For David John CanhamOn a grey day, under clouds of slate, the grey train click clacked between closeted, over manicured villages where graffiti at home is a crime worse than genocide abroad, then onward into the grime of beige commuter towns, separated from the railway by muddy parks and weedy allotments and shunted to a faltering halt under the glare of harsh lamps that cast no shadows. The tube took me north west, out of the city and into leafier suburbs nestling under the same slate clouds. Preston Road, Northwood Hills, little settlements known to the tube map but alien to me. Are they real places I wonder or just handy platforms for commuters caught between the city and whatever tempts people to live in a Zone 9 postcode. Deep breath of damp city air, press the doorbell and wait slightly longer than comfortable. Warm greetings for grey days and grim news. A stale bedroom and empty words. About cricket, about which I know zilch, but he once belonged to the MCC and probably deplores my lack of insight, about the grammar school he attended with Reg Dwight, about Watford FC and about Christmases in Suffolk, which never properly began until he stood on the doorstep clutching a suitcase to his chest with presents balanced on top, all capped by an awkward smile. I drank bad coffee while he dozed. I thought about all the trips to London when I had better things to do than pop in to say hello. Back in the days when he'd know I was there to see him. I thought about a man past 70, on his hissing air bed, and about the shy man I once knew. A sharp intelligence inside a brittle shell, the rise through the ranks of the electric company, a few halcyon years and then his troubles, the descent, the diagnosis of dementia when he was barely into his fourth decade. Slowly but surely calcifying a brain too fragile to resist its creeping tendrils. I remembered the case conferences, admissions, discharges and re-admissions. Tedious social workers, tired consultants and eager junior doctors who carried the smell of the hospital with them. I talked again. Filling the empty spaces with empty words, about nothing and everything. His family home in Pinner. The organ with his graduation picture on, next to the statue of a knight whose head bent back to reveal a lighter that always fascinated me as a child. A monologue of the banal to keep myself company. I said goodbye. I said I'd be back in February, but I knew they were useless words. Said for me not him. I stood on the doorstep between the warm haze of inside and the bright cold air outside. Talk of care, comfort and 'arrangements' to be made. All these useless words. Somehow, I was on the tube, rocking back to the city accompanied by the buzz of meaningless chatter and useless words. 'When do we get off mummy...' 'Do you think Watford stand a chance against Newcastle on Saturday..?' '... And he told me never to do that again, but I was like...' The man with the cocaine tic feeding mints between his cracked lips. The woman in a hijab staring at the advert for glossy overpriced homes for two… three… four stops, as if committing every detail to memory. The long-married couple sitting close together and a long way apart. Two teenagers, playing verbal ping pong of boasts and lies. All these useless words as we rattle through dull stations, neon shops and uneven houses with their backs turned to the railway line. Untidy gardens, and broken swings, a slash of graffiti on a leaning fence and a train of bored commuters swaying past in the opposite direction, on their way home to Preston Road and Northwood Hills. Ugly shoes on ugly seats, swaying into Baker Street, exit for Madam Tussauds, ugly people and ugly thoughts. Alight and shuffle with the crowds to another carriage under skies turning from grey to black without my permission. Bethnal Green, higgledy piggledy roofs, neon kebab shops and glaring chemists. Cars crawling outside the carriage. Inside children chatter, nonsense words, parents umm and arr... more useless words. Too much cheap Christmas scent, phone screens for tired eyes and pale ghosts reflected in the window staring into laptops. Tottenham Hale. TE COS superstore, wondering where the first S went and why I care. Bleak rooms abandoned dinner tables and anonymous offices lit up for our inspection. All these useless words. Words that shuttle us between now and the past. Memories and snippets of history played out in a flat narrative, free from trauma and worry. Words of comfort and consolation, words of hope and peace, and words of half-truths and lies. Words that define us, defile us and expose us. That drown out our inner voices, smother our guilt and give shape to our impotence to change anything, now or in the past. Words spoken but not meant, heard but not understood, ignored and forgotten or stored away forever. All these useless words that change nothing. Nothing at all. Words that die with us, David passed away at 04:00 on 31 December 2018.
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Welcome to another in our occasional series of blog entries. The pictures don't have anything to do with the text...we really cannot do justice to the scenery with mere words.
