And Rain Interrupted Play

In England there are weather forecasts after the news broadcasts at 6, 9 and 10. A trained meteorologist gets up there with a moving map behind him or her and talks of low and high pressure belts and there are numbers and often swirls of white and blue indication clouds and the rain within them.

People watch or listen to these newscasts and behave accordingly. There was Michael Fish, who looked more like a physics teacher, but now they are more assured. There are women with shiny hair and men in shiny suits but their message still lacks levity. It is crucial information. DO WE PACK AN UMBRELLA IN OUR BAG TOMORROW? They don’t tell us what to wear, they don’t say “ bring out those cotton frocks tomorrow. “ Or “ long trousers might be too much for the next couple of days.” But everyone knows when that little yellow sun appears and the numbers creep up above 24 Celsius that they can have breakfast in the garden and lunch on a park bench. And then it happens. People get complacent, it is a friday night. Another warm and wonderful week and the weekend beckons with it’s July weddings and rooftop parties. London is awash with restaurants and cafes that have pushed out onto pavements, pubs with tables that have people standing in the evening sun with a pint or whatever sometimes spilling out into the street itself. Everyone knows it is summer, hooray! ties are in pockets, sleeves are rolled, shoulders are bare and umbrellas are a thing to be forgotten. But Saturday comes. This long anticipated day of rest …. The sky is grey and bulbous with dark clouds. It is on the cool side. I meet a friend at The National Theatre. We sit outside for a while, it is lightly drizzling but we stay and chat. Until we both decide we will have our second cup of something inside. After a few hours we part ways as she catches the last train home at 6.30pm. At Waterloo there are big signs with rolling information in orange telling you the time of departure, where it will end up, where it will stop on the way, if it is on time and eventually the platform it will leave from and everyone stands around with their eyes glued on it. Except on Saturday there is only one train on the board. And there is a woman’s voice on the tannoy, apologizing for the strike action but clarifying that this will be the last train that evening. There will be no further trains. My friend got the train, I walked across the river where I had tickets for a play.

And then, ladies and gentlemen, the dark clouds had their vengeance and released their troubled waters upon us all.

Gaggles of people who hadn’t paid attention to the heirs of Michael Fish warning them what Saturday would bring. Astonished by the audacity of a sky that would ruin their clothes and their hopes, battling their way to their meeting place in Piccadilly or their pic-nic in Hyde Park. The streets were full of women in strappy shoes and strappy dresses. Men were in T shirts and shorts. There were flip flops and Birkenstocks, there were evening dresses soaked around the hems. There were newspapers folded over heads in triangles to protect curls from uncurling. Plastic shopping held up like kites. There was a lot of sheltering under doorways and awnings. I had my little white borrowed umbrella in my backpack. I opened it up and picked my way through the streets pushing it in front of me as it threatened to turn inside out with the strong winds.

Some three hours later, when I came out from the theatre, Charing Cross Road was a river. The rain was bucketing down. The puddles underfoot were now ponds. There was a proper problem on the roads around Trafalgar Square. Buses, cars, taxi’s all jammed, coming into town..empty lanes going out. Nobody cared, everyone’s head was down as they looked for shelter. trying to work out how to get home.

So, not only had the heavens opened and released a November storm in July. And the train stations were without trains and there were no buses in sight. But London, at 11 o’clock of an evening, is a city that is putting chairs on tables, turning off lights and closing front doors. The tourists were confused and kept looking for options. The Brits just stood in the rain at the bus stops. Soggy and silent. Resigned to the waiting that comes with years of practice. When the number 88 bus arrived, there were no questions asked. Everyone just shook their umbrellas out and climbed on silently, not questioning the bus driver who was assuredly having a bad time too. Oh and the rain caused England to lose the ashes. I’m not going to try and explain that one.

The following morning was bright and blue. It was as if nothing had ever been other than summer. The End. Until next Time.

