Coming Home to Story

Wednesday 10 January 2017

Back to work this week after a wonderful Christmas and a New Year break with Hedda in Dubai for a family visit. Today I am at Ashridge Business School for the start of a two-day workshop facilitated by a hugely talented group of doctoral students (ADOC5, for those who know the system).

For the opening circle, we were invited to select an image from a collection of postcard-sized pictures and speak to it. I chose the picture above: a bridge in an ornamental garden of some kind. My choice was instinctive rather than rational but I have plenty of time to think about its meaning and significance as I wait for my turn to speak.

The photograph is taken from the point of view of someone standing at one end of the bridge, but whether they are looking ahead to a bridge they are about to cross or looking back at one they have already crossed, is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps, in some way, both possibilities exist at the same time: a sort of Schrödinger’s Bridge.

As I muse on the ambiguity and complexity of this apparently simple image, it occurs to me that the now in which we live our whole lives is in constant transition; always moving from one temporal shore to the other; an infinitely repeating fractal of bridges upon bridges that constitutes at every scale (moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day, year to year, birth to death) the span of our existence. What lies on either side is a mystery: the future is unknowable; the past soon dissolves into memory and stories.

As I contemplate the image, I feel a rush of gratitude. How extraordinary it is to be alive, to have incarnated during this brief tick of the cosmic clock – the stellar age – when life in our universe is possible.

I try to explain these grand existential thoughts to the group, using hand gestures to illustrate an infinite number of bridges stacked one upon another but I can tell from their puzzled expressions that I’m not doing a very good job. I need another metaphor.

You know how it’s Turtles all the way down?

There is laughter and some people nod as they recall the old joke.

Well it’s Bridges all the way up!

1 January 2017

Yesterday evening, Hedda and I joined friends for a New Year’s Eve dinner party in Lyme Regis. After a spectacularly good meal, followed by bonfires and fireworks on the beach at midnight for those who wanted to go (we had Ted with us so stayed behind) we re-gathered for a quiet hour contemplating the old year and the new.

Looking back, we discussed the implications of Brexit and Trump and grieved the loss of so many fine creative talents in 2016. We also asked each other what had been personally important during the year and I realised that completing certain cycles in connection with mourning Chris’s death had been hugely significant.

I concluded my long peregrination with her ashes on 3 December, the second anniversary of her death. Coincidentally, I finished writing a book based on the experience of bereavement and sent it off to a publisher just before Christmas. Fundraising in her memory for Penny Brohn Cancer Care came to a close after reaching the target of £5,000, and the story that I wrote for her when she was ill in hospital was accepted for publication as a children’s book.

As all these endings were coming together, I also experienced wonderful new beginnings: meeting and falling in love with Hedda, who brings me such joy; dreaming together into a shared creative life of story and song; committing to my own life as a writer with many more stories to tell and books to write; singing with a choir for the first time in my life; and on a practical note, starting the badly-needed renovation and extension of Folly Cottage.

When it came to considering what we wanted to achieve and how we want to be in 2017 we turned to a miniature oracle, created by our host artist Hugh Dunford Wood, in the form of a branch with paper leaves each bearing an injunction. We took it in turns to pluck several leaves, sight unseen. I ended up with three:

Don’t fail your hopes
Be vulnerable
Persist

At the time, we laughed that they seemed rather morose compared with some of the more upbeat messages others had received, but they have lodged themselves firmly in my mind. Stay open to the suffering of the world, they seem to say. Work to create that for which you hope. Above all, in the year of Donald Trump, persist in your belief that love ultimately trumps fear.

On reflection, it strikes me that the injunctions of the oracle offer a way to light a candle in dark times and I decide to take them seriously as a rubric for 2017, to hold them as touchstones for right-living as I go about my life. Thank you Hugh for this gift.

Love and light to all from me and Captain Midnight.

Happy New Year!

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir,

I have it on good report that the Internet has been invaded by kittens. Their gurning faces appear on social media 20 million times a day. This electronic invasion could not have taken place without deluded human collaborators spending half their lives posting photographs of their fiendish feline friends.

One might be inclined to forgive such a habit were it kept private but many of these twisted souls then see fit to inflict these ghastly images on the rest of us on the grounds that they are (and the very word is ash in one’s mouth) – “cute.”

Having a respectable portrait of oneself with one’s dog hung in one’s club is one thing but the wanton display of these alien creatures in public is quite another. It is an affront to decent society. Those who perpetrate this calumny are to be castigated and shunned as unworthy of canine affection. As that perceptive dog-lover Ogden Nash once wrote:

“The trouble with a kitten is that eventually it becomes a cat.”

Yours faithfully, Edward Midnight, Capt. R.N.

