LXX

LXX, three score and ten, that number, it always crops up. It hardly ever crops down. It is a miracle of rare device, a bullet, a coil of razor wire, a Latin seventy. It is not some kind of cryptic shorthand for Lysergsäure-diethylamid.

And so it was that I woke up to the fact that the man, once a young man younger than I, married at what is now half my age, was now an elder statesman. And of course, throughout that vital transformation, one thing had remained constant. He had always been (and continues to be) Dad.

What is there to say about him? Deep eyes, brown, kind and crinkly in the lines around them, but deep enough for a person looking at his gaze to not be utterly certain of survival. He has made many hard decisions in his youth, and not said a word to anyone, except perhaps to Mum. He keeps mum, most of the time.

He has a delicate pedantry about him. It is punctuated frequently with the kind of hilarious wordplay and curiously erudite thought that makes you realise the pedantry is just one of the things he can do. I remember reading from the Book and having him mentally track down the exact chapter and verse; I remember doing it in reverse.

He used to run around the garden a lot, just to entertain me. He did it less with my siblings; by the time my sister came along, he did it less only because the garden was soon replaced by a much smaller one, and because perhaps he was a decade older and busier. But he always tried. He still does and, as in the past, often succeeds.

It has taken me this long to write anything substantial about him because there is just too much to write about. Some fathers are existentially pervasive. They never go away because they are just too much.

He is one. I have too many memories, too many legendary moments. I will never forget the day I carelessly dropped a book in a roaring storm drain. He took a look and said, "Forget it." I was outraged, upset. A few years later, he bought me another copy when I wasn't expecting it.

If I have learnt anything about teaching, I have learnt it through great mentors; my parents first of all, my grandparents as well, and some excellent people God has given me for colleagues. But in Dad's case, I have always been amused when those I teach have wound up in his tutorials and lectures. That's when they learn that all good things come from somewhere else, that there is nothing new under the sun, that wisdom is transmissible.

I have not written this in any kind of well-structured way because there is too much to write. But I've felt that something still must be laid down as a marker for this particular day, and so this is it. Happy 70th, my father.

Going Gentle

It is right that things should fade
That oxygen should draw its electronic debt
In every cell and line of age

It is left to me to say
That I have always loved my different cats
Despite outliving all of them

Memo to the interior designer:
Let the parquet stain grow pale
Grow old along with me
My falling hair will then be less visible

Memo to the exterior designer:
I've come to appreciate
This maturing pain
The sense of loss balanced by forgetfulness

If the guitar were less hollow
The sound would be less sweet
If the sound were less hollow
I would listen harder to my beat

And so my trousers they are rolled
By rhyme to remind me I am old

El Cheapo

It is not a nice thing to call a person you deeply respect. But it is an excellent pseudonym, because my large-hearted iconoclastic cynical skeptic of a great-uncle was not that at all. He was careful about things he thought needed care, but he was always generous with literature of all kinds. He would've got the joke.

I have a shelf of the stuff he used to send me — newspaper clippings, unusual phenomena, and two old volumes of science fiction collected by Robert Conquest and Kingsley Amis. It was these that set me on my path to science fiction hunger.

Great-uncle's growly laugh, precise enunciation and sinister shades concealed a man who thought generously of people and stingily of truth. But when it came to accepting things for which he felt he had sufficient evidence, he went large again.

He was a man of great complexity who saw himself as a simple person. His life was full of tension, incongruity, ambiguity and the liberty of mind. But his spirit resolved it all. When he left this morning at half past seven, I could imagine his first interview with his Maker, and how interesting it might be.

But I could not imagine him gone. I am left with memories instead. I will always remember his pale eyes, alert and intelligent, and the gifts of packaged words that he always sent my way.

Kindred

If April is the cruellest month, then October, half a year apart, must be the kindest. As Keats might have said, it is a season of fellow moodfulness; it is the time towards the day of the dead, when the year also dies. (That, I got from Susan Cooper.)

October is kind, it wraps us in blankets of the fallen. It tells us that it will get cold, but it remains warmer than winter. Where the fall comes in the North, all green is red, and all is well red.

And I recall many times with people I used to know, and some are gone, and some have nowhere left to go.

Gentlemen

Tonight I sat in a burger joint, with five young men. They were a lot more polished than when I had last spoken with them, and they too had passed through fires of their own. I used to be the master of their domain in the high tower, but this was only because I was the oldest wyvern in the brood.

Tonight they saw many things for me. They patched the fabric of time. They laughed at the lame jokes, claiming nostalgia. And so we shared stories that brought closure to the past and humour to the present.

I am glad to have been their guide and now their friend. It is only a few years since they left their home on the hill, but you can tell that they sniff the wind and see the future unfold. Their wings itch for it.

"The best is yet to be."

Ladies

I remember that when I worked on the hill, I used to refer to all my charges as 'ladies'. There were some giggles and guffaws (yes, even those) when I first did this, but I know I was steadfast in thinking that some day they would certainly be so, if not.

