Laid Bare

I remember, on New Year's Day, saying to the In-Charge: 'I wonder if anyone, a hundred years ago, knew what kind of year they were welcoming in?'
For most people, it was probably a New Year like any other - Auld Lang Syne, the coal and the bread on the doorstep, a few jars too many...
When I said it, both of us sort of  - paused - hindsight being what it is. The In-Charge numbers war heroes amongst his ancestors, a father and son who died together at Passchendaele in 1917, so his genetic memory (as it were) of the First World War runs very deep.

Having studied various aspects of that war at college, and, more recently and far more poignantly, having visited Ypres, Tyne Cot and many of the other Passchendaele war cemeteries to mark the 90th anniversary of that terrible battle, it runs pretty deep with me too.

There were no graves for the In-Charge's relatives to visit, just the knowledge that the bodies of their beloved men had been lost forever in Flanders mud. But we found their names - at long last - carved on the great wall at Tyne Cot, where 12,000 soldiers are buried and another 35,000 have their names inscribed on the wall, because they too were never found. It was a naked moment for us all - a raw, vulnerable sensation of being laid bare, feeling the loss of them, the waste, all over again, despite the years, despite the generations.

I say us, because our son was there as well. He had been asked to make a speech on that memorable occasion. The Queen was present, and Prince Philip, and the Queen of the Belgians (their King was in hospital at the time), and representatives of all the Allied armies, and Governments. It amounted to a lot of Big White Chiefs and scrambled egg on shoulders.

I am lucky enough to have a DVD of my son's speech, as one of the many cameramen present sent it to me afterwards - a kindness I greatly appreciated. I also found it on YouTube recently, to my surprise, and if you'd like to watch it, you can, via this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM_Q1sG55yU 

(The coverage starts 40 seconds into the recording, and finishes 4.40 later)


He was magnificent. Neither the In-Charge nor I could have uttered more than a couple of words without breaking down completely, but No 1 Son did a fantastic job, which only served to make me cry even more.

Ypres, totally destroyed during the battles of Passchendaele, was identically rebuilt after the War. The Last Post has been sounded every evening since the end of WW1 at the town's Menin Gate - except during Hitler's occupation

The next day, we were taken to the battlefield where they died - and someone who knows a great deal about military tactics and even more about Passchendaele, explained just why the In-Charge's great uncle Ronald was killed.

It was a quiet field, sloping gently upwards to a small knoll of trees, and planted with cabbages.
Such an innocent-looking landscape. You would never guess how many men lie beneath it.
Beautiful boys, just like my son, most of them.
It was the slope that killed Ronald - he'd been given the almost impossible task of leading his men up the hill to take the German position at the top. There was nowhere for them to hide, and the Germans just picked them off.
His father, Harry, died because when Ronald was brought into his headquarters, mortally wounded, Harry insisted on going to find a doctor to try and help his son. Lieutenant-Colonels weren't generally cannon-fodder in the First World War, but on that occasion Harry, a veteran soldier, was in the wrong place at the wrong time; and the saddest part of all is that no doctor could have saved Ronald at that stage, anyway.

We found their names, at last

Melancholy thoughts for a Monday afternoon. Thoughts prompted by the year that's in it, and by the fact that - just two months into2014 - every time you turn on the radio or the television, the Ukraine is teetering on the brink of something potentially explosive, potentially disastrous.

I was in Sligo Town earlier on, and the chap behind the counter of a shop I visited spurned my platitude about the gloriously sunny day.
'I wonder what will happen in the Ukraine?' he said.
We talked about it for a few minutes.
'The guy I work with is Polish,' he commented. 'He says if anything happens in the Ukraine, Poland will probably get involved, and he will have to go home and join the army - all his family are in Poland.'

Who could blame him?
When the politicians and financiers and economists string us up in the tangled webs they weave, what option are we left with but to defend the values, the people, the land - all the things we love most and hold most sacred.
I came away feeling that, collectively, we have all been here before.
And perhaps, collectively, learned very little.

The memorial at Tyne Cot, bearing Kipling's words: 'Their Names Liveth For Evermore'

.Keep Calm & Eat Cake

Using the picture of my waste paper bin on my blog last week brought to mind a post I wrote way back when. I thought I'd re-post it, especially as, since then we have also had the excellent BBC TV series 'War Time Farm', which was probably my favourite programme last autumn when it was screened. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and order the DVD - it was marvellous.

