It’s remarkable how early the celebration of the Christian festival Easter is this year. Unlike a fixed date say of Christmas, the date of Christ’s crucifixion and subsequent resurrection is moveable, linked to the lunar rather than solar cycle, and can occur sometime between March 22^rd and April 25^th. Even after reading some of the interpretations of Old and New Testament scripts concerning the date of the crucifixion, I still find it strange that it can vary by over a month.  The resurrection was supposedly ‘on the 3^rd day’, so they must count the day of the crucifixion as the first, otherwise we would celebrate it on Monday! And of course this is using the Gregorian calendar, which in the C21st is 13 days earlier than the Julian calendar used by Eastern and Orthodox Christians. This year The Archbishop of Canterbury announced that there are ongoing discussions between the Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox communities to fix the date, possibly as 19^th April – but not for 5 years or so.

Growing up I remember, or was told as a two year old’s memory is not reliable, that my parents had placed some chocolate Easter eggs on my bed. I had woken, found them, eaten them, and when my mother came in she found me covered in chocolate. Of course!

My mother and step-father lived in a small village in Sussex and went to the local Church of England C12th Saxon church every Sunday. At some stage the vicar discovered that they were confirmed in the Church of Scotland and so it was, on Easter Sunday, to take communion, we all travelled up to London to St Columba’s Church in Pont Street. Although we had driven the roads many times, I do remember a moment of confusion in 1962 when we reached a particular T-junction: “Left or Right?” Ahead of us was a poster advertising a Bob Hope film – “The Road to Hong Kong” and so the inevitable comment was made from the back seat – ‘if you go straight on we’ll go to Hong Kong’. (We probably thought this a preferable option!!)

Before the communion, those who were not confirmed left the church. My brother and I would go and find some Sunday papers and read those in the car, before we were joined by our parents and driven off to lunch at Lyon’s Corner House at Marble Arch.

So for many people, Easter is about religion, marking the death and resurrection of Jesus. For others, it’s about Easter eggs, of bunnies, and overdosing on chocolate. I read that this year in the UK it’s also all about eggshell wreaths, bunny string lights and stylish Easter trees; the sending of Easter cards has made a comeback. God Help Us! Incidentally the ‘egg’ association started in the C13th, as a representation of new life.

This year the Easter weekend has been used to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin. This had nothing to do with Simnel cakes, hot cross buns and the like, but an attempt by seven fervent Irish nationalists to form a new nation, independent from London. The rebellion was over in a week, and the ‘rebels’ executed, but it hastened the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922, known as the Republic of Ireland from 1937. The Easter Rising was, according to a recent book about the seven nationalist, ‘a catastrophe that poisoned Irish veins with the toxin of political violence’. One sixth of the island of Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom and is known as Northern Island. That ‘toxin’ encouraged a thirty year terrorist campaign by the IRA to force the UK to end its governance of Northern Ireland. It ended in 1998 but fringe groups continue their misguided criminal activity. The actual date of the Easter Rising is 24^th April 1916, but as Easter is so early this year ……!!

But for me, the abiding memory associated with Easter is completing the canoe race from Devizes, 125 miles west of London, to Westminster; the ‘DW’. You might not think of me as a roughie toughie canoeist, and you’d be correct; I’m not and wasn’t! On commissioning, I was posted to an artillery regiment in Devizes, Wiltshire. I duly wrote to the Commanding Officer, as required, expressing my enormous pleasure in joining his regiment. I was also required to say a little about myself; after mentioning playing rugby and a love of art, I was scrambling around to fill the page. Stupidly, I said I loved canoeing, having spent a couple of lazy sunny Sundays on the lake at the military academy, complete with female companion and bottle of bubbly. I never made the connection – that Devizes was the start of the DW Canoe Race. Volunteered in true military fashion, ie “Yates! We’ve entered a team of three two-man canoes in the DW. You’re in charge!”, I found myself on Good Friday morning 1968 on the Kennet & Avon canal, ready for the off. I won’t bore you with the details, as it’s immensely tedious to paddle 125 miles. The first 53 miles are on the canal, before one joins the River Thames. On the canal stretch, at every one of the 77 locks, you had to get out, carry the canoe around the lock, get back in and start paddling again. Some parts of the canal had no water and you just had to carry the bloody thing! The Thames becomes tidal, and consequently very choppy, after another 55 miles; those last 17 miles are “just mind-numbing” says Sir Ranulph Fiennes the British explorer. Indeed, many teams fail on this last 17-mile stretch. Suffice to say my crewman became sick, another team canoe struck something and developed a leak, and in the end it was just one canoe, mine, with a different crewman, paddling into London, against the coldest wind imaginable. Someone gave me a cup of tea – I dropped it, so exhausted, so wet, so frozen.

The winner that year came in in about 25 hours; we were not in racing canoes and took considerably longer. But we finished and I have the certificate to prove it, although as we had changed crew, we weren’t given a ‘place’ but simple recognition we had completed what has been described as the Mount Everest of canoe races. The former Liberal Democrat politician Lord Ashdown also completed it as a young Royal Marines commando, famously commenting afterwards that he could think of only one person who’d had a worse Easter than him!

