Annals of Queen Lignacia, The Merciful

Wed Apr 13, 2016 7:31 pm

     My Tube of Camponotus Ligniperdus of Queen + 6–10 workers arrived today and it has been entertainment from the start. First of all, the Queen is very beautiful, with a goldey shining abdomen, laden with eggs I should say. A lot of interest and activity.
     However once opened, I noticed that a worker was tugging very firmly on the cotton wool bung and I felt myself in a dilemma. Antkit's Ytong Glass nests aren't ready yet, so I also ordered a little 14 x 7 x 6 cm Arena to keep them in to await the new "Coming in April" nests.
     But that one's not here yet, and I wanted a bigger box for now!
     Fortunately my carer had picked me up a plastic box in Amwell's Aquatics with a double-hinged lid, so I have put the tube in that. I also put in a piece of rotten wood I brought from India, which has been used by ants in the past as there are tunnels in it. A few days ago I boiled it for half an hour, and scooped out some of the sand from a tunnel which previous ants had used.
     One of the workers was "lame" as he only had one antenna, but he had a key "rôle" in the exploration of the new halfway house*. He (she) went to the entrance to "sniff the air" (as it were). The the results were reported (via antenna touching) to the rest of the young colony, and after that another worker was sent out for a recce.
     Much exploring of the bug box which is now fully mapped out I reckon.
     The Queen started to venture out, but later she returned to drink from the cotton wool bung.
     Now the full colony has returned to the test tube which is their first home.

*Oh that governments could do the same with their disabled citizens!"

Nor Joy Nor Sorrow

If Joy has got no limits
Then Sorrow knows no bounds
When Joy and Pain are interlinked
And all my letters fully inked
And knotted cords are all unkinked
My sorrows can't be drowned.

Not an Easy Ride (or an Easy Read!) for me!

Resist by Sarah Crossan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


     At the end of Sarah Crossan's first novel in this duo I was left breathless, excited and looking forward to finding out how the tale concluded. The destruction of the 'The Grove' — another domed area where trees were now flourishing, and people were at last living away from the tyrannous Air Tax — had left me feeling shattered and sad. I was looking forward with great expectation, to reading about the Resistance as it built slowly and steadily.
   

I was also gripped by the fact that the novel read from first person perspectives. But unfortunately those perspectives which held me in the first novel had begun to lose their grip: Bea, Jude, Quinn, Ronan, Alina — oh dear, the trouble was there were too many ‘I’-s, and I ended up becoming thoroughly confused. I thought that by this volume I would have settled down as to which   ‘I’ was which, but sadly no. The ‘I’-s were too much of a muchness whereas interesting characters such as Maude, Jazz and Vanya and even the thug Maks did not get the chance to tell their own story.


Added to the profusion of ‘I’-s, we have the position of all the various masks and air tanks in the story. All characters need them, even if some have been trained to breathe thinner air, but if this is the situation you’ve set up, you do need to remember which air cylinder is where, and how much oxygen is left in each. It can be done, but it makes hard work for the author and even harder work for the reader to remember where all these devices are, and how much oxygen —full  half or empty—  each one has.


     A fragile setup was created with the set-up in the first volume and it takes a lot of skill and finessing to hold this together, and hopefully strengthen it more. I was prepared to stick with it, looking forward to seeing it all gelling together, but the addition of the ticking time bomb towards the end added to the already hackneyed flavour of the narrative. Yet it was anything but exciting.  And the solar respirator stinking? Dear, they stunk from the very beginning, and that would have been a good time to bring in a device to deal with it.


In a word, the story didn’t work out well for this reader although I held out high hopes for it. The concept of the clunky solar respirators ease the problem a little. Still, the inquiring mind is bound to wonder how these contraptions work. They couldn't possibly of course, yet the tale might have been redeemed a bit if the author had at least gone through the motions of an explanation!



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The Perfect City. Where I Melted.

