Hello again

I am finding it incredibly hard to think of what to write about - I am feeling better so have no horror stories of misery and depression to share - my mind seems to have seized up and refuses to allow me to access small baba stories and my day to day life is sooooo dull.

I can always fall back on that great British standby, the weather but feel that that would be cheating so fear not, there will be no eulogies for the sun and dappled shade of an unexpected spring.

This is a hard time of year - these weeks leading up to the anniversary of Mum's death each have a marker - last hug, last ride out in the car, last time we laughed; inexorably building to the day itself when it all floods back. This year I miss her more than before - I mind her not being here to talk to, to tell about things and to laugh with. The pain never goes away but it gradually eases to inconstant stabs of unexpected memory or loss.

I am thinking of giving up smoking!!! Shock horror! Had to light another one as soon as I wrote that but the desire is finally there - bored with the smell of tar and ash and would quite like to structure going out around the event and not the fag breaks. I'll keep you posted but don't hold your breath. I am also about to take up Pilates and Zumba and will need to breathe a little more easily. You see, I really am feeling better and starting to think there might be a future after all.

So there you are - updated. Light your candles that I might find my baba voice again soon and until then, wish me luck in the fight against the fags. And if you can, light a candle for Joy so she can see our light below her and know she is missed.

Related articles

• I Am Your Candle (telautograph.wordpress.com)
• Pilates as you've never seen it before (humankinetics.wordpress.com)
• Zumba for Me Too! (earthoceanskyredux.wordpress.com)

Hiatus

Sorry it has been such a long time - the fallout from the Christmas blog continues to make itself felt and that puts certain constraints on me, or so I thought. Plus, the black dog has been heavy on my shoulder and that just makes boring 'poor me' reading.

This, sadly won't a small baba tale - bit of a blockage on those at the moment - so I thought I would write about the daily grind of trying to be better and less down. Small things make me happy these days, a tree just smudging with green, a crocus showing its glorious colour. And then big things make me sad -~ Japan, Cote d'Ivoire, any conservative politician.

I am registered to vote again so will go and make my mark - I missed out on the last election because of the move to here and felt very aggrieved - I always vote - as much for Emmeline Pankhurst as myself.

I really have very little to say to you tonight so let me leave you with a poem from my newly acquired copy of "The Great Zoo". You may remember I  wrote about it some time ago - now that I have my own copy I love it even more. I hope you do too.

THE WINDS

You cannot imagine
how these winds behaved
 last night
They were seen
eyes flashing
their tail long and rigid

Nothing ( not prayers or oaths)
could turn them
from a shack, from a lonely ship,
from a farmhouse,
from all these necessary things
that they unwittingly destroy

They were finally brought back this morning, bound
lingering lovers
caught by surprise
while wandering pensively
near a field of dahlias

(Those over there, to the left
asleep in their cages)
Nicolas Guillen

I do hope you love it as I do.

Shopping in the New Market

I have to confess that despite my hymn of praise to the dress buying experience the other day, I hate shopping and most particularly shopping malls. Poor Basingstoke really doesn't stand a chance.

It has to do with, like so much else in my life, Calcutta, and how the experience of shopping there formed my buying habits. To shop in Calcutta was to walk into an adventure. The New Market, a Victorian mall in fact, was laid out in such a way as to invite you to experience the world. Avenues of shoe shops, side alleys filled with flowers, curio shops that would have had Dickens frantically rewriting The Old Curiosity Shop.

To go with my mother as a small baba meant following her to Empire Stores where jealously guarded imported goods were produced like jewels for her inspection: tins of baked beans, canned smoked oysters and even Kool Aid were brandished and bought. Further on the meat market, best walked through with a fixed stare and holding one's breath. We went through and out the other side - the cook was sent to buy the meat. Just next door the fish market - again the smell was overwhelming but here we would stop and look for lobsters, bekti and hilsa. Huge prawns would be added to the growing pile of goods that Old Buddha balanced on his head.