So, some thoughts at Easter in 2016

Richard 28^th March 2016                                               richardyates24@gmail.com

 

My recent encounter with a dentist away from his treatment room (PC 62) started another train of thought. Just what is your relationship with your dentist? One to be put up with, an acceptance of a necessity, or one you would prefer not to think about? After two close encounters recently with chums who are undergoing ‘dental work’, but not really wanting to know too much detail, I saw an old man on the bus the other day who had clearly given up going to a dentist – absolutely no front teeth, top or bottom, and what teeth there were, were stained by tobacco or too much coffee. Could I dare to scribble about our teeth? Worth a try!

We do not want this sort of decay!

First the details, in case you’ve forgotten? Children have 20 deciduous teeth which they lose after some 10 years. A normal adult mouth contains 32; 8 incisors, 4 canines, 8 premolars and 12 molars. The latter include 4 wisdom teeth; they are the last to appear right at the back of the mouth, by which time you are supposed to have gained some degree of wisdom – personally I’m not sure about this!

I lost one of my baby teeth on a sailing trip on the west coast of Scotland in 1956. I fondly remember the feel of the coin under my damp pillow in the wet berth, for in the UK we have this tradition of placing a coin under the pillow when a child loses one of their baby teeth. It used to be an old sixpence, but I’m sure inflation has increased the coin’s value. I learned later that the yacht had been in danger of capsizing – but that detail is hidden in my psyche!

One’s tongue is a funny part of one’s body, very sensitive, strange-looking, and indicative of good health. But when you have a loose tooth, you use your tongue to ….. lick the tooth, to tease it, rock it in and around in its socket, push it so it almost comes out ….. just a little more!! What a delicious feeling!

Growing up in 1950’s Britain, sugar, which had been rationed during World War Two, was more available, but only just! I am old enough to remember Ration Cards that allowed me to buy sweets from Mr Sugden’s newsagents in Margaret’s Buildings, a small pedestrianised shopping street around the corner from The Royal Crescent in Bath where I lived. Four Black Jacks cost one penny (in old decimal currency a two hundred and fortieth of a pound). I think I indulged my love of sweets too much, trading other’s sweet ration for chores; that and an oft-quoted ‘we all have soft teeth in the family’ and visits to the dentist became a regular feature of my life. If you have ‘soft’ teeth you should not eat Winegums or toffees, especially caramel, but they’re my favourites!! (Oh! And dark chocolate-covered Brazil nuts ….. and Cadbury’s Chocolate whole nut and …….)

I haven’t talked about this nightmare before, so forgive me if I get a little emotional! Mr Sharp, my dentist, had a practice in one of the honey-coloured Bath stone buildings in The Circus, a circle of large, tall, terraced houses with a stand of enormous trees in the centre. As a schoolboy, wearing shorts and long socks, I would ring the well-polished brass bell by the large front door, and step into a stone-flagged hallway. Mr Sharp’s surgery was on the first floor ….. and he stood hands on hips at the top of the stairs, with the light from the surgery behind him. He looked threatening and I climbed those stairs with huge reluctance, wishing that I could have been transported away, anywhere actually; “Beam me up Scottie?”

“Hello, Richard!” His cold clammy hand did nothing to lighten my mood. “Come on in.” The chair of course becomes your prison, its back the wall. If I had an injection, it always seemed to me that the numbness was at its most effective just as I stepped out of the chair at the end of the appointment. In those days I think the drill was a cable & foot-pedal affair; it might have been driven by electricity but the fluctuation in its speed suggested otherwise. When that drill bit made contact with a tooth, it made me sympathise with concrete when a workman starts digging it up with a hydraulic jackhammer. You couldn’t talk as you were like a hamster, with bits of cotton wool stuck in both cheeks. The suction device that was meant to take away the saliva was never quite in the right place but you couldn’t move it as your hands were gripping the armrests of the chair so tightly. Oh! How I hated going to see Mr Sharp!

In common with many children I managed to come off my bicycle, in this case crashing into my brother, and chewed the tarmac. This hastened the loss of the front teeth – and reminded me of that song “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth.” There was a small gap between my two top teeth which aided my ability to play the trumpet in the school orchestra. My passion for sweets created cavities in my teeth, much like the hole at the core of the Chernobyl Nuclear reactor that needed a concrete cap, although the covering in my case was made of a nicer material. Most of the work was done by an Army dentist and I spent so much time in his chair that we became good friends! Those crowns remain in good shape, such was the quality of his work. I am still in touch with his wife who, forty years later, lives in Hastings.

Other memories of the dentist cover a broken crown that I glued back temporarily with super glue (the dentist was not amused!); failing asleep in the chair; and a root canal that required a second mortgage to finance.

But I have had sufficient money to get the treatment when and where it’s been needed. Woe betide those who don’t. (To be continued …….)
Richard 20^th March 2016                                                         richardyates24@gmail.com

 

Should I have worried when the receptionist fixed a plastic strap around my wrist and said: “Welcome to Il Campanario Jureré”?  It was like that thing they do when you’re an in-patient in hospital, so you, and they, can remember your name, but this was apparently for ‘security’. It was a shade of green that I adore …. but I could have done without it. According to the travel agent, on Ilha de Santa Catarina the place to go was Jureré , some 40 minutes drive north from the capital Florianópolis. After two days we thought otherwise. The pool was fine except the muzak too loud to talk comfortably … we asked for them to turn it down but they said: “no”. Welcome to Jureré!

Although it was low season, and only at 40% occupancy, everything took an hour and a half. We had a problem in the shower in our room; well, actually a major problem –  no water! We called reception – after a long wait they eventually answered and said they would send someone. Thirty minutes later another call, another ‘we’ll send someone’ adding they were very busy. A man arrived, mumbled something, and went away. The words Faulty Towers were beginning to surface from my memory pool. He came back, muttered to himself, fixed it and left. An hour and a half. We showered; unfortunately my towel was so threadbare you could see through it so it didn’t dry well. I almost took it to reception ….. but decided to go for dinner instead.

