Durian Fruit

There are so many things I could be writing about.  So many things have happened.  I could write about The Great Cufflink Incident.  Or perhaps, getting lost in the woods last week.   I could write about the cats, or of skiing in France.  I could write about the magical delights of The Animal Party, hosted by the Last Tuesday Society.  I could write about work, or Guy, or mom, and Jane.  I

But no, I will write about durian instead.  I wonder why this comes back to me now?  It was a while ago; a visit to friends in West London.  It was an interesting evening.  There were people I had longed to meet face-to-face for a while.  They were all - each and every one of them - fascinating, interesting, fiercely clever people.

We didn't stay late, Guy and I.  We don't anymore.  It has to do with alcohol, I think.  We just don't, anymore.

But early on in the evening someone served food.  And somebody brought durian fruit.  I've read about it many times; this exotic, odiferous, pungent fruit but never seen it or had a chance to taste it before.  I couldn't resist. 

He opened the container and gave me a piece.  With my fingers, I popped it in my mouth and chewed, intently observing the flavour, the feeling, my reactions.  It is impossible to describe.  No wonder its' reputation is so enigmatic. 

A flavour at once disgusting and delicious; how is that possible?  But that's exactly what came over me.  Pungent, smelly, ropey, old but juicy.  I swallowed and coughed, melodramatically, a little for show.  He smiled conspiratorially.  We went our separate ways.

But the experience was by no means over.  And I laugh now, because of course - he knew that.

Later on, in the car, I could feel the heat of the fruit beginning to seep out of every pore of my skin.  My face began to swell and pound; my whole body began to tingle.  And, more than anything, in the confines of the car I began to sense I was giving off a seriously strong smell.  Faintly familiar, now what could it be?  Oh dear god, that's it - old, sweaty socks!  Oh no!  I glanced over at Guy, at the driver's wheel.  His nose twitched ominously.

"I'm sorry" I said.  He looked over at me and said, a little accusingly "how could you!?  It stinks in here!"  He wound the window down, just a little, to let in a breath of freezing winter air.

I could feel odd sensations washing through me; I felt almost as if I had smoked a joint.  A little stoned, on the very edge of hallucinogenically hammered.  I touched my forehead and felt myself perspiring.

It lasted the entire trip home; 45 minutes of something balanced somewhere between torture and a strange sort of delight.

"So that was durian," I thought.

Last night at the gym, I have never felt so good.  As I ran, I felt random memories coming back to visit me.  I was windsurfing; I was camped on the shore of a lake at night, watching sparks from the fire popping and launching into the dark spaces.  I was on a white beach; I was running in Cape Town. Friends dying; friends made and gone.  Journeys across the world; and the interior journey I'm still on.

And it was the taste of durian that came back to me; each experience wrapped in a leaf of the fruits from exotic places, come back to remind me of so much despair and happiness. 

Scared of Skiing

• 40 minutes in the gym on Monday night.
• 40 minutes this morning.
• Walking: 10 miles every week (2 miles a day, to and from the station)
• Step: 500 a week (100 a day, every day, to and from the station)

I've discovered the key to enjoying the 40-minute gym sessions at least, is tapping into my all-time favourite "happy songs" on Spotify, using my Apple iPhone.

As I'm exercising I can feel tiny bombs of happiness; small treasures of thought and knowledge and insight and joy and understanding, exploding in my brain.

It's a start.

I learned that "the black dog" means depression; that Kony 2012 is a powerful, moving, haunting story told by less-than-credible storytellers; yet it has validity enough that it should overcome our souring first-world cynicism. I learned that I miss the company of friends; that I don't always miss alcohol. I learned that I'm scared of skiing, but I might just give it another go. I learned that my cats love me unconditionally.

I am tired of being cynical and joyless. I am sick to death of living an online, face-the-screen-all-day Facebook life, of fielding emails and never being able to think a thoughtline true to its real, narrative conclusion.

I want the bombs of joy, and I'm going to have them, I tell you, come what may.

I intend to feel good all day. Wanna come with me?

You have to sing this out loud, alone :)

xx

The deep, deep peace*

Yesterday, for Valentine's Day, I gave him a Slow Cooker.

