Soot.
the particles that bind
The temperature has dropped, possibly to a more normal one for the time of year but I’ve forgotten what that is, if I ever knew. The drop has been accompanied by a clearing of the skies, abandoning of the soft grey duvet of cloud that kept us warm and slightly suffocated for so many weeks, so that the blue shocks the eyes and the glorious sunshine is let loose and bursts through the front window, highlighting the dust and ash residue on my fancy white venetian blinds. Whose idea was it to get white blinds? Idiot.
The sunshine also lights up the copper beech tree at the bottom of my garden, making the now gold and rust coloured leaves glow in glorious tecnicolor™ as they begin making their way to the ground. It also shows up the ivy that is making its defiant way all the way up the trunk, strangling new growth so the top branches are straggly, bare and pathetic. It’s not our tree, it belongs to some misty entity that owns the river bank below our garden which is designated an SSSI, Site of Special Scientific Interest, apparently, though it sounds more like a venereal disease and frankly I haven’t seen one scientist out there since we got here.
(Talking of venereal diseases, what an election result eh? The orange one returns. Oh well, moving swiftly on.)
When I am, what I like to call, working from home and it’s cold, I light a fire. It keeps one room warm, rather than heating in the whole house with central heating (yes, I could go round turning individual radiators off but you know, there’s always one that will stay forgotten and blah blah), and is in fact more effective anyway in that space than a radiator. As I do this I invariably inhale some soot particles, the rest land on the blinds and other surfaces because the stove is a crappy design and every time the door is opened a whoosh of smoke billows out. However, once it’s going and burning cleanly all is well and warmth radiates nicely.
I was musing on this and reading stuff on substack when I was pointed (thank you Chris J Rice) to a post by Brandon Taylor which is, in part, about growing up in Alabama in a trailer where mould and smoke made up the best part of the air he breathed. It is a brilliant essay and I am so delighted to have found another amazing writer. It was about a great deal more than that of course (I highly recommend reading it yourself), but my mind being occupied by a tribe of manic monkeys scattered my thoughts and led me to thinking about a book my grandmother wrote called Breakfast in Bed which was set during one of the notorious ‘pea-soupers’ in London in the 30’s - the mind boggles at how much soot must have been inhaled then.
My grandmother, Sylvia Thompson, wrote lots of novels, some of which I have read. They are very dated and populated by a cast of women and men impossibly in love with unsuitable types, house maids and travel on the Queen Mary to the New York cousins, but I must hasten to add this is not candy floss writing, nor is it historical fiction as they are set in their own time, and while some of the characters can be really irritating her writing is sharp and clever, and some of the stories are really good.
One has just been republished, sadly a last hurrah by Hand Held Press, called the Gulls Fly Inland set in 1939 just as war is breaking. “The Gulls Fly Inland opens in October 1939. Blanche Lancret is now a French exile in England, looking after her best friend Annabelle’s baby. She is waiting for news of Annabelle’s brother Vernon, who is fighting the enemy in France, and of her surrogate mother Tante Julie, a rich démi-mondaine who refuses to leave Paris”. Tante Julie is a wonderful character, Vernon a bit stupid and impulsive, Blanche far too romantic. If you read it please let me know your thoughts.
Death again.
Some years ago in a period of my life when I was all loved up and walking on air and petty, mortal rules didn’t apply to me, my car was towed while I was looking into the eyes of the object of my affection and dallying over wine and morsels of ambrosia.
Being immortal is all very well but I didn’t wish to walk home (Olympus, also known as Cliftonwood, is a long steep climb) so needed to find a way to get to the pound and pick the car up. Remembering a good friend who ran a restaurant near by we wondered if might help. He did help. First he looked surprised as we, Stuart (that was the loved one’s name and that’s another story for another day) and I were a very new item, then he lent me the money for the fine and took us to the pound after his shift finished. He was that kind of man.
Matthew (for that was our rescuer’s name) was half Lebanese and the new restaurant he had set up served Lebanese food. I watched him making babaganoush before I knew what babganoush was. I ate carrots roasted with black onion seeds for the first time in that restaurant and it’s how I cook them to this day.
Stuart died in 2002. Matthew died on Tuesday.
Death it seems is back, stalking the halls, dragging his scythe around. Of course the death of someone you know has an impact like no other, and I hadn’t been a part of Matthews’s life for a long time, but he was a part of my past, a dear friend and a funny man. He leaves a very big hole that, while I may not fall into it, I can sense close by.
John too, an old family friend and close buddy of one my brothers, died a few weeks back. A dear, kind, funny man, again leaving a large hole in the lives close to his and that I can feel too, despite being on an outer ring. Somehow there is comfort there.
To refer back to the subject of soot, all subjects mentioned above smoked, including me. That however was not the cause of death of any, although mine is yet to be announced of course.
I shall end with a quote from Archy, the creation of Don Marquis (if you have not yet discovered him you are in for a treat), a cockroach with the transmigrated soul of a very libre poet.
as far as government is concerned
men after thousands of years practice
are not as well organised socially
as the average ant hill or beehive
they cannot build dwellings
as beautiful as a spiders web
and I never saw a city
full of men manage to be as happy
as a congregation of mosquitoes
who have discovered a fat man
on a camping trip