I went to see a separate drama
I went to see another show
The drama lost its otherness and
It was at that point I began to know
That 'I' and 'you' aren't different — No Way!
There is no line 'twixt 'you' and 'me'
If 'I' and 'you' have meaning — Do we?
It's not for you or me to say.

So it was for me, as these lines circled round that I had trouble focusing on the difference between a watcher and watched as the debut performance of 'The Perfect City' unfolded before me in the Friends Meeting House in Cambridge. Although truly speaking they came in from the side, gesticulating in conversation one with another, singing and bewailing about what might happen next in they were found to be holding an illegal Meeting. From all sides they came, backward and forward and round about ↻. I was greeted by the beautiful face of Timothy Benjamin, a Peter Pan of an actor. Together with Jamie Noar, who plays William Penn singing their heartfelt dreams of the inner spirit reflected in the beauty of this seeming external world in front of us. Their dreams resonated with my own youthful aspirations, their love was my love and when Máirín Miller came on, the dewy moisture in her eyes caused mine to well up too and holding back the tears wasn't an easy matter.

The actors sang in stereo, the actors' voices were quadraphonic, playing and dancing behind you, in front of you, sitting beside you and falling on the ground at your feet. And in true Greek tragedic manner, the beatings, whippings and hanging of Quakers were performed off-stage, in this case in the room adjoining the main Meeting Hall upstairs. Vocal indeed were the sounds of the wailings and sufferings, and many a head was turned.

When I slept that night, the story and lyrics were floating in my dreams and as this week progresses the story is seldom far from my mind and it has roosted to take up place in my heart. 

See The Perfect City 

Heaven's Shadow left me in the Doldrums

Heaven's Shadow by David S. Goyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


It makes a wonderful and frightening tale to think that if aliens wanted to attack and cripple us it wouldn't be that hard: all you'd have to do was put a few rocks 50 km or so on a trajectory for our major cities, then sit back and watch the fun begin. The idea certainly has a lot going for it. That's a pretty 'primitive' way of achieving your goal, but at least it should work. Still when you think about it these aliens can't be expected to possess this aim of : "If it moves, shoot it! If it's stationary, keep it in your sights!" Extraterrestrial life would surely have far more subtle ways of going about this. Still, even this chucking missiles idea does have a lot going for it, and it can make an engrossing read, especially if their real intentions are far more subtle, and far more disturbing than a gang warfare in space.

    And yet engrossment was the last thing I found with this book. In fact I struggled like anything to get through it. To start with, the cast of characters is huge. Most of them are quite unmemorable in fact, and I found I had to keep referring to the dramatis personae to remind myself who was who. Already I was sighing and giving it the nick name of Heaven’s Flaming Shadow before picking it up and wading through another chunk. I really struggled with it and had to push myself to finish it because the sight of it lying around was just too irritating.

As I said, a wonderful idea but such a shame it was executed this way. It muddled and it lumbered, and really I felt this collaboration just wasn't really thought out. For one example, take Harley, the ex-astronaut. Around page 45 we learn that Harley uses a wheelchair, which is fine. But the Wheelchair is an important prop in a story, and the reader, who can only work on words - not visuals- does need the occasional reminder of this important logistic. Yet  we're not reminded about this until we're into the final 100 pages, and the last lap is in sight. Add to this the fact that the book could do with a good proofread - I kept on having to decode ‛wed’ as ‛we'd’ and ‛shed’ as ‛she'd’ - and I found I had a cluttered tale that I'm now really glad to see the back of.



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Anushti

Anushti ~ A Hard Working Girl

Two days ago I had no idea who or what Anushti was. Yesterday I knew. And tomorrow, and in the coming days I'll continue to remember her, just when others in the village are starting to forget her. I can't remember anything about her because I never knew or saw anything of her apart from her playing over my wall; so what I have to remember is just little scraps of other people's memories. And what people remember is this.

