acts

Dad’s death affected me in ways that I hadn’t expected

month

I was wandering the playground, pretending to be working but really just seeing what was happening in our little part of the natural world, when it occurred to me that we call the time about now spring because things are springing into life. Actually it pretty much is, although I was thinking about the verb rather than the noun. I approve of the literalness, it’s a wee bit like the French Republican Calendar — breezy, rainy, hot, slippy…

Spring, the verb, works for the flora, the vert, it’s not so apt when we are talking about the fauna, the venison. Fauna around here mostly means birds at the moment. If we discount the dogs, which I think we can for our purposes. The birds are astir.

Dawn is about six-thirty just now, so I walk to work in the dark, surrounded by spring noise. It isn’t the fully immersive dawn-chorus wall-of-sound yet but it is noisy. Mostly you hear, and see, Blackbirds, they’re always quick off the mark in the spring. But other birds are busy too. The Mallards have started to fly around in their squadrons, I’ve seen the Goosanders pairing up. The black-headed gulls are developing their eponymous head, they’ll fly off somewhere to breed soon. The, bigger, Herring Gulls who will be the Gulls of our summer are starting to arrive. The Sparrows seem to be interested in the hedgerow again, I’ve seen them chasing about there a few times. I don’t think they nest there, but they did use it for their offsprings’ flying lessons last year.

Now. Did you imagine that when I got started on the etymology of words that I’d tarry in the portico of the rabbit-hole? Of course not. Rabbit-holes are like steamed puddings, the best bits are at the bottom. I went searching for an alternate Old English word for spring; one reflecting the active/busy doings of our local avians. There is an old word for spring — lenctentima, from Lent I assume, but we need something more poetic. Fortunately Old English is a storehouse of wonderful words for bards.

I’ve settled for néodspearuwan, meaning active restless sparrows in honour of our own little birds. It won’t really do for the whole season, so we’ll just say that it’s our word for the time of the second moon of the year when the sparrows are… As a bonus we now get to name eleven more Mo[o]nths based on what we see going on in the playground.

the dream

Since I’ve been a janny my dreams, those that I have when I’m asleep anyway, have been very predictable. I don’t remember having any dreams as a young adult, I must have had them but none of them seems to have been interesting enough to stay with me. Nowadays I remember my dreams quite well. The broad outlines and my feelings of helplessness anyway. Said dreams come in two categories, both involving some school, mostly an imaginary and peculiar one. Towers, turrets, tunnels and underground lakes peculiar. The first kind has me struggling to lock up a building, one of many doors, full of people; sneaky people who don’t wish to be locked out and are as biddable as cats. The other has me discovering some part of the building that nobody knew existed. There’s often a pool. Which is unsettling as somebody has been looking after it, I know all about empty buildings, they crumble fast. It doesn’t take a Freud to winkle out the hidden meanings here — these are stress dreams, loss of control and work undone. As if to compensate the dreams that I make up for myself when I’m conscious lack neither range nor crazy, so usually I don’t share.

I had to share a part of one of my (waking) dreams this week with Derek from our Parks Department. I was with the Bee and Wildlife sub-group of the young adults’ ECO group; Derek was here to help. The discussion ranged widely, we talked of hedgerows and paths. We agreed not to cut the grass this year. This may not sound much but not cutting the grass is almost the most important part of the plan. What plan? I’ll tell it as a story, stories have power.

The dream came to me during the lockdown, remember that? Alison and Helen (who used to work in the kitchen), were sharing a socially distanced bottle of wine by the lawn. I was lying in the grass, which hadn’t been cut all summer, it was thick, rank and spiky; there were daisies and buttercups. Bumble bees and flies, butter, damsel and hover, flitted, hovered and bobbed. It was hot and sunny. There was a smell of straw and green with a background warm sweetness, if we stopped talking we could hear the rustle and hum of insects. I must have been thinking about the playground because I had a moment of sharp clarity. Certainty surged into my mind full formed —— yes, this is it, this is what we want, loads of insects. The blocks of my dream playground, that had been swirling in the vaults of my mind for a while, tumbled into a whole. I saw the playground entire and what I’d have to do to achieve it. Well that’s the story anyway…

But it’s simple really: more grasses means more insects. We want lots of insects. That is the dream.

reincarnation

… When it’s raining, especially when it’s lashing it down, people often say to me, ‘Nice weather for Ducks’. People do say the most fatuous things but when the biscuit is handed out for dumb things to say this is a strong contender for second place after, ‘it’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht’. I’ll own that the affairs of Ducks are subtle and they are quick to quack if you meddle but I can tell you, from long observation, that they hate the rain as much as we do. ‘But they are waterproof’, people wail when you point this out; well so am I, I like a nice bath, I still don’t care to be soaked by some random liquid that drops from the sky. I would not like to be reincarnated as a Duck.

