The Climbs They Are A Changin

Alzheimer’s disease runs ‘club-footed’ through my father’s side of the family. I say ‘club-footed’ because I come from a family of shoemakers – my uncle’s an orthopedic shoemaker - and doubt whether Alzheimer’s will jump a generation: it lies in wait, like a blackboard rubber between me and oblivion. My grandparents, their brothers and sisters – my grandfather was one of thirteen - all ended their lives as ‘old children’ in old-peoples’ homes, as did their parents before them; and now, my uncle has just been diagnosed. Like Larkin says, in ‘The Old Fools: “Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people inside them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms like a deep loss restored…”

One thing I’ve noticed about Alzheimer’s: where, so much - once so close - becomes detached, old rhythms and rhymes, seem to stick. Where any kind of meaningful conversation is impossible and they no longer recognised their children (or spouses), and they’re missing their mouths with food (for ‘died of Alzheimer’s’, read, ‘died of starvation’), many Alzheimer suffers are still able to recite nursery rhymes - sing hymns and songs -, are wet-eyed with recognition during old sing-a-longs.

It’s with this in mind – with a dry eye on an old age, when I won’t be able to recall past-times, unless they’re preserved as rhymes – that I’ve begun to commit some of my ‘key’ experiences into rhyming verse.

This is a climbing holiday in Austria, in the 1990's, ruined, when we had our tent stolen from right under our noses. No: stolen from right under our toes. And seeing as rock climbers rhymes with Alzheimer’s, what better place to start?

It happened just as the poem says: we were a high – a good couple of rope-lengths - up a limestone cliff, climbing in the valley above our campsite, near Innsbruck, the day we were forced to watch our tent (and all our belongings – we hadn’t come by car) being stolen. It all happened as if in slow motion. We screamed at ants – carrier-ants: we were tied-up, in a tantrum, and to the world (the rocks, the sky, the birds) must have appeared mad. Perhaps that’s what it’s like, being old?

Watched My Tent Being Stolen (to be sung to the tune of, 'The Climbs They A Changin')

I watched my tent being stolen

Whilst dangling from a rope,

Halfway up a rock-face,

As if backwards through a telescope.

Hung helpless from a rusty peg

As they up-rooted my tent-pegs:

The view between my legs,

Ripped-off condom-sized sleeping bags.

Climbing a cliff above our campsite

(Too high-up to read their number plate),

Passports stolen in broad daylight,

Halfway through our July fortnight.

Yet, as the airbeds deflated

I could only feel elated;

Like the sea had just parted,

Like all the junk I’d carted,

Like the groundsheet had been pulled from under me

(They’d even taken my identity):

Like a vagabond - the chance to be free –

A new start in a foreign country?

But I abseiled down to the embassy,

Checked the cover on my indemnity,

Reversed charges to those close to me.

Reverted to whom I’d chosen to be.

The Wart Went

I got my first ever wart on the last day of Lent:

My nana Dot rubbed a chunk of raw-meat on it,

Then told me to go and bury it.

After about a week the wart went.

Rector Seal, he always parked his bike on top my nana’s,

In the graveyard - she was inside doing the church flowers.

I can see them now, locked like a couple of locked spanners,

Up against a gravestone.

Nana Dot said, he needs all the help he can get, pray for him,

Reverend Seal’s got trouble with his waterworks.

It turned-out to be a kidney stone.

But the miracle of the wart and buried meat

Led me to operate on Seal’s seat.

Splatter-proof in my cycle cape

I studied the anatomy of his bike:

Imagined the break cables and water bottle

Circulating Seal blood - full throttle.

There was even something scrotum-like

About his old leather saddlebag.

And I knew I’d made the right decision

As soon as I made the first incision;

Through the epidermis of Seal’s saddle,

To the blubber-like foam in the middle.

I cut round the colon of springs

To the sound of the choir practicing hymns,

Yet when I hit skeletal frame,

I settled on burying a chunk of the fat-like foam.

Before patching up the scars

With a strip of tape from the handlebars.

Nana Dot died years ago.

But Seal’s still on his bike as far as I know.

Nana Dot cradling, not glue-sniffing (traced), 1987

Reverend Seal was the vicar of St Mary’s Church. My grandmother, Dorothy (nana Dot) adored him; she was a tireless worker for the church – an “Excellent Woman” - Barbra Pymesque; tidying the graves; arranging the flowers; organizing jumble sales; ringing the bells; mending prayer mats; teaching Sunday School; attending funerals (often, the burials of complete and utter strangers – she lived for funerals).

Both sides of the same page of the Parish Magazine, announcing my baptism, 1964

I don’t know whether or not Dot noticed that an advertisement for ‘Complete Funeral Undertakers – Day and Night’ happened to be printed on the reverse-side of the page announcing my baptism in the Parish Magazine. The irony would have been lost on her though; given a preference, she’d have attended a funeral over a baptism any day.

The hand of my father (son of Dot), a Sunday-painter, sketched the outline and I added the colour, in this Sunday-school depiction of “The Cradling of Baby Jesus”.

