Presents and Packages

 PRESENTS AND PACKAGES

Yesterday, a largish package arrived.  I woke up to the insistent ring of the door-bell well before my normal nine o’ clock. When I came down bleary-eyed and crotchety, there he was. The delivery-man was more impatient than I was, so I reminded myself that he had to do a lot of this recently. I restrained myself from remarking about his lovely smile and 

grimaced instead.

  I weighed the carton in my hand; could it be the lap-top my son had been threatening to buy me?  I hoped not. We have five or six lap-tops in this house in various stages of distress – we even have a purple one because that’s Asha’s (my screen-addicted granddaughter who is ten years, going on sixteen) colour of the month. Thank God, the parcel was light, a plastic toy, I thought.

  Later my son opened it; it was a ‘computer on a stick’ for his use, not a gift. Marvel of marvels! It was the size of a large match-box with brown wrapping paper filling up the rest of the space. inside a box fit to hold a toaster. Which rain forest got the chop for this one? I wondered as I threw the paper and the carton into my garden-shed, which is groaning with a surfeit of cartons and paper. And the house is fast filling up with junk.

  Paper, mind you, is a vast improvement on those bubbles that have a mind of their own. They refuse to be marshalled into sheds – they break free and float. So you end up with a tsunami of recalcitrant shapes around wherever you walk.

  And then there is the Styrofoam, which crumbles and gets up my nose. I have to get rid of that before my puppy chokes on it. Another hour and I will be choking on it

  I recall, with nostalgia the Christmases when my boys were toddlers and got just one toy each. We adults went without; there was no habit of buying gifts for grown-ups. Christmas didn’t cost much, and in India, before I married my Sri-Lankan husband, gifts never happened. Christmas did not cost at all.

  In Kerala the big day of the year was Onam. The floor of each veranda would have a pookkalam, a design with flowers, collected by children from gardens and open ground. Onam meant new clothes for all and a big vegetarian meal. There would be payasam, rich, creamy and sugary for dessert. There were no packages to clean up after, then and now.

  When I look at the land-slide of coloured parcels piled under our Christmas tree, I wonder about the children who don’t get anything at all. This year there will be more than usual due to our Chancellor and his CUTS. I feel guilty about the casual profligacy in our house-hold.

And the new hillock of paper we will deal with tomorrow. And the junk which will fill up the breathing spaces in our home.

  

That Vote to Attack.

I remember an afternoon in the late seventies. We were travelling, my children and I, on a train from the Heathrow Terminal to London. Tony Benn was sitting in an aisle seat two rows behind us. My son, Raghu, had just bought a copy of Benn's biography and hero-worshipped the man. He walked up to Tony Benn shyly and asked for an autograph. Benn tore a piece of paper off a notebook and signed his name on it. We still have it. When Benn was defeated by one vote in the leadership election some time in that era, we were disappointed. I think it changed the direction of Labour politics forever, leading it off into detours and closed alley ways that it should never have traversed.

   Hilary Benn's spech. That speech. Applauded by the people he supported, mainly, but not only, the Conservatives. There were the Labour right as well, the Blairites who have still not woken up to reality. What a sell-out that speech was! 

   I used to be something of a speech-maker myself, wasn't too good at it. But I started at age eight, so I can recognise a good, well-thought out speech a mile away. Benn's speech was not one. It was emotional, unprofessional and did not make any points worth considering .It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

   So the IS hold us British in contempt. (Along with most of the rest of the world they also hold in contempt.) Are we to fight wars whenever someone shows us disrespect? If disrespect is what we are angry about, we need other strategies - like ignoring them completely. Writing a few decent articles about them. Getting our effete Media to think straight. Educating our children to respect the diversity, which is the richness of this country.

   Many things about the Syria vote confuse me. And the aftermath is even more confusing. Someone said Tony Benn must be turning in his grave after that speech by his son. I think that is a safe prediction. My father, the freedom-fighter of the Gandhi era turns in his grave, or blows at his ashes, whenever I exhibit symptoms of rabid consumerism. He is probably down to his last spoonful by now.

   And de-selection? I have always believed the local parliamentary party must choose its candidates, not some cultish group of Neanderthals who have established themselves in Westminster and haven't got a clue about how party members think and feel.