He gave me a Calendar with pictures of hamsters.

I've never been so happy.

*The title of this blog comes from a quote by an actress by the name of Mrs Patrick Campbell who praised long-term wedded bliss as "the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue". Sometimes (but only sometimes) I couldn't agree more.

Miss Plum and The Dark Knight

I can't complain; it has been a very long, warm autumn. The amazing thing I've always found here in England is how you can tell - to the very day - exactly when the season changes.

Today is the first day of winter.

I slept in till 1pm; disgracefully late and that meant I missed the Post Office and wasn't able to renew my Road Tax on my wonderful new car - Miss Plum. As with all gorgeous women she has been achingly expensive, but the sense of freedom she gives me is worth every backbreaking penny.

We ventured out very briefly for basic supplies (this being the absolutely vital Saturday newspaper. Amazingly, during the first year of our stay here on the edge of the world between Slough and Stoke Poges, I could only find the most upper-crusty, Tory right-wing newspaper, The Daily Telegraph. Now, intriguingly, a few copies of my favourite lefty free-organic-recycling-is-hip-grunge-is-good paper, The Guardian, have crept into the locals.)

Then the cats and I ventured out into the garden very tentatively - they because of That F***ing Stray, me because it has suddenly gone cold. Very cold.

The lengthening nights have been settling in; part of my ritual of concern for little Phoebe-cat is walking them out onto the pitch-black lawn when I get home from work, for toilet visits.

The garden is ghost-ridden, haunted, spooky.

I was startled out of my skin one night when I turned round and in the light of the misted half-moon, saw the gigantic shape of a dark knight looming over me; in a hard-edge helmet and leaning, so it seemed, on his broadsword.















The ivy has grown up around the core of a tree and some nights he seems threatening, on others he is guarding me as I tiptoe past the hedges. I won't go to the end of the garden now at night; I linger halfway very briefly then scurry back to the warmth and safety of our home.

We are here for at least another year, and I feel secure. Well - as much as is possible in these darkest of days.

It's only 3 weeks to Christmas. How strange, how strange!

Then in 4 weeks I leave to go home. "Go home". Will I never lose that turn of phrase? Two weeks with mom; who spent 4 months recovering from a broken heel only to break her arm after a week and is spending another 2 months in torment because they won't risk her age under general anaesthetic. Poor mom! She's so valiant and stoic and brave and uncomplaining, she quite makes me grind my teeth in irritation. I can't wait to see her and hug her, and share some laughs with her. We shall live a lifetime in 2 weeks; it has been 2 years since I last saw her, and who knows what comes next.

Home.

Here at home (my other home), Guy and I seem be more in love, more committed, more happy and more blessed every day. We work like dogs during the week, hardly seeing or speaking to each other. Then on weekends we revel in the early mornings together; we shop, clean, hobby and socialise and still, life seems good. Our biggest trauma has been working the Small Cat through her fears - of noise, intruders, garden and Guy - and having to rescue all the poor little creatures she catches.

Leaving food on the carpet (to prevent toilet accidents - don't ask) has brought in the occasional rodent; and last week I saved a tortured rat from her clutches (well, god, I hope I saved it and wasn't being cruel to be kind); then the next night we cornered a second rat. This one was unhurt, although Guy and the cats were determined to catch and kill it. I had to beg and plead, literally on bended knee, to save the life of that poor creature. I manage to trap it (Guy was seriously impressed - actually, so was I) and walked across the dark road to release it in the hedges near the allotments. It leapt out the box and stopped a moment to eye me in the beam of the torchlight.

Then it took off to where, with all my best, most fervent hopes and wishes, the other Ratty got away.

The Story of The Death of The Great Blondini

Two weeks ago I wrote this email to a friend in South Africa:
* * *

Hi Jinx

Ja, the car is a write off.

This is what happened:

Driving on the highway, he saw two cars in front of him playing weaving games in the fast lane; he thought it started looking like a road rage incident developing. They stopped abruptly in the fast lane, and he rear-ended one of them. Apparently the damage wasn't that bad at that stage, and he could still drive his car, and was trying to edge out of the way, when a young girl came up fast from behind, completely inexperienced, didn't even see what was going on, and smacked into his passenger side full-bore going about 100km an hour.

