Bread

Bread

Hunger was loneliness, betrayed

By the pitiless candour of the stars’

Talk, in an old byre he prayed

Not for food: to pray was to know

Waking from a dark dream to find

The white loaf on the white snow;

Not for warmth, warmth brought the rain’s

Blurring of the essential point

Of ice probing his raw pain.

He prayed for love, love that would share

His rags’ secret; rising he broke

Like sun crumbling the gold air

The live bread for the starved folk.

-- R.S. Thomas

Romance and Art

This is my favourite painting.

I don't pretend to know very much about art, but I loved this the moment I saw it. Friedrich was a Swedish-German romantic painter of the 19th century whose work is either stunning or risible and rarely anything in between. It makes me a bit uncomfortable -- there is a smack of the Wagner Tutonic Aryan master race about a lot of his work -- or perhaps that is just historical hindsight. And much of his work references Christian beliefs -- although I actually think there is a profound pagan sensibility about almost all of it, almost as if he didn't notice, but couldn't help it.

I am not sure why I love this particular painting -- perhaps it is the gothic romanticism of the work, the heroic male figure with his back to the viewer (seen yet not revealed, something of a motif in his work) or even just the beautiful image of the traveller high above the mountains, which makes you wonder who he is and where he has been. Whatever the reason, it is wonderful, inspiring, beautiful work, cinematic enough to be (deliberately?) referenced in Rob Roy (which is a better movie than the critics thought it was). I have deep reservations about the sensibilities the artist's work seems to inspire and reference, but I still love this painting more than any other.

Maybe that's what good art is about -- making you love it whilst making you uncomfortable about loving it.

Teenage Dreams, So Hard to Beat.

Oh, how I wanted to be Debbie Harry. She was my teenage hero -- I am just old enough to have seen Blondie first at an impressionable age. The combination of the music and the look and I was hooked. Nor had we ever seen the like of it and we all aspired, quietly, but very obviously, to be her. Not that many of us had the legs for it, frankly. But we could all manage the lipgloss and hanker for a platinum bob just like hers.

The first time I saw them, on video with Denis Denis on TOTP, with her hair like a halo, is one of the abiding memories of my teenage years (that, Geldof’s checkered jacket and the opening riff of ‘My Best Friend’s Girl’). But the music was brilliant and even though it wasn’t supposed to last and some of it was dreadful (Rapture, which I hated, marked the descent into oblivion) but Parallel Lines remains one of the great albums of all time and the songs stand up nearly thirty years on. I have it on cd, tape and original vinyl, but tragically none of them are worth very much on ebay. Not that I'd sell, of course. I love every song on that album far too much. It’s the alchemy of her voice (so clear, so sweet), those lyrics (‘incense and peppermints’) and the irrefutable catchiness of the tunes -- the riff from ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’ alone is worthy of theme tune status. 

Blondie were so hot it hurt for about two years and then crashed and burned, lost in the usual rawknroll tale of drugs, poverty and infighting. But I remained true to the cause, even in the wilderness years when people looked at you as if you were missing a crucial gene when you listed Blondie as one of your favourite bands. Thanks to Debbie I always wanted to be a blonde and even managed it for some time, but only when I was far too old to be told off by my parents. She’s now a rather unfetching shade of red, but their rebirth with Maria was marked by Herself in full Blondie mode and it was pretty glorious. I will live and die a Blondie fan and my headstone will be a glittery one, which plays Fade Away and Radiate.

Cold. No, Really.

It appears that I have a cold. In the hottest July on record. This may be more to do with the use of a fan for an hour last night and all the upstairs windows being open all night, but the cough I have been sporting for the last two weeks is much worse and I don't even smoke.

On an entirely different note, I am thinking of spear-heading a revivial in Romanticism and not just because wikipedia have put my favourite painting front and centre of their entry. At least I have the consumptive cough to go with it.

Swelter.

It’s almost too hot to be outside during the day. Sultry, sweltering, stifling: the sky is barely disturbed by a cloud and there’s hardly a breeze in the air. Everything is sluggish, torpid. Even the hovering insects in my garden, carefully nurtured by years of chemical avoidance, are still. I try to read my book, but it’s too warm. All I can do is to lean back in my seat, close my eyes and feel the sun on my face. I try to memorise the feeling for the dark cold days that are to come. I can hear the twinkle of the wind chimes, disturbed by the gentlest of breezes: the soft whisper of the air on my flesh is intense. The heat and the sun and the stillness seem to intensify the senses. 

At night, especially tonight, it is Mediterranean – airless and still. It is not like a night I will sleep much, I think, as I turn on the hose outside. The steps of the house are covered with pots, a jumble of them, stuffed with flowering plants – purple verbena, red geraniums, lilac lobelia. I love watering the plants at dusk on a hot summer's night, as the stars open overhead and the warm air wafts the scent of honeysuckle and nicotiana through the garden, wrapping like a stole around the house. The air is especially thick with perfume tonight and the house is too warm to be in, especially upstairs where the heat has settled, no matter that all the windows are open. It’s a night for sitting out under the stars, with candles flickering and a glass of red wine in my fist and the stillness of the summer settling around me.

The Wind that Shakes The Barley.

I went to see The Wind that Shakes the Barley tonight , after several abortive attempts, too tedious to detail, but which mostly involved the cinema being too small or my social circle too complicated. Mostly, I liked it, though it has Loach's tendency to propagandise (although as usual he's on the right side) leavened with his compelling cinematic sweep. I loved it, really, reservations about cliches aside ( the cliches are in this case cliches because that's what happened). 

