Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

Window Cleaning Aaron Douglas

There are so many possible reasons why a book jumps into one's hand. Luscious new paperbacks provoke greed to own them purely as objects, colourful wedges of words. Second-hand books seduce by the feel of their paper, binding and the comfortable imprint of previous ownership. Some books need rescuing, dusty tales larded with unfashionable woodcuts get a last chance to engage interest.

The library itself is a sort of bibliographic bordello, where the long, the short, the exotic, the frightening, the beautiful and the everyday are paraded for your pleasure. Titles entice you, first paragraphs hook you, blurbs do their job and wheel you in.

Sometimes you look at the face of an author on a bookjacket and just want to know more about them. That's how I found the Scottish writer Candia McWilliam back in the seventies, when she stared at me from the cover of her first novel A Case of Knives. The writing was as magnetic as its author, a crisp, clean, elegant English carrying a sharp, unsettling plot. Two more novels followed, slowly, Little Stranger in 1989 and the 1994 Guardian Fiction Prizewinner Debatable Land. I gobbled them up, they made big critical ripples and then - nothing.

From time to time I checked her on the Net and in catalogues. She had continued reviewing and journalism, but I never came across it. Then suddenly at this year's Edinburgh festival she surfaced and told the story of her last twenty years, as riveting a tale as any of her own novels - a trip to hell and back.

I like this piece that she wrote for the Guardian on the death of Stanley Kubrick. A woman with a vocabulary. With luck she will pick up her pen again, I'd like to see what a mature and bruised McWilliam would produce now.

Today, journalist Matthew Parris used that handy term post-spin spin in discussing David Miliband's statement on council tax revaluation. The government's U-turn is being presented as a piece of openness, a frank admission of a change of mind.

The new humility makes standing still look conveniently like activity; it may easily confound opposing parties by finally embracing their ideas.

To paraphrase Parris: "The baldness of this recantation has about it the odour of incompetence, but there is insolence in the way it has been contrived. The best that can be said for it is that it is, finally and at least, honest."

And so our cynicism peaks as, wandering in the political maze of mirrors, we now perceive honesty as spin.

Today, after a year of pussyfooting around with several builders, our ancient bathroom met its end. The huge old iron bath was bashed to pieces and the basin took two men to carry it out. Those of you with the en suite/elegant-living mentality will hardly believe that we have been living with a totally Nile Green bathroom dating from 1950 (when it was quite the thing). This was my Aunt's house and, in her nineties, she saw no reason to change anything for purely cosmetic reasons; a stoical lady, raised on oil lamps and tin baths, her attitude was "It's fine for me, you can alter it all when I'm gone."

Well, when we took over, the bathroom came well down a list of priorities for this largely unreconstituted house. Now it will be a relief not to wield the mastic gun every few months, to fight a losing battle to keep old grout clean and to feel no need to apologise for the utterly-green-experience offered to abluting guests.

I was sad to see the sledgehammer crash in, all the same. Bums of the much-loved had sat in that bath over half a century. The chrome taps, purchased in 1949 for goodness' sake, were intact, still shining, the print on them saying hot and cold still black. The solid rubber ring on the shower head the original. I bought an expensive shower tap for the Colonel's bathroom and had to replace two of its parts in under a year.

If all goes well, the Nile will turn gently cream and white, all downlit and vanity unit-ed in just a week's time.

I re-read the excellent Graham Swift's Waterland today, a novel that blends its Norfolk fenland narrative with a dialectic between a teacher and his pupils on the value of history. In a central paragraph he compares history to the endless silty struggle of the fens.

'There's this thing called progress. But it doesn't progress, it doesn't go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It's progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn't go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires'

This must reverberate with most older people; on reaching the sixties you will have moved a deal of silt in your time - at work, in organisations, in social interaction. In the beginning comes the time of ideas, faith in new methodologies, change and improvement. Novelty provokes the energy and confidence to push aside old ways. All movement is forward, upward.

