52%

Bring it on

Story

Today is a down day - only scored 41% on Moodscope. So there you are, it's official, I don't have to try to be upbeat because it's a 41% day. Apparently on these days one is supposed to contact friends to let them know so they can be supportive. Hmm, I have a finding for this mood management technique.

All alone in the office, facing the prospect of diminishing job satisfaction without my long-term colleagues and a dearth of interesting stuff to do so off to the Oxfam bookshop. What should I happen upon on my 41% day but The Bell Jar - irresistible. But the best part is the inscription written inside it:

love G '82
(well not that sort of love
more a kind of creeping attachment
to your personality actually. And
almost definitely a reaction to
recent events).

If that don't make you smile! And wonder. Enough to amend a 41% score.

Tomorrow evening NT Live is screening Minghella's Madama Butterfly at the Met and I'm going to see it with Ruth. So there can only one choice of music, yes? Ah yes, personality will do it every time.

Fissure

Death was waiting for us on the platform at Ribblehead Station. Well actually it was Mikhail who sang so beautifully and looked so cool in the evening sun that he must be without sin because he’d be so very, very, easy to forgive.

And so began an interesting journey that took us to artistic interventions in Ribblehead Quarry on Friday evening, across 12 miles of Yorkshire dale on Saturday, culminating with our assent of Ingleborough at 7.00am Sunday morning in 50mph winds. The idea was that by Sunday we’d be vulnerable - and vulnerable we were. Hectored by mountain rangers to stay down we huddled like a penguin colony against the wind, grinning and gurning at each other (depending on our skin’s elasticity – work it out) in amazement that we’d made it.

During the assent two ideas came to me: firstly that we were bodies in extremis - well as much as it was possible for a bunch of middle class wannabes to be – and secondly that this is what some people actually had to do to escape a grim fate.

To feel oneself tried to the limit of endurance but have to carry on alters the focus of preservation from the other to the self. What better illustration to show what happens at the immanent end of life, when all other considerations are irrelevant, that we are drawn upon our own resources and instincts for life, for the will, to continue? We find what we need, what has worked for us in the past, and we use it. We use it all.

The second consideration was in applying this idea to people who are in the process of escaping malfeasance of some kind. I remember hearing of stories gleaned from refugee women who were asked to bring objects of significance to a museum focus group (how to make British museums relevant to ethnic minority groups). One story tells of a woman who brought a humble cooking pot. She carried it over the mountains in deep winter, heavy in her pack and it’s been close by her ever since. Why? Because it belonged to her grandmother and to one of her earliest memories, it symbolised everything she lost in her flight for life. Her grandmother’s hearth, her love, her homeland. A simple pot that cooked food to nourish a family, to grow them strong, to help them work the land, to make more food, to nourish a family, to grow them strong…

What euphoria was shared with our fellow travelers in that descent from Ingleborough – that we were always going to be safe was never really in doubt. The mountain rangers like sheep dogs invested in our protection and we, like sheep, allowed it, happy for someone to be in charge. The euphoria came from knowing that in gamba sono ancora. Our boys and men were safe, our homes were still ours, our cooking pots weren't wanted because our families were fed, nourished, thriving and there’d be hot food for us at base camp, smiles and congratulations.

Reaching

In the wind, hands reaching out, pulling in. The wind so strong. At night, in a dream, in the dark a hand reaches out. The night so dark.

As long as there are hands that reach out there is hope. Sometimes that's all we can do.

And all the while this song going around in my head....

Aaargh

AAAAAAAAArrrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

Meadowsweet

What is it about running that makes me feel so emotional? - it happens every time. Maybe it has to do with mornings like today's when the sun is rising, the sky is big and blue, the clouds are freshly washed hung out to dry and the hay meadows are showing whippets of swaying grass so sweet smelling it's almost possible to taste them. Just running past those meadows makes me want to tumble into them, rolling and laughing for pure joy. Like a child, remember that? Ach, childhood is long gone.

So maybe the emotion's there because everything is so clean and beautiful and alive, because on days like this I remember people who won't be running any more. So even if the left knee's getting dodgy, I can still run. Cue a bit of Andrew Marvell. Life is good, we don't have to follow the wraithes just yet, we can live if we choose.

Sisterhood

I am generally suspicious of gendered activites and it would be fair to say that with three men in tow last week's event could not reasonably be described as exclusively feminine but that's how it felt. Women gathered, conspired, to bring another woman home. To bring a woman back from 58 years of exile, back to the warm earth that held her parents, back to a country that accepted her from the moment of her birth to the moment of her return. From the florist to the stonemason to her sisters there was approval for the rightness of what we did. We brought one of theirs back and they were grateful for it. And the tears came and came and came and haven't stopped coming since. It is done and done well. And it seems as though all the living of the last 58 years was ancillary to the first 27 when another life was lived. Curious.