Summer birthdays

I have a summer birthday. I have always rather relished having a birthday away from specific festivities. For I find birthdays are days that always contain emotional nuggets whether you want them or not. A sense of time passing. A glance back at what can seem to be a crumpled life. With way high expectations unreached. A reminder of people whom you can no longer offer a slice of your cake. A chance for better. A feeling you could fly. As a child, my birthday came as school was breaking up for the summer. There is a cine film of a birthday party when I was about ten in the back garden of our brilliant house in Moss Lane. I wasn’t a popular girl at school but I managed to get quite a few friends over to a party with promises of a rounders games on the back lawn and a slap up tea. The cine film is evidence of why I wasn’t a popular girl because I apparently spent the entire party in a ballet tutu and I think I refused to play rounders. Around this time, my parents bought a tiny flat in the north of Spain, an economical way of spending holidays and giving us exposure to another culture. All sounds promising, except as I said my birthday fell as school broke up, so we would wave good bye to school at lunchtime and by that evening our famiy would be on the south coast waiting for the ferry to take us over the channel where we would drive for 14 hours straight until we could unpack our cheddar cheese and tea bags at our postage stamp of a holiday home in Calella de Palafrugell. To clarify, My entire birthday would be in the back seat of the car, chasing some audacious Citroen down the autoroute. Parent “ Don’t worry, we’ll just celebrate your birthday tomorrow.” Child “ But it won’t be my birthday.” Parent “ we can pretend it’s your birthday.” Child “ ( with a gold medal for sulking) but it won’t be…” As I moved on in life I found Birthdays to be a reminder of what I hadn’t achieved. I was embarrassed by people celebrating me for just having been born, when all I could see was the procrastination or apathy that had filled the previous twelve months. When I was working on location on a film in Texas, the catering crew would always make something special for a birthday. Candles, a cake, the whole crew singing… they found out about mine and made me a huge English trifle as a surprise at lunchtime. I was just about to enter the tent, I knew what was in store and I literally turned round at the door and ran away. Ran away… good lord… Not my finest hour. For years I didn’t let anyone sing that rather silly and repetitive song. I didn’t allow cake or candles. We could do tea or supper on my birthday but no one was allowed to mention it. That wasn’t my finest hour either. But that’s behind me now. Nothing like making a loud noise as a way to not be noticed. I read that in certain cultures you don’t celebrate birthdays when someone is young. You wait until they are older, and then every year is a marked as a marvel of survival. So on my birthdays, I try to do something I had never done before. Like take a flying lesson. Kayak across a bay.

I always have a breakfast of grilled tomatoes on toast and there are raspberries and cream at some point in the day. This year I went to supper at a Polish Club and caught the BBC proms at The Royal Albert Hall.

I wore a new dress that I now think looks like a French tablecloth but hey! And down which I managed to spill something oily. But I was with dear friends and them wanting to be there turned out to be enough.

I think birthdays are little pockets which gently remind you of how far you have come. And how lucky you are to have had the life you had with those people who make you see that the life you have is a good and worthwhile one. Well done my friends and my family, that is what I say now. For persevering with me over the years. Thank you for your good wishes. For the ribbons and the cards and the flowers. For the outings and the reassurance and yes, even the cakes.

I am thrilled to be in your company, I am happy to be who you believe me to be, Even though I have my suspicions you are misguided.

But I have enough raspberries today to make my birthday last another day. I just have to get more cream Hip Hip Hooray! For us summer birthday people.

And it is of Hollyhocks I now must speak….

My parents were not great gardeners. But we inherited houses that came with gardens that had been designed with some care. There were hydrangeas that skirted the entire house and deep red geraniums in window boxes. Long stretches of daffodils under the weeping willows. Rockeries with small tufts of flowers all down the right side of the lawn. And then the garden devolved into raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes. Curved greenhouses for tomatoes and glass boxes for cucumbers. Then across the stream there was the fiefdom of my welsh grandfather. Who made rows and rows of neat shallow trenches laid out with string in military precision that held broad beans and potatoes and wigwam structures for runner beans and peas.

But truly, flowers were never the opera stars in our gardens. Everything of beauty survived by luck, the daffodils just kept coming back. The hydrangeas just flowered despite being driven over a few times by my first boyfriend who was not a great driver. Sorry Paul. The roses bloomed and bloomed again, but there was no grafting or specific pruning, they just kept giving these fragrant teacups of colour despite how much they were ignored.

We didn’t have cut flowers in vases. I don’t remember any house plants. There were books and Buddha’s and lamps made by my father in woodwork classes. There were bowls of oranges ( for our breakfast juice) and apples fallen from trees for our anytime. Living now in Santa Monica, I always have flowers on my kitchen table, in my living room and upstairs in the bedrooms and bathroom because for me now it is the fastest way to feel I am celebrating the luck in my life. But it wasn’t always so. I remember living in London and having this sense that cutting flowers was not allowing them to grow their full life. It went hand in hand with my not eating Granny Smith apples with the cape symbol on them because my not buying a pound of apples was really going to have a difference on apartheid. It was my friend Geoff, who drapes flowers like an artist into any vase, who looked at me scathingly as I spouted my concern for the rights of the flowers. That look was enough.