Nineteen years later, I had the great pleasure of catching up with many of them on a lovely Monday afternoon. All around me, the same naughty smiles, the same charming graces, the same pointed wit — but more refined. If not ladies then, they certainly were ladies at lunch.

I really enjoyed their company. I am glad we are friends. It would have been inappropriate then, when I taught them. But it is a blessing now, and I am grateful for it. Each of them gave me a different fragment of light back then; I saw the whole rainbow this day.

"Simple dans ma vertu; forte dans mon devoir."

A Musing

A tribute to amuse a muse or muses, a museum, music, a musement, amusement. This is.

I sat on the cold gravel at the long end of a rainy day. No runner I, just a tired man with painful feet, likely to grow more pained with time as the physiotherapist had said.

The muses were goddesses, it is said, by descent if not by inclination. I have known many in my time. I take as their lowest common denominator the ability to inspire, no matter how briefly, no matter how fleetingly.

I have loved many in my time, and in fragments of my times. I have admired some while not loving them at all. And I have liked some, been made affectionate by some, been affected by others, and had my affect turned upside down by a few.

What indefinite and undefinable qualities of each encounter could lurk in crystal-cut vials or cut-crystal vials of tears, of perspiration, of inspiration, of laughter? I had a collection of such. But they did not exist, except in idea and not in rea, ideal and not real. Imagined.

You cannot grind the monoceros into a vial. You cannot place the dance in a capsule or the song in a pill. You can only dream them there, and then you must let them go.

Years later, I am still letting go, and yet they never leave me. They are part of my spiritual, my living, my natural, my vital. They are an incomplete sentence with dangling bits.

I got up and walked away from the cold gravel, my sandals crunching softly. My footsteps, I left behind.

On The Bleachers

The human mind conflates. It makes scattered memories one, binding all life's pages into individual books.

There is a book in my head called The Day On The Bleachers. In that chunk of memory is a combination of all the days I used to sit there, with sun or cloud, rain or dusty breeze. The people I saw, the games played, the teasing and jostling for space — these and more, like snowflakes in a snowglobe.

And there is always that one young lady, who still lives, but will never be that young lady again.

Touchies

It wasn't until I was about two years out of the classroom that it struck me. I had taken for granted, whether true or not, the idea that I was significant in some way to the hundreds of students I knew. No doubt, at some low level of significance, this was true.

But what hit me harder was that for a very short while, to be honest, I felt sad that I no longer meant anything to so many people. Fortunately, some old boys turned up and disabused me of that thought. They were quite clear I had been of significance to them — but also that now I was just a slightly odd friend for whom they had some residual respect a bit above the norm.

You have to let it go. I had come to secretly, unconsciously believe that I was of greater import than I really was. What was really important was my work, my service, my calling. In the dark days, I had sometimes forgotten that.

It reminds me of the etymology of the word 'arrogance'. This word comes from the Latin verb rogare — 'to stretch out (one's hand in demand)'. 'Arrogance' is the attitude of assuming that anything you want is there to be taken when you stretch your hand out for it. Mea culpa. Guilty, guilty.

Curious Yellow

"... the deletion of memory is Curious Yellow's deadliest weapon."

And so began the odd little story that played off the sideline action in the big story. The subtext here was not about verging-on-porn new wave Swedish docudrama, but about the cognitive dictatorships mentioned by Charles Stross.

I attempted to look back into the history of the last twenty years, but was opposed by such constructs. Fortunately, I was armed with Strossian knowledge, and was prepared for a Curious Yellow kind of attack.

In the stand-off that ensued, I had the data and the memory, the documents and the network. The old-style dictator was balked and frustrated, and the first act came to an end.

Score (Part IV)

There is a cold scent in the bright morning. It is the day after the revolution. Moses, at that age, slew an overseer and fled for his life. He married the daughter of a pagan priest, at one stroke going from polytheist culture to pantheist (or perhaps animist — we are not too sure about Jethro).

I am lost. Or rather, I am in the position of a captain who knows his ship is well-supplied and sound, but that a storm has placed him in uncharted waters with neither dead reckoning nor sextant as guide.

The sealed orders told me all I needed to know. The Dark Lord of the Admiralty had cast me adrift. Part of this was because of my allegedly annoying alleged habit of resorting to what some thought of as privateering to earn a living. I had done nothing of the kind.

The next few months would prove very interesting.

Score (Part III)

For years I ate the hot crispy noodles from the same stall, every morning, at the same times each week. The kind folk who supplied this sustenance would put chili on chili, sauce and fresh and dried, with pepper ground and split, making food that would raise a hellish sweat. I loved it. The heat in my body and the increased velocity of blood from caffeine (long hard black from the other stall) prepared me for each hard day.

I was on top of my game. Everyone said so. But it wasn't the game that mattered to the Dark Lord on his Dark Throne.

Innocently, I taught, I learnt, I walked around. I was given a Ring of Power, but I never really used it. Still, there was fear. As a wiser and older colleague pointed out, the insanity of ambition sees competition in every minion; those who lack it are often victims of the sudden strike, the knife in the dark.