The most gripping scene wasn't the much vaunted flying column appearing out of the mist, but the argument, post-Treaty, about who was right. It got the problems with wars and armies and orders perfectly and in a pair of scenes contrasted the willingness of the main protaganist and a young British soldier to obey orders, no matter what and in that conveyed the inhumanity of armies and hierarchies with guns. This, I thought, whilst I watched it, is why I am a pacificist: despite all the provocation, endorsing the notion of a just war leads you to the shooting of a youngster in the head. What starts out as a noble cause ends up in ignominy and blood.

Happy Accidents.

A friend rang. Was I doing anything? Not much, I said, rousing myself from my afternoon in the garden reading chick-lit. Well, there was this film-maker friend of his from Uzbekistan and she was in town for just a day and they were just going to eat in the garden and did I want to come? He is the sort of guy who has friends from Uzbekistan who drop by for the day, so I said yes, of course I did. 

They had spread out two brightly patterned rugs on the grass by the time I got there, stopping only to pick up some fruit as a gift. They’re the sort of people don’t eat wheat and that sort of thing, so a tub of Haagen-Daas was out. Half a dozen people were there already, including the friend from Uzbekistan and one from Germany and another from Moscow. Oh and a refusenik Israeli and, later, an Algerian and a brace of Dubliners. We ate cold chicken, tepid pasta, brown bread and salad, sprawled out on the cool grass in the evening sun like Romans at a feast. The cat and the new kitten weaved around us, prowling for food whilst we talked about politics, land, fighting the system and, of course, the weather. 

“It’s beautiful”, he said, “Can you believe it?” His voice is like gravel, only nicer, I realise. ‘Don’t jinx it by mentioning it’, I shot back quickly, afraid that all this admiring of the summer will bring the hailstones down upon us. I always think you should ignore good weather in Ireland, in a sort of whistling-past-the-graveyard sort of way. The minute you notice it is the minute the gods of the hills and the sky have their revenge and it’ll rain for a month. I said so and he laughed, in his crinkly-eyed way, and we went back to playing with the cats. Later we lay in the field at the back after a couple of historians had joined the company and argued about the 17^th century and whether O’Neill was unlucky or dumb. On my way home I realised that this is one of the reasons I like my life: the people in it are often extraordinary and I am all the happier for it.

Make My Day.

Sometimes someone thanks you for something you've done in a way that makes up for all the times that no-one has bothered to say thank you, in a way that makes you want to frame it and hang it on the wall, if only you could. Sometimes it makes your day.

The Weaver's Road.

Take the Weavers Road, he says, pointing to an iron gateway between hedges of dark red roses, tumbling over the gates. The way through is a grassy path worn into the centre, billowing blossom on either side. We had bowled down twisty Kerry lanes to get there, burrowing through hedges of scarlet fuschia, purple heather and knotted thorn, white with yarrow. 

A long walk down a stony path, we pass the grassy loop of a fairy fort; my heart beats faster at the view from Dunbeg. I pick up two stones from the earth and drop them, with an invocation to the god of the mountains, into a gap in the Stone-Age walls. I leave a coin as well. Someone else has left a ring as an offering. I’d leave my heart if I thought I’d get it back in one piece. It’s moments like that when I know I’m a pagan, no matter what.

Happy.

Around about this time a year ago, I was sitting the terrace of a small café on a promontory on the Amalfi Coast, looking out across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius. It was the most beautiful day – warm and balmy, but not sweltering. The sky above was almost cloudless and the sea beyond the terrace was a postcard Mediterranean Blue. The only flaw in the experience was the radio in the café behind me, which was blaring out the usual awful europap, but I managed to tune it out.

Then the DJ had a sudden rush of taste to the head and put on The GooGoo Dolls beautiful song Iris. I put down the book I was reading to listen to the music and as I did so, I realised something. In that moment I was happy. I had no especial reason to be happy – I was on my own, drinking water, reading a book, but there it was, I was happy. I remember thinking, this is what peace is – being happy in a moment for no particular reason and knowing it.

Happiness isn’t a constant state: perhaps that’s the biggest cultural, emotional con-trick played on us all. Happiness is an intermittent thing: the important thing is to experience it when it occurs and not break your heart trying to make your life and the people in it into the impossible state of constant joy.

Sometimes I sleep with the radio on. Because sometimes, especially when the nights are light, I can’t sleep without it. I find the Shipping Forecast strangely soothing and the faint drone of the World Service in the background wafts me slowly off to sleep. It makes for whacky dreams sometimes – last night there was clearly some programme on about vets who moonlight as plumbers, because I dreamed I was hacking a radiator to pieces in a room slowly filling with kittens. I don‘t do drugs, but I do mainline Radio Four.

It's the summer. Apparently. Not that you'd know by the gale force wind currently bending trees all over the place. Out of the side of my eye I can see a line of ruffled birds perched along the brow of the house opposite. A quick gust of wind and they're off, blown away, like a flight of bubbles in a wind machine.

I spent a big chunk of Friday evening at a party in a friend's house in Donegal. The house has this amazing view over the Foyle estuary and out to sea, falling away at your feet, tumbling over a sweep of green fields and bowling right down to the water's edge a few miles away. In the distance you can see Magilligan and Benevenagh, over the sea to the north -- or rather to the north-east. Directions are a bit tricky in my part of Ireland, where you can be in the south even when you are further north than the north. If you see what I mean. Anyway, the house was tiny and the party large, so we sat outside, slowly foundering whilst the sun paled and the moon swelled and the stars came out. If I had a view like that I'd never be inside. Not even on a day like this.