As you can see, I think the slogan so apposite, I have added a mug to the collection too.
I use it regularly.

When I bought the bin, there were several slogans to choose from.  I would have preferred 'Keep calm and eat cake', or even better 'Keep calm and have a glass of wine', but sadly neither of those were on offer.

So, as you know, I got this one.

How thrilling is that?

I could have had 'Waste not, want not'. In fact that was the one I picked up first, but when it came to it, I just couldn't do it.

Daft really.

If you are my age, then your parents were either war-youngsters, or actually took an active role in WWII.
If you are a bit younger, then maybe your grandparents lived through the war.
If you are younger still, then you won't have a clue what I'm on about.
But the rest of us know that anyone who lived through the war can't throw away so much as a length of string or a candle stump.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking thrift - even thrift that to the uninitiated smacks of parsimony..
But where thrift is concerned, initiation does help.
Unless you've lived through the war - any war, probably - I don't suppose you can ever understand what chronic shortage really means. I certainly don't.
It's hard to imagine, after the surfeits of our own times, that in Britain, people were allowed just 1 egg, 2oz (not quite 60g) butter and 2oz cheese per person per week - less if it wasn't available. And meat, sugar, flour, jam etc etc etc were all rationed too.

And it wasn't just for the six years of the war - rationing didn't end until 1954!
War Time Farm was a real eye-opener on how people actually managed to 'carry on' - and it was interesting to see how much hard work went into ensuring that bread was never rationed in Britain, although for many countries in Europe, bread was hard - sometimes impossible - to come by.

Watching what did - or, more likely, didn't go into meals make me wonder why I spend a good deal of time scratching my head wondering what to make for dinner.
I just can't imagine trying to feed a family in those days.
And it wasn't only food. Clothes were rationed too. Try telling the average girl today that her clothes are going to be rationed from now on. Seriously rationed. No more Saturday afternoons in the mall.
It was during the war that shorter skirts for women and short trousers for boys were introduced. Boys had to wear shorts until the age of 12. It saved a lot of material.

Not everything was rationed. Some things were simply unobtainable.

So you can't exactly blame the older generation for hanging on to stuff - understandably, waste not, want not was their credo.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era and environment of plenty, but old habits don't die, so I was brought up with the concept of 'reduce, recycle and reuse' long before the ad men turned it into a slogan to save the world.

It's a great concept. It's even a great slogan and I wholeheartedly support it.
But I don't hang on to every bit of string and candle stump.
Instead I live with a virtual wagging finger, with a shadow of disapproval falling over me every time I chuck a plastic bag, dump a perfectly good paper carrier, scrunch tin foil, scrumple up gift wrap or ditch the fag-end of a bar of soap.

But the greatest sin of all is to throw food away.

I may not be squeaky clean on the tin foil and plastic bag front, but I really baulk at binning food.

Apparently (in the British Isles anyway), - if everyone threw one in three of their carrier bags away as they left the supermarket each week, that is how much of their purchase - on average - they are going to waste.

Whaaat?

You don't need to be a war-baby to be utterly appalled by that.
What happened to 'left-overs'?
What happened to 'Ort Pie' - something delicious constructed from whatever happened to be left in the fridge?
(Well, OK, an attempt at something delicious!)
In the name of culinary inventiveness or, failing that, pure unadulterated impecuniosity, it's got to be worth a try.

Nothing - well, practically nothing - well, very little is ever thrown away in our house.
(How's that for self-righteousness?)
Before I fall off my own pedestal, I'd better come clean. I am based at home, so if something is left over from supper, it can be made into lunch the next day.
For another, I have a battery of  back-up options. There is a strict protocol governing anything rejected by humans. First refusal = dogs. Second refusal = cats. Third refusal = hens, and if all else fails, final refusal = the bird table. I have to say, not much makes it that far down the line. Occasionally I by-pass the line and make an outright donation to the hens or the bird-table. Bread, for example, that has turned silently to the texture of old plasterboard. Ends of cheese that have transformed into translucent plastic. (How does cheese do that?)

Second refusal = cats

And then - while I'm still in the confessional - there's the fungus-y stuff. The container in the back of the fridge that you pull out and look at and think - that needs eating. Um - maybe not tonight though...
So you put it back. And back. Until eventually it feels so unloved it grows its own comfort blanket.

There are some things that have to be thrown away.