   More to the point - if you worked in a firm and found that you disagreed with the beliefs and actions of your CEO, you would consider resigning. Or get sacked. Those who do not go with the majority opinion within the parliamentary Labour Party should have the grace to LEAVE. Or, I could hope the local party members would see them off. Threats and abuse are bad behaviour and those who do this are not doing the Party or Mr Corbyn any favours. But now that the Conservatives have bulldozed the Country into war, maybe they could get Fallon and co. to do some discreet phone calls inviting some of the committed Blairites to join the Tories. They belong there.

   It is petrifying, the huge dissonance between the thinking of the Labour right and the local Party members. Why are these dinosaurs still with Labour? How do you define Labour with this motley bunch in it?

This Unholy Call to Arms

This is very unusual or me - my blogs are not normally political. However, I listened to  (was it John Humphries?) on Radio Four this morning, the anchor talking to Angela Eagle. If ever there was an exercise in Press bullying, that was a prime master-class.   

   Angela Eagle, making herself comfortable on the nearest fence, would not be my usual day's good deed. But Humphries came back at her like a terrier with a rat, he pulled and tugged and turned it around and circled around her. When he could not get a firm commitment to going to war from her, he asked her, what her principles would be.   Mr Humphries: what is your professional code of ethics about interviewing Labour politicians? No holds barred and let's degrade and destroy? Do you apply the same vitriol when it is a Tory minister? What do you hope to achieve, you, Laura Keunsberg and that pack of Press Hounds who feel they are entitled to pursue and destroy at least one Labour M P every day.   You are concerned about the 'disarray' in Labour ranks. What about the twenty - odd M Ps in the Conservative back-benches who will not sign up to Cameron's shenanigans? I'd like to see them squirm for a change.   

   These millions of pounds now happily committed to being spent on armaments, which will appear when the Syrian Question is hopefully solved, in 2025 or thereabouts, (like the bird-flu vaccine, which never quite worked and is still cluttering the store-rooms of NHS clinics ) could they be put to better use? 

   It would help to know what exactly Cameron proposes to do, in Syria, or in Europe or anywhere else. The man is lost. 

 

  I wonder whether we could annihilate violent fundamentalism by educating the disaffected and the disenfranchised? By creating jobs, by spending more money on supporting the community, rather than practising austerity in that easy direction.     

  Are we going to war to please the French? To SHOW UP the Americans? To win support with voters as Thatcher did with Faklands? This country, indeed the world, cannot afford another fiasco like Iraq. After such a war, there will be other Muslim fanatics springing up in outrage. There will be more Jihadi groups looking for revenge.

   Corbyn, I often feel, does not need enemies, he has his shadow cabinet and dispossessed Blairites to attack him. I hope they remember the strength of Corbyn's mandate. Or, are the vipers in the Labour nest saying they know better than your ordinary Party member, like yours Truly? I thought we made it clear to the likes of Yvette that we don't trust them. We like a little honesty from our leaders. We prefer careful deliberation to knee-jerk gunghoism. 

 

  And I fear for all those perfectly non-violent Muslims who are tarred with the same feather, as the terrorists, for just existing.

   

   

Being Old

My son, Kitta worked in the States at a University for one year, some twenty-five years ago. He is a Mathematician (for his sins) and told me this story. He had the chance to talk to a distinguished Hungarian Mathematician, Paul Erdos, at a conference in Kansas.  Erdos was an old man by then and told Kitta, ' Being old is terrible, all sorts of aches and pains. I hope you get the chance.' Erdos didn't live many years after that.

   I suppose I should be grateful for the chance to have the aches and the pains, especially when so many young people die without the time to achieve their aspirations. All those people in Paris and Beirut and Northern Nigeria, Mali, and... What a sad symptom of our times! 

   So, I mustn't grumble about that shoulder, which is reminding me that I overdid the gardening yesterday. Wielding that power saw with abandon - it was fun. Since my sight is not entirely trustworthy about small spaces, I think I may have chopped off a perfectly healthy Peiris, just coming into flower. Not unusual for me. That Peiris was too near a huge bush that had outlived its decorative usefulness and needed to be dispatched.

   When I take a plate off the shelf I knock the sides on the wood and the plate often gets chipped. When I get up in the night for a trip to the bathroom, I sway and have to hang on to the wall or bed. And when I go out in the night, I have to hold on to someone because the dark makes it all much worse and I am totally disoriented. Still, I tell myself, I am functional - almost.