The Dark Lord said to me once, "Do not dream of building an empire. I will raise to eminence only those who will do my bidding and will not contend against me."

I had not thought of building empires, rising to eminence, or contending against him. Unfortunately, I was soon to realise that I would not always do his bidding either.

Thorns

They grow, as other green does
You cannot tell buds from them
When both are young

They can be very long, sharp
As the words of leaving love
Or nails fresh hung

I remember grasping them
Gasping when the flowers failed
Götterdämerung

Doubled

There is a rainbow above me
And the ground beneath me.
There is the sky of stars my roof,
And the trees that guard me.
There is cloud against the sun's heat
And the sunlight in day;
There is wind across the moon's glow
And the cold dew at night.

Here with my cat I sit and wait;
Here with my love I drink and dine.
When fifty years are gone
My memories are dust.

Millennium Catalog

The golden cat sits in the golden sun. This is something he has been doing for nigh on a decade now. He is no longer the jumpy kitten he used to be, hurtling around the bedroom and bouncing up and down.

He came to us, abandoned in a storm-drain, at the turn of the century. Now, into the second decade of the new century, there are days on which I wonder when he will no longer be with us.

On days like that, I write about him. I take photos of him. It is all very sentimental and unproductive; some might say it is irrational. But our definitions of 'rational' and suchlike are human, and humans shouldn't be allowed such liberties. As research has shown, removing emotion from humans reduces motivation for any kind of behaviour, including rational behaviour.

The golden cat in the golden sun is no mere meat-machine. He is a friend, despite having little in common with me, this non-feline who cannot think with his mind or perceive with his senses. And I think, as he turns and decides to trot over to me, that he has the cat-equivalent label for me.

Yesterday Once More

It's been years since I last heard the living voice that was once the most beautiful in the world. And yet, I can remember it over the radio. I feel the lower frequencies tug at the distant heart of my youth, summoning the distant heartache of bereavement, the sense of injustice that one so beautiful had left the world so soon.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A woodchuck could chuck wood as much as a woodchuck could chuck wood.

It seems that everywhere I go, carpentry provides reasons for living. And Christmas, in so many ways, rubs that fact in.

In Earnest

Today I spent the afternoon carefully opening many books, the collection of my late principal, a man of great integrity, hugely varied interests, and a magpie mind which seized on facts and built palaces out of them. We were looking through the books in order to sort them out and think of a new home for them. There were more than a thousand of them.

In the curious, vacant disorder that accompanies the departure of a man who lived alone, I found an unopened drawer. It contained little brown notebooks.

They were his travel diaries; more than that, they were shared diaries co-written by his late wife, a wonderful lady who had passed on in untimely fashion decades ago. They chronicled the mundane events and the wonderful events of each day in small, meticulous writing. They had pizza one day. They spent £5 on a souvenir for an uncle. They had lists, and tables, and terse descriptions of days which they had clearly enjoyed together.

The books had not been touched for a very long while. I shut their drawer carefully, stabbed by a moment of melancholy sharpened to a sudden point.

Burial Grounds

In some cultures, people are buried. In some, they are left in the cold, clear mountains to be carried away by ice, air and raptors. In others, they get funeral pyres or cremation. Sailors used to be buried at sea.

In many cultures, we honour dead ancestors in their absence. We remember them in stories and images, in spirit and in essence. After all, they are the people whose lives gave birth to ours. I don't know why we want to keep our cemeteries as if they were necropolises though, cities of the dead.

The dead will come to outnumber the living, given finite resources. The world population currently exceeds the combined total of all the dead perhaps up to about 1000 AD. But in a twinkling of an eye, we living will soon be overwhelmed.

The physical spaces some cultures set aside for their dead are not sustainable. Soon, 'ashes to ashes and dust to dust' will have to become the truth, not just a mealy-mouthed platitude uttered at some funerals at which the corpse is to be interred with the hope that the body will last forever.

Some believe that bodies must be intact for the resurrection of the dead — certainly, this belief is as old as Ancient Egypt. I find it hard to believe, however, that a Power which can raise the dead cannot simply reconstitute the bodies from the dust of the cosmos.

And so, we should favour the living over the dead. If a road must pass through the last resting-place of my ancestors, I think they would be amused. No mere road would have served to baulk any intentions of theirs when they were alive.

Fragments

Today was a host of fragments, splinters of the mind's eye, as Alan Dean Foster once put it.

Primus: breakfast, with interesting ladies and a priceless look of startlement on the face of one gentleman of long-standing acquaintance.

Secundus: lunch, where the hands do the burgers, and many shirts were bought.

Tertius: a memory of Luca Pacioli, patron saint of double-entry accounting.

Quartus: an inscription given to King Merikare — "be a craftsman in speech, that thou mayest be strong; the tongue is a sword to a man, and speech more valorous than any warfare."

Quintus: a quiet night, and the scent of forgotten jasmine in the cold hills.

Old Badges

There is a little metal box. In this box are badges, signs of the past, items worn by people I used to know, or not at all. I was a very young person once.

Now, not so much.