Most guests from Argentina, Uruguay and some of the locals seemed to be tucking into the buffet …… and an hour and a half later we knew why. We sat in the alternative  ‘bar restaurant’ and waited. Laverina bought the menu and suggested we order our starters and mains at once as they all came together! Not quite sure what she meant at the time, but as we waited ….. and waited ….. her words came backs to haunt us. How long does salad and 6 little cod croquettes for an appetizer take to make? Almost exactly an hour and a half later our starters and mains arrived, together. We decided not to have pudding as …..

We didn’t have Manuel attending to us when we tried the buffet the second evening but Andrico, who had learnt English in London and was keen to impress us with his knowledge – standing too close to our table, he wanted to talk about English football, of which I know nothing, and the European Union, of which I know a little. (But I am being extremely hypocritical here, as my knowledge of Brazilian Portuguese hardly runs to more than ‘boa tarde’.)

After two days we drove south to Quinta Do Bucanero on Praia do Rosa, north of Imbituba. We had arrived! At the end of a sandy track with pousadas left and right, very much like on the Mediterranean coast, a wonderful seductive atmosphere awaited us. … and seclusion. The pousada was cleverly built into the rocky hillside, and consequently on many levels. Our room overlooked the beach and you walked down a steep path to get to the sea, which was a little cool. The staff were attentive, the food was lovely, the massage relaxing and ……… we had that view!

Praia do Rosa, voted one of the 30 best beaches in the world in 2003

Next to Praia do Rosa was Praia do Vermelha: almost deserted as to access it you had to climb up and around a headland, so few bothered! After three nights we moved on.

It’s only about 250kms to get to the top of the Serra do Rio do Rastro mountains from the coast, a climb of some 1500m, but the final 20 kilometres are extremely steep. We came up behind a lorry which, in order to complete particularly sharp corners, had to reverse! Traffic backed up, the roads wet with rain showers and with low cloud, one could be anywhere apart from Brazil. It was slightly nerve racking and with visibility low there are some anxious moments.

Into the Serra do Rio do Rastro

The economy of this southern state, population 7 million, is mainly agricultural-based, with apple production and cattle farming abundant; tourism is on the increase. Vineyards abound and the local wine, I’m told, is delicious, the expertise being handed down through the generations by the Serra Catarinense people, descendants of the Germans and Italians who settled here in the C19th. This part of Brazil still retains the traditions of those original European settlers; for example, as we drove into Orleans, the sign over the road declared: “Hertzlichen Willkommen”!

The Rio Do Rastro Eco Resort, in Bom Jardin da Serra, where we had planned two nights was a mistake!! I guess we imagined more of a hotel complex, not a group of chalets lying in a natural bowl …. with no view. It’s the only place in Brazil where it snows every year, so we expected a change of temperature, but the drizzle and cold did nothing to lift our mood ….. so we went to check out the restaurant. After some trout laced with ginger and honey (terribly sweet), I liked the sound of the ‘ice-cream with wild berry sauce’ …. but got some microwaved raspberry jam instead. The alternative was what turned out to be a few strawberries swimming in 500ml of balsamic vinegar and 500g of sugar! Then we decided to spend only one night here!

The following morning the sun came out as we headed for breakfast and the American comedian Allan Sherman’s ‘Camp Granada’ song came into my head. Sung to Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, it’s an amusing letter from a teenage son to his parents, moaning about his summer camp in the rain. At the end, the sun comes out and he writes: “Wait a moment it’s stopped hailing …. muddah, fadduh kindly disregard this letter.” But the clear visibility gave us a wonderful view from the top.

We went home …. back to Quinta do Bucanero for one night before flying back to Rio.

More scribbles to come!

Richard – 4^th March 2016 – richardyates24@gmail.com

PS When you book a flight you think: “Oh! That’s ok, we leave at 0915.” forgetting if you work the times back you have to get up at 0450 to get to the airport! C’est la vie

Eek! What awful words ….. so many connotations of the end of life, finished, the scrapheap!! But actually we shouldn’t read them as such, should we?

Some years ago at a post-theatre supper party (sounds grander than it was!!) a guest asked a close relative of mine what he did. “Oh! I’m retired!” he responded, effectively ending any further conversation. I was reminded of this exchange the other evening, when a long-established friend of Celina’s family came to supper. “And what do you do?” he asked after the initial pleasantries were out of the way. I accept that youthful looks belie my actual advancing years; I fell into the trap and replied: “Oh! I’m retired!” I later apologised to him, saying that my response was very lame, and went on to tell him what I had done in my three careers, so as to encourage conversation. He is a dentist and conversations with dentists are often completely one-sided. You sit in that chair: they talk to you; your mouth’s open and the gums are numb; the suction device struggles to clear the saliva; and he (or she as I have been treated by a number of female ones) asks “Oh! And how’s so-and-so?” ….. and blah blah ….. and all you can do is mumble and look appealingly into their eyes as if to say: “Please stop asking questions!”. But I digress!