Speaking of comfort blankets and disposal, I had an interesting experience a while ago. I was away for a week, helping my brother move house. Lovingly - rather virtuously, I thought - I made a large casserole to keep the troops going for a few days in my absence. I left it on top of the oven.. About a week after I got home, I rooted in the cupboard for the casserole dish and fished it out. Gosh, I thought to myself, this iron pot is even heavier than I thought it was.
Hah!
When I opened it, there was the stew. Or rather, there were the mountains of the moon, comprising several species of fungus hitherto unknown to science.
Don't even ask...(But yes, by some miracle, we are still co-habiting. Acceptance is just one of the many marvels of the human psyche.)

But for all our sins and oversights, there is very little that gets thrown away (or buried in a deep hole, far from the prying noses of rats and foxes).
Something of the make-do and mend of my childhood has lingered in there somewhere.
Probably just as well, with all of us the world over, teetering on the edge of serious shortages of money and food and resources. I can't see anyone in the first world taking very well to rationing though.
Hopefully it won't come to that. But maybe the shadow of it still hangs over us. Like some sort of genetic imprint.
I guess that's why 'Waste not, want not' was just a step too far. A truth too close to the bone.

I'd rather stay calm and eat cake. And look what I found on my trip to Enniskillen last weekend!

But if there isn't any cake, I'll opt for staying calm and carrying on.

Demons

We were awoken long before dawn by the demon of the heavens.
Jolted out of sleep, I lay quaking, with a a vision of some vast, dark being swarming through the skies directly above me, roaring - racing, chasing, in furious pursuit of I knew not what.
I understood why small creatures quiver under stones and hide in undergrowth.
It is suddenly essential to be invisible in the face of such uncontainable rage.

Is that what it's like on a battlefield?
The barely controllable instinct to turn tail, to burrow in, to be anywhere except in the line of such cataclysmically terrifying sound. Heavy guns, coming out of nowhere.
They say we are born with a fear of loud noises.

Today it was just thunder. The worst I remember.
And the speed with which it rolled away only augmented the unbidden picture in my head, as if the beast had merely trodden on my lair as it sped through the halls of heaven in pursuit of other prey.

Not so for everyone.

As the crossfire took over from the big guns - the breath-stopping staccato of wind-driven hail exploding against the roof - I turned over in my warm, dark nest and snuggled down again - my heart beating faster, but my body and lair unscathed.
I closed my eyes, but other unbidden visions came to mind.
Of ordinary people, just like me, around whom demons roar, but who are not unscathed.
In Syria.
Afghanistan
Mali
The list goes on...



Since posting this I have heard of two houses nearby - one belonging to friends - that were struck by lightning even as I lay shivering in bed. In one, skirting boards, floors and pipes exploded, in the other wiring, electrical equipment and computers were trashed.
Mercifully, no people or animals were harmed.

Game, Set and Match

What is it with machines?
My printer has just declined - several times - to scan something.
It flatly refuses to print anything.

The Silver Beast can be just as bad. Dare I mention the Silver Beast? Will it hear? Will it take a pet?
And let's not go into the two and a half year old washing machine I had to replace this summer, or the In-Charges's computer that just crashed, and crashed and crashed the moment it came out of its pristine packaging.
My printer informs me that 'something else has possession of the machine'.
Too right.


Forget aliens with green faces and robotic laughter. The actual aliens have been amongst us for years. It has been take-over by stealth, but machines now have the upper hand, they rule the world.
Electricity is their god, and batteries their archangels.
And meanwhile what are we all doing?
Alternately sitting back and nodding with a daft smile, like doting parents, or shouting and screaming, like parents who know they have lost control.


Game, set and match to the machines, I reckon.

(Come to think of it, isn't that how computers started off? With green faces and robotic laughter?)

THIS WEEK: 

In celebration of Writing from the Edge's first birthday, 
I will be having a wonderful Giveaway! 

Don't miss it!

Inspirational!

I thought you might like to share the five most inspirational moments of my week - things that I find still resonating in my head even now. That's what you call shelf-life!

Number one. If you read my October post, Shoe Boxes v Handbags then you will really, really enjoy this clip! It made me smile, then laugh and finally cry.
(If you don't know anything about 'Shoe Boxes' then check out my post!)

The Journey of a Shoebox in 3 Minutes!

www.youtube.com

http://www.operationchristmaschild.org.uk/ Want to know the incredible journey of a shoebox? Keep watching!


