All of a sudden I'm in charge

February 2019

I first went along to the village hall where the Buddhists meet nearly three years ago. I had a couple of aims - I wanted to find out why my very good friend had immersed himself in this movement, but I also went because my close friends and family don't live very near to me, and I knew that I would soon be living alone, and I wanted to establish some meaningful social contact that didn't revolve around meeting in a pub and drinking, and I thought if I needed help for some reason the Buddhists would probably show up if I asked.

The people I have met through this group have matched my expectations, and I have achieved my aims. Throughout the time I've been in contact with the group I have stretched myself gradually, first with meditation, then dipping a toe into the experience of the Retreat - first a day, then a weekend - but always reminding myself why I'm there - to learn, to make friends, to be a friend, to talk about meaningful issues, to add value to my life. Not to take on responsibility or volunteer, just to turn up each week.

Then, of course, it happened. I had a conversation with one of the organisers that made it clear that they could do with help, and despite my resolution I stepped forward. And in a trice I was on the Committee, and proposing future activities, and agreeing to do things like manage the email list at some point in the future, and come up with the social stuff that I am particularly looking for. And this week, I found myself In Charge Of The Whole Shebang.

Our usual leader was away on holiday and a substitute had volunteered to stand in. He wasn't a complete stranger because he was the original leader who had been there for my first two years, but he hadn't led us for a while. He doesn't have a car so he would be coming by train, and it would be much more convenient if he could stay over after the meeting, so he would be staying with me (the first overnight occupant of the newly decorated and carpeted Auditorium). As we arrived at the hall after picking up the key and opening up (another first for me), the other organiser turned up to drop off all the stuff - tea bags, biscuits, the Buddha statue, the cash tin - but couldn't stay, as her partner was ill and she was needed back home. Not a problem, I said, I'm happy to take all the stuff home and bring it back next week.

So stand-in leader and I were on our own, but surely some of the regulars would be attending who know the ropes? Well, two turned up, but one of those was newer than me, and both of them bolted before for the tea break and discussion, so suddenly there I was with ten newbies as the Voice of Buddhist Experience in the group. Quite a responsibility, really, because my usual role in the discussions is to interrupt to say I don't understand and could you just repeat what you just said about the Impermanence of Everything and Achieving Enlightenment through the Eightfold Path? I had to actually pretend to know a few things, and I do know a few things, but nearly all the regulars know much more than me so it was all most peculiar.

And now the Buddha statue and the tea bags and the cash tin and the biscuits are in my hall waiting for next time, when I hope I can retreat back into the shadows with my familiar bafflement and comfortable incomprehension.

What I've been reading

The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad

narrated by David Horovitch

"Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong."

Another from my list of 'classics', this was very evocative of the period - horses, gas lamps and the like. And anarchists, whom I've never understood but seem to crop up so often in these stories. Atmospheric, as I've said, but rather dispiriting as the three main characters all die, and all the other people are rather unpleasant.

The Rotters' Club
by Jonathan Coe

narrated by Colin Buchanan

"Birmingham, England, 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school."

The book mainly follows four schoolboys and is set just a couple of years before I was their age, and I was in suburban London rather than urban Birmingham. And I definitely didn't follow the politics of the age and was blissfully unaware of any industrial action going on. My political awareness was born with the election of Mrs Thatcher, but didn't grow and mature very fast. This book was recommended by a male friend who I think related much more closely to the narrative than I did.

The Dark Forest
by Cixin Liu

"Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion - four centuries in the future. The aliens' human collaborators have been defeated but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth's defense plans are exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret."

This is the second of a Chinese science fiction trilogy lent to me by a friend (the same one who recommended The Rotters' Club), and if it were not for that and the fact that I struggle to leave a book unfinished I would have stopped after the first book and definitely halfway through the second. It has really held up my reading progress - my 'waiting to be read' shelf is growing faster than ever. Then it suddenly became interesting for the last hundred pages, and now I'm not sure what to do about the third book, which is even longer than the first two. If only the author had combined all the interesting bits into just one book, it would have been a really good one.

The Third Policeman
by Flann O'Brien

narrated by Jim Norton

"Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures where he is introduced to 'Atomic Theory' and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but 'sausage-shaped.'"

