Dial 8 for Dido at the bank

A strange thing happened to me this morning when I tried to get hold of someone from the bank. The strange thing was the fact I managed to get hold of someone from the bank. Usually I call the number on the back of my card having taken the adequate precautions. The sleeping bag is ready along with enough tins of beans to survive a nuclear winter.

And then I will go through the whole process of pressing numbers on cue and being put through a labyrinth of options before giving away precious chunks of my life that I'll never get back again by listening to an automated voice that tells me a service representative will be with me "shortly." The message should really say "longly shortly," but that's not great grammar.

This time I was asked to press 1 for a service rep and then a very weird and disturbing thing happened; a human voice answered immediately. This was so unexpected I found myself floundering, my tongue flipping around like Free Willy in a fish tank, utterly in shock and almost forgetting why I called in the first place.

The other surprising aspect of this call was the fact I was able to achieve what I wanted without having my request denied because I couldn't recall the middle name of my great aunt Beatrice's long deceased gold fish.

There was a brief interlude during which I was treated to Life for Rent by Dido. This got me thinking about music on corporate voicelines and wondering why it's usually of the Dido, Celine Dion ilk. While I'm rather keen on Dido but not so keen on Celine, it would be surely be more interesting if banks opted for something edgier.

Suede, for instance, a band that never made it big in the US but had something of a heroin chic cache in Britain during the '90s, although I have little idea what they were singing about, but probably not the woman who works at the buchers'.

"She sells heart, she sells meat
Oh dad, she's driving me mad, come see."

If Suede won't make it onto Bank of America, the Sex Pistols really don't have much chance.

God save the queen
The fascist regime
They made you a moron
Potential H-bomb
But you think they'd consider The Smiths and the one line that resonates most with me (unfortunately).

I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour
But heaven knows I'm miserable now.

Especially after waiting for 40 minutes to be told your overdraft limit will not be extended by some snotty rep from Rockville hovering on pubescence who probably plays Join the Dots with his acne every morning. It's enough to turn the mildest mannered individual into Sid Vicious after a couple of Tia Marias.

Personally I'd be a lot happier hanging on the telephone, in the immortal words of Blondie if they had Bowie on there. Ashes to Ashes would be the most appropriate song not only because it's probably the most amazing song ever written, although that' s a big claim, but because by the time the folks at the bank have finished with us we all feel like Major Tom.

The simplicity of southern skies

There's a simplicity to southern skies, a shining symmetry that we don't always appreciate until it's gone.

We walk under so many skies, heads down, missing the shimmering world above the sheds and the pine trees and the tumble of wires.

But occasionally we take the time to look up and there it is; iridescent pink strips lighting up the blue, the last vestiges of a warm winter's day.

I found my camera before it was too late. But already gray was drifting into the pink, like a dirty smudge on the lens. I moved the lens to the left and the right but the grey moved in; gun smoke seeping across peaceful vistas.

We should make more time for the pink; we should bask more in the iridescent before the gray marches in for good.

The demise of penguins and badgers

Time was I could rely on penguins to cheer me up. No longer. Just their fluffy buzzard heads (which I know is a bird mixed metaphor) and their flappers were enough of a tonic.



Sadly my recent visit to Busch Gardens where the penguin show was flagged as something of a highlight has cured me of my notion of penguins as a panacea for all ills. Zara was unhappy that I forgot to bring dirty hard currency which meant she was unable to attempt to win an angry bird by throwing a dart at the head of one of the hapless Busch Garden workers dressed as elves.


“Don’t worry. I said. There’s always the penguins.”

And let’s face it. There was always the penguins wasn’t there? During times of terrorist attacks, plane crashes and global warming, all we needed was an image of a cuddly penguin and – hey presto, like a giant Band Aid on all the world’s problems, everything was hunky dorey.

We had to wait in a long line for the penguin show, which I was told was more of a walk-past. Finally we got into a dingy house with a few small penguins clustered behind glass, along with a handful of bigger Emperor penguins.

“They stink,” said Zara.

And sure enough they did. The penguin house was awash with stinky fish water and the penguins looked pathetic and smelled badly which got me wondering why we had lined up for an exhibit that wouldn’t be seen to be fit to grace a Bogota zoo.

After this incident I fell out with penguins. I’m fickle like that.

Today I realized badgers are also missing from my life. Back in the day almost every Wednesday I would stroll across the House of Commons and have tea with a Member of Parliament. He was not a particularly important or influential member of Parliament. But he was something of an expert on badgers.