      Anushti was a very independent and rather clever little miss. As soon as she'd grasped the essentials of things like walking and speaking simple words, she had set her eye to watching Mum and copying simple tasks. Anushti noticed that Water was about the first and foremost necessity of family life. After watching her Mum and other elders trooping daily to the village tank and filling their pitchers, she must have started calculating in her small, exquisite mind, that there was some way she could help. Her tiny, practical life must have realised that it would be a very long time indeed before she could carry a water pot as heavy as Mum's, yet the other end of "Can't" is "Can" and Anushti's business-like way of going about things made her realise that she could help by carrying her own load. She called for a small water pot and as soon as it came to her hand she began to queue when the water was switched on. The grown-up women, immediately charmed by the independence of the little mite, allowed her straight to the front. So in no time at all, the lass was back home, tidying and folding up her clothes. Tidiness was Anushti, and a bright and industrious future awaited her.

      This was her problem : the little girl became so independent and capable that parents, aunties and uncles left her to what she enjoyed, and was so very good at. Warnings not to go near the underground water tank may not have been given. It's not my place to inquire. Perhaps a day came when it was raining, or perhaps for some other reason the mind of Anushti had decided not to go all the way to the village pump. Perhaps she thought she could figure out a way of getting water from the family underground tank. In any case, she had tried something, which caused her to fall in. With full confidence in her capabilities, aunties had been indoors, watching a soap-opera on the telly.

      Anushti was about three years old. She was drowned yesterday, buried at noon today, and all I hear from my veranda now is the occasional stifled sob.

               Good-bye, little girl.

Moving in Frozen Frames

Such Fine Boys by Les Brookes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I felt myself pulled into this story right away. So many of the scenes and situations resonated with similar events which had occurred in my own life. It was, for me,  a painting which moved when looked at closely, or it or at least it appeared to. Or was what I saw just the flicker of shadow seen from the corner of my eye? Stretched on the frame of the 1960’s, the canvas so tight you can see the strands and colours of daylight peeping through the pin-prick holes, the author has then painted a broad wash of faun across the hempen fibres and without letting it dry out fully he’s gone on to apply a broad coat of the ’seventies with its yellows and golden browns. On top of all this, Brookes has laid the pattern of the ’eighties with its greedy shades of green, profit and spite.

    Because he hasn’t let the colours completely dry, the chemistry of the picture is still active, or so it seems, because it’s one of those pictures where you stare fascinated at one corner of colour and activity and see the Pub, the Black Horse, with its northern bon homie and mateyness. Billy the cheerful young barman is one of the main attractions with his banter and his nimble pulling of pints and halves, his smile and his sexy bum. Move your eye to another area of the painting, and the colours look twisted and Gothic; what started as a skilled attempt at the pointy noses and ears of hobgoblins has melted and run into a sickly dark smudge. That’s Arthur.

    Billy and Matt strike up a relationship, which seems to work, in different ways depending on whose point of view you’re considering. Matt comes over to me as pushy and selfish, verging at times into the mind-set of a spoilt brat, with poorly educated Billy tagging along behind as the sexy victim. It was at the beginning of Part Two, seen through Billy’s eyes, that I shouted with joy, realising that I was being given a dose of the Rashomon effect. This had become my favourite literary form when I first viewed it in the TV Series Talking to a Stranger, way back in 1966. Sad it is that this form has suffered so much neglect. So my spirits rose as further I realised, leafing my way through the pages of Part Two that I now found myself drawing parallels with the classic tale A Case of Knives by Candia McWilliam, fine mistress and purveyor of matters literary that she is.

A Case of Knives, however, is a Rashomon work which winds you up in an ever-tightening spring, whereas Such Fine Boys coils you up in Part One and Part Two before releasing its tension and letting its latent energy bleed and wash back into the picture. It’s as if the artist had decided that something wasn’t quite right with the painting yet, so he’d sprayed it with a fine mist to encourage the hues to blend some more. Part Three tells the tale from another point of view, from someone we hardly know. Another of Matt’s pick-ups, he’s lucky that he’s even had the mention of a name. He ends up feeling used, feeling that Matt is a complete shit in his handling of matters of the heart, and here I have to agree with Clint (that’s his name!). If the tale is seen as driven by narrative, then it slowly starts to run out of steam in this section, and if judged on those criteria the story would deflate.

