The Hay Buzz

It's still with me - that excitement and optimism that Hay can generate in a book-mad person like me.

   It was busy - claustrophobic busy in the corridors.  It took fifteen minutes to go from one tent to another. But the quality of discourse Hay brings together year after year is amazing.

   I had the pleasure of listening among others, to Bridget Kendall on Russia, its current and past agendas with respect to to rest of the world, its wonders and our misunderstandings about it. She made Putin sound irrelevant.

   And then there was Dara O'Brian, almost 90 minutes of stand-up hilarity. Th audience, figured out his end-lines even before he reached them, so that he had to finish each joke amid laughter. 'You are laughing too soon. Hold on,' he pleaded.  

   The rains came down half-way through, like a deluge, beating on top of the Tata tent and making a quagmire of the fields where we camped. This was my very first experience of camping. I wish I had done all this earlier, when I could still get down to the floor-level futon without flopping on to the floor and crawling in. Also, to state the obvious, a private toilet would have been great. 

   In the Masai Mara national park in Kenya your camp has a toilet and shower for each tent and the beds are normal beds. I remember being totally spoilt. The hippos can be heard in the dark African night munching away at the grass just outside the back of the tent , which is on the river-bank. The monkeys set up a signalling system alerting all their mates when a lion is near and the elephants crunch at the palms and pull down the odd one for sport.

   However, I go to Hay for the intellectual excitement, the stimulus that makes me want to start writing as soon as I am within reach of my desk-top.

   It was fun to meet Lionel Shriver. I just finished reading the signed copy of her new novel, The Mandibles. Shades of 1984, I thought. She writes beautifully with an in-bred arrogance. I did not find her likeable, cold-blooded in fact. But I will forgive anything in honour of good writing.

   My daughter calls Hay the Davos of the thinking person. It certainly gets me thinking. The research from Cambridge university on the pathology as well as the functioning of the ageing human brain was interesting. I have a vested interest in this.

   I have already booked up for next year. A proper B and B with a bathroom at the end of the corridor.

Walking the Woman

This morning, I am getting the collar and harness on our Jack Russell puppy, whom we have named Lily, (Who said she couldn't be a Lily, though I am told it is not a dog's name.') when I realise how clumsy I am. The animal is contemptuous. 

   I am reminded of the two dogs in Nelspruit then. (Well, actually, Nelspruit is now called Mbombela. Lost all its Afrikaner associations.  Not too dissimilar from Bombay becoming Mumbai and Madras, Chennai. But I just keep on calling them by their old names, the ones I have an association with, pre-independence.):

   Cody was the young brown male, pavement special breed, my friend Dorothy said. Joey the old, tired female had significant bits of Jack Russell in her and a very pretty face. When Cody got bored, he tried to persuade Joey to go out with him. They lived in this huge mansion with much garden space and the whole veld outside their front door.

   If you opened the impressive roll-back gate in front of the compound and stepped out, the path went left to the end of the housing estate and right towards Nelspruit town. Me and the dogs always walked left. No collars, no harnesses. There were no humans to be seen for miles and no traffic to worry about. No paraphernalia to carry around either.

   I did not have to take poo-bags with me. I did not have to hold a leash. The dogs ran happily in front of me. Well, Cody ran, but Joey hobbled along. They wandered off into the bush now and then and unfailingly did their deposits. They always returned to me when I called them.

   That fortnight in Nelspruit was a hot one. Dorothy gasped for breath and I broke out in a heat-rash on my face. Something I mind admitting, born and bred South Indian that I am. I think living in England has destroyed my heat defences and sucked all my D vitamin away.

   Joey sensibly, found her cot in that kind of weather or slept under a tree. Behind the living room curtains was also a favourite place. Cody could be found by mid-day under the living room fan, proudly displaying his masculinity.

A puff adder appeared from nowhere near the edge of the swimming pool and lay there, absolutely motionless until Cody found her and mayhem broke loose. It had crawled on to the edge of the swimming pool and had to be rescued and liberated by Sarah, Dorothy's daughter.

   England's test cricketers toiled in the heat and won two matches, but lost the series. After the first two matches, which we won, South Africa asserted itself and we also lost the plot. And the matches.

   Gradually, Cody got the message. I could be coaxed out if she hung around me and wagged her tiny tail. I got the impression she loved walking the old woman. I loved it as well.