  Then there is the knee, which refuses to do its job without protest; the stomach, which has its own idiosyncrasies; the wrist which cannot hold up my favourite hardback in bed. So I end up buying Wolf Hall, paperback and e book. Ditto with Beevor and his delightful book on the final retreat of the Germans in Ardennes, in WW2.
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   However, the most irritating aspect of ageing is that you cannot predict the future even a year ahead. I want to prepare for dilapidation, but what shape will that take? Shall I fall once every year and break bones? Shall I irritate my family by making them repeat everything they say to me twice over? Never mind, they say when they have reached the end of their affectionate tether. But now I want to know what they said, and they have moved on to other thoughts, leaving me hanging. 

    I am angry for nothing and impatient for trivia.  This is not without cause. I lack confidence to jump into my Polo and drive where I wish. In the eighties, I was forever driving all over East Anglia and Suffolk. I would drive to Southwold to pick my daughter from her boarding school four times a term. I had to go to empty Ely for examiners' meetings for the C S E exams.. On Thursday evenings I went straight from Wickford, where I taught, to Chelmsford. I attended a course on Computer programming, taught by Brian Jackson, he of the nimble fingers. What an accomplished card-shuffler he was! We had computers, larger than my bedroom and punched cards for each command of a programme. So, in addition to being uncertain about the commands themselves, we also punched them to oblivion. The programmes never worked. Did I hear a long sigh when Jackson looked at my pack of cards?

   I would return home to Laindon at ten in the night weary and diminished from my battles with the machine. I could not even see the purpose of the project. No sat nav then or mobile phone. The country road was without street lights and I drove on a wing and a prayer.

   It is the dependency and the lack of control that is unpalatable about old age. How can the young understand that. If you are thirty years old, you can't know how forty feels. If forty, sixty is another world. And at sixty eighty is the outer space.

   And I still haven't been to China. Or written my memoirs.

Hands off Education, Nicky

Gove was ridiculous, but everyone knew that, probably including himself. He did serious damage to the idea of education, but Nicky Morgan is positively lethal.

   Now, I don't get exercised too much at the antics of the pack of Conservative ministers/ monsters, all focused on money and debts and deficits as though they are running the family firm. But when they get their grotty little paws on the schools, I have to sit up and scream. 

   I spent my entire working life in education and believe that all change for the better can only be achieved by educating the little ones. Catch them early and make them understand that all people, little or big, are born equal; that religion is a human construct (albeit a useful one, though some would argue that the idea of money and international banking are more useful ones. Yuval Noah Harari has some interesting things to say about this in Sapiens) and must be treated as such, not fought about. They need to understand that human achievement is not all academic, but must also include compassion, respect for the vulnerable, the disabled, the intellectually challenged, the idea of being part of a community, a society. No amount of testing can assess that.

   Testing at age seven? Is our lovely Nicky confusing test results with actual achievement, skills, knowledge...? And as a measure of progress in schools, what kind of progress are we after? Do we want to get more like the Japanese and the Chinese in this respect? India is bad enough - torturing four-year olds with tests in some schools. Germany starts Primary Schooling only at age seven, but the children catch up in quick time. In Africa most children start at age six; my children started school at six and I have not noticed any shortcomings in this regard.

   Or - is it teachers Nicky Morgan wants to harass? Someone should gently inform her that we are harassed enough. When I left teaching Secondary Maths in 1983 the biggest relief was all that regimentation I escaped. Those attendance registers on Thursdays for the County Council, the glib report templates that asked all the wrong questions...

   And what are our teaching unions doing about the dismantling of schools? Must I, at eighty, get myself a placard, and take to the streets?

Gone up in the World

Definitely we have gone up in the world, I think a bit wryly. We have a cleaner and a gardener once a week, though it was not long ago that the family did the gardening and the cleaning, in our small house in Churchill Road. I plead age these days. I certainly cannot push the lawn-mover around any more and digging deep to turn the soil is a sure no-no. I weed, walk around the (now larger) garden with my walking stick and the cats follow me. Another phase of life, I say to myself.

   It was however, when I watched myself peel a potato that I noticed how old habits have survived. In our kitchen in India my cousin did not peel potatoes; she scraped the skin off carefully. Now my daughter and I peel generously. The tomatoes are an even stranger story - old habits die hard: I find myself carefully cutting the stem away and using every last bit of tomato around it. My daughter slices the stem area and throws it away carelessly.