It cannot be denied that this is a very strange book. The narration was pitch perfect and the whole was enlivened no end by the Irish accent - I particularly enjoyed the pronunciation of 'bicycle', and there were plenty of instances of that word cropping up. I would never have read this had it not been for the list of 'classic books' I'm working through, and on the whole I'm glad I did. I still don't have a clue how to describe it, though. A man with one leg looking for a money box ends up condemned to death in a police station and is saved by a bicycle.

Eat Up! Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want
by Ruby Tandoh

"Filled with straight-talking, sympathetic advice on everything from mental health to recipe ideas and shopping tips, this is a book that clears away the fog, to help you fall back in love with food."

A foodie book about how we eat today that is refreshingly free from preaching or agendas, and even contains a few interesting recipes that I'll probably try. Easy to read too. The author was a contestant on the Great British Bake Off a few years back, has a girlfriend and a tendency towards disordered eating, and draws on all these experiences to make her points about food in the UK in this era. And I tend to agree with her, which is always a bonus.

Week off

Auditorium, February 2019

I often joke that I work harder on my day off than I do at work. This has been the literal truth this week, when I have knuckled down to do jobs that have been waiting some time for my attention, and it occupied so much of the week that I only managed to see three films. Here are a selection of the 'highlights'.

LTRP

The carpet fitters were due on Monday, so on Sunday I moved all the furniture out that hadn't already been moved and took up the remaining remnants of carpet and underlay, cutting them up to make it easier to shift them. This was much harder work and took much longer than I was expecting.

Monday: carpet time! for the Auditorium and upstairs hall. The two fitters arrived as scheduled and the work went without a hitch, although as anticipated they had to take the door off because it needs shaving a little off the bottom to go over the carpet. We had a useful discussion about how to manage the join at the top of the stairs and access to the cellar trapdoor in the Auditorium, they cleaned up after themselves and I made some brownies for them.

I'd been wondering for a while how difficult it was to make vegan cake, so I got a brownie recipe off the Vegan Society website and had a go. I had to make several substitutions - golden caster sugar for brown sugar, black treacle for golden syrup and ground almonds for desiccated coconut, but it was dead easy, quick, and tasted fine.

The carpet fitters also helped me move the enormous TV back into the Auditorium - I could do the rest myself, except for the piano. The carpet looks and feels absolutely wonderful, but no time to admire it on Monday night - straight out to badminton.

No time to admire the carpet on Tuesday either because I'd got in touch with Olf the builder - he who took on the garage, the first job of the LTRP, so long ago. He came round first thing to talk about various outside jobs - paving, pointing, rendering, brickwork and the 'verandah' - the sloping roof attached to the garden side of the house, which has started to disintegrate. We spent an hour going round assessing what's needed and I'm now waiting for his estimate.

Badminton

Apart from the usual club night and a match, there was a badminton Chinese meal social event. I love a Chinese meal as a group because you simply can't have a decent selection of dishes when there's just one of you. The match: we lost, and it included a game that my partner and I agreed was the worst we'd ever played.

Shopping

I planned on doing a load of 'shopping in person' (as opposed to online) on Thursday, and I succeeded in buying a suitcase (my first!), ski socks, casters for the sofabad (now that it's standing on carpet), a protective cover for my tablet, and the binding of two carpet offcuts so they can be used as mats to cover the trapdoor to the cellar in the Auditorium. While I was out in town, as usual I found a reason to visit the greengrocer, only to discover that he was planning to close the shop in only a few weeks' time. This is indeed tragic news.

Friday was for online jobs. I made some progress towards buying a widget that will connect my hosepipe to the external tap, hoover bags and pull rings for the trapdoor. I still have to attack the holiday insurance and the energy supplier, but the biggest job of all that has been hanging over me since last July is my big trip to Brazil. If I'd known how much work it would entail I might have thought twice.

I've spent hours on this, and so has the travel agent, but it is now settled. I made a quick dash to the doctor's surgery to fill in the form about travel health and vaccinations which acquired a sense of urgency when I realised there are only seven weeks to go, along with a realisation that I have to put in my request for leave for work because they can get very shirty if lead times are less than six weeks, especially if patients' appointments have to be moved.

Buddhists

Tuesday was the usual meditation group. In my absence the introductory course had attracted twelve newcomers, of whom five returned this week - almost as many as the old timers. They benefited from the brownies that the carpet fitters left.

