It wasn’t heartbreak that brought her to my door that night, but rather a sense of grief for pain inflicted, a search for contrition and ease of the soul.  Words had been spoken, intemperately but without malice, formulated to a context misunderstood across unknown frontiers, and had caused pain.  As many words inevitably do.  She is a kind soul, really.

My door and wine rack are always open to her and I’m glad she knows that because safe havens are important, for the friends that seek safe anchorage as well as for me.  I had been spending too much time looking out to sea for another ship, that one, the one you wait to come in, one that had to find port under its own sail, and I had lost a sense of mending my own nets.  I opened the door for her, opened the bottle, and laid out the nets.

It was still warm and dry, so we sat outside on my terrace, in what by day is a riot of green and other colours, weeds, pots and snail shells, but after sunset becomes a night garden.  The air was light and smelled of damp earth from an early evening’s watering, combined with cigarette smoke and the whiff of whiskey we poured to oil her grief and mine.  Light spilled out from the living room, sorry tales punctuated by throwing the ball for a dog happy for the unusual play so late at night.  The bells of the village church chimed down the hours into morning, but we didn’t hear them.

Her story is important only to her and me, and is not, in any case, of great interest outside the confessional of the friend.  But there came a moment, when the wheels had been well greased, when I asked her what she knew of opera.  I hasten to add that I am no great expert here and may not even be classified as a fan.  But I told her the story of my brother-in-law who, on a youth’s trip to Italy, witnessed (La Bohème?  La Traviata?) at the Roman amphitheatre in Verona and fell hard for opera that night.  This fired her imagination.  And drunken pedantry in me.

I don’t know anything about opera, she said.

And so with wide open windows and no upstairs neighbours, I gave her at high volume the Top 40 introduction to what little I know: the exquisite male duet from the first act of ‘The Pearl Fishers’ by Bizet, the Flower Duet from Lakmé, by Delibes, and that old opera karaoke standard, ‘Nessun Dorma’. 

But it was the love and death thralls of Violetta in ‘La Traviata’ that captured her, and for a few moments at least that summer night, dissolved the nets and let her swim free in the pleasure of music and voice, and put aside, at least for a bit, the yoke of the confessional.  She freed herself on another woman’s love and grief.

When the last of the whiskey was downed she said, ‘I want you to take me to the opera, Bri, I want you to take me to La Traviata.’

‘The next time it comes to Covent Garden’, I said, ‘we’ll go over to London and do it proper.’

And we’ll go for a drink after, I said to myself.  But not to the Nag’s Head.  I walked in there once and drank with the ghosts of Maugham, Isherwood, Auden and one other.  But I won’t go back there again till that ship on the horizon makes port.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roses in the Wreckage

 

It started with a puppy, and ended with hello.

Monty didn’t run with the pack of other puppies but the day I came to pick one, he was eventually found, shivering and frightened, hiding behind boxes in the garage.  Love was instant and everlasting.  He soon adjusted to the open space of my garden and with age and confidence he began exploring the neighborhood.  It was soon clear a fence would be required.  I put this off for way too long until a knock on the door started a chain of events likened to that butterfly in the Amazon that spawned Hurricane Katrina.

One of the first expressions I picked up in Flemish off Cartoon Network was “Ik bin bang”; “I’m afraid.”  So when I opened the front door that afternoon, to a rather frightened woman who I had sometimes seen in the lane that ran next to my house, I understood that she was frightened of dogs, and had been all her life.  I also knew that I feared another knock on the door, the one that would bring tragic news, because I didn’t keep Monty safe. 

 Come a warm, dry day last September, a friend and I installed a simple and cheap affair of spikes, wire and a gate you could buy off the shelf at Brico.  Monty was curtailed, but safe, and I no longer had the worry about him running out into the road.  Which was just as well, because it saved room for the mountain of worry that was to come.  Unbeknownst to us, one of the pikes we shoved into the ground hit a shallow oil line that ran from the underground tank to the furnace in the cellar.  It was a small line, and no wider than a toothbrush, one centimetre either way would have missed it.   Except it didn’t.  One month later, 1500 litres of oil had leaked into the ground.  My worries were to be somewhat more substantial than no heat or hot water as winter settled in.