We would talk about the black and white fellas until we were black and blue in the face and the sun went down. We would talk about bovine TB. I would urge you at this critical juncture not to be overly jealous and to want a part in such sparkling repartee.

But the strange thing about badgers is nobody in the USA seems to know much about them, even though I’m told they exist here and there’s a Wisconsin based university team called the Badgers. I assume badgers must exist here because why would you name your team after a non native animal unless it’s something macho like a tiger? Otherwise it would be like the Boston Duck Billed Platypuses.


I have emailed a number of people today asking them if they know of the existence of badgers in America. So far nobody has replied. I wonder now if there’s some kind of sinister conspiracy of silence about badgers in the USA. Is to mention badgers like mentioning the secret society in Eyes Wide Shut where influential folks dress like Gandalf and take part in sex orgies?


Nobody got this movie but I found it rather interesting as is anything by Stanley Kubrick, the obsessive director who probably got off on making Tom and Nicole do sex scenes when there was clearly no chemistry between them following Nicole’s discovery she had married a short guy.


I also admire Kubrick as a talented American who, like T.S. Eliot, chose to live in England for much of his life. I’m only sorry he never had time to devote a movie to penguins and badgers. Perhaps he could have used a curious story that emanated in Basra during the Iraq war that British troops had let giant man eating badgers loose on the streets.

Which is the sort of scary thing our boys and girls in combat fatigues do in war zones after destroying the morale of the local population by carpet bombing civilians with dead penguins.

New Year's Eve with the human wrecking ball and sister sulk

I'm a firm believer that something unfortunate happens to us in our 40s. Aside from the perpetual mid life crisis, we make the stealthy transition from being protagonists to victims.

Suddenly we realise one day we have no control over our own destinies and are rather purely reactive people who watch horrified on the sidelines as awful events explode around us thinking weakly 'I used to shape and now I don' t even have the energy or the belief to follow; rather I stumble haphazardly in the wake of things, blinking weakly and trying to remember the world we once mistakenly eyed up as our oyster.'

New Years Eves used to be a case in point. These used to be so full of hope and expectation, even if they so often ended up in the arms of a stranger with a bad complexion at a second rate party in a disused bowling alley.

We got older, they got more respectable. But we still waited for the countdown, we still went through the motions of partying. We threw our arms around people when the clock struck 12.

But now in our 40s we seldom even bother to wait up and watch the ball drop. We're far too tired to stay up so late.

And we seem to have little control over the chain of events; a relative said we should meet at the Great Wolf Lodge because she had four kids in tow and we have two and we should all get together and it will be fun and frolics and she forgets to add to explain more is less with kids and to mention a key word that comes back to haunt us and nibble at us as we beat a retreat from hell; purgatory - it will be purgatory. You may never have been to Purgatory USA but the brochure looks positively nasty.

Another symptom of being in your 40s is that you realize something will be bad but you are powerless to change the course of events. The pictures of the Great Wolf Lodge looked frankly alarming - you could almost smell the sweat oozing from the bodies of children out of the pages, you could hear the screams and yells and demands for more and less and something you couldn't give. The good news is the rate had gone up to $500 a night by the time we got round to booking, so we stayed in the Hilton instead.

And as soon as we arrived there and the comfortable bed wrapped around me I weakly suggested not even showing up for my rendezvous at the Wolf Lodge.

Overruled. before I knew it the great faux hunting lodge rose from the woods and we were descending into its depths beneath giant polystyrene wolves asking at reception where we could be fitted with Adamantine chains. The place was full of miserable adults, recently disgorged from flash Mercs and BMWs looking uneasy and out of place while the kids screamed at them to part with $15 for magic wands that would open the chests placed along corridors straight out of The Shining.

Before we could reach the water park we were taken to a BBQ shack for a late lunch. The place was renown for its BBQ but had all of the aura of Steffi Graf's arm pit. "I'm sure the white table cloths are arriving soon," I joked to deadpan silence.

By now Jax was causing havoc, hurling just about every piece of food related junk on the table.

"Look - I've just about had enough or you," I growled assuming the fearsome demeanor of a polystyrene wolf.

"Ah," he threw a cup full of water over me. That's what I'm trying to say about the powerlessness of being in your 40s.

Then as I went off on another bleak foray for plastic utensils he sunk his teeth into my wife's arm.

Yes. It was going to be a New Year's Eve to remember.