Earlier that day I had visited the school where I play badminton on Mondays to look at hiring one of their rooms for the Buddhist group, and here is where I admit that I have been co-opted onto the Committee, despite my resolution not to get too involved in the organisation. The trouble is that the group was dwindling - although many people are associated with it, attendance at Tuesday meetings was down to an average of six, which isn't enough to meet the cost of the hall if everyone gave the suggested donation. Anyway, all involved in the Committee are very glad to have fresh blood, and I am drawing upon my advanced skills acquired in organising social events for the badminton club in order to organise social events for the Buddhists, as well as offering my house as an alternative meditation location.

The first social event was tea and cake in a cafe on Saturday afternoon. Despite my advanced organising skills the event attracted only myself, the other social organiser with whom I'm sharing the job, his wife (who isn't part of the practising group), and another couple of committee members and their four year old son. Not a huge success, and it seems likely that there are far fewer people than I hoped who are interested in the social aspect of the group. Our second social event is going to be a walk, so we'll see how we get on with that.

And the rest

Off up the horrible M6 I went on Wednesday to visit lovely H+B, where I was royally treated to lunch and cake as well as reading some of H's recent forays into creative writing, which were all very good, rather entertaining, and as his group has commented, 'clever'. A bit too clever for me; H had to accompany me on one particular piece to explain all the jokes (I think I got about two thirds of them on my own). Would anyone else know that Prior Art is a reason not to award a patent? Or recognise a line from the poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'?

Films: due to the large amount of admin and other activities I hardly had time for the film-fest that a whole week off work at home should have produced. I did manage to get to the cinema to watch the Oscar-nominated film Green Book about a black pianist touring the Deep South of America in the 1950s, and I watched The Commune on iPlayer - a Danish film set in the 1970s about a bunch of people who decide to cohabit in a large house one of them has inherited. The last film was from my DVD subscription: Journey's End - a first world war story that was originally a play, ending as most first world war stories do.

And to complete the account of almost everything I did for a week, there was also the first music group of the year, which was a little disappointing as I'm not that keen on the choice of music this time, or the arrangement. My fellow baritone sax player, however, is very pleased at the simpler arrangement - he is an improviser and struggled with all the notes in previous arrangements.

Life is good

Oxford, January 2019

In life outside diabetes, nothing much of note is going on. I play badminton a lot; we win matches and lose matches. I have been hosting the Buddhist group while the usual hall is running an introductory course for newcomers. I had four guests altogether, so not an overwhelming number, but it was very lovely and it is clear that Lola Towers is finally open to visitors.

Speaking of visitors, I welcomed Bee Lady and Landrover Man for an overnight stay. Very unusual to see them outside their normal habitat, but they seemed to manage admirably. There was lots of cake, because I felt that in order not to be outdone I ought to make a cake, and Bee Lady also brought a cake presumably assuming that there wasn't a chance that I would make one. So we had two. Lola II and Mr M also came along, and I took Mr M out to the wine merchant shop where there were some whiskies to be tasted. We tried three at about 2pm, which made me much less stressed about the whole course of the evening. The final guests were my two friends (A and S) with whom I have been to the Christmas markets in Germany for the past two years.

The doorbell rang while I was waiting for all these guests, but it was a stranger who looked very puzzled when I answered, clearly expecting to see someone else. As usual I pointed out the same numbered house in the adjacent Road rather than in my Street, an error made every now and then by all manner of tradesmen and delivery drivers. He apologised and introduced himself as my Member of Parliament (Labour). Which gave me the chance to let off some steam about the state of the nation as well as local politics. I still despair at the lack of any party which will allow me to support an anti-Brexit ticket, if (god help us) there should be an election. Her Majesty's Opposition shows little sign of opposing the biggest and most divisive issue I have faced in my lifetime.

Anyway, the evening's entertainment was enjoyed by all with food being eaten, drink being drunk and games being played. And then it was midnight and time for bed, but I managed to get up next day ready for a morning walk and a pub lunch with BL and LRM and other old friends from early Midlands badminton days and it was lovely. And one evening after work I met another old friend from RNIB times who is doing very well in almost every aspect of her life, which is also lovely. And another day I met Lola II in Oxford and in between the lunch and the puddings we managed to squeeze in a couple of exhibits in the Boddleian Library, one showing boxes that books were kept in (some of them from the 15th century) and the other all about the achievements of women, coinciding with the anniversary of women's suffrage. And this day, too, was lovely.

So that's it, another diary entry style of blog which I may read again one day and remember the odd snippet, but is otherwise of little or no interest. Sorry about that, but it does highlight that there's much less to say when life is good.