I would always beg to go through the animal markets, birds, parrots and budgerigars, rabbiits, white and pied and monkeys - oh how I wanted a monkey. All it took however to make me quiet again was the repetition of how if bitten I would have to have ten injections - all in my stomach - to innoculate me against rabies. Even now, I hesitate to pat a strange dog such was the power of that particular moral tale.

All provision shopping done we would head into the main market with its lanes and alleys spiralling out from the centre where, at Christmas, the Chinese would sell paper chains and lanterns. A favourite stop was Chumbu Lama, a tiny shop owned by a Tibetan refugee - in a similar manner to Emipire Stores he would reach into the back of the shop and treasures would be brought out to be viewed. Exquisite bronze buddhas, ropes of turquoise and coral; the tresaures of a refugee race forced to sell their heritage to live in a strange land. Every piece had a story and most were heart breaking. I don't remember Mum buying much - simply listening and sometimes returning with Desmond or letting Chogyal know that soemthing rare was in the bazaar.

Shopping done it was off to Flurys for cake and coffee, or in my case coke.

As I grew older I would fo on my own or with my freinds and we would spend hours trying on shoes, buying thirty of forty of the beautifully coloured glass bangles that would match our dresses and leave us with myriad cuts on our arms when the bangles inevetably broke. At one point I was sent to see if anyone was selling tiger skins - of course they were and so much more beside. A moira (a whicker stool) could be ordered and hashish packed into the seat and then sent by freight to the UK or US. For a time I felt like Mata Hari.

You see with memories like these - a sterile mall filled with shops that are all identical is no place for real shopping. Sadly those paper Christmas decorations caused a fire that consumed Hogg's New Market and although it has been restored I believe much of its charm has been sanitised. Memories can't have that happen to them thank God.

Friends, Romans and Countrymen

Desmond had decided to have a roof party with dancing and singing and laughter followed by some slides he had found of his first trip to Bhutan, back in the days when there was no road. He was one of the only joutnalists escorting Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi on her official visit there.

We had to wait for the night sky so everyone was talking and drinking when suddenly, spontaneously a friends of Desla and my mother jumped up on one of the service pipes that crisscrossed the roof of Minto Park. It took awhile for people to stop talking and that made it all the more real.

His voice rang out, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend my you ears" and he gave the speech with such passion and belief  that we were no longer on a hot roof top in West Bengal but transported to Shakespeare's Rome and the anger and the fury at the death of Caesar. For me it was an awakening - to Shakespeare who I promptly went off and read cover to cover, skimming the bits I could not understand but loving the language that I could.

Dean Gaspar was his name - another renaissance man, he could paint, draw, act and write. He was exciting and wicked - so much so that his parties were ones that I was never allowed to go to. He was another of the men who set me free with books - no question was too trivial and I adored him as some form of exotic uncle.

I have never seen Mark Antony played better and he gave me the greatest gift anyone can give an impressionable child - Shakespeare.

After he had finished we sat in the dark illuminated dimly by candles and watched as Desmond took us to another place and another time when the way into Bhutan was on foot and the journey took days not hours, It was a night of magic lantern slides and an all too brief glimpse of a man who, in different circumstances, would have ranked with the Richardsons, Oliviers and Gielguds. But my Calcutta was like that - always roses blooming from unexpected places. He did achieve celluloid immortality appearing in Attenborough's Gandhi and doing so very well.

Related articles

• Paro Taktsang Buddhist Monastery in Bhutan. Milarepa meditated at the cave in Taktsang. (exploringtheheart.wordpress.com)

The words not spoken

My darling Dumsy,

It has been almost ten years and yet it feels like yesterday. For the last year I have been writing this blog as a kind of therapy/remembrance about our past. I wish you could read it - and there again if you were here it would never have needed to be read or written. We spent so much time talking you and I - living a fantasy Janie called  pandering to our need for unreality. So not true - we just had fun.

I miss you so much that even now it physically hurts when I think of you - there is this great gaping hole inside of me that only you could repair. I am nobody's little Nan now. Even Janie has had enough - I wrote something about Christmas day that was supposed to funny and she hasn't spoken since. And yes, I have tried to talk to her but you know what she is like. Not even a birthday card so I am really in the doghouse.