17 December, 2016

Captain Midnight here.

OK this is a bit of a tricky one.

Technically, I’m guilty of criminal damage. At least, I would be if I were human. But – and it’s a big but – I’m a dog.

I tried explaining to Himself why I chewed a hole in his Pendleton blanket last week and (even trickier to explain) why I also chewed a hole in Herself’s favourite handmade Shetland Jumper yesterday. The conversation went something like this:

Him: “Look what you’ve done you blankety-blank, good-for-nothing, useless excuse for a mutt. You’re a bad, bad Boy!”

Me (lowering my head and looking pitiful): “But I love you.”

Him: “That’s no reason to ruin our things, is it?”

Me: “I only took a couple of small mouthfuls. How can that be “ruined”?

Him: “But they were precious and expensive. We wanted them 100% intact.”

Me: “Well, that’s just greedy! Besides, now there’s 110% of them because I’ve added an extra 10% love.”

Him: “You call that love?

Me: “Doggy-love.”

Him: “What!?”

Me: “If we dogs like something, we lick it; if we love something, we chew it. It’s pretty basic canine psychology. I love you both but you wouldn’t like it if I chewed you, so I chewed your stuff instead.”

Him: “But why holes? Couldn’t you just have given them a good suck?”

Me: “Suck? I love you both much more than that!”

Honestly, he’s so dim-witted sometimes.

Saturday 3 December 2016

Over the last 18 months, I have scattered Chris’s ashes in many parts of the world: Crete, Italy, Africa, United States, Mexico, Ireland and some special places in the UK. Today is the second anniversary of her death and time to complete my long peregrination by laying the last of her remains to rest in Kingscote, the village she called home for 20 years.

Friends come to call: Miche and Flora for breakfast; Ben Bennett our ex-neighbour for a cup of coffee; Carole and David for tea and cake. During the day, we visit Chris’s memorial and peek under Sassy Bear’s winter covers; mix some ashes into the earth beneath the stone Buddha in the garden at Folly Cottage; and place the remainder into the heart of a hollow tree in Kingscote Woods by the light of a crescent moon.

Among her ashes, deep in the soil, I bury a fire opal that I’d brought back specially from my trip to Mexico in June. It’s said that the Romans believed opals to be the most precious of all gemstones because they contain the colours of all the others and that the Bedouin used to think that they contained lightning and fell from the sky during thunderstorms. I want Chris to have some of that opaline fire to keep her warm in the cold, cold earth.

As I say farewell to her material form for the last time, I feel a deep sense of peace and satisfaction. I remember a much-loved volume of poetry by Rolf Jacobsen called The Roads Have Come To An End Now and the thought comes into my mind with a smile that though this road now is ending, the journey of my life is not yet done.

Tuesday 29 November 2016

Chris loved her work at Schumacher College. She felt at home there: nourished, appreciated, and given licence to work at the juicy edges of her practice as a facilitator and teacher. She adored the long walks along the River Dart that she took each year with her MSc students, so when I spoke recently with her dear friend and collaborator Toni Spencer, we decided to go there together to spend some time reminiscing and to put some of Chris’s ashes in the river.

While Ted chewed fallen twigs and splashed in the water, Toni and I made a fire on the bank, drank from a thermos of tea, and talked about Chris and about what was happening in our own lives. I spoke about finding new love in the midst of grief and Toni told me about her own journey of transition.

Only then did I understand why I had been called so strongly to this place. It was time to say goodbye to the woman that Chris was becoming before she died: a woman claiming her power and place in the world; painting, drawing and clowning with great gusto; writing boldly and creatively; and bringing her unique practice of artful inquiry into being.

Toni and I took it in turns to step into the Dart and release Chris’s ashes into the water. When I got back to shore, Toni pointed out a Robin that had been dancing on my abandoned jacket while I was standing in the middle of the river. It reminded me of the Robin that had made its way into Folly Cottage just after Chris died, but before I had a chance to get misty-eyed and sentimental, it defecated on a nearby stone and flew off.

Amusez-vous. Merde! clown teacher Philippe Gaulier would say to his students. Chris quoted it in her PhD thesis to stand for a “tenacious, non-sentimental insistence on life within loss that is honest, ready to risk failure, and absolutely courageous.”

It’s how Chris lived her life and it’s how I’m trying to live mine.

Captain Midnight here, reporting from the home front in Acton.

I must say that London life is very exciting. There are many new things for Himself to get his addled head around. For example: on Monday evening just after I got back from a hard day at the dog minder, Herself said:

“It’s choir night. Do you want to come?”