   Indeed tomatoes, cabbage and beans were known as English vegetables, rarely bought in Kerala households. We had the local Brinjals and Ladies'-finger. And many different kinds of spinach.

   It was the bathroom soap that really did it. It made me think of all the things we used so carefully, growing up in India.I found I had stuck the last soggy bit of Pears soap on to my new cake of Sandalwood soap from India. How precious soap was - and to me it is still hard to throw away the things I arrived at the hard way. In our house in Thalassery, on the Arabian sea coast, only my father had soap. All the rest of us used moong- powder or channa-powder to clean ourselves. Instead of shampoo, we used pounded hibiscus leaves for our long hair. I often came out of the bathroom with tiny bits of leaf stuck in my hair. My aunt would chase me back to wash my hair again.

   I was well into my twenties when I started using shampoo. Now of course there are three different shampoos crowding the shower-shelf. I have to read the small print on them before I know which one is appropriate for my scant, dry, old-woman hair.

   When I was about fourteen years old I asked my father for a cake of soap, and thus I came into my first Rexona soap. Luxury! I hoarded it from everyone else and kept it with my saris. 

   We had a huge Bakelite box radio, which went up in smoke one day when I was listening to Swamithan's commentary on the test match (there was no other kind of cricket then) between India and England. The one in which Len Hutton scored over four-hundred. Today the house is littered with I-pads and computers and many different screens, all chattering at me and driving me out of rooms , just to find a quiet corner.

   I slept on the floor on a mat in many houses in India and made-do in other ways in England. Now there are four bedrooms and we are still looking for more space to store junk and spread our unending possessions. I remember I arrived in England in 1974 with two suitcases and lived as a lodger ( nine guineas a week) in two houses before I bought my re-vamped council property. 

   This is all bewildering if I think about it. I must stop thinking.

Child-birth

Child-birth - No, nothing medical about this one. This, I am writing for Mellisa who is going to become a mother for the first time, probably on the eleventh of August:

   I had my first baby at home in India. All I remember is my lack of faith in the family faffing around and trusting only to the mid-wife, who came and went. She must have had several on the go that day. The doctor, a lady (what else in India?) turned up twice during labour. She was newly qualified and a friend from school-days. That visit felt more social then professional. 

   Afterwards I had a feeling of messiness and not enough disinfectant, though the house smelled of Jeyes fluid for many days after. I always felt unclean, with the primitive sanitary arrangements. My son wet my bed and later, soiled it constantly and I had to find the dry spots wherever. Never again here, I said to myself.

   My doctor visited again after a month and left a baby-book by Benjamin Spock, from which I learned to do up a nappy properly. Dry beds after that, thank God.

   I had luck on my side - and I hope Mellisa is also blessed - in that I did not have to have stitches or Caesarean or any intervention at all. The labour was long as you would expect of a primie. But being India, I was not to mention it to any man who came by. When the next-door man came by, I had to pretend that I had no contractions. He had too much to say that day, all of no consequence, while I winced and prayed for him to go, go GO!

   My second child born in Sree Lanka took all of one hour to appear. The doctors did not expect him quite so soon and I had to shout for assistance at the last minute. But there were many doctors and nurses about in Dr Abeyasinghe's pristine nursing home. I had no complaints. Except, my husband struggled to pay the final bill and I had to wait an extra day in the hospital while he borrowed the money at high interest.

   The third baby, born in a remote bush-hospital in Anua, Eastern Nigeria, was a revelation. She was two weeks late and arrived calmly. She was a happy baby who rarely cried. The Irish nuns made me feel that nothing could go wrong and nothing did. I listened to the noises of a woman suffering eclampsia in the early hours of the morning, in a room not too far away, but the Sisters there were so unruffled I knew she would be alright.

The fourth was a painless labour, because I had learned the method from a book I had picked up in W H Smith's in Victoria, by Erna Wright. I was in a lovely nursing home in Enugu and there were four doctors in attendance, who simply could not believe that there was no pain. The pain came later - I had three days of depression and hysteria after the birth. I think my uterus had had enough and I decided to give it a rest for good.

I enjoyed all the babies and think of those months as the happiest in my life.