This blog has been about all our yesterdays - trips to Bhutan and Sikkim, Mary Demetrios, the witches that weren't, the general that was, the aunties and of course Desmond. Memories of a small baba lucky enough to have a mother who took her everywhere and showed her such a wide variety of life. Through writing it and putting out on the Internet I have found so many old friends and connections - I even found Gail and went to stay with her in Canada just before Christmas. She hadn't changed and I loved her even better now.

I messed up on the job front - you were right about Lesley - she took me down. There wasn't anyone there to patch me back up again anymore and I never have learned how to do that for myself. I think I was in a kind of lunacy after you left - I sold Cornwall - stupidly and bought a horrid flat in Kingsclere; to be near your grave which I can't bear to visit. I did plant a rosemary bush there for you and if flourishes. Dad came to live with me and developed bowel cancer - that was grim. His mind was pretty much gone and he kept asking me when you would be in to see him. I was so tired Mum and needed to sit and cry with someone - you know really cry and feel yourself being hugged back to humanity. You used to do that for me and me for you.

We both know money was never my strong point and to make a long story short I got evicted from the flat - Janie's first words were, " You can't come here". Annabel was in India so I stayed with darling Katz in Tunbridge Wells and tried to live with Peter in Somerset - he had just lost Lawrence- but we both realised quickly that it would be disaster so back to Basingstoke I came and ended up with a flat in Winklebury!

It is quite lonely - I think I have cut myself off from people and lived vicariously through Facebook and emails. I grieve the loss of Katy Joy - I would like to have been part of her growing up as I was part of the girl's but so it goes.

So there you are darling- ten years of misery in nutshell. I always said I wouldn't do very well without you and it's true. This blog had perhaps been the only achievement I will  leave behind - might make a book of it.

Promise me when my time comes you will be waiting for me at the top of the path and we will be happy again. I love you so much - so very, very much
Your little Nan

xxxx

High Days and Holidays.

You know they say you should never cry on your birthday or you will cry for the rest of the year. Well, for every birthday since Mum died I have cried, and I have cried for the whole year.

I am crying tonight because of the kindness and warmth of  the birthday messages sent to me on Facebook by my kids and old friends. I am also crying because of the utter futility of being optimistic about the next twelve months.

I wish I were dead - it is that simple, that easy. I have no desire to continue to carry on the charade of a life and the only thing that stops me is fear. There is no bright tomorrow, no shining future to look forward to, just more of the same and I have had enough of that.

I know this is a broken record but, as I believe I have said before, this blog is for me. These are the things that I find it hard to say to people face to face, hard to say in a jaunty email. What a shocking waste of oxygen I am. I contribute nothing.

I am going to stop now - sorry if this was bit self indulgent  and I am truly thankful for the many good wishes - as we all know - if wishes were horses then beggars would ride...

Age

Well, I am officially 56 although I think the real things starts around three in the morning - Mum was always a little vague, always replying to my question with the same comment - the doctor thought she would have prepared a litter of puppies. I suspect he was right.

I wish I knew where the years went - they seem to go so fast now - when I was younger a year was forever now I blink and I miss it.

I am sad tonight, not because of the age thing although do admit I have cause, nor yet the sister thing which still remains unresolved. I am sad because life seems to be passing me by. And yes, I know that I am the only one who can change it but still - 56 and what have I to show for it?

And then I count my blessings - my friends, loyal and loving through good and bad times. The blind neighbour who makes me laugh at least once a day. The flat - although I hate the location I love the flat.
And I thank God daily for my brain - it may get muddled at times but I know it is a good one and I like not being stupid. I really, really like it.

I don't know what the next year will bring  - better things I hope but my other blessing - this blog- will keep us all informed about this rollercoaster ride I am on. Thank you for all the nice things you say...I do appreciate it when you respond to what I have said. And you know what?  Writing this has taken away the sadness - so there!

xxx