I thought she was talking to me so I wuffled about in a generally excited way to show that I was definitely up for a bit of a singsong. It turned out she was suggesting that Himself (he of the tin ear and eccentric vocal chords) might like to go with her to the West London Community Choir to sing some Christmas songs and carols.

There was a long pause as Himself scraped together a rather unconvicing smile.

“That would be… er… nice.”

Herself decided to take that as enthusiastic assent, picked up a bundle of sheet music, and marched us all out to the car. Before you could say Handel’s Messiah, we were inside St Peter’s Church, Notting Hill being greeted like long lost friends by lots of women he and I had never met before.

Himself looked a bit shell-shocked, though being a babe magnet myself, I’m an old hand at that sort of thing. I advised Him to stand back and let me handle the onslaught of patting and chin-chucking while he gathered his strength for what was to come.

Soon it was time to take our places. Himself turned white and clutched the sheet music (which by the way He is quite unable to read) like a drowning man holding on to a lifebelt.

“Are you a Bing or a Bowie?” the conductor asked Him.

“Er…”

“Bass or tenor?”

“Er…”

“Sit with the basses. They’ll look after you.”

Looking after Himself is really my job so I went with Him. There was much whooping and hollering to warm up and then they were off: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

Brutal is the only word for it.

Plum. Plum. Plum. Plum. Plum. Fa la la. Fa la la. Plum. Fa la. Plum. Fa la.

His eyes wandered desperately over the staves searching in vain for something resembling a note while he croaked random syllables in a voice that was more Banshee than Bing or Bowie. I wagged my tail to help him find the beat but he didn’t seem to notice. When it finished, he grinned triumphantly across the room at Herself like a man who against all the odds had just survived a train wreck.

I’m glad to say that things got better when we got onto the carols, though I still don’t understand why they don’t have dogs in them. You’d think shepherds would have had dogs wouldn’t you? But apparently not. No mention of dogs anywhere near the baby Jesus.

But, I digress. As I was saying, things got better when we got onto the carols. Pretty soon Himself was belting them out and by the time we did The Twelve Days of Christmas, he was actually laughing with pleasure.

I suspect we might be going again.

I must say it’s very decent of Himself to lend me his glasses so I can scribe another bulletin from the frontline of domestic life, which is just as well as He seems to be more interested in canoodling than writing these days.

Love! I ask you.

He’s spending a lot more time in London. I go with him of course to make sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble. I’ve even been on a thing called the London Underground (so-called because it goes under the ground – how wildly imaginative you humans are). I didn’t like it much: lots of people with big feet, not looking where they were going; it’s a wonder they didn’t tread on my tail.

There are lots of houses in London and a distinct lack of fields. Mostly I walk Himself on the pavement but we went to a park yesterday so I was able to let him off the lead for a while. I swam in the duck pond and then stood guard outside the café as he had a flat white.

I’ve no idea what a flat white is (except that it isn’t flat and it isn’t white) but it must be very precious because he muttered something about costing more than a week’s worth of dog biscuits as he handed over a fistful of coins to the man behind the counter in return for a miniscule container of warm brown liquid. The man spoke quietly but I heard words such as artisanal, organic, single estate, tasting notes, hand-roasted, and hipster.

Apparently we’ve acquired a new life style.

Sunday 6 November 2016

I never met Chris’s dad, Jim. He died when she was only 28, long before we got to know each other. Today, I drove with Ted to the crematorium where Jim’s ashes had been scattered, to meet Chris’s sister Helen and her mum Joan. They had brought a spring-flowering plant and a trowel and I handed them a container of Chris’s ashes for them to perform their own rite of farewell.

Ted and I waited in the car as they went off into a wooded area, beyond our sight. They’d asked for privacy and I understood that this time I needed to stand back and allow Chris’s immediate family the opportunity to say goodbye in their own way. They returned half an hour later, chilled by the damp autumn weather but smiling.

“Did it go well?” I asked.

“Would you like to come and see?” replied Joan.

I followed them back up the path to a stand of silver birches.

“Look,” said Joan. “This is the same place we scattered her dad’s ashes.”

“We put some underneath and scattered the rest,” said Helen, pointing to the newly planted Osmanthus Burkwoodii. It took a bit of doing I can tell you; the ground was as hard as a brick.”

“And we put this up,” said Joan, indicating a small brass plaque which read:

CHRIS
HERE WITH HER DAD
R.I.P.

After a little while we went to a local pub for Sunday lunch and then Helen left for Manchester and I drove Joan back to her home in Stratford-Upon-Avon. As we made our way north, she turned to me in the late afternoon half-light and said quietly:

“Chris loved her family – all of us. But she adored Jim. The two of them used to go skiing most years, you know. She was a Daddy’s Girl, really. I’m very glad they are together again.”