Full stop

There was a pebble in my shoe, but it wasn’t the pebble that was the irritant, that was the shoe that surrounded my flesh, rubbed and blistered me, rigidly pushing against the ways I liked to move. Meanwhile, the soul/sole clung to the hard metamorphic rock because it was as old as time, or at least as old me, which might as well be the same thing.

Once the strange is familiar and what was foreign seeps from, not into your pores you are not a Guiri. In that sense he is dead.

Well, at least very ill and in convalescence as if all goes to plan, I’ll be moving again within a few years so he’ll be a Guiri once more.

Ginger

I’d like an affectionate cat” she said, her mind casting back rather than dealing in hypotheticals.

I knew what she was thinking about, that puppy she’d briefly owned, but had to be given away when her sister’s allergies had quickly flared up. For nearly 30 years her affection for animals had been held back behind scabs of practicality and tenant agreements

“I’d like a vocal cat, one which tells you when they’re hungry, happy to see you or just angry.” I’d said, also thinking more of things loved and lost rather than what could be potentially had.

One thing was for sure, we weren’t going to take home those three kittens I’d found and been feeding. Those poor bundles of fur covered in burs and summer earth would have to make do with the milk and food I’d been taking to the copse where they’d been hiding.

Hopefully the tri-coloured blind one would get better with some food and drink inside of her and if her brother and sister would carried on looking after her.

“It’d be nice to have a cat”, we’d agreed, before co-signing a verbal agreement with “We’re definitely aren’t not going to adopt them.”

Below the barrel I found a timecapsule

I’ve been going through the entries of a blog I used to write a few years ago. I stopped maintaining it and withdrew it from public view once this blog came into being. I never deleted it, and had long forgotten about it. I can barely remember writing more than two entries from that time period, so reading them is a genuine surprise. Not a wonderful one, but still a surprise. I’m not sure I like the younger me I’m discovering. He’s a bit of a downer and he writes  with a tone of grandeur that doesn’t fit his weak and unused writing muscles.
He might be embarrassed if he knew that the 30 year old me published him, but I know he wouldn’t mind me picking and rehashing his best bits for inspiration

A close friend once said to me:
“No-one moves to another country because they want to.”

No matter how much I think about that statement I can’t fault it.
In Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner” Amir’s father describes sin with a similar profundity:


“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft..”


“...Every other sin is a variation of theft; When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness...”
Neither of us then knew that within twelve months that I’d become an immigrant myself. I doubt she even remembers saying it, she might even read this and never know I'm talking about her.

In that way that boys and girls often do, that friend and I have drifted apart. Our wings began to unfurl and mature and with a wobble and a push from our legs we flew, picking up a breeze each and gliding slowly apart. Actually it wasn't as beautiful a separation as that, in fact it was as ugly as they come, but that's for another day far in the future when that wound is numb scar tissue.

The original blog entry from 2005 that inspired this entry can be viewed by Selecting the white text below the fold:

catching my breath

I don't think I'm alone in being so quiet on my blog since the summer. Most of the bloggers I follow seem to have gone through the same. It was the car crash and the following wait to see any sort of physiotherapy that knocked me for six. It changed a relatively active exercise regime into a sitting and watching TV all day routine. The threat of legal action by one of the parties in the crash has meant that I've never been able to write about the one thing that was happening to me. Even if I hadn't been in too much pain to write anyway. That threat is still real so I still have to be quiet.

The physiotherapy has finished, but I had committed myself before the crash, to learning German and doing a creative writing course. Two severe pressures on my energy. Energy that wasn't renewing itself because of one of those flaws in the human body:

The less you do, the less energy you have. The other one that pisses me off is its ability to store fat, but not vitamins, but that's another moan to be rolled out flat in a future online moan.

You don't pay for my words and I make no money from them so the words I put here have been a low, low priority and I'm not going to promise you that that will change anytime soon, but I'm just suggesting that it might.

Taid

I own one item of jewellery, a plain gold ring. A 21st birthday gift to the young man that would later become my Taid. I was given his ring after he died. I don’t remember if he wore it when he was alive, but it is time-worn, its engravings smoothed through age.

A floral pattern reaches out, embracing its flat top where you can just see the intertwined initials of his name ‘Gordon Griffiths’. When I wear it I think of parts of his hands I do remember:

His thinned index finger stripped of flesh in an accident down the pits and the green scars too, tattooed with cloying coal dust, hiding in plain sight, in the nooks of scars.

Technorati Tags:
Taid, Grandfather

Favourite books

Because my life isn't a complicated enough I'm studying German classes at evening classes and doing a distance learning course on 'Creative Writing'. I had to submit a list of my favourite books as an ice-breaker. I thought I'd share it with you all. What are your favourites?