The Belgian environmental authorities must, by law, be notified of such incidents.  The contaminated soil has to be excavated, is washed if possible, and replaced.  I don’t know if this was done in my case.  However, this is a very expensive process, and in rural areas such as mine where buried oil tanks are still common, there is insurance for such eventualities.  The Hippocritical Oath for insurance companies is “First, Do Not Pay Out”, so this is currently under negotiation.   But the surrounding soil had to be dug out to a depth of 6 metres, and this also meant the garage had to be demolished, to get to the earth underneath.  Thus, what once was a healthy plot

Had become rubble.

 

 

And a crater.

But as these machines violated my soil and ripped out the work I had put in, so they tore down walls that might have taken years to unbrick.  This is Flanders, where you may have a nodding acquaintance with your neighbours years before you know their names, but my neighbours came by, those who could see the garden through the fences, and knew of my love and care, and lamented its loss while sharing the joke of the new swimming pool I was having dug.  They introduced themselves by first name, unheard of here.  I was touched and heartened by such neighborliness brought on by a hole in the ground.

Six months later.

You can’t always anticipate how the cues in your life will lead you down this road or that, because often you don’t have control, or you abdicate control, or you look around at your life and wonder how you lost control, and when you arrive at the end of a road you didn’t plot, you wonder, how did I get here?  This was not on my map and I don’t know if I can ever get back again to where I am meant to be.  Rubble had occluded the sunlight and I was without my compass of sunlight and time.

But that is the way of most of us and my garden is only a metaphor.  I had lost a sense of growth and seasons and the unnerving shake of that put me off the rhythm of my life.  There are other phosphorous bursts in this scenario, but they belong to other stories.   I had lost a desperate muse, and found no way of getting him back.

In effect, the work you put into a garden is your hope of future flowering.  In the destruction you think is your life, you plant seeds, nurture them, watch them grow, and somehow, some way, you learn to make the hard choices to bring it back to life. 

And sometimes to bring yourself back to life.  There are, sometimes, roses in the wreckage.

One of my overwhelming impressions of Paris when I went there for the first time as a young man was that, not only would I never go there with my sister again, but that it was difficult to see the sights when you were constantly looking down.  The Parisians, then as now, were very nonchalant about the manner in which they allowed doggy detritus to foul the otherwise elegant trottoirs du Boulevard des Champs Elysées.  It was more like the Champs du Mars for the minefield of muck one had to negotiate.  Playing hopscotch with the butt-bombs, I was appalled that the French could allow this in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  It was as if Leonardo painted a pimple on the Mona Lisa.

A week of professional training brought me to Brussels many years later, and it seemed as if it was déjà-poo all over again.  It even inspired a song:

“Doo-wop, doo-wop, step, step pretty, you’re spending a week in dog-poo city”

Or words to that effect.  I remember wondering if this was a Francophile thing, or a European thing, (Swiss dogs, by law, do not poo), but more than that, why no one seemed to mind any more than they minded flicking a cigarette end in the gutter?   It was amazing to watch the well-heeled and the down-at-heel alike deftly side-stepping these canine calling cards as easily as a loose cobblestone with only the faintest of a Gallic turning of the nose.   I had forgotten that I once had Paris and was not so fortunate.  

Years later I was to return to Paris with my fiancée, not my sister, and was able to walk the Champs Elysées while reading the paper except to be almost run over by a limousine carrying the Queen of England.  The streets had been cleared of muck-mines and on my return to Brussels several years later, things had quite improved.  Signs forbidding the pooing of dogs were ubiquitous, and in the parks there were even bins dedicated to this purpose, provided it was well wrapped in a doggy-doo-bag.   

One of the by-products of acquiring a dog is an education in waste management.  Monty trained up pretty well, and today will now happily be closed up in the kitchen all day, not touching food and drink like an aesthete, and boiling it all day until I come home to let him out to do his bidness in the garden.  Sometimes I’ll then chuck it over the fence into the goat paddock on the premise that goats have no self-esteem and don’t give a, well, you know.  But Monty is a creature of habit and when we go walkies to get the paper on Sunday mornings, he always pauses in front of one particular house and makes a deposit.  One such morning, I had no doggie bags with me and walking a few metres further on, I turned to be greeted by a torrent of Flemish abuse by the owner of the house whose pavement Monty had blessed.  I explained that I was on my way to get more doggy bags (an expedient, if useful lie) and would return presently to relieve his sidewalk of said befoulment. 