My first ‘retirement’ was from the British Army in 1985, on a pension large enough to buy one glass of wine a day! After twenty years’ service I was still under 40 and another career beckoned. It seems to me that my step-father’s generation had made the long career in one company or organisation their ‘goal’, one you started after school or university and left when you were 65; the gold watch in your pocket and the grateful thanks or otherwise of your colleagues ringing in your ears. It was the aspiration of the middle classes (actually when I was typing this I missed the letters ‘m’ and ‘d’ and typed ‘idle’ classes before realising my error – or maybe it wasn’t an error?). Frankly it should be ‘working’ classes as we all need to work. Retirement isn’t necessarily confined to older age; “The Home Office (forcibly) retired him on a full pension, as it was reorganising the department.” The phrase ‘put out to grass’ was often used in this context; it rather sadly originated in farm use, animals too old for other work were ‘put out to grass’.

People now talk about having fun when they ‘retire’, as if they didn’t before they stopped working. In my professional business coaching days, I tried to get my clients to identify where they could have fun, even if they were ‘working’. Surely you don’t want to wait until your mid 60s before you can indulge yourself in joyous activities? This word ‘retirement’ is now linked to places where the elderly ‘rest’. To the west of Hove is the town of Worthing, known unfairly maybe as God’s Waiting Room, and to the east Eastbourne, near the Continent (of Europe) and incontinent; such is the density of the elderly!

There is a rather archaic use in relation to an unassuming, unassertive, effacing person. “A retiring acquiescent woman with a fondness to be on her own.” For me it conjures up a rather sweet, quaint character who actually contributed to the fabric of society in a funny way. Is anyone ‘retiring’ anymore?

It can of course be used to describe the withdrawal from a race or match; participants ‘retire’ from a race because of equipment failure or personal injury or retire from the sport, say rugby, because they’re not able to keep up (trying to avoid using the words ‘too old’ here!!). It’s not the end of life as we know it!

I love the use of the word to describe withdrawing from a particular place or indeed to just somewhere else.  “He retired to bed.” And I imagine silk pyjamas, slippers and a little ‘nightcap’ (material or liquid?). The use of the word ‘retire’ in a courtroom actually means of course the start of work for the jury. “The judge finished his summing up and the jury retired (out of the courtroom) to consider the evidence and come to a conclusion as to proven guilt.”

And finally, it’s used as another word for ‘retreat’ in a military context: “lack of numbers compelled the British force to retire“. Researching the background to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, as a great great grandfather had been in the country at the time, I came across the story of General Charles Napier’s foray into what is now Pakistan. His orders had been to put down an insurrection of Muslim rulers who had remained hostile to the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent. Napier’s success went to his head and, despite huge diplomatic efforts to make him and his army retire, he greatly exceeded his orders by conquering the whole of Sindh Province. Napier was supposed to have despatched to his superiors the short, notable message, “Peccavi“, the Latin for “I have sinned” (which was a pun on I have Sindh). This pun appeared in a cartoon in Punch magazine in 1844 beneath a caricature of Charles Napier. The true author of the pun was, however, Catherine Winkworth, who submitted it to Punch, which then printed it as a factual report. Later proponents of British rule over the East Indians justified the conquest thus: “If this was a piece of rascality, it was a noble piece of rascality!”

Oh! To have that knowledge of Latin to enrich my writing! So, no retirement, just fun, like scribbling another postcard !!

Richard – 20^th February 2016 – richardyates24@gmail.com

It may be that you catch up with my postcards in bed, getting ready to sleep; I hope my banging on about this and that doesn’t keep you awake or indeed produce a soporific state? If I get my mathematics right, whilst this won’t be applicable to any of you, there have been some twenty five thousand two hundred and eighty something times when I have laid my head down, ‘to sleep, perchance to dream’, and whilst I can’t remember every place …..  a few come to mind, some generic, some particular.

I recall laying my head down on bunk beds, iron bedsteads, futons, slatted beds; sofa beds – wow, have you ever had a decent mattress on a sofa bed?; adjustable beds in hospital; water beds, so cold and clammy; on a car seat, waiting for a ferry; on a floor in a half built house in Aachen, Holland on a hitch hiking holiday aged 17; in a railway sleeper carriage, the ‘clickety clack’ rhythm rocking you to sleep; in a sleeping bag on a blow-up Lillo; on an apartment floor a few years ago, trying to get comfortable on old coats and cushions; or even on an aircraft seat – once you’ve experienced an upgrade it’s difficult to opt intentionally for discomfort!!

I get the basic sizing of beds, as in ‘single’and ‘double’ but then we get to ‘Queen’, a bit bigger that a double. The late Queen Victoria was extremely small; our current queen only average, so why it is bigger than a double? Then the king – as in “I need a bigger and better bed that my wife” and jokingly Emperor. One of the last great western self-styled emperors was Napoleon and he was famous for having small man syndrome – so you name the largest bed size after the smallest …….?

You put your head on someone’s lap for a little nap – an expression of intimacy/closeness. Firstly you hear the gurgling torrent that takes place the other side of the epidermis and then in the background the sound of the beat of the heart – well, that’s a good think to hear but you really can’t fall asleep with the noise in your ears, can you?

Talking of sounds, many years ago I went off to Manorbier in South Wales to make a reconnaissance of a live missile firing facility. My Battery Sergeant Major accompanied my small party and we were accommodated in a wriggly-tin roofed Nissen Hut in the nearby training camp. Across the road that ran beside the camp was a small, single track railway line that was used by the occasional cargo train. After a supper in Tenby we retired to bed. The bed itself was comfortable, my head hit the pillow and I was soon asleep. At some stage in the night I was shaken awake by the sound of a train rumbling past outside. Sufficiently compos mentis within a minute or so, I realised it was actually the rattling sound of the Sergeant Major’s snoring from next door.