Reincarnation, or metempsychosis to be posh, as I understand it, works a bit like this: you do good things; you get to come back in a higher form; eventually becoming so good that you escape from the torment of here. (There is such a thing as overshooting — being so good that you have to come back as a sprul-sku Lama to help others. We’ll ignore that. But there’s a lesson there I think.} Do good things is a bit nebulous isn’t it? How evil can a Ladybird be? So we’ll leave that too and concentrate on the higher form stuff. It isn’t made explicit but richer more powerful human seems to be intended. I can’t help but feel that this is very convenient for some people…

——I am the naughty nabob of nantucket, I was born thus as a reward for my great merit in a previous existence. If you have issues with my riches take it up with my religious advisor.

——What? That man in the metal hat with the big axe?

——The very fellow. The hat is a simple against mind control rays, the dogmas require it. Or he may be off his chump, but he does have the axe. So you get the point, or the edge in this case. He signals the court to erupt with laughter, which they do, the nabob is known in nantucket and far beyond for his mordant wit and for munching on the tripes of the heterodox. He had foresworn Lampreys on medical grounds.

No. Let’s make up our own version, a no-fault reincarnation if you will, where you get to choose what you want to be next. (I realize that this isn’t practical, whole phylum’s would get no takers; who would wish to be a worm?) I think I’d choose to be a bird. For the flying mainly. But what kind of bird?

I am a janny and share the sins of my tribe, so Wood Pigeon is a strong contender. Fine sonsy birds who seem to do little apart from some clown-o-batics in the bushes now and again. They’re the most chilled of birds. Ambition neo, I thought, become a crow. I took the photo…

…is it just me or is there something a wee bit suspect about that photo? Take a good look. Does it remind you of…? Then I read back the rest of what I’ve written here and I realized that it’s just me being me. That cheered me up until someone said, ‘nice weather for Ducks’…

spring

I know that I’ve been wittering on about spring since the beginning of winter but it is, finally, really, here. It’s official even, the equinox was on Monday. Everywhere you look, listen or smell there are signs. Spring is a blink and you’ll miss it season, our friends in the biomass of living things that aren’t us are busy. They have their progeny to begat.

Did you know that the moon that’s just been was called the worm moon? No neither did I. Being compelled to be me I looked up Old English words for worm. Surprisingly many; for the worms that make their living inside of us anyway. Poor Anglo-Saxons. I don’t think it was intestinal parasites and the denizens of our buboes and pustules that they, the moon namers, were thinking of. I think they had in mind worms more like the one in the picture above. There are loads of these just now, commuting someplace by night. It will have something to do with procreation.

starlings

Above is a picture of a Starling murmuration. In the evenings you can watch these from the sundeck, where I took this photo. It was a bad picture, so I adjusted it to better reflect what I was seeing inside my head. I suspect that the reason behind these murmurations is simple — it’s a Starling party. You can tell by the noise.

symbols

The above, items I’ll call them, for I’ve no idea what they are, have appeared in the trees in the upper part of the playground. At first I was mystified, then I recalled that on Saturday mornings Christians of some stripe have set up a booth, or tabernacle, from which to proselytize and distribute tracts. Fairly tasteful as these things go but it must have annoyed the local Pagans who have hit back with the occult equivalent of a strong poster campaign.

coltsfeet

The Colts-feet, in the Solar, are coming on. It’ll take a few years until they look like how I want them. If they ever do.

When I was the janny at Craiglockhart I got to read the school log book. It was the centenary and such things were being looked out. The bit that interested me most was a visit of The Elders of Supreme Presbytery of The Church of Scotland to examine the children on their catechism. That sounds fun. Each Elder, for they were legion, had written a couple of paragraphs of complaints and suggestions for improvement. Apart from one, he (and I’m sure that he was a he) just wrote, ‘a start has been made’. It’s like that with the Colts-feet.

crows

Balthazaar the Crows (recall that all Crows around here are called Balthazar, the double-a is the plural) have taken to leaving us offerings above the automatic doors. I have been feeding the Crows, while shouting, ‘Balthazar’. The idea being that they will associate the name with being fed and come when I call. Then, if I became involved in a squalid argument with some jakey, I could call down the local murder. That should settle things: what fool argues with a man who commands Crows?

I may have to re-think this. They might start honouring their dead, making hats out of crisp packets and hatching a priestly caste. If they start developing a civilization we’re in trouble — they’ll domesticate us, coral us into Swedish furniture stores and force us to eat worms. That might be what we deserve but I, myself, do not fancy it.

In other bird news the Black-headed Gulls have left us this week. They were there on Saturday, on Monday they were gone, off to summer in the fjords. Spring really is here.

yellow

It’s sakura season in Japan just now. When people picnic under the Cherry trees, drink saké, get lightly sozzled and admire the blossoms. It’s termed hanami — flower watching, a metaphor for the beauty and brevity of life. Culture is rooted in people and place, often it does not travel. For example, lightly sozzled is nearly impossible to translate into Scots. But I do think that we could pluck a blossom from an ukiyo-e (ideally by Hiroshige) and pause to exalt, in our dour Scottish fashion, the ephemeras of our own spring. Just now is the yellow part of the season, soon to be gone.