My garden doesn’t have many flowers, I am always surprised when the occasional dahlia pops up or the amaryllis I had forgotten was in that pot at the bottom by the mermaid, shoots forth another exotic bloom, I am thrilled however by the quince blossoms, that couldn’t be more delicate, the passion flower which only lasts a day or so and is so complicated it needs an engineer to dissect it. And the various kinds of scented geranium that cover the ground, peppermint, chocolate, rose. The purple rose that survives despite getting in the way, the French lavender and the brilliant African blue basil, that provides a playground for the bees. Gardens here in England are not all beautiful. Some are over tailored. Some are full of weeds. Some have pavers and couple of deck chairs. Lots of privet and boxwood. There are books published, massive flowers shows in Chelsea and Hampton Court. I would not dream of adding my naive comments on those.

But I can talk of the glorious and slightly insane Hollyhock. “Alcea Rosea” it seems from the Mallow family of plants. And it is everywhere here in this summer month. Native to Europe and Asia. it shoots up so tall and leggy like a wayward teenager, so it is often found propped up against walls and fences.

But sometimes it will emerge in a solo performance waving around some three or four foot tall it’s bright flowers demanding your attention. There is no smell. The blooms shrivel on the stem and drop off. Madame Hollyhock, she is blowsy and big like an opera singer with only a few high notes…but Lordy, are they high. And Lordy , do they give me pleasure in these July days…..

Graveyards

I have always had a fondness for graveyards. Growing up in England where every village had a church and beside the church would be a graveyard where those who had been baptized in the Christian faith were buried. From my avid teenage reading of Thomas Hardy I knew that children born out of wedlock or to pregnant unmarried women were not allowed to rest in consecrated ground. Graveyards are collections of the best names, the saddest stories, the hope for rest at the end of a tired life. Gravestones are often made large enough to carry the family as they die one by one. Bertha, the dearly missed wife of Henry, then Henry the loving husband and beloved father to Harry and Jemima. Then Harry and Jemima, much missed by their children Polly and Bertie. I am not good at counting. I am not going to grace my lack of skill by calling it maths. I count on my fingers. And in graveyards my fingers are busy working out old Martha was when she died in 1859. Or how many years baby Samuel had before he was spirited away with colic or TB. In New Zealand there were many born in Ireland or Scotland, who traveled the length of the world and would die in their adopted country.

In Glenorchy, the head of the Routeburn Track, the jumping on point for the River Dart a remote 50 miles from Queenstown the outdoor activity capital of the South Island, there is one general store. One hotel. Two cafes. A rugby pitch inside of a grass racetrack, a school, tractors in driveways. I went to Glenorchy in the Spring, but the hundred or so houses are set up for Winter snow with metal pitched roofs and double doors.

In the graveyard, there are about sixty or so headstones. Grouped in families. Most of them coming from Scotland, Dunfermline, Fife. Named Stuart or MacKenzie. Leaving a hard life for a hard life. Schoolteachers, miners, dying in their sixties. Explorers, adventurers, dying in the late twenties drowning in the Dart or tumbling down a mountain. Leaving behind their parents and sometimes their young families. In Britain the graveyards surround the old stone churches. To get into the church you walk though grass pathways inbetween the old headstones. The new ones are either in an area at one side or all now allocated to a place across the road somewhere. Which feels a little unsatisfactory. Like parking at Tesco’s when you have a card in your name at Harvey Nichols. The new stones are often smaller, made from a darker, more glossy stone. They will have potted plants in front of them. A chrysanthemum perhaps. Needing to be deadheaded. Or a bunch of silk flowers, beaten to colourless by the weather. In America families sometimes buy plots with room for a generation or two. I haven’t really looked at those. Maybe that kind of forward planning is too practical to hold any romance for me. I do remember a sweet woman from Central America who cleaned houses for a living whose sister died and she used all of the money that she was left to have her buried. I remember that not making any sense to me, but realizing in that moment, we spoke different languages. Graveyards show me the grip and the unraveling of small societies. Grandmas who lived into their nineties. Husbands who left widows to live on for decades past them. Wives, so much younger than their husbands, who clearly died in childbirth. Young men who left holes where support should have been. Children upon children who lived just long enough to be christened or managed to make it through a few sweet years before being called up to their maker. ( the words carved in stone, not mine.) The weather beaten stones, curved now at the edges, with their dedications and remembrances, dotted with moss and an occasional flower pushing up through the grass. Different to unmarked photograph albums that end up in antique shops, full of posed wedding shots, or young soldiers in uniforms, or young things sitting on the grass in tennis whites, or children in ill fitting clothes standing in doorways. But unclaimed in the same way. Maybe that is why I stop in graveyards and read the names and dates and dedications out loud. To put their names once more out in the air.