I have sailed around the waters of Britain, extensively in The Baltic, occasionally in the Mediterranean and once a long haul across the Atlantic to the tiny islands of Bermuda. Up in the bow, in the forepeak as it’s known, under sail you suffer the rise and fall, the crash and shudder, the rushing noise of millions of gallons of water just past your head; difficult to sleep but exhaustion normally kicks in. Amidships, the port and starboard berths required a certain athleticism to clamber into. I once saw the opposite berth almost vertically above me as we broached (sort of capsized!) in a dramatic squall in the North Sea – water poured in, the mainsail ripped but then the yacht righted itself.

In charge of the directions we should take to Bermuda, I had the associated navigator’s bunk. With the chart table in constant use, getting into my berth was difficult; I had to double up, before straightening out and sliding my head under the table. Feeling queasy when sailing at the best of times, being claustrophobic, with the underside of the table 6 inches from my head, did not make sleep easy!

When you’ve had a tiring day, nothing better to fill the bath with steaming hot water, fill a glass with some crisp white wine*, and ……. soak! Gradually the issues of the day drift away, you drift away …… and you wake up later in a cooling bath with wrinkly skin! Nice Huh!

Part of Louis de Bernière’s latest novel “The Dust that Falls From Dreams’ covers the First World War and he describes the horror of living and sleeping in the water filled trenches. You will imagine that in the early weeks of my officer training at Sandhurst, we dug many holes and some we occupied for a day or two; some were dry and others filled with water in the pouring rain. Sleeping half standing up was not the easiest position to adopt but needs must. I also remember actually falling asleep standing up on the third day of a long exercise. Up a couple of hours before dawn, trekking to the start of some manoeuvre, and then waiting and waiting. Only woke up when the chap behind me moved forward and bumped into my back!!

In the steaming jungle in Belize in Central America, we first made the A-frame by chopping down some suitable saplings with a machete, then lashing them together. You tied the poncho to it, as a hammock, got the mosquito net in place, and settled down for the night. Of course ear plugs are essential in the jungle for the noise of the other inhabitants is deafening!!

Many years ago I tried camping again when going for a walk-about in the Australian island state of Tasmania. This is a dramatic, remote part of the world, one of rare natural beauty and delightfully uninhabited. As part of the circumnavigation, I hiked into the Freycinet National Park, complete with freeze-dried food for supper that night. I was awoken in my tent in the early hours by a Possum chomping its way through a bag of Chicken Supreme. Poor thing – it rushed off but not before it had completely emptied the little aluminium sachet – I often wonder what happened when it got thirsty and drank ……. (Dried food expands very quickly when it meets water …..!!)

But, for all of the above, when all’s said and done, there is nothing remotely as pleasing as one’s own pillow, in one’s own bed, on which to lay your head!

Richard 6^th February 2016 – richardyates24@gmail.com

*Although I gave up alcohol fourteen years ago it doesn’t mean I can’t recall the delight of a glass of a NZ Cloudy Bay or a Pouilly Fuisse!! Yum! Yum!

Observations and thoughts …….

Just how do we say goodbye to a loved one? It’s a challenge facing us all, and often more than twice in our lives. It doesn’t matter whether they have reached the full expected span of their life with accumulated wisdom and maturity or if only an infant – it’s the same pain, the same distress, the same anguished cry of “Why?” ……… and often the follow-up guilt in the “If only ….”! Buzzing around my head is this:

“Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corpse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot, o’er the grave where our hero we buried.”

Just simple, expressive, oozing with sadness and loss. The first verse of a poem concerning the burial of Sir John Moore after the battle of Corunna in the Peninsular War (1807–1814)

We all know we should listen to our bodies, but there is a tendency to hide a suspicion about this or that, a hope, maybe a belief, it will go away; must have been an aberration!! ….. then it becomes an issue and it’s often too late.

Worried family and colleagues gather in hushed muted groups to share information and the latest prognosis, all the while hoping against hope for the best. The end comes quietly and peacefully. The grieving grieve. In the hospital basement, in a small windowless room masquerading as a chapel, the body is clothed by nurses, delicately and with sympathy; just another job that needs doing.

Every one of you will have experienced the death of a loved one, or even an unloved relative, whose life on earth deserves recognition. Unless you’re of Muslim, Jewish or Hindu faith, where custom dictates the funeral is conducted on the same day as the death, in northern Europe it’s normal for the funeral to take place some days, even a couple of weeks, after the demise. So I had to get used to the idea that Carlos Eduardo Guile da Rocha Miranda’s body would be cremated less than two days after his soul departed. Whilst I understood from a practical point of view how this custom developed in hot countries, my mind was shocked by the undue haste; and still is.

Christians used to expect to be buried ….. ‘dust to dust, ashes to ashes’ ….. the intonation rang out across the graveyard at past funerals; the coffin lowered into the cold ground. But there’s pressure on the physical space and cremations are becoming more normal.

The crematorium is surrounded by the graves of the departed – above ground for the Jews and below for the Christians. Some huge edifices have been erected ….  the artist obviously having been given free reign  …… winged angels stand guard  …..  women lie draped in distress across the cold stone  bust  …. mausoleums large and frankly ridiculous dot the landscape. Is this glorifying death …… or life? Not sure! Maybe just highlights our awkwardness about what to do and how to do it??