Feeling impressed with the forceful change in attitude, though of course somewhat shamed, I returned a few minutes later to the front of his house and made a dramatic turn in front of his windows of scooping the product in a perfumed poo-sack, and, tying it to the dog lead in the chic fashion of country dog-owners, proceeded home, feeling finally welcome in the new Belgium.      

 

 

 

 

I spent Boxing Day in a hotel, a Christmas gift from my cousin, over 2000 metres atop Mt. Pilatus above Luzern in Switzerland.  After an afternoon in a museum of Picasso and Klee, we travelled up the mountain by cabled gondola for almost an hour over children tobogganing below.  We munched on toasted chestnuts, chucking the shells out a small transom window for the scavengers of the night.  We bobbed to the top to skies that could only end with the curvature of the earth.  Blackbirds that never leave the heights of this mountain scavenged on winter lichen frozen into the sleeping granite.  

It was as if you were free of your cramped window seat on a plane in stacked descent, and could sit on the wing.  That afternoon, the skies were as clear as the eyes of a newborn.  The lakes around Luzern were deep and blue; you could see how the city played itself into the contours of the land it had settled in.  Come nightfall, I had hoped for stars, but the lights of the top of the mountain were too strong.  But even then, there was the sense of cold, and darkness, and the wonder of how those who came before us lived in a world lit only by moonlight on snowfields.  When candles and glass in thin windows were the purview of the wealthy.  When, in the age of my grandmother, the lights of stringed pearls along the lakes below did not exist.  The landscape was covered in jewels, and I could stand in the frozen night, not being master of all I surveyed, but wonderfully grateful and humbled at the gift that had been given me.  A sumptuous dinner of excellent company and good wine fed the enchantment of this place.  Plans were laid to see it in summer.

At the deepest hour of that night, I ventured outside to a temperature of -6C.  I was wrapped well and looking for stars in the thin atmosphere.  Content to be solitary in the frozen night a few thousand metres closer to starlight far more ancient than the lights below.  There was peace and stillness and unforgiving cold.

Or so I thought.

 Within days I was on a train back to Brussels.   And a few days after that my garden was buried in snow and a cold doubly harsh to my mountain top.  The earth froze and the snow lay old and brittle on the ground, Miss Haversham’s wedding cake left to dust and grime and the cold of age.  Venturing outside was painful and for a few short winter days I thought I’d never be warm again and longed for the first sunburn of summer.

But this is the stuff of the seasons and seasons will change and the earth moves on.  This is the last chapter of The Potting Shed.   All that needed to be said has been said; it’s time to say something different, casting a new light through other windows.  In a few weeks this space will carry a new column, tentatively called “Blogging Brussels”, observations of life in Belgium generally, Brussels in particular.

I’ve been pleased and humbled that there have been those who have enjoyed these scribblings.  You validate me as a writer and I hope I have been of help as a gardener.  Kathleen has the corner on cooking, my other passion. I will sit on another corner, watch Brussels go by, and write about that.

I wish you all the greenest of thumbs and the joy of watching good things grow.  Back soon. 

 

I only remember Tante Judith vaguely, though I remember her husband, Onkel Albert well, as he took me to see my Uncle Johnny for the last time before Alzheimer’s took him.  Albert prepared me well, saying Johnny was unlikely to remember me, but may remember my mother as he dandled her on his knee when she was six.  Mother was over sixty the last time I saw Johnny.  And that was what Johnny remembered.

I never knew Tante Cornelie at all, though I became quite close to Tante Helen when I was a young and callow lad in my early twenties.  I stayed then for a long weekend in her flat in Zürich, whilst Helen, a career counselor and psychologist for the young, conducted a battery of tests on me to determine where my career prospects lay. 

We spent hours over a table in her living room; her findings, which I returned to Zürich for a month or so later, were that I would find my strengths as an actor, or in drama in general.  Her findings were to prove true, but what she was not able to find was the lack of courage back then that most young people have to drive them to be what they were meant to be.  I had no courage then; I had allowed it to be beaten out of me.