Back at the Great Wolf Lodge we were preparing to use the water park. My wife pointed out rather pertinently that while the rooms may have large lumberjack-style four poster beds and cost $500 a night for New Year's Eve, they reeked of child vomit.

I thought it might be the distinctive odor of the vomit of the Papua New Guinea duck billed platy puss but I didn't argue the point. That's another characteristic of being in your 40s; you don't want to waste energy defending stances you would have built a barricade for in your twenties.

At this point it became apparent I had forgotten my swimming trunks so I had to borrow those of my nephew that were rather too tight. This left me uneasy on the water slides as I expected an unpleasant ripping sound that would herald more trouble.

So the night unfolded with only extortionately priced cans of Miller Lite to dull the pain. Jax ran through the water park with me haphazardly in tow at one point falling and gashing his face. And he ran and ran until we adopted plan B - namely restraining him as he screamed and writhed and knocked over cans of Miller Lite in his temper.

Zara merely sulked about rides she couldn't go on until we agreed she could most certainly stay at the Wolf Lodge and we'd pick her up again on New Year's Day - 2014.

And after a tortuous few hours we got back to the Hilton where we could miss the ball falling in Time Square and any other mawkish activities traditionally associated with New Year's Eve.

As it turned out I had to pick up Zara before 9 a.m. the next day but the organized activities in the lobby on the cotton wool snow failed to mask the chill that had descended on the place with my wife's sister having fallen out with her boyfriend and the kids sitting in a woeful line comparing their moon faces. I was barely acknowledged as I picked up Zara and nobody ventured those well worn comments: "Happy New Year."

At least there was a sense of normality back at the Hilton, even if the woman on the next breakfast table kept glancing at Jackson's scarred face and we expected her to dial up social services at any time. Or perhaps she was just being wary because he had just thrown a buttered roll that had missed her face by mere inches.

We drove away bereft of New Year's resolutions or any high hopes although we harbor a hesitant expectation that 2012 won't suck quite as much as 2011.

Why did you marry a Brit, Katy?

So there goes another promising Anglo American relationship – Katy Perry and Russell Brand are to divorce after a mere 14 months ending a relationship that had more promise than – I don’t know – Liz Taylor’s marriage to Larry Fortensky.


This one is somewhat shocking because Katy and Russell were seen as the uber cool couple. However, according to the Sun newspaper they had a “huge row,” – a good term that like their marriage, doesn’t translate – and Brand spent Christmas in none so hip Cornwall.

The Sun newspaper said a source told US Weekly mag the pair had a massive row, saying: "She was like, 'F*** you. I'm going to do my own thing'."

The source said that Russell replied: "Fine, f*** you too."

So in such profound terms one of the most talked about relationships of recent years ended…

If there’s a message to come out of this – and who knows if there is or not – it’s don’t marry a Brit. Americans may like the quirky, offbeat humor thing. They may have seen Notting Hill a few times but the reality is we are unreliable and crap and we’re not very funny after a couple of months. And we hate to put out the trash. We start to miss the strangest things like warm beer and fish and chips that don’t taste like cardboard and we realize we’d be happier watching Newcastle United after the fifth pint of Newcastle Brown.

In recent years we have seen a number of these Transatlantic gigs falter as surely as SkyTrain, which is a very old allusion. Take Madonna and Guy Ritchie, a union that straddled all the stereotypes from the obligatory vows in a Scottish castle to Madonna becoming an honorary Brit, owning horses and trotting round her Wiltshire estate blah, blah. For a while we adopted Madonna as real down to earth Londoner ignoring her obvious lack of any discernible sense of humor.

Guy, in contrast, remained being a regular Guy, albeit one from a privileged background, and later said he didn’t have any regrets, especially as the marriage improved his film career. Spoken like a true Brit.

Now I’m on to taking bets about how long Gwyneth Paltrow will remain with the ginger bloke from Coldplay.

While I never had much time for Madonna as an individual, although I have a soft spot for her as a singer, I have a soft spot for Katy Perry as an individual while I have no time for her as a singer.

I didn’t know much about Russell Brand to start with.  In fact I was rather shocked because I thought Katy, who is kind of cute, even if her eyes are a bit close together, was marrying Russell Grant.

Alas and Santa sucked too

As I predicted in my last post about the Tooth Fairy, Santa wasn't really up to scratch either. He forgot to put anti freeze in the sledge, the reindeer entered a parallel universe in which they believed they were workers at a French airport and promptly went on strike at the prospect of visiting x billion kids in just one night.