The open coffin, the recently departed pale and lifeless, lies in the small crowded chapel, with only a figure of Christ on the Cross on the wall to suggest religious significance. The extended family, friends and academic colleagues gather to recollect, to pay their respects, to share in a life’s contributions. A priest conducts a simple, short service; the family are invited to say a few words. Eventually the orderlies come to put the top on the casket and wheel it away. Later the ashes will be collected and a decision made about what to do with them. My mother sat on my mantelpiece for a year or two before I scattered hers where my stepfather lay! Aunt Cynthia was placed under a rose brush outside her favourite church. Tom our loved Labrador was scattered on Hove beach at low tide. We all find the right place eventually.

The memorial service is in this case a mass. After the service, the line to meet and greet, to offer heartfelt condolences, snakes across the church. There is no haste, rightly so, each person wanting to express their memory of the man.

In the UK, about 1600 people died on the same day. Some quietly, some violently, some bravely, all just a number in the statistical record but as an individual so special and so loved. Some chums have written to say of similar end-of-life situations before this Christmas and others of the lingering for years in the twilight; one wishes we had a better way of ending the suffering.

I think Carlos would have liked to have recited this little poem, looking at his beloved Cecilia whilst he did so:

“If I should die and leave you here awhile

Be not like others sore and undone, who keep long vigils

By the silent dust and weep;

For my sake, turn again to life and smile,

The man I grieve in this piece was an enormously loved, talented individual who used his intellect to further our understanding of our brains and how they function. He was a simple man of faith or maybe a man of simple, deeply held faith, and if anyone was prepared for what might follow this earthy life, he was.

Richard – 20^th January 2016 – richardyates24@gmail.com

Doesn’t take much for a present day experience to bring to the surface, from those deep recesses of memory, a poignant recollection, does it? And so it was on New Year’s Eve, when I visited a dear friend’s father who’s incarcerated in the grim-looking Victorian prison in Lewes. The town boasts a Norman castle and a house left to Ann of Cleaves in her divorce settlement from Henry VIII, so the prison is comparatively new, being built in 1853! Looking out from the visitors’ room, out into the free world, I jumped back to 1955, locked up in St Christopher’s School in Bath, aged 8. That school stood high above the city; you could see lights, houses, life going on ….fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ night for instance …… and felt abandoned.

I told a friend I was making this visit, the first since the judge had sentenced the chap just over twelve months ago. Over a year incarcerated and my first visit: some friend? But that’s life. I have written most months, carefully adding his prison number to each page, but never visited. “What’s he in for?” ……. and when I told her, I could sense her recoil in horror …. probably about the offence but also that I was going to visit him. “So why are you going?” And then you get into that debate about guilty until proven innocent, or is it the other way around? How one person’s recollection of events can be chalk and cheese compared to the reality, but the reality is simply perception huh? When I learned from the father’s daughter of the events, of the cries of ‘foul’, of the cries of ‘this just isn’t possible’, I added my own cries and we both struggle to process the information and come to a conclusion.

Guilty? Well, the jury found him so. I am unsure ….. and only have the daughter’s version of the events …. and that’s the side that shouts “not guilty” but when all’s said and done the chap’s in prison and will not be out for another couple of years. So if there is a shred of doubt surely we should show humanity?

In the United Kingdom the number of people locked up has doubled over the last twenty years. Currently some 85,000 men and women are inside. Most prisons were built in the Victorian times, overcrowding is rife and less time is spent trying to reform the inmates. (As I write this in Brazil, I am conscious that British prisons are five star hotels by comparison to the more shocking state of some foreign ones.) The vociferous majority cry: “The bastard’s guilty so he should be punished.” But who knows which particular experience in his life lead him down the path towards incarceration. Was he willfully abandoned, orphaned, adopted, fatherless, abused? Were his parents alcoholics or drug-dependent? You could probably research the background of those in prison and find a higher proportion here. Our new Minister of Justice Michael Gove is trying to rethink how to balance crime committed with society’s expectations. It’s not working at the moment and reoffending is high.

The only time I’ve been up close to a prison was in 1975 when my Royal Artillery regiment, in Northern Ireland for four months, was responsible for inter alia the guarding of the perimeter of HMP The Maze. We had no say in the internal running of this place, built to lock up terrorists of both persuasions in the struggle for change in that part of the UK, and could only ensure no one was going to escape.

So here I was, on a gusty winter’s afternoon, gathered around the visitors’ entrance with others who had come to visit loved ones. I looked rather dispassionately on this group, mainly white, cheap, tartly clothes and all smoking: peroxide blondes: and felt slightly apart …. but we had the same aim, to bring some warmth into the heart of someone who, for whatever reason, was incarcerated. You can imagine the lengths the warders go to ensure no drugs enter the place, but first we had to get in! “Very sorry, Sir, but you’re not on the list of approved visitors.” We pleaded, we charmed and then it only took a telephone call to Trevor, I guess the duty office, to make it happen; we learned that often there’s a mix up or poor admin and ‘Cheryl’, who’s come all the way from Brighton on the bus, leaving her three children in the care of Nan, isn’t allowed in. Some staff can be really unhelpful!

One’s pockets are emptied into a locker, less for some loose change for a coffee, and eventually this sorry mournful group move through security checks, an open courtyard, up three flights of stairs and into a large hall with table & chair arrangements, past a sign telling us what we couldn’t do – the writing so small all I caught was something about not exposing one’s ….. ? Our man looks up, happy to see his daughter and actually to see me – anything to relieve the boredom that must hang heavily in a place like this, like a damp blanket around your shoulders.

