Friday 5th October - Connections

The book club choice for last month was 'A Time of Gifts' by Patrick Leigh Fermor'. I had already read it several years ago, and enjoyed it then.

I think it may be one of the first books that Mummy read after her stroke; I have one of those penguin '40s' books of just the first few chapters (my brother gave me 40 of them for my fortieth birthday, rather clever, I thought). She loved the descriptions of the Netherlands, especially Rotterdam, before the war.

I spotted this book by Robert MacFarlane and downloaded it because it was only £1.99 and I liked the cover picture;

Then I discovered it is all about Robert MacFarlane's reaction to having been given a copy of 'A Time of Gifts' by a friend.... and the effect gifts of books have on the giver and the recipient.

My father, a couple of weeks ago, insisted on buying me a copy of 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' by Edmund De Waal.

At the book club meeting, one of the members commented that there is a link between 'A Time of Gifts' and 'The Hare', in that a descendant of someone that PLF stayed with on his travels appears in 'The Hare'. I will have to finish the 'Gifts' i order to make the connection.

I've just started 'The Hare', but stalled in the first paragraph of the preface (I nearly always read the preface - it can be the best part of the book!) where De Waal recounts going to a language school in Shibuyah, Japan.

I teach an extremely popular chant in my music classes, which goes;

Shibuyah! Shibuyah! Ha! Ha! Shibuyah! Hoh!

You then go on to add individual statements before repeating the chant.

I'd always thought 'Shibuyah' was a made-up word; it has a lovely sound and feel. And then the word leapt at me when I was least expecting it!


The chapter names in 'The Hare With Amber Eyes' are so enticing that I can't wait to find out more;

I ought to get up. It is nearly lunchtime. Himself has been busy fixing the gates back to the driveway; a job which has been 'on the list' for a few years. Every time he goes to the tool cupboard in the next room, I hear 'hohoho Merry Christmas' from the Toy Father Christmas that was in a stocking so many years ago. Its battery is lasting well.

Tuesday 11th April - Bicycles in Amsterdam

We're back now! But I'm just getting round to posting.

Here's Amsterdam Centraal - a magnificent station, where we pitched up on Saturday morning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_Centraal_station

It didn't look like that when we got there - the weather was cold and grey, and the forecourt was bustling. The last time I was in Amsterdam I was probably about ten or twelve years old. I have almost no memories of that stay apart from the traffic, specifically trying to cross the roads. I still have occasional nightmares about that. 

No-one in Amsterdam walks about looking at their mobile phones - to do so means death. Probably. After a while you get the idea of which direction the nearly silent trams are likely to appear from. They ring their bell at you, so that you leap into the path of the tram coming the other way. 

Thankfully the buses, cars and motorbikes make more noise and you have a chance to hear them coming. 

But then there are the bicycles. No-one can properly imagine a city full of byicyles until they have been to Amsterdam. They hurtle towards you from no-where. I swear they use magic to appear when you least expect them. Dutch bicycles are not the highly-strung, light-weight contraptions like the ones that flit about the London streets, driven by skinny-ma-linky-long-legs all dressed in neon lycra. No, no, these are substantially engineered frames of an upright nature, with a tremendous sense of momentum and, great barrows on the front, full of shopping and children. Also, as far as I could tell, they are not fitted with brakes. At least, they never seemed to stop at lights and crossings.

So, when in Amsterdam, the best thing to do is take a canal trip. My pictures didn't come out, so these are all from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_Amsterdam

An aerial photograph of the canals of Amsterdam

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Brouwersgracht

  

Herengracht

Sunday 9th April - A Day at the Beach

Back at the beginning of the year I started making a list of 64 things I'd like to do this year. The number isn't of any significance apart from that's how many lines there are in my notebook. However, "A day at the seaside" did feature, and on Sunday I was able to put a star by that item...

The occasion was a family gathering to scatter my mother's ashes on the beach where she grew up, in Ijmuiden, The Netherlands.



It is a long, long flat sandy beach, with dunes where she used to play with her best friend when they were very young. As children, on some of our occasional visits to the Netherlands, we had stayed in her sister's beach hut. I remember sand castles, and riding a horse, and kite-flying. Chips with mayonnaise, chewing zoethout (and spitting the fibrous strands into the sand everywhere). Gas lighting. Sun. Wind. The cold North Sea.


Now, after all these years, we were back there, along with many of the Dutch relations. Most of us hadn't seen each other for decades. The cousins we used to play and argue with are all grown up (like us!).

It was a hot sunny day, tempered by a sharp wind, just as it had always been in my memory. A "beach taxi" - now there's a brilliant idea - took us along the beach away from the crowds, to a quiet place among the dunes, and there, we made a depression in the soft sand, and deposited the ashes. We covered them over, and scattered petals, and taosted her memory with prosecco. Someone (was it her sister?) thought she would like a share in the drinks too, so we poured some of the prosecco over the petals.

It was all very casual, very informal, very easy. A little quiet, maybe, but not solemn. And afterwards we went back to a pavilion for a (very late!) lunch together and catch up on theevents of the past forty years.

Back in January, last year, leaving her bedroom in the nursing home after we had gone to see her on the same morning that she had died was hard, very hard. I felt disorientated, and rather at a loss as to what to do next (lunch, as it happened, proved to be the right decision then as well!).

Later in February, walking out the the crematorium at the end of the funeral felt entirely wrong, as though, once again, I was leaving her when I should really stay (as I felt on so many occasions when we visited her in hospital). I took the funeral wreaths home with me, at my cousin's suggestion, and re-arranged the flowers into vases. That helped a lot.

Leaving the spot in the dunes was easy - the sun shining, the wind blowing. We had brought her to one of the places where she had been so happy. The other funeral and memorial gathering had all been about "us" - the family. This one was about her.