I wrapped presents with Zara the night before and we put out cookies for Santa; we even sprinkled reindeer food on the lawn late at night which seemed rather surreal with the neighbor's white car rumbling up and down outside as they went out on nocturnal drug deals.

We went to bed with some kind of vague idea of waking up at 4 a.m. to do the Santa thing but it didn't quite happen. The next thing I knew it was 7: 52 a.m. and I heard Zara yelling: "Has he come yet?"

Cue a lot of confused throat clearing and mumbling.

"Houston we have a problem."

Not only was Zara's door wide open but Santa had obviously been a no show and wrapping paper was lying around the floor.

We sprung into containment mode, locking down her room and finding her presents - no mean feat in itself because some were in the car, her new bike was in the shed and quite a few of them have failed to achieve lift off from the store, although to be fair her list amounted to two pages of A4 and contained a veiled threat that reindeer would be decapitated if Santa delivered the wrong kind of Angry Bird.

Still it was another great escape - albeit one without Steve McQueen and motorbikes. Zara fell for the fact Santa had really visited our humble abode and taken a bite out of the cookie, even though I still had the telltale crumbs around my mouth. Had she not heard the hasty rustling of wrapping paper or noticed it was the same stuff we had wrapped around presents the night before?

My colleague Joe who also has a 7-year-old child has an interesting theory on this. It's not actually that interesting and probably quite prosaic for anyone who doesn't have a 7-year-old.

A few months ago, he tells me, his 7-year-old David was asking probing questions as to the existence of Santa. Some of these questions didn't have easy answers such as what aerodynamic forces exactly keep reindeer suspended in mid air and how does Santa visit every kid in the whole world in one night?

But then a few weeks before Christmas David stopped asking questions and became unfaltering again in his belief in Santa. Because he wanted to believe he believed, Joe told me, even though his rapidly developing intellect was telling him otherwise. Kind of like God for grown-ups, I suppose.

Still Joe surmised that this would be the last Christmas his seven-year-old would believe. This made me sad in an indescribable and abstract way; our childhoods are less an awakening than a long series of realizations at how our parents have betrayed us.

Until the final betrayal when they leave us altogether but we have to fill our closets and sheds with their forlorn belongings - just because.

(the house is not ours BTW)

The tooth fairy as a slovenly bag lady

The tooth fairy was shambolic; she was more like a wrinkly old bag lady living in an beaten up car.

"Sparkle me some glitter dust on last night's beef and cheddar wrapper from Arby's will you love?"

Here I am back from another day of ever deceasing circles, orbiting around abstract meaninglessness and the shelves of a supermarket where I forgot to get half of the items texted to me on the list.

"Zara's lost a tooth - a big one at the front."

"Great. I'll check it out," I said persuading her to open her mouth and show me the gap so as I could laugh at the gap toothed effect so beloved of clowns and vagabonds the world over, peddlers of cheap mirth. (I could never see the point of Benny Hill).

"I can't believe you are laughing at her. She's been upset all day," my wife snapped at me.

"Oh." And I declined to reply that if diplomacy was my strong suit I'd probably be hosting Bill Clinton at some reception at the embassy in Laos hoping he didn't reach for the cigar box.

If the downside of losing a tooth is a disfigurement, the upside (at least for kids) is the visit of the tooth fairy. Don't ask me where this tradition came from but it's there and it doesn't seem to apply to the loss of other body parts. If Mike Tyson happens to chew off your ear there is no corresponding ear fairy to make you feel better. If Lorena Bobbit ... well you get the idea.

Zara demanded $20.

"Get out of here. I could fly to Hawaii and stay there for a week," I said somewhat insincerely. But hey - I'm cheap. If you can chase the roaches around the hotel room it saves the cost of a safari.

The morning rolled around, as it tends to round these parts, and my wife was rushing around and tearing apart my wallet. Zara had woken up and the tooth was still under her pillow. The tooth fairy was in serious big shit, banged up in some cell facing a DUI charge and getting unsettling looks from an overweight and brutal looking deputy.

We managed to salvage $3 and a mittful of quarters (which sounds like a low budget remake of a Clint Eastwood Western) that were wedged under some books on the floor. And by a somewhat shambolic sleight of hand the tooth fairy rearranged her dishevelled  dress and slipped the filthy lucre under the pillow.