    Yet for me, it was deeper than that. Even though the story had almost petered to a complete halt (and I must confess I was hoping that things were going to tighten up from now on), the book was seen in yet a different light by Part Four. From an individual's perspective, we had moved to becoming the all-seeing eye. If the novel has been freshly sprayed with water mist in Part Three to slow the drying, in Part Four, in sunny Greece, we see the entire painting put out to dry and harden, to freeze the frames and the cameos of the characters. We can see that Billy really is beautiful and despite his promiscuous actions he’s little more than an innocent boy at heart who didn’t, and shouldn’t grow up to be a man. The canvas is hardening nicely now. The murky smudge in the corner is all that remains of Arthur, the wet character of Matt is starting to gain grain and substance as he leaves his brattish traits in the past. As it dries to a hard nail-tapping finish, the author has frozen time. Nothing can happen now, and we are glad, knowing what the end would be, were the story to continue to run.

   I found the synopsis  disappointing: it told me too much of what I'd rather have found out for myself yet left unsaid the factors which would entice me into a book which turned out to be a fascinating and unusual experience. It would be great if the author had another story in him, waiting to break out.




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Some Are Different. Some Are More Different than Others.

Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different by Karen Blumenthal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These days if someone told you to “Think Different” you'd probably get no raised eyebrows, but if you'd said the same thing ten or twelve years ago you'd have raised quite a flock, and probably gained a few admonishments as well. It was bad grammar in those days because you were supposed to think different-ly.
Yet this article isn't about grammar books or anything like that : It's the advertising slogan launched by a computer company called Apple. And it was in Autumn 1997. The educationalists threw up their hands at the incorrectness of it all, never once pausing to take a closer look at how cute and clever the phrase was.

I didn’t know this, and now I know it I’m really glad I do, along with all the other factoids about Steve Jobs and his Apple Company. I have never owned any Apple product, and after reading this book I think I’m less inclined to go in for one than I was before starting it. Chiefly because almost every one of his products had some glaring fault, each of which happened to work against me — and my disability — in a direct way.

For some reason Mr Jobs hated the CD drawer on computers, so he removed it, to outcries from Apple owners. The same had happened earlier with the floppy disc drive (at that time users were heavily dependent on them). Then later on he then decided that he didn’t like cursor keys (arrow keys) on Apple keyboards. They are the keys which enable you to nudge your cursor up or down the lines, or left and right within the line so you can position it exactly where you want. They were removed without so much as a ‘by your leave’ with even greater outcries from faithful users, all on Mr Jobs’s whim. So far all the things he detested have been things which make my life far easier.

So why did a man’s products, which went so much against the grain against much of what customers wanted become the owner of one of the wealthiest corporations in the world with a customer loyalty base which verged and often over-tipped into the devotional?* And why did I find the Steve Jobs story so riveting, to the extent that I completely lost track of time?

As the tale moved on, my own and Jobs's visions drifted further and further apart. Jobs envisaged phones and electronic gadgets becoming intimately interwoven into our personal lives until their presence separate from the body-mind complex lost all distinction. The final step was his conviction that Apple gadgets should be built with no on/off switch. As the gadgets should be woven into the warp and woof of our life pattern, so too should their 'consciousness' never fall deeper than slumber.

Steve Jobs developed symptoms of pancreatic cancer which he initially tried to bully away in typical autocratic style, (initially with a shot of pethidine in the bum). At one point he'd lie about his condition by informing share holders that it had been cured, a story which aficionados and the markets must have swallowed whole. Certainly the lie prevented Apple stock from taking a nose-dive. The tiny Islets of Langerhans are, however, immune to bluster, genius and deception. Despite the best which modern medicine can do, carcinogenic spores infiltrated every cell of this phenomenal, maddening and brilliant billionaire. In the final weeks of his life, Steve receives a visit from his old friend and colleague Bill Gates and the two spend 3 hours reminiscing on old times.