We get some coffee and chat ….. about this and about that, about books and the open university course, and about being a nominated listener for those inmates at risk of self-harm or suicide.  For some there will be a huge difficulty about being locked up, incarcerated, your life no longer your own. I was reminded of those first 6 weeks at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst when your life was certainly not your own! One of the statistics about modern Britain that saddens me is the number of adults who could be classified as functionally illiterate – over 10%, some 7 million people! It is believed that 75% of the prison population falls into this category. So here’s the challenge for a government. A prisoner’s sentence can be reduced if they can improve their literacy skills. I was told that generally inmates are disruptive in educational classes. “Don’t want to be here” “must kick against the system” but if there was some better incentive? These people are captive, and for the younger ones surely a golden opportunity? The cost would be an investment in the nation. Oh! If life were this simple!

I drove away with very mixed emotions but so pleased I had gone. I must go back, and not leave it for a year before I do so!

A sober scribble for the New Year!

Richard – 11^th January 2016 – richardyates24@gmail.com

The doorbell rang; it was a DHL delivery. “Sign ‘ere, mate” the chap demanded, thrusting the electronic data entry device into my face. I love my normal signature, but try as I might, scratching the pen across the face of the machine produced a poor example. It didn’t help that the pad was grasped in his moving hand, but he seemed satisfied and left. One’s signature is being replaced by your finger print in a lot of areas; it couldn’t come sooner for this sort of use!

A thought? How can you create your signature if you aren’t taught joined-up writing? Just printing the letters, I guess, but it’s not the same. Manuscript is literally ‘written by hand or, interestingly, typewritten – but not printed by machine. The word obviously comes from the Latin – manu scriptus meaning ‘written by hand’ and in the UK there are recorded examples of this that pre-date the Norman Conquest of 1066. Latin is also responsible for the word ‘cursive’, meaning running – as it’s faster to write if you join the letters up. A C15th Italian from Florence, Niccolo Niccoli (just such a gorgeous name huh!), is regarded as the inventor of the cursive script, which became known as italic – not to be confused with the slanted forward letter in type which is known as italic! (Seems ridiculous but true!)

During my time in the British Army I learned that soldiers generally had poor handwriting skills. One particular Chief Clerk didn’t do ‘cursive’ writing and had developed a quick sort of ‘capital letters script’ that he lined up along a ruler. Like this:

Works quite well, actually; but it’s slow by comparison to cursive.

When you’re trying to write something about ‘manuscript writing’ it’s odd what comes to mind. I have always been fascinated by the story from the Old Testament of Belshazzar’s feast; Belshazzar was the King of Babylon who died around 539BC.  After huge amounts of food and the raising of goblets of wine in toasts to various Gods, the king thought he saw the fingers of a man’s hand writing on the plaster of the wall. Well, I suspect we’ve all sensed that things get a little blurred when we’ve had a few, seen things that aren’t there, so it’s hardly surprising ….. and his knees shook to boot!! I imagine this rather debauched scene, the guests’ faces glowing with alcohol, the light from the oil lamps casting shadows everywhere, and this yellow ochre wall where, if you screwed up your eyes enough, you could make out some marks! Daniel, a well-known soothsayer, was asked to translate what the king had seen: “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin”.  “God’s brought your kingdom to an end as you’ve been found wanting; it will be divided between the Medes and the Persians.” That night Belshazzar was killed and Darius the Mede took his kingdom. Bit of a nightmare really; all because of some writing on the wall!! Maybe Daniel was in the pay of the Medes, and told the king what he knew was going to happen; you could easily see words and letters in the smudges and uneven plaster of a wall, surely? We’ve all seen the man’s face on the moon, so why not words on a wall?

Another quotation associated with writing that often whizzes around my little brain is this:

“The moving finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

I’m not one for poetry but this translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám by Edward FitzGerald has, for some reason, lodged in the depths of my memory. I know nothing about this acknowledged classic except these four lines; well, if I’m being really truthful, only to the semi-colon!!

Celina’s great grandmother Branca caught Spanish Influenza and her mind, poor soul, was slighted altered as a result! One of the fascinating consequences was that she could write backwards as easily as she could forwards!! Below on the left is a photograph of one of her letters from November 1918 to Minha Querida Virginia (My Dear Virginia) – with the mirror image on the right.

So why am I so alarmed by this idea that our children will not be taught cursive script? “Does it matter?” I ask myself, as I type away on my laptop! Why can’t they just be taught to touch type? Or do we really need to write to, I don’t know, compose the supermarket shopping list. “So last century; actually shopping ….. in a shop!” I hear you cry. “Do it online!” But if you do want to go and see, touch, feel just what is available you need to go. And of course you can do your list on your iPad or iPhone and take that with you. Check it out next time you go, just see how many people in your supermarket are using a scrappy piece of paper or interrogating their phone?

So we can now all swipe our phones across an electronic demand for payment, almost touch our credit card to pay for items if they’re not too expensive; will our grandchildren have any need to write their signature? Will their children even know what handwriting is? Who knows? But I read that students who write up their lecture notes rather than type them into a laptop, derive better conceptual and factual learning – in plain language, it sinks in better!! And they have better hand-eye coordination to boot.