Unbelievably lucky she wasn't killed outright. Unbelievably lucky Guy wasn't driving our other little car, Mighty Mouse (which has just been sold), because he would've been killed too. Only reason he survived that impact is because he was in a big old-styleee Merc. His car was shunted round to the right, towards the barrier where a girl was standing (from the road rage cars that had stopped); his car pushed her legs onto the barriers and trapped her. Any harder and he would've crushed her legs.

Every single person got out of that multiple car pile up ok and relatively unhurt. Amazing, really.

Then, for some unbelievable reason he got a tow truck to bring the remains of his car back to our house. I think - in his after-accident jolted thinking - he was thinking he could still break what was left of it and sell off some of the parts. So now we have a wreck parked in front of our house again. God knows how he got the crashed one in at 1 o'clock in the morning - I was fast asleep just upstairs and never heard a thing.

Mad, I tell you, my life is a mental hospital sometimes.

So then he did the insurance claim and - blow me down with a feather - they gave him a stunning, brand new Hire Car to drive around in. What are these insurance companies thinking?! This is a man who is proud, PROUD I tell you, to say he has been in 54 car crashes and survived. Really, I just don't know what they were thinking of.

I am worried, I must say. I hope the insurance pays him something. I sold my little car a couple of weeks ago (it really was completely on its last legs), and if the hire car goes (which I'm praying it does soon, before he writes THAT one off too), we will have no transport whatsoever.

Except bikes, which I keep falling off of .... into the path of oncoming cars, I kid you not.

The awful thing though, Jinx, is that he tried phoning me from the scene of the accident - several times. I was in bed (cross, grumpy, sulking about some stupid thing we'd been fighting about), heard the calls and just ignored them, thinking "oh it's just him, telling me he's on his way home." The next day I listened to the voicemails he left me, and he sounded really shaky, I must say.

I did feel bad about that bit, because - a few weeks before all of this - I happened to witness a guy getting hit by a taxi. It was spectacular - I mean, this guy just went FLYING across the road, cartwheeling in the air - I literally saw him go HIGH, legs in the air, bollemakiesie, head over heels. I seriously thought he was dead. I rushed up there, and he was fine. I stayed with him till the paramedics came. He was an incredibly sweet chap called Tulani - very British though, very upper crusty accent, just fine - bruised his shoulder, hurt his foot, but conscious and talking and all-round jolly nice. It was almost a funny incident.

But immediately afterwards I tried phoning Guy to explain why I was coming home late, and even though I phoned about 7 times in a row, he just wouldn't/didn't pick up. Eventually I got hold of him and I crapped all over him, saying "what if it was ME being hit by a taxi!?!?!?!"

So for about 2 weeks after that, every time I called him and only got his voicemail, I would leave a message saying "this is Margo, I've just been hit by a taxi".

Which seemed funny at the time, until it was ME who didn't answer HIS emergency call!!!!!!!

LOL.

My life - the soap opera - never a dull moment.

How are you, and also how is Jonny? Please send my love and regards to the Birthday Boy xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Lots of love - only 45 sleeps before I am home and I see you all again - I CAN'T WAIT!!!!

Margs

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Something lost and something found

There is nothing - nothing - quite so good as a Saturday morning in good company. I love English autumns. Always, the skies are blue, the early mornings are crisp and cool and the days warm up to a pleasurable degree. There are trees that change colour and lawn leaves to kick through and the faint scent of bonfires to sniff in the air.

However much you've argued the night before; whatever weird things you might've seen on the way home from work (a man being hit by a taxi and cartwheeling high in the air right in front of you; then rushing up to him convinced he's been killed, only to find yourself having a jolly pleasant conversation with a Nigerian chap called Tulani, speaking with a cut-glass British accent who works in a shirt shop in Jermyn Street); you come home shattered, power through your fish and chips takeaway meal and sleep the sleep of the deeply exhausted - having not slept at all for the last two nights in a row - and in the morning, there will be Guy.