Towards the end Mr Steve debated, deep within the labyrinth of his madcap genius mind, whether God existed or not, deciding that the odds must be 50:50. On balance though he thought it was more likely that it was like an on/off switch and that at the end we simply winked out of existence just as we’d once winked in. Maybe that’s why I never wanted an off-on switch on any of my devices, he chortled, and I had a little laugh too, even if it wasn’t for quite the same reason.

I found this a rivetting read, without being sure why.


*Because Windows' operating system is so awful?

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Yes I Was Haunted

The Last Talk with Lola Faye by Thomas H. Cook

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Yes I was Haunted ~ The Last Talk with Lola Faye

Just when I was congratulating myself that I no longer had anything to do with Kindle's Daily Deal I took a wee peek and saw that today's offering was the usual waffle-and-maple-syrup fare. Nice when you bite into it, but then you read the label more closely and see that it's only 10% real maple-syrup and the waffle mix had far too much bicarb in and you swear you're never going to eat one of those again.
   What I didn't suspect was that the label to this packet had a little Alice Door in it. The book didn't interest me really. I could easily prove it by downloading the free sample just to prove how right I was. The sample arrived, remarkably quickly too considering it was Kindle PaperWhite with its 'free 3G' which is so grotty it's almost a Con.

The Haunting ~
Hauntings are sneaky, let's not mince our words about this. They target the unwary. They're worse than that little old aunty who's no trouble to anyone, and whom you'd hardly know was there - at least that's the line she feeds you when she's touting for somewhere to stay.
   The second line such aunties feed you is that they don't eat enough to keep a little bird alive. It's true, unfortunately. They don't. They Nibble. They nibble at the the tastiest bit of pie which you were saving for later; they pull off knobs of cottage loaves and start into fresh blocks of cheese. They eat so many corners off rectangular food items you're left with little but curves and sculpted sweeps. You never really see them at it, until you could swear you're going to the shops far more often than you used to, and your weekly total food bill has crept way above inflation.

Double Disguise
Imagine that you'd dressed for an evening out at The Theatre. You're going to see Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and it's going to be your fourth time. You've selected your fondest, wistfullest, yeah bestest outfit in your wardrobe as you've heard it said that the new actress playing Blanche Dubois is Something Else. That's why you've gone to so much trouble trouble dressing.
  When you get to the Stage you find you're right. Spot on..
   Except that in this tale, Blanche isn't quite Blanche, is she? This lady who's described as drab, humdrum, shabby, a mere redneck girl, seems to have got a remarkably pointed mind, even if she gets it from the boring show Dragnet, or the magazine article she half read while waiting to see the doctor.
   If Lola Faye backwater education makes her perception little more than a rusty blade, it's evident to me at least that one one of those hicks sure got the knack of brewing poky cider vinegar to use in knife sharpening. When Lola Faye's blade is dipped in this acerbic brew, the knife becomes insidious. Yet she always remains the shabby, dowdy stacker girl who just asks a question or two. To clear things up, considering it's going to be their Last Talk.

Columbo Niggles
Before I knew it, I found that Lola Faye was creeping under my skin. Like chiggers*, it was hell to live with, but Heaven when I scratched it. And I did plenty of that. Lola Faye made her shabby entrance into my slumber, dropped a few words and made to leave. "Come Back!" I called. "Read on then!" came the rejoinder. Which was exactly what I did. At 4.10 am, with my cup of hot Darjeeling and my cooling fan, I read on, sipping until daybreak when I heard a voice through the window telling me my hot water was ready and it was time to bathe.
   My day's schedule was full and there'd be no time for Lola Faye today. Except after bathing and being swadled, there seemed little harm in slipping out a hand to peek at the Kindle. Especially when it tells you you've got 10 minutes remaining until you reach the end of the chapter, when she jacks out that there's 'just one more thing.'