Zara was none the wiser and swallowed the tale that the tooth fairy leaves behind large teeth for unspecified scientific purposes, but it's to be hoped that Santa puts down the crack pipe long enough to get his act together for Christmas Eve.

Try to remember you're a Womble

I hanker for Britain when I read stories like the one about the Womble removing his head before the cameras stopped rolling and wrecking a lot of kids' dreams. Good old Britain - so progressive and yet so caught in a time warp.

London may have unnerved me last time I was there because everyone was so young and so trendy and so obvioulsy un-British. And yet the Wombles - those loveable rubbish (sorry not garbage guys) collectors from Wimbledon Common are still in vogue.

In fact they are so current that a new generation of children believe they are real. So when Mike Batt removed his head before the cameras had stopped rolling on a recent TV show there was an outcry from children and their parents. It was as if someone had stood up and declared: "Santa Claus is really your dad," and your presents don't arrive in a sledge but a Fort Fiesta.

This story stops me dead in my tracks because I grew up with the Wombles. The song "Underground, overground, Wombling free," was the theme of my childhood in suburbia. And yet the Wombles are not only still living and breathing but kids believe they are real an dthey are in with a shout of being Number One at Christmas - another great tradition that's lost on Americans. But if you are British Mistletoe and Whine is ... well a sort of gawky part of your heritage.

The Wimbledon Guardian reather alarmingly refered to the Womble incident as the "Womble 'severed head' debacle."

The other remarkable thing about this story is the fact that it mentions DJ Simon Mayo; someone who was a fixture of my adolescence if not my childhood. It's extremely reassuring that the likes of Uncle Bulgaria and Orinoco are still ambling around Britain which makes me wonder if Dougal and the Magic Roundabout and Bagbuss are doing the rounds still, although surely not the Clangers, who I tried to introduce to my daughter recently only be be told they were "boring and lame."

And what of Captain Pugwash? - and was it really an urban myth that this show was pulled off air because it contained characters called Master Bates and Seaman Stains.

Of course if you talk to Americans about furry Wombles and Dougal they tend to look at you in a funny way and you can see that look pass over their face as they desperately seek the phne number for social services to dial up a restraining order.

Which is the way I like it, really.

Swept away by the sea - Kitty Hawk pier

I was glad Nancy's memorial service was by the sea because the sea puts life in perspective.

Men and women live and die and the sea simply turns its rounded shoulders, shrugs them and sloughs off, pulling the sand beneath it. About 70 percent of the earth is ocean. As land dwellers we are clinging to the edge of a great watery abyss; we are as insignificant as the grains of sand on the beach.

And as we pass on there are many to take our place. I'd like to say I was moved during the memorial service and I was in places but I spent most of it trying to stop Jax Jax screaming out. BlackBerry therapy only worked to a point - and that was the point where he texted a particularly bad tempered councilman who I had last spoken to on acrimonious terms five years ago.

But beyond the pier house with its Pepsi signs that evoked jaunty times by the sea so many years ago, the great waves crashed on and on, oblivious. They pulled us to the ground where men once made flight.

Funny how our parents always took us to the sea when we were kids. Without fail they would head to the coast as if they had ran out of ideas and wanted to slip off the edge like pre Columbus sailors. And at the first sign of the water my father would strike up the familiar mantra: "I can see the sea through the trees."

And still we see the sea through the trees, although we have long ago departed our childhood selves who would get giddy with excitement at the silvery water and the smell of brine in our nostrils. I wonder if we all remember that time when suddenly we were on the beach with our parents and we didn't want to be there anymore. I recall looking around at the flat dull expanse of the sand and seeing the resort for what it really was, a crumbling piece of nostalgia that I didn't want a part of anymore.

My daughter can spend hours on a chilly beach while I chafe with impatience to leave. But one day she will no longer care about her bucket and spade and something will die inside me. Just like the days when I raced my dad and one day I won and saw him panting and suddenly I was sorry I had won.

Back at the house with the death of Nancy a tie had been broken, a cord that held a bundle of letters has snapped, sending correspondence scattering to the ground.

The order was gone and photograph albums lay haphazard on the floor, some of them spilling pictures - my wife as a kid, paddles and trees and inevitably the sea. And it seemed strange how I felt those childhood days would never end - like the trails I carved in the sand as the sun slipped low over the Cornish coast. Or the day when the fog lay low over the rock pool and I jumped on and on, across briny pools until I came across a huge red crab, magnificent and triumphant as the sun came slanting through the mist.