Second on my list is something I heard on BBC Radio 4 last week. It was just great - spare yourself half an hour and have a listen. Brave girls.


The War Brides Return

Third up, I'd like to give you a tantalising glimpse (alas, not in the flesh, and alas only a glimpse - you really need several light years) of probably the most amazing art collection in the world. The art is breathtaking, but the way it's displayed is the icing on the cake. In my ignorance, I knew nothing of the Barnes Foundation until this week. There is only one word: WOW. (Even if you don't want to watch the whole programme, it's worth - oh so worth - seeing the art...)

The Barnes Foundation - Billion Dollar Art Heist

If you can't get the TV programme where you live, at least have a look at The Barnes Foundation

It will take you to another place.

My fourth treat is a small piece of writing - small referring to its length! It's only a paragraph.

It's beautifully crafted and very satisfying.  When We Write by Robin Hawke

It is part of the 100 Word Challenge for Grown Ups

Last but by no means least is another BBC Radio 4 programme.  I listened to this while I was making cupcakes for the market. Andrew Motion's 'Laurels and Donkeys'

A verbal collage for Remembrance Day. An emotional piece.

Enjoy!

Remembrance

Don’t you think it’s really sad that everyone doesn’t mark Remembrance Day?

It deserves to be remembered.

Not the wars and all the political nonsense. Just the people whose lives got wasted in the process.

Remembrance Day may be British in origin, but now it’s marked all over the world – it’s a time when people remember people whose lives have been lost in conflict. Those millions who believed in something enough to fight for it, or who loved someone enough to try and protect them, or who in some other way felt it was necessary to put their lives on the line. Remembrance Day isn’t about the issues, or the rights and wrongs, or the bloody politicians and profiteers – it’s just about remembering the ones who died sooner than they should have done.

But you’d go a long way to see anyone wearing a poppy in Ireland.

Like a really long way.

I think that’s woeful.

Everyone thinks primarily of the two World Wars in connection with Remembrance Day. Well, 60,000 Irish died in the two World Wars alone – and there was no conscription, they were volunteers. And they weren’t fighting for Britain, they were fighting against something else. You’d think someone would care enough to wear a poppy for them.

And what kind of travesty was that last week? A popular Irish radio station making much of it being the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month of the 11^th year – without a mention of the deeper significance that that particular moment carries for millions of people.

Get your act together Ireland. If your new President can make it his first official duty – to lay a wreath on Remembrance Day – then I reckon it ought to be possible for the Irish to pin on a poppy – or start their own version of poppy day. Even if it’s just a way of clicking ‘Like’ to say we’ve grown up enough, one day a year, to see beyond the politics to the human stories that are the stuff of life. And loss. 

Keep calm - and waste not

I bought a waste paper bin yesterday.
I didn't set out to buy one, but every now and then, in lieu of holidays, I take a day off and scarper. It's a great way of shimmying down from the edge when life is shoving you in the back.
Yesterday was one of those rare and joyous days. And while I was out, I bought a bin.

Oh wow - 'be still my beating heart', I hear you cry.
Fair enough. Not the most exciting of purchases. (I did buy one or two other things, but the bin is the one that stands out.)
It's one of those British retro-style items, reminiscent of the World War II era.
It's pillar-box red with a stylised crown and a slogan on it.
The slogan reads: 'Keep calm and carry on'.
I would have preferred 'Keep calm and eat cake', or even better 'Keep calm and have a gin & tonic', but sadly neither of those were on offer.

How thrilling is that?

I could have had 'Waste not, want not'. In fact that was the one I picked up first, but when it came to it, I just couldn't do it.

Daft really.

If you are my age, then your parents were either war-youngsters, or actually took an active role in WWII.
If you are a bit younger, then maybe your grandparents lived through the war.
If you are younger still, then you won't have a clue what I'm on about.
But the rest of us know that anyone who lived through the war can't throw away so much as a length of string or a candle stump.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking thrift, even thrift that to the uninitiated smacks of parsimony..
But where thrift is concerned, initiation does help.
Unless you've lived through the war - any war, probably - I don't suppose you can ever understand what chronic shortage really means. I certainly don't.
It's hard to imagine, after the surfeits of our own times, but in Britain, people were allowed just 1 egg, 2oz (not quite 60g) butter and 2oz cheese per person per week - less if it wasn't available. And meat, sugar, flour, jam etc etc etc were all rationed too.

