The Lolas in Cheltenham

Gustav Holst, October 2019

Eight months after her birthday, Lola II and I celebrated the passing of the years with a weekend in Cheltenham - we couldn't find an earlier date we were both free and other things kept getting in the way. It was, as usual, a triumph. We subsisted mainly on cake, with a few other meals when cake was unavailable or inappropriate - actually, I can't think of a situation where cake would be inappropriate so it must have just been unavailable.

As we are both working less than full time now, we started a bit earlier on Friday and arrived in time to have one of the best Japanese meals we have ever had, which is saying something considering how often we have Japanese food. If you're in Cheltenham you should visit Kibou, but you'll have to book - we were lucky to get in at lunchtime.

There was a lot of rain on Friday, but we sheltered in the Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, named after Dr Edward Wilson who was a doctor, naturalist and artist on two Antarctic expeditions including Scott's doomed trek to the South Pole, from which he didn't return. The museum had lots of lovely furniture along with the usual eclectic collection of artifacts that always find their way into local museums.

On Saturday the rain stopped and we joined a guided tour of the town, which is extremely similar to Leamington in its architecture. This is not surprising given that it was built at exactly the same time but with more money because George III and William IV enjoyed going there. It has wrought ironwork, a crescent smaller than Bath's but bigger than Leamington's, a Pump Room for events and drinking the spa water, public and private gardens, and a Promenade rather than a Parade.

Cheltenham is also the birthplace of Gustav Holst, so after an amazing Sri Lankan lunch we visited the museum installed in the house where he was born. They have collected some of his possessions from later in his life, and the attendant was very welcoming and let me try the piano he used to compose 'The Planets'. I think he was also quite pleased that we sat and watched the whole of a film about Holst; I got the impression that not many visitors do, but it was a welcome opportunity for us to sit down.

On Saturday night we had a choice of entertainment, and chose to see two of the male stars of Strictly Come Dancing (Ian and Vincent) who are touring with a show including two female dance partners and another chap who sang and danced. They had some scripted interludes with 'jokes' and audience participation, which were fine but not as good as the dancing and particularly the singing. Quite a lot of the banter was lost on me as I have never watched Strictly, but most others in the audience were clearly huge fans. I met one lady in the interval who had booked her tickets last December.

We thought about taking a bus trip on Sunday, but instead went for a walk through lovely parks to the Pump Room which was supposed to be closed but which was open, and then to a street market which was supposed to be open but which was closed, but there happened to be a handy cake shop there. After the fourth lot of cake in three days we were ready to go home.

What I've been reading

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
by Henry Marsh

"With compassion and candour, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humour that characterise a brain surgeon's life."

This is an account of various neurosurgical operations, but much more than that. It builds a picture around the surgery of the people who have the ultimate responsibility for cutting into - damaging - a person's body in order to repair it, and the risks and pressure of that responsibility. While an operation on paper might have a 5% risk of a negative outcome, that 5% is the doctor's risk - for the patient it's a 100% disaster if they happen to be the one in 20 that it happens to, or 100% success if it works. And, he certainly highlighted some of the frustration of NHS bureaucracy that I experience, as well as the thankless task of the medicine regulatory and advisory bodies, weighing hope against cost and percentages. A beautiful, savage, frustrating, uplifting, truthful book.

Spies
by Michael Frayn

narrated by Martin Jarvis

"It is wartime and Stephen's friend Keith makes the momentous announcement that his mother is a German spy. The two boys begin to spy on the supposed spy, following her on her trips to the shops and to the post, and reading her diary."

I suppose it was OK. Because it is read by Martin Jarvis the main protagonist (Stephen) sounded much like a more serious wartime version of Just William or Jennings and Derbyshire (especially as there was also an Elizabeth Bott character), but aside from that it wasn't bad. Slow going, though, when read out loud. If I'd had a print copy I'd have skimmed a lot of it.

Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving
by Julia Samuel

"This is a compassionate guide that will inform and engage anyone who is grieving, from the 'expected' death of a parent to the sudden unexpected death of a small child, and provide clear advice for those seeking to comfort the bereaved."