Nelspruit

At Tambo airport, Johannesburg, the immigration man asks me, ‘How are you?’
   ‘Good,’ I say. But he shakes his head. ‘You don’t look good,’ he insists. I am back in Africa, I think. No white lies for me.
  

 The young girl in charge of my wheelchair does a great deal more for me than she’s paid to do. She peels off my old-woman pressure socks and helps me put away my cold-weather stuff, two cardigans, two pairs of woolly socks, shoes and shawl, in my suitcase. The cabin in the plane was freezing. My toes are slowly recovering from blue to something close to lavender.
   

I don’t need warm clothes for the short hop to Nelspruit. I put my Indian sandals on and feel immediately more human. This is where I belong, I think, sometimes even more than in India where I was born. I have spent half my adult life on this continent, working or hibernating after retirement. Unlike the UK, this is a good place to be when you’re old, if you don’t expect too much by way of resuscitation, if your lungs give up on you. In a way that is good too from where I stand.
   

 ‘You’re very kind,’ I say to the girl.
   ‘May be you also very kind to me.’ She smiles. This is a language I understand I make a mental note to find some extra change for her

'Pounds or Rand? I ask.  

‘Pounds,’ she answers without hesitation. The Rand is slipping fast. The last time I was here, in 2011, it was sixteen to the Pound. Today it is twenty-three.

  When eventually, I get to Nelspruit, forty-five minutes away, it is boiling hot. The Strelitzia, (named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George, the third, of Mecklesberg, Strelitzia) or the Bird- of -Paradise as the plebs like me call them, are holding their bird-like pink-and-blue heads up proudly along the short walk-way to the airport. A surfeit of elegance! I wonder, was Queen Charlotte elegant too?
                I walk slowly to the concourse, enjoying the brief moment in that no-man’s land between one sector of a journey and another, to yet another wheel-chair assistant, and another inefficient search in my disorganised hand-bag for tipping change

.   It’s hot here – hotter than I expected, hotter than ever before.  But this is one of the things I came for, I remind myself, running away as I was from the February chill in England, which in the end, never quite arrived.
                

 In a moment I am surrounded by my friends; it feels like home.
 

What a Con!

We've fallen for it - Valentine's day, Mothers' day, Fathers' Day...  What next? Postman's Day? We, the yuppie Indians of today - take out our heavier purses and give our money to the shops. We buy junk, which will be thrown out with next week's garbage. The only winners are the shops and the ad-agents who have been targeting us relentlessly through the year.

   So much to learn from the West and we go for the maniac end! When I came to England, escaping from a bad marriage, no one asked me why I had left my husband. No one asked me, ever, how much I earned. No one here asks a bachelor why he is not married or a married couple why they are not having children. Blessed liberty to live as you please.

   Teaching Comprehensive school in the early seventies I was impressed with the sense of humour of my students. They laughed at each other and themselves. I admired their individualism, like Amanda who said she was going to be a long-distance truck-driver. At fifteen she knew that was what she wanted. She also knew she was free to choose.

   If a British person claimed Einstein was Indian or that Indians discovered black holes, his friends would laugh him out of the pub. Indians have enough to their historical credit to stop purloining from the rest of the world. No- lady Diana did not have Indian ancestors. For heaven's sake!

   As for our riches, we could just cast our eye beyond our own navels. All those beggars on the street corners, the children sleeping rough who will never own a book, the women who support drunken husbands and even more drunken sons. We could spare a tithe for them.

   I object to being commanded to, coerced, conned into lifestyles, which are surplus to need just to feed the rampant commercialism of any world.

   I'd like to go back to that time when Kerala bought a set of clothes for Onam (in September, after our harvest,) and a pound of mutton on Vishu, our new year's day. We had no 'shopping' culture. School uniforms were bought once a year. Beyond that, that one set of clothes for Onam was precious. For the rest we got just enough. That mutton was a luxury for a fish-fed family. That one pound of mutton would have to feed a family of six on Vishu. But did it taste good?

   Christmas was celebrated only by Christians and Ramzan by the Muslims. My Christian friend, Mabel's mother, would sent us a piece of fruitcake with almond icing at Christmas, and our neighbours, the Mukkatil people would send us delicacies made of egg and chicken on Id and Ramzan. Now our family buys Christmas gifts for every one every year and I would love to cancel that practice.

A day of meditation would be good.

   

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.