After the Rorschach Test, she said, didn’t say, that my approach to my sexual identity was up for grabs.  It remained so for two decades after that.

Tante Helen was right in that, years later, I was to have a measured success in the theatre in Hamburg which lead to some professional work, but was never to be a career.  Other fears and desires took their penance.

These were my Swiss aunts and uncles and Cornelie and Helen were patient/pupils of Jung.  Though it has now been many years since I have read Jung, (encouraged by my Aunt Jessica, the Tantes’ sister-in-law and my father’s aunt), I remember taking very much to heart his ideas about the collective consciousness, and how it serves to drive societies and tribes to a kind of mass memory and thus, perhaps, to mass culture and opinion.

Jung had a rather more global view about collective consciousness.  Yet even he, in Memories Dreams and Reflections, admits,

In this book, I have devoted considerable space to my subjective view of the world, which, however, is not a product of rational thinking.  It is rather a vision such as will come to one who undertakes, deliberately, and with half -closed eyes and somewhat closed ears, to see and hear the form and voice of being.  If our impressions are too distinct, we are held to the hour and minute of the present – in other words, how our unconscious is responding to it.

I rather think that in the internet age, where we are enjoined to read less and absorb more on the basis of what our information should be, that we are more compelled to be informed by half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears.  And I fear that this is what drives American and British politics at this most crucial moment in world history.  That America will take its financial cue from another country is heartening in a global scale, but how long again before the world defines its being with half-closed eyes and somewhat closed ears? 

By a quirk of fate, the table where Tante Helen, in her flat in Zürich, conducted all those tests on me that postulated a future that was only later to be, is now sitting in my front hall.  It is laden with photographs of my family in various periods of our history.  It is centred with an art nouveau piece from her father’s house in Zürich.  And crowned with flowers sent to me by my love.

Sadly, a photograph of Tante Helen is not there. 

But she brought me to Jung, and she brought me to me, and bringing the young to themselves was what she treasured and worked for.

And I have her table.

 

I had been sawing back and forth between my landlord and his agent over an overgrown leylandii hedge at the bottom of the garden.  As is common with such hedges, it had been let go over thirty years and now was tall enough to block out most of the morning sun in the garden.  My landlord, a perfectly nice but rather, ahem, frugal gentleman, had brought in a professional earlier in the spring who recommended that the whole thing be taken out.  This I most certainly did not want as it was a nesting site for pigeons and mourning doves, and blocked the view of an agricultural warehouse on the other side of the goat paddock.  As is the law here, I would have been perfectly within my rights to call the commune and have them trim the hedge and bill the landlord.  But that was not a solution.   I just wanted a short, back and sides, not a shave or ill will.  So I arranged with the agent that we would address the issue in the autumn after the nesting season and I would pony out for a trim. 

This is the hedge that is the perennial problem between neighbours.  It is often a border feature and because it grows quickly; it is a good privacy hedge.  But it has to be pruned masterfully else it grows out of control and you get the neighbours coming through anyway to rail against your sunblock.  But the problem with leylandii is you just don’t cut them back.  They won’t put out interior shoots, so if you prune them back roughly, all you get is dead wood.  They only grow from the outside out.

So you can imagine my surprise to find my landlord and his wife, an elderly couple of at least 70, out all weekend attacking this 20 metre hedge.  He was shinnying up a ladder with an electric chainsaw, and she was at the end of a rope hauling off branches the size of a baby redwood.  Hercules and Amazon in their dotage were fast tackling this wall of insurmountable hardwood between me and their goats.  Gobsmackedly guilt-making.  I was working inside most of that day but would occasionally feel shitty enough to venture out and help shift branches and proffer cups of tea.  They would hack, saw and drag branches over to their van, load up, make a run to the dump, then come back and start over.  At one point I did make the offer to split the cost of a professional tree service with them, which they graciously refused on the grounds that the job was already half done, which it was.  I tucked my tail between my legs and retreated indoors while Monty the Dog was having a whale of a time wagging his at all the excitement and attention.

By day’s end, a full two-thirds of the hedge was gone and even with the waning sun there was so much more light in the garden and, indeed the house.  The sky was open and huge, like the big skies I had loved in Africa and the Malvern Hills.  And yet….