Looking at it now, I appear to have got my bible stories reversed. My image reads more like the post-crucifixion gathering at Christ’s tomb than the ‘Birth of the Infant Child’: Mark 16:1-4 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

My chalk ‘Cradling’ is a direct copy (combination) of two sleeping bag advertisements from Climber & Rambler magazine (home of rock walls and boulders, the home too of Peter Storm). It’s as if I were painting the contradiction of my baptism/funeral collision from the pages of the Parish Magazine: plagiarism by anticipation?

The loner in the sleeping bag was based on Reverend Seal.

There were three women involved: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome; they planned to bring spices to apply to the body. Apparently the women did not know that the tomb had been sealed and placed under guard. The sealing involved a cord that passed around the stone, and that was attached to the rock wall with sealing wax that had been impressed with an official Roman seal.

Shady Cradle Roll Certificate

It’s not much of a leap: from cagoules to sleeping bags, via a cycle cape (doubling as a surgeon’s gown). Especially when bridged by a vicar called Seal. But isn’t the concept of hermetically sealed metaphors a contradiction? Vicars, like the rest of us, when sealed in hooded-sleeping bags, resemble seals. Perhaps now you can see why I’m so obsessed about stalking Peter Storm in Peter Storm in a storm (see “Storm-Proof”, 26/11/09). Larkin was right: you can't escape your wrong beginnings. But they are great levelers, sleeping bags: they reduce us all to the same sealed, seal state; as well as making us vulnerable to the same fate: very difficult to defend yourself against a golf club attack when you’re in a sleeping bag.

Sunny Cradle Roll Certificate

Wildlife At Home

Opened my oven door for the first time ever. The gas cooker came with the flat (ten years ago) but I’ve never used the oven: I’m vegan. Only opened it because I plan to get rid of it. Wish I hadn’t bothered inside was the tiny skeleton of a bird. I’ve no idea how it came to be there. Odd thing: no feathers: Unless it had plucked itself, before plucking up the courage to commit suicide. Bird commits suicide? Not as farfetched as it sounds.

This photograph of “A Hen Chaffinch Hanged By A Hair” was made by the Kearton brothers (in the late 1890’s), who described it as “a most pathetic picture, and as the photograph was being made, the poor bird’s mate kept on calling for her and flying round in the most evident distress”.

This skeleton in the oven, it wasn’t the first distressed bird I’ve had in my flat. In the summer a thrush flew in, and also started “flying round in the most evident distress”. I tried everything (endeavored to blow it out with the hairdryer; catch it in my sleeping bag - like a big air-sock – thought the bird would feel an affinity with the 82% Siberian goose-down filling) but I couldn’t get rid of it. So I opened all the doors and windows and went out (it’s perfectly safe, I live on the second floor).

It was a warm day so I walked down to the Thames, where I witnessed a couple rowing, rowing. He called her a whore. It’s a wonder she didn’t stop rowing and slap him across the face with her oar. It would have been the perfect retort.

I left them to it and made for the charity shops. I bought this copy of “Practical Hypnotism”; not because I planned to hypnotize the poor creature (if it was still in residence when I returned) - purchased it (40p) because of the five dabs of glue on the first (blank) page; and who could resist a publication by “The Society Of Metaphysicians”?

The book didn’t appear to offer any advice on how to hypnotize birds; which is funny because there was a whole chapter on “Hypnosis in Animals”.  But in the chapter on “The Theory of Hypnotism” I came across this:

There's plenty of chalk in m flat, I could trace a magic circle around the bird. I set off home, reading as I went. But as I approached my block my newly discovered hypnotic confidence ebbed – I’m frightened of touching anything with feathers. I may be vegan, but I’m also chicken.

I had to be sure it had gone before I dare go in. So I decided to climb one of the big trees in the garden, the top of which is directly opposite my windows. As I became level with my sitting room, things looked optimistic - I observed the all clear. Then, to see into my bedroom window and have a clear view through to the hall, I teetered out along a horizontal branch. It’s a very odd experience, spying on your quarters – to be so connected-to, yet disconnected-from, your things. Larkin was right: “Home is so sad. It stays as it were left/Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/As if to win them back. Instead, bereft/Of anyone to please, it withers so,/Having no heart to put aside the theft…”

All was quiet in the bedroom and I’d remembered to close the bathroom door. But just as I was thinking about making a descent, I saw it move - the silhouette of a bird perched on my pull-up bar in the hall. I suppose it was the obvious place for him to have gravitated to – only natural if you think about it. Then, as I looked more closely, he appeared to be pecking at the chalk residue on the bar between his feet: surely he couldn’t be feeding - recycling chalk into guano, on my perch/patch? 

At this point I became aware of a neighbour’s steely stare. Reluctant to take my eyes off the bird, I glanced down to see a woman, half hiding-behind, half pretending to be hanging the washing out. “Are you stuck? Do you want me to call for help?” she shouted (so loud the whole street must have heard). “No, I’m quite all right; I’ve just swapped places with a bird for a bit. I’ve lived in there for ten years (I gestured towards my window). The bird – he’s a thrush, local too I think; you've more than likely seen him up here where I am now. Well, he's in my flat for the time being, eating my chalk - it's possible to hypnotize them, you know - birds. No, I'm just keeping an eye on him – he's made himself quite at home - call it a house swap. No, so I thought I’d try his branch out. No, I’m very comfortable since you ask. No, everything’s hunky dory, really, don’t worry, we’ve just traded places for a while, that’s all.”