But to grow up was to lose the randomness of rock hopping and to forget the impetuousness of youth. Yet back at Nancy's house something had slipped; suddenly the children were taking over. There were screams and possies of them and menacing figures in the yard clutching huge plastic guns and whatever they could plunder from the house.

Like a revolution there were forces we could no longer control. It was time to move over or to be swept aside.

Leave it to Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Casey Anthony

It's been a tough week following the sudden death of my mother in law and I can't thank my blog followers out there enough for your kind comments that I will respond to shortly.

It's also been a week when I have been rethinking a lot. It occured to me this week that giving 120 percent all the time at work can be rather unproductive. You still end up being kicked around while the people who give 20 percent will be promoted. There was a tale, that may be urban myth, about a worker who died at his desk and nobody noticed for 24 hours. It struck me that this could easily happen to me; in fact people would probably have one sided conversations with a somewhat dead me and not even notice until I failed to comply with a piece of unnecessary paperwork.

So it really is time to revamp my life but how? I have read about people whose blogs make them vast amounts of money but I can't really see how this would happen. Brits experienced something of a spike in readers just over a year ago, and slid down the virtual Matterhorn to level out at a respectable but hardly earth shattering 150 or so views a day.

I think Brits isn't going anywhere fast because I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough. I know a bit more about who he is than a year ago and I still can't see the point. But I have forgotten the mantra and neglected Bieber. Have I said I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough.

But a lot of people have him on their easily distracted little minds a lot, it seems. A recent survey found Bieber was the most searched person on line in 2011.

And the second most searched person I'm quite mortified to say was Kim Kardashian, a character who gives the Biebs about as much depth as Albert Einstein in comparison. Kim and Justin don't have a lot in common but they do succeed in looking rather like waxworks of themselves.

The most searched news story was the trial of Casey Anthony and somewhat surprisingly the most searched for sports star was Maria Sharapova.

The most searched for musician was - I don't need to say, of course - and the most searched for show was American Idol.

This list is somewhat depressing because it reveals how shallow we have all become; if we weren't that way to begin with. It's the stuff of reality TV junkies and disaffected bloggers desperately seeking a bit more SEO juice guv.

In Memoriam

I had to get away from it all. So I walked. My gait was halting in last night's shirt and Bill's crocks that were too large for my feet.

But the small beach was close and the weather strangely warm for December. I could hear birds whittering away in the trees, three whispy clouds were painted on a peerless blue sky. Such a cruel day to die, although technically the time of death was the night before and the small neighborhood beach ten worlds away from the sterile room at the back of the hospital.

It was the first time I had stared at the work of death, waxy, yellow and undone and while I was grateful for dodging death for half my life, it had caught up with me. Still the words of John Donne marched around my head.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

Death struck me as a sickly and a mean thing, not at all mighty, a hobgoblin panhadler that had stolen the vibrancy and magnificent from her face.

And death left me speechless, weak and wavering. Absent minded and wandering, mouthing at cupboards. I was lost unlike my dear wife who put up with so much but complained so little.

Only the beach drew me with any purpose, away to the small jetty and the drifting blueness of the sound. Souls drift away on such days and we can only watch and wonder at the ebb and the flow. I recalled a sunset when I was here before. Noah threw stones in the water and Rob showed him sticks. Still the distance between us went well beyond the beach. Rob was already drifting away and soon would be a name without a face. And the child was an adolescent now, although I had not seen him for a long while.

From a house on the bay I heard laughter from a yard sale and remembered a similar sale here two years ago when we had laughed as I picked up a bulky JVC camcorder for $1 only to throw it away.

Now these people were separated from me both in time and mood. In a way I wanted to be anonymous as if this small beach was a microcosm of the desert island I longed to be a small black figure on, lost in sunsets, like driftwood on the rocks. My mother-in-law could be difficult but she had a big heart; at least until it packed up.

The occasional spats were as insignificant as fragments of shells in the bigger picture of the world, so why did we let them fester? And the words of one of the saddest songs caught in my throat.

Of all the things I should've said,
That I never said.
All the things we should've done,
That we never did.
All the things I should've given,
But I didn't. 

More than 40 years ago there was a wedding of college sweethearts. I don't know the details but picture a small white, clapperboard church. I picture hope springing from the roadside verges. But they went their separate ways and their paths seldom crossed and only bitterness grew from the verges. At least until they were reunited within the year - walking down a valley where we assume there is no sea. A place from whence no traveler returns.

This woman's Work - Kate Bush