Wordsworth would not have to wander far to stumble upon a golden horde of Daffodils in these parts. Their very ubiquity dulls my appreciation of them if I’m being honest. There’s something too brash and ‘put there’ that spoils them for me. I prefer the Celendines and Colts-feet clumps that dot the edges of the canal. Best of all are the Willows by Harrison Park. Their branches: louche yellow ropes, swathed in pert leaves and tight catkin chrysalises, dripping off fat raindrops as they eddy and sway. There’s a bench under one, where I sat and wondered, in the stillness of evening, one very gray day.

Later in the year there will be other yellows; Irises come to mind, and of course Dandelions. But by then yellow won’t be the only colour in the the world. Just now it can seem like the only strong colour around is yellow, and it’s almost all of a singular tint — some strong Sulphur or Cadmium pigment, brilliant, bright and lustrous on a muted ground.

All this yellow brings to my mind Vincent in Arles, living in his Yellow House as winter turned to spring. There he would start to produce those works, full of yellow, that we see as typical of him and love so very well. Maybe it’s just me looking forward to getting our playground back, our forthcoming art exhibition and Brufts, but our bit of the world seems to be opening out before us in the way Van Gogh’s did in Arles. I anticipate a summer of warmth and life, of weeds and wild things, of colour and birds. Of mist in the mornings and soft rains on starry nights. I picture myself watering the sundeck in a livid red sunset to the screeching of Swifts. The extension has nesting boxes for Swifts, I see an omen there.

Of course Vincent ended that summer locked in a sanitorium short of an ear. I’d give up a lug to paint like Vincent I think. I’ll settle for my perfect summer, that way I can still wear glasses.

what I did in your holidays

When I was at primary school Mondays started with an essay — what I did at the weekend. There was a special jotter for this, sized crown octavo and covered, in my case, in a purple-patterned flock wallpaper; a remnant from an ill-judged re-decoration of the front room, an example of my parents’, and seventies, poor taste. I’m not sure why my teacher, fierce, tiny, Mrs. Sobecki, of the flashing eyes and unerring aim when it came to the throwing of chalk at our heads, made us do this. It wasn’t make-work, it was marked, and the silver and gold stars, that were our reward in those days before house points, were given out. This was important stuff. I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed making up a load of lies to start off the week.

I once claimed to have synthesized nitroglycerin, from cough medicine and nitric acid, in my imaginary chemistry lab (this featured heavily in my prose at the time), and of using it to blow-up something; I forget what exactly. I’m sure that if I wrote this now my teacher would be referring me to Prevent as part of the multi-agency response to my being crazed and bonkers.

I don’t know what brought this to my mind, or why I remember writing that particular story; I have been reading Proust and eating biscuits I suppose. Such things do have their dangers. Whatever. I’ve decided to revisit my youth, what follows are some of the things that I did during your Easter Holidays.

The grand piano is no more. This, object, was a gift from someone. It has been with us, perched on two legs, mute and gathering dust, for some time. When it comes to gifts it is not only the Greeks that one should be wary of — everyone’s motives are suspect. In my experience gift horses come riddled with colic, their mouths chock-full of carious teeth. Sometimes I think that the school is just an oasis on some secret silk road, an artery for the world’s dross. Where caravans off-load their garbage and let their camels pee on our toilets. Recently one company had the effrontery to send us several crates of out-of-date hand sanitizer. Such people are monsters. Have we no hero to seek out these trade-hags in their gold-girt corporate lairs? To hirple and hasp them, and hoop them with steel. We could reward them with poem and bright-mead from our hives.

One reason for getting rid of the piano was to create space for our new barista station, finally they have a proper home in the Social Space. This always was called the social space but nobody ever called it that. Now that it is, a, social space we’ll call it that again. After only five years every part of the school now has a proper name. Although some of those names you don’t know yet.

Some work was done in the playground, where I harassed by Mallards. At this time of year the Mallards act oddly, for Mallards that is. Usually a Duck of the towpath, they’ve taken to the fields, when they aren’t flying about madly in flocks. You find them sitting on walls, dangling on branches and pecking our bike sheds. I caught a couple trying to get into the school. They waddle up to you in pairs and quack at you, they want something but what is a mystery. Soon they will have Ducklings, the males will desert their wives and all will revert to their normal placid selves.

The Ducks and I have been checking out what the workies have been up to behind their fences. We’re getting a new raised bed, a Cherry tree, a shiny gate that will break and some bushes that may not last long. Hopefully we’ll get our original raised beds back soon — the Pear tree that we were given as a reward for our eco probity really needs to be planted out.

Hopefully you will notice that the school is looking extra-super spruce on your return. There’s a reason for that: on Monday we have our Art and Design Showcase. I’ve been watching some of these works in progress, I can promise you a treat. And to showcase the Showcase we’re going to make super-duper effort to make the school look nice. The refinery, the ceremonial gear, the rags and the rug, (refinery is the janny word for articles of this kind, its etymology is lost), that we don’t bring out for riff-raff will be deployed. I suggest you pop in.

Now you may mark my work.