Later, one perceives that the same problems come circling again, the platforms built - say, on new technologies - founder and are rethought. Old ways, discarded within one's memory span, are re-discovered and packaged as new ideas. Old intrasigencies still run like fault lines in a block of marble, undermining new models. However well you maintain your edge and enthusiasm, eventually one day you will think "Oh, God, no, not that old chestnut again".

In my time in libraries I went through two local government reorganisations, countless regroupings of directorates and departments. I have seen priority given to taking books out to the people, then on bringing people in to the books. I have struggled to mitigate crackpot educational theories, now discredited. I have laid out libraries in a dozen different formats and seen them finally return to Dewey by public request. Still I see the old pre-occupations with identity and image and the curse of an almost genetic amateurism.

I like Swift's analogy; essentially one is in a holding pattern where progress is in making systems work for people within the temporary span of one's reach and capabilities. The next lot to drive the dredger will work over the small heap you have made. Even revolutionaries and geniuses lay down but a sandbank that will shift in time.

As we are sort of on the topic of nuclear power stations - I regularly check a nuclear information briefing service. Just monitoring the progress towards location of the UK's underground nuclear waste solution, you understand. Yesterday I read there this astonishing (slightly paraphrased) item:

'BNFL has a strange problem at one of its sites - what to do with hundreds of dead seagulls and pigeons. Because the birds can carry radioactive waste outwith the site, BNFL employs people to shoot any gull or pigeon that lands on the hazardous waste stores. The birds are then classified as low level wastes, but cannot be taken to the national dump because they become putrid when they decay. They therefore store the carcasses in freezers until a decision is made what to do with the birds. A special landfill site is being considered but no decision has been taken.'

Thanks to my virus and a cluster of social engagements, I have shamefully ignored my blog.

We had arranged some trips which I was loath to give up, so I coughed my way through a visit to friends in South London, a walk and picnic at a new local nature reserve, a chatty lunch in Norwich and a wet grey Sunday at Orford on the Suffolk coast. Wet and grey it may have been, but there were consolations. I found this dream house about which I am still fantasising, every single thing about it pleased my eye. Should my premium bonds come up I will be knocking on that elegant door waving bagfuls of banknotes which would, understandably, be rejected. The back garden (walled, of course) was a tumble of jasmine, honeysuckle and old rambling roses.

Following a local-crab salad for lunch, in lieu of a boat trip into thick mist we spent time in another dream place. Out back of a comfy Georgian house near the quay is an old conservatory room; in the garden a colourful flock of mixed bantams pecks about. A Save the Children collecting box hangs on the door with a sign - 'Help yourself to as many books as you want and put what you think they're worth in the box'.

Inside, floor to ceiling is a mish mash of the good, bad and ugly; fifties paperbacks, dead sermons, cookbooks that came free with primitive gas stoves, a first edition Huxley, sets of Shaw and Dickens - the whole lovely chaos offering a couple of hours of happy bibliosnuffling.

I came away with eight for a fiver; Carson McCullers, Anita Desai in an original Indian edition printed on see-through paper, three verse anthologies, novels by Barbara Trapido and Martin Amis and an early Penguin edition of Sir Gawain.

The trouble with a good fruit year is that everyone has too much. Mary-Anne in the village offers her produce to help with church funds, but the apples are sticking. I got a curiously contorted marrow from the blue tray last week which was delicious with cheese sauce.

Our apple crop is huge, especially the fine Bramley cookers. I am going to have an applesauce day tomorrow, cooking up portions for the freezer. The eaters are not quite ready although they are falling. I regularly jump out of my skin as one thumps behind me when I'm working.

Now the deer come in at dusk to find the day's windfalls. Walking quietly by them under cover of the blackberry brambles, the noise of their munching sounds loud in the quiet evening.

