Ahem,
Ella and Sam gave a party at their new house to celebrate their move and their thirty-third birthdays. It was one of the several fine and warm days that we had during and after the heat waves of previous weeks. With their neighbours, friends and family, we made the most of their spacious garden as Sam used his new gas barbecue to cook a robust lunch to go with salads made by Ella and Alli. I drank zero-alcohol beer under an awning while blankets were spread on the ground to provide sunny spots for eating. There were compelling (skittle-type) games of Kings that revealed the ascendancy of females over males, probably unlike when the games were first played. Such agreeable events seem all too seldom and yet they stand out even during a heat wave and are instantly memorable. Perhaps their scarcity is the reason for their memorability.
I am passing into a state of pretend retirement. The pretence is because I find myself, after finishing my manuscript, with time on my hands, but not so as to sink back into gawping at the television, or to study bank statements or calculating tax avoidance schemes or my tax return. Nevertheless, progress of my manuscript through the publishing process to fledge into a book seems long and drawn out. I have expressed mild impatience at the pace while spending time on a last read-through of the whole text, and have supplied ideas for a cover and jacket copy (revisiting the work of my first job as a blurb-writer after leaving university).
I am also working on the mechanics and logistics of setting up an online creative writing course. I previously gave such courses when living in Abidjan, Basel, and Brussels. This time my efforts are double-targeted: narrowly on face-to-face training sessions in Uckfield; and more widely on online training via Facebook and Substack. Everything will be launched in September.
In my preparations I have lost the ability to talk to a camera without some form of prompter, so the necessary videos are looking rough-hewn, despite my quibbling investment in a tripod, remote connection, and microphone. Bizarrely, the new inspiration behind lessons that I have devised for UK students springs from a sharp conversation a few months ago in which I was verbally attacked for saying that English grammar was like its language — hopelessly acquisitive, impermanent, and unreliable. I added that it was unwise to assume that there were any safe rules beyond that of maintaining clarity. And that oral language is a lively river running through the hummocks and tussocks of written language.
My main argument provoked a sharp response from an angry English teacher, as if I had waved a forbidden flag at her. I found myself under the cosh for a while, arguing about gerundives and awaiting arrest as a terrorist, although I was not in England at the time. Alli corrects me when I say “There’s”, when it should be “There are”, but my brain reminds me that this battle has been lost many years, even centuries, ago, since the Bard himself was a transgressor in Hamlet: “There’s tricks i’ th’ world”.
I went to a piano concert in St Margaret’s Church, Buxted, given by Amiri Harewood, a young and rising star. He effortlessly played a range of very difficult pieces that spanned Shostakovich, J. S. Bach, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Brahms, and Robert Schumann, the writing of whose sombre and final work “Geister-variationen” was interrupted by his own suicide bid, jumping from an old pontoon bridge into the freezing Rhein in Dusseldorf in February 1854. He was pulled out and went back home to finish his variations, before sending them to his wife Clara, who happened to have left him the day before. The sky was still light and the temperature warm when I emerged from the church at 9.30pm, threading unspectacularly between the gravestones back to the car. I have been through the churchyard many times with Max (and Bonnie) but it was my first visit inside the church.
We are lucky to have very sociable neighbours and we tend to meet up every few weeks for an evening together. This time we were next door with Karen and Steve in a mini-party also attended by Gary and Amy, and their children Maeva and Ozzy, who were kept busy by a variety of toys including an impressive remote-control electric toy car monopolised by their parents.
The summery days have brought a fair share of incidental events. Social violence is unusual in Uckfield, but there was a non-fatal stabbing recently in the town described by police as a disagreement between two friends, and on a couple of the hotter nights recently, inebriated men have shouted loudly while returning erratically back from their all-night drinking dens, smashing bottles along Harcourt Road, whose very name sounds like it is standing to attention. Twice I have scraped up shards of beer bottles and vape containers from the edge of the road outside our house in the early morning, mindful of those who have to clean up far worse street jetsam much more often than I. After all, this isn’t Baltimore.
Yours in small mercies,
Lionel