Dirty hands and rocket

We have created and planted a raised vegetable bed outside the kitchen door with rocket, various salad leaf, herbs, and tomatoes.  It was my idea but not entirely my own work.  My wife designed the bed and did most of the detailed planning.  She also bought the wood and built it. I provided the heavy labour: digging, turning the sod, driving the wheelbarrow, hefting this and that, hewing where required, etc.  The finished bed looks good, everything is growing fast in the warm, wet weather, and we can of course eat the results.  Rocket salad with shaved Parmesan is a particular favourite. However, I have been reminded again that I would not have enjoyed being a peasant farmer regardless of the satisfaction to be gained from 'growing my own food'.  Son of the soil I am not.  I was impressed too with the quantity of compost the raised bed took to fill, the huge number of stones sifted from the soil, the variety of bugs and creepy crawlies to be found in a few square metres of ground, and the length of time it took to scrub my hands and fingernails clean.  If time suddenly reversed back to the Middle Ages, I would definitely want to be a monk in the scriptorium.  Or, failing that, a handmaid for Hildegard of Bingen.

Prague in Easter with Carmen

Prague in April.  A great city and great fun.  This Easter it was swarming with tourists, mostly in groups and entirely well-behaved despite the city's reputation for occasional loutish behaviour. (On my return to work a colleague professed herself equally in love with the city and determined to return, but with more people, her own 'group' because, she felt, 'Prague was a city that would be more enjoyable with more people around you'.  Having experienced both ways of seeing Prague, I'm not sure I agree.)  The weather was glorious, the food filling, the beer tasty, the wine from Moldavia a pleasant surprise.  Our hotel overlooked the Vltava river towards the Charles Bridge and allowed us to enjoy a morning walk along the riverside and downstream to the cafe Phoenix for our breakfast.   For a week or so we happily tramped the streets of Prague doing nothing very much of anything, although we did go to the state opera to see Carmen.  It turned out to be an exciting evening.  We thought a man had died in the row in front of us, just before the end of Act One. Turned out that he was comatose through drinking too much.  After he had thrown up over the row in front of him, he was carried out into the corridor and we never saw him  again.  Carmen was also notable for an excellent production, wonderful playing from the pit band, a very good chorus, and equally fine principals -- with the exception of the toreador who was execrable in the first half and only slightly better in the second.  I almost booed but glanced at my wife and thought better of it, but refused to clap when he appeared onstage for his curtain call. Stories about the Cafe Kafka, outrageous pricing in popular tourist spots, begging, breakfast, Prague restaurants, prostitutes, art galleries, city walks, trams, taxis and beer to follow.

Strange, isn't it, how the most seemingly banal of lyrics can strike a chord.  This from a song by Elena Ledda called Della Mia Vita: 'Of my life the sweetest moments / Are those I spend, my love, adoring you'.  Not so profound, less cerebral perhaps than the lines from the 'vain and narcissistic' German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (not my opinion, never having read more than just the occasional poem quoted elsewhere) that also caught my eye this week: 'To love is also good, for love is hard.  Love between one person and another: that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate trial and test, the work for which all other work is preparation'.  But both appeal to the sentimental side of my nature, the soft spot that allows me to cry when I hear 'sad music': mostly opera, mostly Puccini. For I do have a soft inner core, a lack of ruthlessness that allows me to resist the lure of seeking promotion in the workplace. And my experience has been that those who mostly occupy positions of middle and senior management possess a hard edge, a coldness that allows them to reprimand error and pretend to a professional superiority that is more shadow than substance.  Or is my lack of ambition an unwillingness  to 'put myself out there' and be judged wanting by my peers?  Perhaps. Certainly, ever since reading the Hornblower novels of C. S Forester, I have sided with his introverted hero and actively dislike the idea of telling people what to do.  Nagging my wife and family, now that's something else entirely.   