If you have plenty of tomatoes you could do worse than use them to make Joyce's very easy and delicious recipe for Tomato Relish. This is heaven with ham and cold meats:

In a pan, sprinkle a litte salt over 4lbs of peeled and sliced tomatoes and 5 large sliced onions. Press down tightly and just barely cover with malt vinegar. Boil for 5 minutes. Stir in 2lbs sugar. Blend together 1 heaped tablespoon of mustard and one heaped tablespoon of curry powder with a little of the vinegar and add to tomato mixture. Cook gently for about 1 hour. Pot in warm jars and cover. Leave to mature for about 2 weeks. It is normal for it to be quite runny.

It's a time of the passing of many familiar things. In my village a dear old run-down thatched cottage, once a thriving tea-room, is now a pile of rubble. Four standard residential boxes are to replace it. The government-sanctioned bonanza for developers whirls on, squashing in the hutches as tightly and inappropriately as possible.

The last of a row of bricked-round railway carriages is about to go, ghost of real rural poverty. Ten of these old coaches were the first houses along my road. We used to visit a lady and her (ex-Canadian lumberjack) brother who lived in one opposite. It was primitive - with a rickety iron stove spilling ash onto the lino, its flue taking the smoke through a rough hole punched in the ceiling. Flowered wallpaper plastered the lumpy walls where the seats had been removed and the wooden floors flexed under foot. It was pretend heaven for us kids with its metal ash-trays and leather window straps intact. That particular carriage has been moved into a local garden and beautifully restored. We are praying that, when the last one is taken apart, it will be all in one piece under the plasterboard and bricks. They'll try to preserve it for sure, there's big money in the quaint past.

In the adjacent small market town the good old unsophisticated Co-op has given up and bowed to the power of a new Tesco store. This is the last of three grocers priced out of the high street. Tesco is about half a mile out of the centre, old folk and those without cars will have only their feet to get them there. It is rumoured that a whole estate of hutches will go up on the Co-op site.

Day by day, pragmatism and economics inevitably take away small-scale things that made communities distinct. They remove props that made the less well-off able to cope; once shops would cheerfully sell one egg, 2 ounces of butter, a couple of rashers, a pack of broken biscuits. No-one believes it, but there are still plenty of people round here who would be glad of such arrangements by the end of the week.

It's no good moaning, we in rural parts must get real. There is no sensible argument to persuade commercial enterprises to carry unprofitable elements, even though their loss causes social deprivation. The state can't carry everything, and what it tries to pick up and carry is often passed down to beleagured local authorities that have insufficient funds and manpower.

One more illustration of this comes in news from the USA recently that the good old Greyhound buses are to drop stops in hundreds of rural locations. 'The decision compounds a sense of dislocation and increasing distance from the country's booming urban centers - not to mention the loss of a cheap ticket to the big city for many rural poor, especially in the South, for whom the Greyhound remains an important connector to country roots.'

Things will change one day when the oil runs low and personal transport is prised away from us, when the economically favourable edge of the big supermakets is blunted by rising costs of transport and production and it becomes more practicable to buy small and local again. But I don't expect that I shall see it.

I know that two of my readers are pleased if I manage to jot down a few of these ISIHAC gems:

Definitions
Routine - an adolescent kangaroo
Gyroscope - an instrument for locating dole money
Arsenic - to steal buttocks
Disillusion - slag off Paul Daniels
Polaroid - an unpleasant ailment in arctic conditions

Can can - a couple of tins
Toucan - a couple of tins
Tin Tin - a comic strip

Mayfly - British Airways flight
Impolite - a flaming goblin

Movies to appeal to the Scottish Film Club:

Sporrans of Arabia
Dundee Bloody Dundee
Scone in the Wind
Grampian the Wonder Horse
Sex, Och Ayes and Videotape
Kilt Bill
Dr. Noo
Unbearable Loch Ness of Being
Fear and Midlothian in Las Vegas

Ivan Durrant. 1987

The full extent of the tragedy in the USA has unfolded today on the news bulletins.
'The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.'

Concern for mere architecture faded in importance with thousands, not hundreds dead, desperate people, imminent pestilence, total evacuation. All one can do is watch, pray and hope.