The hedge was now straggled and ragged, stumps of the trees peeking over the foliage like bad dentistry.  And as welcome as the open light was, it left a queasy feeling of exposure and vulnerability, as if I was now out in the garden in only my socks and foundation garments.  A garden that had once seemed so cosy and inviting now was far too big and less intimate.

But this I could live with if it meant the daffodils bloomed in March rather than May.  Ivy would soon cover the ragged stumps, and once I had filled and re-hung the bird feeder, the birds flocked back as if nothing had changed.  Come spring I am sure I will get used to the big sky and wonder how I ever did without.

 

I have never been comfortable with any particular political ideology, and find no home with any party.  Maybe this is has its roots in my being wary about joining groups, but I’d like to think it is the wisdom of age that makes me realise that opinions and stands evolve with age and experience, and that what might have been true for me twenty, or even ten years ago, may not be true to me now.

A back-story to the next paragraph; I forget what the conversation was about and I think it was when I was 13 or 14, but I remember exactly where my mother and I were standing in the kitchen.  I was standing in the doorway to the dining room, and she was in front of the stove, stirring some pot on the right front burner.  And Mum said to me,

‘You’re a liberal thinker.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re a free thinker.’

And that’s what I always thought a Liberal was, someone who was not beholden to any ideology; someone who investigated all sides of an issue before coming up with an informed opinion.  Therefore I am flummoxed that ‘Liberal’ has become a dirty word in American politics, and a sign of a wet in British politics.  From what I have been able to garner from my meagre political sleuthing, a liberal is actually what a Conservative should be.  Thoughtful, inquisitive, tempered by reason, prudent and deliberative.   Actually, what anyone entrusted with governance should be.

So I find myself picking and choosing what I like from across the political spectrum.  Social liberal, fiscal conservative.  Don’t spend more than you have, though some debt keeps the economy afloat.  There’s no reason wealthy countries can’t afford universal health care and high standards of education (the train wreck of the Britain’s NHS notwithstanding).  Having independent watchdogs on finance, law, and business, and generally teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish.  But also making sure that those folk who cannot rightfully hold the fishing pole are taken care of.

I’m sure that makes for a political muddle which is why I should probably never be allowed near public office.  But I have always believed that public service is a noble endeavour, and particularly when I worked for the U.S. government.  When I became a lowly civil servant, I was made to take the same oath that any U.S. President takes on Inauguration Day:

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

I always let the God bit slip, because it was my word, not God’s, and if I couldn’t adhere to the oath, God would be no use.  Anyway, I was rendering unto Mammon.  God wasn’t innit.

Perhaps all this is naïve of me.  But at my cousin’s home in New Hampshire four years ago, I saw this and it made me think of the America my father had come to and served in the US Navy for in 1944, and why he was so disappointed in America before he died.  I and my mother were far more sceptical, but my father believed in America.

I posted what is below in another forum this afternoon.  I’ve always thought politics was highly entertaining.  I never thought it would become farce.

Bearing in mind that, what has struck in the past few weeks as America lurches from crisis to chaos is that Senator McCain has evinced the same contempt for the American electorate as the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal has shown in the past eight years. 

·         Pretending to suspend his campaign

·         Picking Palin as a sop to the Hillary voters

·         Parading the Palin family in the public eye, then crying "foul!" when the press goes after them

·         Gunning for televising Barstool Palin’s shotgun wedding before the election

·         Grandstanding in DC while the economy tanks and saying, well, nothing, because none of his seven houses face foreclosure

·         Gunning for drilling when he knows damn well the pumps won’t see a drop for at least 10 years

·         Touting Palin’s foreign policy creds because Alaska’s next door (maybe she can fix this Wall St. mess, she lives next to an ATM?)

How can he believe people swallow this stuff?  I don’t want a maverick in the White House, thank you, it’s time that job was given to a grown-up.  And I don’t want someone "just like us" an old man’s heartbeat away from the job.  I want someone whose bar is higher, A LOT higher, and McCain’s standards are so patently low.  Sarah Palin has the intellect of a doorknob, and that’s exactly how McCain is using her; as a doorknob to the Oval Office. 

A doorknob with lipstick, sheesh, can these people be serious?

My vote’s in.