Lola II lent me this book, and it's pretty good - obviously true to life, so there are no stories neatly tied with a clear message, just the messy episodes that life (and death) brings. She ends with a couple of chapters of suggestions for dealing with both your own troubles and those of others. We don't have much difficulty talking about death in our family, what with dad's preoccupation with the subject, but I imagine it will be a different story when it actually comes a bit closer to me.

Breaking Free: Glimpses of a Buddhist Life
by Srimala

"In 1975 Srimala (formerly Jane Goody) was ordained into the Western Buddhist Order by Sangharakshita whilst pregnant with her second child, and in this book she recounts the challenges of combining motherhood with the spiritual path."

I picked this up while I was at the Buddhist retreat and read it in a day. Just because everyone has a story in them doesn't mean they should publish it. Write it down for yourself if you want to, yes, of course, but a bad book about an interesting story is disappointing. Hard to pin down what was wrong, but I never really understood what she was up to at any point, and it skipped from here to there all over the place. I suppose that's what is meant by the 'Glimpses' in the title.

The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body
by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson

"Remarkable findings that show how meditation - without drugs or high expense - can cultivate qualities such as selflessness, equanimity, love and compassion, and redesign our neural circuitry."

Another book that I read while on the Buddhist retreat, but this time it's my own book that I took with me. It describes the research carried out by the authors and others looking at the positive health benefits of meditation, trying to separate the evidence from the myth and conjecture. They discuss the dose-response effect - more hours of meditation bring more benefit, by way of slower ageing and reduced levels of inflammation. The 'Olympic' meditators they studied (yogis from Tibet) even demonstrated a totally new brainwave pattern.

The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner

narrated by Grover Gardner

"This book relates the tragedy of the Compson family, set in the US South at the start of the 20th century - the days of segregation and prejudice."

If you have read this book you will understand the situation when I say I had no idea whatsoever what I was getting myself into. I thought this was just another of the classic books from my list, but how wrong I was. It relates some of the events within a family with four children whom we follow from childhood to adulthood. The first part is narrated from the point of view of one of the children who is 'deaf and dumb' - has a learning disability in today's parlance. The narrative in that section jumps between several points in time without warning; apparently in the print book there is some indication, but not in the audio version.

This ought to be baffling and annoying, and by rights I should have been unable to get through the book, but somehow it completely won me over. Full disclosure - I had to look on the interwebs to find out what on earth was going on, and I doubt that I would have understood several parts without the help of that research. To be fair, the author makes it all the more confusing by having two characters named Jason, two named Maury - one of whom is also called Benjy - and two characters named Quentin, one of whom is a girl. It's as if he isn't even giving the reader a chance to work things out the first time round, which is why I started reading from the beginning again as soon as I reached the end. Totally worth it.

Genuine Lady Gardeners

The Garden, October 2019

There's so much filling my days and weekends, but I'm trying to avoid making this blog into an online diary. What has been notable?

The gardeners. They comprise an older and a younger lady, whose leaflet advertising their services is headed 'Genuine Lady Gardeners'. Whether that indicates that they are genuine gardeners or genuine ladies is not clear at all, but anyway I had booked them to deal with my lady garden on Wednesday. They had expressed concern several times that they might not be able to park their van and trailer outside the house. So on the designated morning I kept watch on parked cars, went out to talk to my neighbours, borrowed a cone associated with the skip that has been in front of my house for many weeks and reserved a suitable spot.

The skip is there because the alley that runs behind the houses on the adjacent road is accessed directly opposite my house. Within one of those houses lives K, who very politely knocked on my door some time ago to let me know that his significant building project would require a skip, and was altogether very nice about the fact that it would need to be outside my house. Since then I have had several conversations with the builders and even loaned them my parking pass when I overheard their discussions about the parking enforcement, and K has offered to pay for me plus one to have a very fancy dinner (which I declined with thanks). Anyway, what has this to do with my lady garden?

The GLGs did not arrive as early as they had indicated, and K's builders were fussing about because they were due to have a delivery of screed, and I was constantly nipping out to see what was going on and to defend my reserved space. On one such occasion I discovered that a van had taken the spot, so I went to talk to the driver who was still sitting in the van, talking on the phone. He made no attempt to cut his conversation short, and at first denied having moved the cone before making it clear that he didn't care that I was reserving a space - at which point I went to get my phone to give K a call. Before I could do it, one of the builders stepped in and told the driver in no uncertain terms to move his van, saying that I'd been very helpful and they were happy to return the favour. That's how we do things round here.