Although I've heard of or read a few of the authors and books in other people's favourite books list, 90% of them are new to me. not I'm not sure whether I should be embarrassed at my ignorance or pleased at the exposure to the new. I've spent a few days running my eyes and fingers along bookshelves in the house and in my head, trying to think of a list.

Trying to choose favourite books is like trying to choose favourite bus timetables; more dependent on the world around you than the paper and ink themselves and just as liable to change.

Even so I think I've managed to find a recipe to help me choose. A little bit of the number of times I've read a book, a dash of the vividness of the imagery recalled and two parts the number of pages I've folded down so I can return to find passages once again.

So, in no particular order:

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre affair: There's absolutely nothing else like this, to describe it would make it sound ridiculous, look it up for yourself and see all the positive reviews. I've read this book 5 times. Suspend your disbelief and breath and dive into the book.

Birds without wings, Louis de Bernières: You can feel the pressure building as you watch the storm clouds of nationalism come rolling in from across the Mediterranean to drench everything in the Levant until the streets run crimson with the soil of olive groves.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams: Read and reread at an impressionable ages, my 'voice' as I write is just a poor impression of his.

Iain Banks for example; 'The Business' or 'Use of Weapons': When I want to escape the world I wrap myself up the in his Space Operas which he writes under the only slightly different pen name 'Iain M. Banks'. His socialist perspective is a comforting, but demanding towline in the cold of space, but a rallying call when he writes his disturbing Fiction as 'Iain Banks'.

Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: I love the entire trilogy of his autobiographical works('Cider with Rosie', 'A Moment of War') and without them, the filling couldn't be a sandwich, but the second speaks to me like no other part. Although now thickly coated with a skin made of of blood, concrete and the rust of time the strong Iberian sun sometimes pierces it to show the silhouette of the already violated and gored Spain he glimpsed before its Civil war.

David Crystal, The Fight for English: I hope you don't mind the inclusion of a factual book, but it's a well researched and intellectually sound antidote to the returning tides of intellectuals who try to clean the murky and fast flowing waters of the English language.

Pulled necks

Although I’m sure my cat would disagree, for me, going to the vets is normally a pleasure. I walk in, sit down and put the cat; now tense and silent in her cage, onto the floor. As we wait she’ll finally settle and become as silent and proud as the Sphinx.

The cat's the one who's confused, imprisoned in her small and terrifying bubble of comprehension. She neither understands what's happening to her, nor that it's for her benefit.
Unlike so many other places I didn't need to learn any new rules or words to go to the vets. Here in Spain it's simple, cheap and relaxed. and should I have to remember anything important I ask the vet to write it down for me, which he does happily, carefully tying down with knots of ink any words that might so easily have been lost in translation.
I should have known things were not going to go right the day of our last visit because there was a man who sat in the waiting room with a bag of raw, bloody wild boar flesh. He told us that it needed to by examined under the microscope to see if it was safe to eat.

Moments of unplanned fluency are the little victories that make the battle of learning and using a foreign language worthwhile. The conversation during the examination of the cat was conducted entirely in Spanish and I was feeling quite proud of myself, but the feelings quickly melted into sticky glutinous guilt, as the cat was examined and finally diagnosed with an ear infection. The symptoms had been there for nearly a month.

What we thought were mosquito bites that she couldn’t stop scratching on her head and chin were where she’d been trying to get at the at the pain inside her head . The occasional vomiting and lack of interest in food were not due to the heat and flies quickly making the food dry and bad tasting, but all part of the symptoms of an infection and earache.
They were obvious enough had we understood them as the vet had.
Jokingly, while the vet tried to physically persuade the cat to stay still long enough to be weighed I’d said to the cat ‘ Why didn’t you say anything?’ .
In her own way she had been telling me all along, but I’d not understood her.

Memories of my my visit to the accidents and emergencies department of the hospital after the car crash a few months ago came flooding back.

Just like her I had sat worried and expectant in a brightly lit room painted institute green, reeking of the inharmonious chord of disinfectant, the disinfected and worry.

This was an opportunity to prove my Spanish I thought myself, to explain the crash, how I was feeling and my medical history.

I’d already failed at every stage since the crash to prove my fluency and needed something to raise my spirits.

Everyone we’d encountered from the crash onwards tried to speak to me first. Presumably because I stow a pair of testicles between my legs. From the crane operator to the taxi driver who’d driven us from the testosterone daubed garage all had assumed I had been driving, that I was in charge of proceedings. I quietly had to defer everything to my girlfriend through the little Spanish that had survived the shock of the crash and I retreated into myself, attempting to practice in my head how I would explain everything at the hospital.It was all good until the doctor, a stern man cushioned with short grey hair and wrinkles of concern opened his Cuban mouth and poured his accent into the shot glasses of my ears, spilling most of the white rum of procedure and diagnosis onto the bar.

For all I knew he might have been saying

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’