And it wasn't just for the six years of the war - rationing didn't end until 1954!
I seem to spend a good deal of time scratching my head wondering what to make for dinner.
Can you imagine trying to feed a family back in those days?
And it wasn't just food. Clothes were rationed too. Try telling the average girl today that her clothes were going to be rationed from now on. Seriously rationed. No more Saturday afternoons in the mall.

Not everything was rationed. Some things were simply unobtainable.

So you can't exactly blame the older generation for hanging on to stuff - understandably, waste not, want not was their credo.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era and environment of plenty, but old habits don't die, so I was brought up with the concept of 'reduce, recycle and reuse' long before the ad men turned it into a slogan to save the world.



Of course, it wasn't just me. Lots of people were brought up that way.
Buy hey - no one's perfect! Every generation kicks back at the one that brought them up.
It's a great concept. It's even a great slogan. I love the idea of it, and I wholeheartedly support it. And gees-louise, we surely do need to adopt it because over the last 60 years we have totally messed up.
But I don't hang on to every bit of string and candle stump.
Instead I live with a virtual wagging finger, with a shadow of disapproval falling over me every time I chuck a plastic bag, dump a perfectly good paper carrier, scrunch tin foil, scrumple up gift wrap or ditch the fag-end of a bar of soap.

But the greatest sin of all is to throw food away.

I may not be squeaky clean on the tin foil and plastic bag front, but I really baulk at binning food.

Apparently (in the British Isles anyway), - if everyone threw one in three of their carrier bags away as they left the supermarket each week, that is how much of their purchase - on average - they are going to waste.
Whaaat?

You don't need to be a war-baby to be utterly appalled by that.
What happened to 'left-overs'?
What happened to 'Ort Pie' - something delicious constructed from whatever happened to be left over in the fridge?
Well, ok, an attempt at something delicious! In the name of culinary inventiveness or, failing that, pure unadulterated skint-ness, it's got to be worth a try.

Nothing - well, practically nothing - well, very little is ever thrown away in our house.
(How's that for self-rightousness?)
Before I fall off my own pedestal, I'd better confess.
For one thing, we are both based at home, so if something is left over from supper, it can be made into lunch the next day.
For another, I do have a battery of  back-up options. There is a strict protocol governing anything rejected by humans. First refusal = dogs. Second refusal = cats. Third refusal = hens, and if all else fails, final refusal = the bird table. I have to say, not much makes it that far down the line. Occasionally I by-pass the line and make an outright donation to the hens or the bird-table. Bread, for example, that has turned silently to the texture of old plasterboard. Ends of cheese that have transformed into transluscent plastic. (How does cheese do that?)

Second refusal = cats

And then - while I'm still in the confessional - there's the fungus-y stuff. The container in the back of the fridge that you pull out and look at and think - that needs eating. Um - maybe not tonight though... So you put it back. And back. Until eventually it feels so unloved it grows its own comfort blanket.

There are some things that have to be thrown away.

Speaking of comfort blankets and disposal, I had an interesting experience recently. I was away for a week, helping my brother move house. Lovingly - rather virtuously, I thought - I made a large casserole to keep the troops going for a few days in my absence. I left it on top of the oven.. About a week after I got home, I rooted in the cupboard for the casserole dish and fished it out. Gosh, I thought to myself, this old pot is even heavier than I thought it was.
Hah!
When I opened it, there was the stew. Or rather, there were the mountains of the moon, comprising several species of fungus hitherto unknown to science.
Don't even ask...

(But yes, by some miracle, we are still co-habiting. Acceptance is just one of the many marvels of the human psyche.)

But for all our sins and oversights, there is very little that gets thrown away (or buried in a deep hole, far from the prying noses of rats and foxes).
Something of the make-do and mend of my childhood has lingered in there somewhere.
Probably just as well, with all of us the world over, teetering on the edge of serious shortages of money and food and resources. I can't see anyone in the first world taking very well to rationing though.
Hopefully it won't come to that. But maybe the shadow of it still hangs over us. Like some sort of genetic imprint.
I guess that's why 'Waste not, want not' was just a step too far. A truth too close to the bone.

I'd rather stay calm and eat cake. But if I can't do that, I'll opt for staying calm and carrying on.

Stay calm and eat cake