it's done well.” And I, in my
idealistic world-changing mode, said with disdain: “What? Even a hairdresser?”
Oh, how little I knew back
then.
How would I respond to my friend's
mother now?
“What? Even an arms dealer?”
Comment from a blog reader
I've just read this
lovely piece because this morning I did something I've long meant to, which is
to see if I could find out who had written an article in the Times in 2002. It
was called 'A voyage round my father''.
When my
father died aged 89 in 2003, my sister Susan sent me a photocopy of that piece.
She had written at the top, 'I saved this because I thought it was a good and
lovely piece of writing, and would be a comfort when the time came.' She was
right on all counts, and I too have saved the cutting all these years.
So many
things struck a chord, not only because our father had his own large store of
anecdotes from farming ancestors; a love of Stilton cheese, and a temper that
could be wounding when things were being difficult on the farm, but because in
his unwavering love for us all, he had created a fine and sturdy family ship.
I still
find comfort in that piece of yours, even now when my sister's idiosyncratic
hand at the top brings tears to my eyes. (She died three years ago aged 61 of
pancreatic cancer.) The ship I sail in now is different: I have my own children
and a grandchild; how I hope that the tales I tell them from my own childhood
and from the store passed down to me will be family anchors for them, and that
no matter how irritating my foibles may be to them, that they will feel that
the love steering the ship makes it a good one to be in.
I hope this
is not too long to write on a blog comment - I have never done this before. But
it comes because I wanted to say thank you to someone who has touched and
comforted my life from time to time over the last decade and more.
Anonymous
February 28th 2016
Measures of success
In 2002, the year my father died, I found one of my
now favourite books - Homestead by Rosina Lippi - in a local
charity shop. It made me sad that I hadn't found it until after Pa had died
because I knew he would have loved it as much as I did. Since then I've read it
every couple of years, and a month ago I found the website of the author and
dithered over whether to email her and tell her how much I liked the book. I
didn't bother.
Yesterday someone tracked me down. They had kept one
of my Times pieces since 2002, and decided to finally find out who I
was, and tell me what the piece had meant to them. The piece was about losing
my father. You can read what they said in the comments section of yesterday's
post. I read the comment (which arrived in my email inbox) in a hurry in the
kitchen in the middle of cooking, and it moved me to tears.
When I look back on the time that I've been writing
and think of what it is that pleases me most, it's
- my
pieces in the broadsheets (most of which were in the Times);
- Plotting
for Beginners
(my first novel/baby) being on the tables in Waterstones;
- the
email I got from a literary agent praising my writing in all kinds of
ways, and saying how she adored Sol (one of my characters) but my novel
was too quiet to sell;
- the
success of said novel - But I Told You Last Year That
I Loved You - after I'd had to publish it myself;
- the
fact that my mother and siblings liked the private stuff I wrote for them
after my father died, and then after my mother died;
- that
my dearest friend Mary's family liked my eulogy for her;
- that
one or two people re-read my books because they find them cheering;
- the
friendships I've made through my blog;
- and
the message I received about one of my pieces from just one unknown person
yesterday.
Now I am going to email Rosina Lippi. But first,
here's that piece about my father.
Voyage around my father
My 85-year-old father died this year. The private
family burial was a beautiful occasion, the day so special that the first thing
I wanted to do when I got home was to write to my father and describe it, tell
him what had happened, how we had been and behaved, what everyone had said. So
I wrote him a letter and sent a copy to my brothers and sisters and my mother.
It makes us cry but captures the day on paper. I don’t know why that is a
comfort but it is.
But then my mother asked me to write my father’s
obituary for the local paper. This task hung over me like a dreaded piece of
homework. I did not want to be writing my father’s obituary, because I did not
want my father to be dead.
Once begun it was soon completed, but not to my
satisfaction. The paragraphs about his schooling, his work, his successes and
his triumphs described the public man. He sounded like a thoroughly
accomplished chap (as he was) but I hated that obituary. The required formal
style, and the sensitivity to my mother’s feelings, constrained me. I could say
that he was brought up a Quaker, but not that for the last ten years of his
life he would lie on the sofa every afternoon watching the racing on telly. I
could say that he was a keen hockey player but not that he had a passion for
Stilton cheese and Craster kippers and home-grown raspberries. I could say that
he was a successful freelance writer, but make no mention of his sometimes less
than happy use of words - that his criticism could be scorching, his rudeness
outrageous, or that his acerbic tongue could reduce a sensitive grandchild to a
pulp.
Neither could I say how fervently he loved his
family, how sure they were of this, how much they valued his wit, intelligence,
knowledge and affection, and how much they will miss him sitting smoking in the
corner being crabby, and then at the end of the evening asking for a goodbye
cuddle. The last time I visited him at home I knew he was ill because it was
the first time he did not say “I had a shave especially, so I could give you a
kiss.” This could not go in the obituary either: so much for obituaries.
I don’t think I ever described him as “a wonderful
father” but so what? He was my father and I loved him. All my
life I have felt as though I sailed in a sturdy ship, my family, looking down
on other mortals whose ships were not so handsome and fine as mine. When he
died it was as though someone had blown a hole in the side of our craft.
I am surprised that at 52 I am so shaken by his
death. I am not a child. I have a large and loving family. And dying at 85 he
was not robbed – he had a good innings is the cliché. But
I am sad for me, not for him.
As children we would roll our eyes when he told us,
yet again, about his great-grandfather’s heifer which won first prize in the
London Show, and then “was roasted whole for the poor of Chelsea.” Now he is
gone I see all the dog-eared stories of his farming forebears as weighty
anchors to our family history.
Searching for written records of them in his desk I
found a photograph of his mother: it could have been me in Edwardian dress. I
used to hate being likened to someone else, but this photograph has been a
strange comfort. I now feel like a link in a long chain stretching back into
the past, and forward through my children into the future. My father may be
gone, but he is still a valid link. He may no longer sit at the head of the
table repeating his catch-phrase “As good a Stilton as I’ve tasted in years,” but
at future family gatherings one of us can say it for him. “Only if the cheese
merits it,” says my brother. Ah, that critical gene again.
 |
| My father, Fred Willis |
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| Pa and me, circa 1963 |