Before

After

My garden is now transformed. The GLGs removed everything that was not anchored into the soil except for the mint that I told them I definitely wanted to keep. There's nothing but shrubs and bare earth left, some stalks where the fuchsia used to be, and no sign of the decorative grasses, aquilegia, foxgloves and cornflowers that I quite liked, or the bluebells that I didn't. They found a wasp's nest, a large number of screws and building litter, and cleared much of the paving but didn't apply weedkiller, which they seemed to think was not part of this job. That's what you get for having no written quote, or invoice either as it turns out. These genuine ladies are all very much cash in hand. They assured me that it would all grow back and look less barren in the spring, and I could get in touch again and they'd come back to do the weedkilling. I think I'll look elsewhere.

The other LTRP project that I have just started is the downstairs shower, and possibly the whole of the wall that side which is showing signs of water damage. So far one company didn't phone me back and I had to phone them again two days later, and a different tradesman didn't turn up as arranged - he has since texted to apologise that he dropped his phone in a bath of water and it has only just dried out. It can't be denied that this is an inauspicious start to the project.

Genuine Ladies

Retreat

Shrine to Shakyamuni and Vajrapani, Taraloka, September 2019

Last week I slept in my tent in the grounds of a women's retreat centre on the Welsh border. It wasn't easy to find, mainly because I forgot how untrustworthy my satnav is - it took me to the general location, but I had to resort to Google maps for the last couple of miles. It wasn't raining as I put up the tent, but after that it rained solidly, persistently, pitilessly for very nearly all the time I was there (although it wasn't actively raining when I took the tent down at the end). On one day it was sunny in the afternoon, and then the night was cloudless and the temperature plummeted, but I had borrowed two extra duvets from the centre as well as a hot water bottle so I was actually too hot.

Accommodation aside, there were 21 of us including 5 who were helping to run the activities, and a couple of other staff who did the cooking for us. The food was vegan, delicious and plentiful. We all had about an hour's work to do every day - chopping veg, washing up, cleaning - and for the rest of the day there were scheduled activities, plenty of free time, and a proper break from routine. No TV, radio, phones, email, Internet. For all we knew the outside world could be going through an apocalypse but if it was out of earshot and didn't show up in the sky we would have been blissfully unaware.

It was blissful, actually. The second worst thing that happened to me all week was that I swapped places to be in a different chair in the shrine room without knowing that they were rearranging the shrine room so the change of seating was completely ineffective. The worst thing that happened to me all week was that I was forced to go first when we were talking in pairs - doesn't sound very bad, but I really didn't like it at the time.

The daily routine was an early start for meditating before breakfast, including gentle exercises that I didn't want to join in with on the first day but looked forward to by the end of the week. After breakfast there was free time, then a session before lunch, another break, a session before the evening meal and then some sort of ritual before bed, which for me was about 9.30 p.m. given that I needed to get up at 6 a.m. I'd prepared for the ritual stuff by getting my local group to focus on ritual for the previous four weeks, and I gave it a try, but it's not really my thing.

We spent about three days in silence. This seems like an odd thing to do, and it is, but it seemed to serve two purposes. First, it really frees up thinking space. You don't get sucked into conversations, or have to seek out somewhere quiet to do some reading. The second effect is that it removes the social pressure to make conversation, to think of things to say over meals, to fill silences with trivia, complaint or just small talk. The downside is that during that silent time you don't get to know much about the people you are with, or make meaningful connections beyond passing the peanut butter. But silence isn't so much a rule as a guideline. Rather than protracted miming it was perfectly acceptable to ask quietly "Where are the spare duvets kept?", and if you wanted to have a conversation it was fine to go for a walk along the canal.

As for what I learnt, it wasn't very much about Buddhism. The theme of the week was 'Mindfully Alive', and as usual much of the talk was about existential concepts that I can't easily grasp (which is why I wanted to go second when we were working in pairs). But I got to grips with Buddhist ritual, met some lovely people, did a lot of reading and thinking, some walking and writing, slept happily in my rain-sodden tent, slowed right down and enjoyed the silence. A calm, positive effect persisted through the weekend, and of course was dispelled almost immediately at work on Monday by my colleagues.

Goddess face, Adhisthana, July 2019