Guy, who has become part of me in a way that makes my beloved Saturday mornings better than they ever were all the years I was alone. And that is saying a lot indeed. I've always loved my Saturday mornings - free, free at last - coffee and bare feet on the lawn. And now there is Guy, and our ridiculous repartee and wrangling and banter, to make it all just-that-much-more perfect.

We talk of Bumble, who pads across our lives in his own inimitable way, a law unto himself, slightly rumpled from a night out on the town; lazy, laconic, self-absorbed, a joy. And fey Phoebe - caught in a moment of magic on the windowsill in the sunshine, watching a bird, meowing and squeaking quietly to herself as she gazes up at her prey, out there, unreachable beyond the glass.

And while I grumble at Guy and he bats my words away with his easygoing wry humour, there is only and ever a growing ease, a quiet contentment. Something lost, and something found.

I never had it quite so good.

The Long Good Summer, when Tony made the tea

I'm writing this on the first day of Autumn, 2011. It has been a good summer; better - for me, at least - than the three that went before it. While some people say it was no better than before, to me it felt like it was hotter, there was less rain, more sunshine and I got out and about a lot more.

It began in March when Guy and I spent three healing weeks in the sunshine in New Zealand. This place, this country corrodes my health; slowly grinding my resistance and my immune system down till I am staggering weakly from one cold to the next, getting ever sicker, less well, less fit, less exercised and less able to recover. It took three solid weeks in the southern hemisphere to clean up my health; clear me of colds and flu, build some sunshine-vitamin-D in my skin and in my soul.

So that when I came back to a warm spring in England, the heat and happiness simply just continued on in one long lovely flowing season.

Guy and I haven't travelled much together since New Zealand. He spent two joyous, boy-scout weeks in France, while I spent weekends on long walks, on camping trips and cycling day trips all over the south of England. We have spent - each of us - a significant number of nights sleeping apart; one on the couch, the other sprawled in the king sized bed upstairs.

Trending: more frequent and acrimonious rows between the two of us.

While beekeeping and studying were shelved this summer, I spent gorgeous hours cycling in Windsor Great Park alone, I spent long hot evenings biking through Black Park alone, and I spent delightful muddy days tramping down the Thames Path, along canal paths, tow paths, cliff paths and other trails, always generally alone.

I've also rediscovered - after a long separation - the joy of reading. From the curious wonder of discovering how very different an eBook can be to reading a real paper book with actual pages; to finding this incredible book, and this one ... to learning that it has been good to not blog for a while, for a change ...

Trending: a renewal of my monkish habit of being alone; immersing myself in solitude and lots of lots of lovely narrative thinking, without interruption or diversion or any kind of disruptions at all. It feels like the beginnings of a wonderful joy-filled return to myself. My-self.

There have been some marvellous interludes in company though; a magical 50th birthday party - in which I finally, finally, got to experience a celebration of Me in which I chose exactly what I wanted, and did it. It felt like a first time; and I got to be with people that I particularly loved.

In camping expeditions, I got to be with people who love the outdoors just like me, and while Tony made the tea we built our tents, we talked and battled and bratted, and stargazed. And said hello and goodbye, while Tony made the tea.

So trending too, has been a strange transformation in many of my bonds of friendship; a loosening, an evolution, a fundamental change.

Part of it has been my mother, and my sisters. My mother is in trouble; she's alone - and it has felt like it's been alone against the world for her. A new feeling; a strange one for our little nuclear family. And my sisters too - a sense of vulnerability; change; newness; need. I have wanted, often, to be elsewhere - to be with them.

In many ways I feel as if I am preparing myself - to change, to disengage, to simply pick up and go. I don't know where and I don't know why but somehow I feel myself disconnecting; shape-shifting in some way, as if a new phase is coming and soon I will be elsewhere - someone else, somewhere else.

Whatever happens I know that, as always, I will regret nothing and go forward with my usual questing curiousity and the ever-present sense of bittersweet renewal and loss that comes in the always-knowledge of "everything changes" and "nothing stays the same" and "this too shall pass" - a willing acceptance of the transience in all things.

I wonder where I'll be this time next year.