Of course the irony is that these scribbles, a word describing immature and often illegible writing (!), are being composed on a laptop …… and sent electronically to you, when the subject of this postcard is manuscript writing! And it’s only very occasionally that I hanker after using a pen. I eye the pile of unwritten Christmas cards which, given an unhurried focus, will be enjoyable to ….. write ….. in my unique joined up style.

Funny life, inn’t?

Richard – 13^th December 2015 – richardyates24@gmail.com

 

My brother, another Scorpio, had his birthday last month and duly reached for pen & paper to write a ‘Thank You’ letter in gratitude for our gift. Such a pleasure to receive his note, the manuscript writing strong, informative and entertaining whilst I admit, in parts, a little difficult to decipher! And conveying more of the effort made than a hasty email or text on smart phone or tablet.

A recent survey by the global manufacturer of biros, Bic, discovered that 50% of 13-19 year olds have never written a thank you letter, 83% a love letter and 25% never sent a Birthday or Christmas card. Maybe 75% of those polled were not Christian (?)  but why not send a physical card to acknowledge a birthday? I know that Jacquie Lawson provides your online card needs, but you can’t put one of those on the mantelpiece, can you? Bic should be worried – who’s going to buy their products?  I am, however, so old school that I am wedded, some might say welded (!), to the need to write manuscript ‘thank you letters’ and send birthday cards. I think it’s a rather British foible, sending cards and the like. Love letters? Well I guess I have poured my heart out in letters to loved ones many times and sometimes ripped them up and started again; now it’s on twitter/some text message or email electronically produced and unable to give a hint of personality through the care you would have taken in your joined up writing.

We journeyed up into Alaska in June this year, following in the footsteps of great grandfather George, who made the trip each year 1900-1902 (See PCs 44 & 45). His manuscript letters to his wife Eva, in London, are a wonderful family treasure trove of experiences, thoughts and comments. His careful script conveys such richness, so much individuality, so much personality; they all started ‘My Darling Eva’, and ended rather formally: ‘Your Loving husband, GM Nation.’ See for yourself:

Lovely isn’t it? If he had been able to email his news to his wife, as in:

From: GM Nation

To: Mrs Eva Nation

Dawson YT 10 May 1901

My Darling Eva. I am emailing you this but it may be two or three weeks before I get an internet connection. Travel has entirely been given up for the last ten days and everybody is watching the river and longing to see the ice float away.…..

Sent from my iPad

 …… where would the record be now, on some disk, some iCloud? And how would I have known that he wrote these letters, but for the physical collection with Cousin Caroline on Vancouver Island? These thoughts came into my head when, the other day, I glanced at a headline in the paper. I looked, looked again …… and tried to register what I had just read. Under an eye-catching headline “Handwriting, you’re Finnished”, it is reported that a school in Finland (ha! ha!), which apparently is noted for its radical educational ideas, the country not this particular school, has decided to stop teaching cursive handwriting. It may surprise you but my English education didn’t run to understanding exactly what ‘cursive’ meant, so I lifted my trusted ‘Oxford Illustrated Dictionary’ (Yes, that one given by my maiden aunt when I was 16 (see PC 53)) down from the shelf. ‘Cursive’ adj. n (Writing) done without lifting the pen, so the characters are joined together.” Ah! OK! Joined up writing!! So they are not going to teach children how to join up individual letters together …… to let the script flow??

The Finns are not alone. In the USA forty-one states no longer require schools to teach cursive script! And within two days I read another piece concerning cursive script, this from the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, who has written many letters to his grandchildren, for them to read when they are old enough – “But I was saying to my daughter, maybe they won’t be able to read cursive with the way things are going.”

So personal, this ability to make writing ‘joined-up’. Can you remember the tortuous classes, holding the pencil just so ….. being told off for holding it incorrectly? No, of course not, but I do remember being beaten at boarding school for writing without my arm fully supported by a table; OK, maybe there might have been other issues that cumulatively added to trigger the beating, but the smog of history has descended! I see people today who were not taught properly and hold the pen in a funny way. No wonder they do not like writing in a joined-up way. However, I do take my hat off to those of you who are left-handed, as it looks to me as though you have arthritis, the way you twist your hand almost through 360°and then manage to write ….in a derogatory way some might say cack handed?

I used to hold my fountain pen in such a way that I developed a piece of hard skin on the side of my middle finger; it’s still there but not as pronounced, as the use of smart phones, tablets and laptops has reduced the amount of manuscript writing I do and hence the pen stays for longer periods in the drawer.

Many years ago I had to take a graphology test, as part of a recruitment process. It was in the days before I had a personal computer, and the application for the role had been in manuscript; couldn’t they use that?  “Ah! But the example must be in biro!”  This I could not understand, as the pressure applied through a nib varied much more than that from a biro, and weren’t they looking for variations of pressure, in addition to all the other bullshit? I assume the company believed that somehow my personality came out through my pen nib, although there is no scientific evidence to back up that claim. I’ve read that a backwards slopping letter signifies timidity or that how you write the letter ‘e’ was linked to your digestion – the neater and more closed the letter the better to digest – sprouts? I don’t think so! I remember looking at how I write the letter ‘e’ and realised I script it in two different ways!! An example might be:

You may remember my PC about treasured postcards? The one about a chap sitting at a desk answer an exam question about surrealism ……. and his pen jumped off the table and ran away? Well, my pen has run away with me, sorry!! So before you start yawning, I’ll stop  … to be continued ….

Richard – 6^th December 2015 – richardyates24@gmail.com