A bit like Sisyphus

I have succumbed to the temptation of the tv ads for the home depot stores currently appearing this Easter vacation that challenge sedentary males to re-imagine, revitalise, yea to redecorate their homes in bright primary colours.  My wife chose the colours, bought the paint and materials, gave me precise instructions on how to proceed, and I provided the labour.  Although at times I felt a bit like Sisyphus the end result is undoubtedly worthwhile.  Indeed, listening to the radio while working, the time seemed to pass quickly and the chore of painting was (strangely?) both rewarding and relaxing.  So keen was I to begin that I was up and out of bed, showered, breakfasted and spreading paint by half past seven most mornings this week.  But I'm glad it's finished, in no small part due to the lofty assistance of my younger son, even if the reference to Sisyphus reminds me that Camus used the title Le Mythe de Sisyphus for his collection of essays on the general absurdity of life and the futility of many of Man's endeavours. Hopefully this doesn't include DIY and redecorating, although I suspect it does.  I don't remember reading that Camus was a dab hand with a brush and paint roller despite his undoubted intellectual prowess.  Glancing around at my pile of 'yet to be listened' to cds and small mountain of 'yet to be read' books, that thought on the 'futility of Man's endeavours' strikes home strongly.  As does a reminder that 'to be always filled with craving and desire' is one of the Three Poisons of Buddhism,  the other two being Ignorance and Attachment, or Hatred and Delusion according to the text you consult.  At any rate, the painting below is Madame Camus by Degas and really quite attractive.  I wonder if Degas was into home decorating?  I wonder too if colour blindness affected any (many?) of the great artists?  Being colour blind myself there have been interesting debates in the last few days about which particular shade of pale yellow (my wife's perception) or pale green (my perception) our dining room walls now are.

A bizarre story caught my eye concerning Henry Nott of The London Missionary Society, and a bricklayer from Bromsgrove by trade, who failed to convert a single Tahitian in 22 years of trying, starting in 1797. 'Possibly', Sue Arnold wryly suggests in her audio book review, 'because they were too busy killing, flattening and drying their neighbours, then making a big hole in the middle and wearing them like ponchos'.   I presume they would be waterproof, but how did they keep the ponchos soft and supple?  Ugh!  A disgusting thought.  However,  I do quite like the Tahitians for their persistence in rejecting Nott's offer of a false god.

More hot toast and butter thoughts

I do have a friend with a heart condition who said he was too busy to exercise.  This cartoon must have been drawn specially for him.  How can you not find time for something that might help to save, or at least prolong your life?  Or is refusing to exercise despite 'doctor's orders' no more than a personal lifestyle choice we are all entitled to make?  Of course it is.  And am I any better for occasionally drinking more wine than is sensible for me?  Knowledge of the ill-health that might result from any behaviour is clearly not in itself enough to prevent the behaviour.  Everyone in Western Europe knows that smoking is harmful to your health but millions of people still do it.  There are other far more powerful influences at work when people chose to smoke, eat to excess, refuse to exercise, drink too much, drive too fast, take illegal drugs, and so on.  I was quite taken recently by a consultant from a major teaching hospital in London who kept repeating (in a radio debate about obesity)  that people get fat because they eat too much, that exercise plays a secondary and marginal role in weight loss (although not in general health and fitness).  I like that and it's obvious when you hear it.  Exercise all you like and keep eating too much and you won't lose weight.  Stop eating and take no exercise and still the pounds will fall off you.  Well said, doctor.  Now where is that hot toast and butter?

Raafat al-Ghosain

Thanks again to Robert Fisk of The Independent newspaper for reminding us of the following.  I paraphrase slightly.  'Just after 2am on 15 April 1986 the Americans killed a young woman, Raafat al-Ghosain.  Three bombs dropped from an F-111 aircraft  "impacted in the vicinity of the French embassy" and caused – to use the usual callous euphemism – "collateral damage".  Her father described the scene. "She was lying on her back with the head turned on the right cheek, she was intact, her hair undisturbed, and a small streak of blood coming from the top side of her head, flowing down her left cheek." Ms Ghosain was aged 18, a graduate from an English school on holiday from London, a promising and beautiful artist whose individual death went unrecorded in the country that killed her a quarter of a century ago. Her mother was Lebanese and her father Palestinian, working for a Libyan oil company. She is forgotten today.'