I’ve never really been one for car culture or coveted driving anything with more luxury than a functioning heater and radio, but I have just borrowed a lavishly appointed car to ferry Alison back from dropping off our Mazda for its MOT. It was a scary experience. Firstly, I had to start the damn thing. What I had mistaken for a handy receptacle for my glasses turned out to be a port for the key fob which, once deposited, allowed the car to start…or didn’t. Not until I’d pressed the correct sequence of buttons and then, to my alarm the interior lit up like a Christmas tree, beeped, flashed and whirred in a fashion that would have delighted a toddler or someone called Wayne but terrified the bejesus out of me. Even the arm rest had more buttons than my own car needs to function successfully. Finally, it settled into an impatient humming sulk while I worked out that the handbrake was a switch buried somewhere out of sight below the steering wheel and required nothing more of me than a gentle prod to release 2 litres of finest Swedish engineering backwards at 70 miles an hour. Until that hair-raising moment my attention had been focused entirely on trying to figure out which of the many gears would result in forward momentum. I tried all of them at least twice before we finally lurched forward in a series of crunching hops. I realise now that it is quite a good idea to acquaint oneself with the basic functions before setting off. Had I done so I would have known where reverse was, that it had 6 gears, not 4 as I’d thought for the first 5 miles of my journey and I wouldn’t have had to stop twice within ½ a mile of leaving home. Once to find out where the windscreen wiper control was (in the boot possibly) and once to try and turn the heating down from thermonuclear to merely tropical, all this while outside rain lashed down and the wind lifted sheep into the next postcode. Once underway again I made good progress, even successfully indicating right by pounding every stalk on the steering column. I had wanted to turn left but after seeing the look on the face of the driver behind me I decided to stick to the direction the car had chosen, to his evident relief as he vanished in a cloud of dust. Around 10 minutes into the journey I discovered the word ‘cruise’ etched into the steering wheel. Maybe it came equipped with its own guided missile system I thought, those canny Swedes pretending to be neutral and all the time arming their family saloons with enough technology to launch a pre-emptive strike on Norway and steal their fjords. While absentmindedly musing upon Scandinavian conflict I became aware of a slowly increasing warmth in the rump. I felt between my legs and the seat was reassuringly dry but alarmingly hot. I guessed what I earlier thought was the control for the radio had in fact been the seat warmer. I took the only sensible course of action and twisted, punched, pummelled and mashed every button, knob and switch within reach until the hairs on my posterior were no longer sizzling away in their own juices. I had no idea how the climate control system worked. Every so often a puff of warm damp air would escape a vent in the dashboard and warm the empty passenger seat to my left or a cold draft would suddenly cool my left ankle until it got bored. I tried a likely looking knob with a red crescent fading into a blue one, but this only succeeded in turning the radio on. So now accompanied by Radio 4 and intermittent updates on the traffic situation in Glasgow I settled in for all of two minutes. I could see the roadworks in good time, and thanks to their luminous coats also the two men with their STOP/GO boards standing at each end of a digger clearing goodness knows what from a ditch. There was no traffic following me and nothing approaching from the other direction for approximately 4 miles, so seeing me, one of them decided to switch from GO to STOP because they’ve had nothing else to do all morning. I jerked down through a few random gears to a dead stop; whereupon he switched immediately to GO. Of course he did…I was just thinking about how he might not be qualified to do a job where the essential requirement is the ability to hold a stick, when I stalled the car and had to go through the whole pre-flight routine before crawling past him and his smirking colleague, mistook 2nd gear for 4th and screeched off in a cloud of rubbery smoke. I tried stabbing the ‘cruise’ button a few times but sadly no one in a high vis jacket exploded. Roadworkers can be an easy target so out of interest I looked up the statistics and now have a renewed respect for the UK’s 4000 or so high vis souls who are generally trying to earn a few bob while making our roads safer. In 2016, 347 incidents of road worker abuse were reported, but fewer than half of the 23 companies who belong to the Highways Term Maintenance Association were asked to supply figures, so the real number will be much higher. [1 Of those incidents, 267 were in the form of swearing, shouting, hand gestures and threats but the rest encompassed a smorgasbord of serious assaults that included; shooting, throwing of items such as screwdrivers, kicking, punching and beating, in one case with baseball bats. Not only that but accidental injuries and fatalities are also happening because drivers frequently encroach into coned off areas (over 150 times a month according to Highways England), all because we want to get home in time to see who’s been expelled from The Great British Bake Off. A study by Oxford University in 2016 placed road workers as the 16th most dangerous occupation in the UK, and some of the professions rated more dangerous include comparatively tiny work forces, like deep sea divers and bomb disposal experts. I didn’t know any of this on my way home, although by then I’d mastered most of the rudimentary controls, so I was at least able to glide to a gentle halt at the first STOP sign for exactly the same length of time it takes to turn a pole with a round sign on top to face the opposite direction. Next time I’ll be sure to give them a cheery wave and smile of acknowledgment as I drive past. Or at least a smile, I’m not sure lifting a hand from the combined steering wheel/gearstick/heater control would be wise under the circumstances. When I eventually arrived home, there were whole clusters of switches that I hadn’t tried and lots of enticingly illuminated knobs remained untwiddled. Goodness knows what any of them do, I’m at a loss to account for anything short of a coffee maker that was missing from my journey. |
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May 2019
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