*Chiggers don't really get under your skin. They just itch, making sure it's you who does the scratching. As well as the blame for the ensuing sepsis.

Home Sick
Dammit, I'm going to miss her, the shabby backwoods girl who educates herself from magazines and TV shows. Never has a humdrum character with such an exotic name made so much impression on me; without revealing too much of her own story, Lola Faye manages to expose ever increasing piles of evidence against the protagonist Luke.  Luke whom we're supposed to sympathise with. Our taste buds somehow grow against him and we warm to Lola, even as we also admit that we don't know why.
   It all seems so complete, so done-and-dusted, until we're almost convinced we had a peek of Lieutenant Colombo's tatty overcoat under that frumpy dress of hers.

Epilogue
This little review was written using the Android App called "NoteStacks" I'd been trying to use it for months now and felt perplexed because I didn't really understand it. I only had that unshakeable "This-Is-Good" feeling. By the time I'd reached the 'use or chuck it' stage I wrote to its developer in frustration. He replied very quickly with a few hints which got me up-and-running straight away. After I'd written 100 lines on This Is Yet Another App I thought "Time to do Something Proper with it".
    Yes, it passes muster. The Android App, and The Book too.



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Liked by Many — Adored by Me

People Like Us by Doug Cooper-Spencer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Life is nothing if not full of extremes, and at the beginning of the scale, what can beat the painful smelly business of being born? An early memory for me is white-coated men carrying tinkly trays of little bottles. Motley smells would waft along with them as they marched past. Some of those phials contained ether, and if I leaned towards them, provided the corridor draught was in my favour I’d feel my soul ascending on its path to Cloud Nine, all sweet and echoey, even if it wasn’t long before another man, this time carrying badly-stoppered phials of human waste pulled me back down to the scatole-laden vapours with a snap.

Yet no lasting enjoyment is ever truly known by ups or downs. Let’s wind the clocking forward to a time when the aromas carry a far more gentle hue, softly tinted with ochre browns and chestnut golds. Autumn is the time which greets my eyes and ears these days. The earlier tantrums are mostly over and the other kids have stopped laughing at my toilet jokes. The tang of hormones, love and crushes is making its entrance and I mopily empathise with Jane Eyre or Richardson’s girl-servant Pamela.

I mooch about in bookshops, touching and sniffing the books I can reach, and yearning for the ones I can’t. And there’s always that smell, of brown and gold and August, or the fusty waft of churches. Village bookshops were the first to arrive, then David’s in Cambridge for second-hand volumes, or even the palatial Heffers. They say it was all started by a Reverend with a loan of just fifty quid. They also say Bowes and Bowes is far better!

Then bones and muscles grew older as the books gained years and weight and before too long the reading habit declined with the burgeoning weight of paper books, only to rise again in 2010 with the birth of the Kindle — that magic grey ingot which sucked any number of books out of the ether and placed them on a screen for me to read. They whispered in feather-like and whether they were a Mills & Boone Romance or the Complete Shakespeare, they all weighed exactly the same. They all weighed nothing, that Magic Number which is both the marvel of mathematicians and refuge of the mystics. Kindles don’t really have a smell but if you were to dip a joss stick in water and light it while it’s wet, the smouldering sandal-and-cow-dung powder would give you a pleasing aroma not far off from the old leather-bound tomes, or at least they’d give an idea of what a Kindle would smell like.

Samples are downloaded. I take a look the publisher to see if a table of contents has been included, or whether any images are recalled. Canongate is good — but do watch out for the odd wasp in the ointment there; Icon Books — not bad; Bloomsbury — pretty safe as long as it’s not Harry Potter or other kids’ stuff—Mr Creecher was painful; Faber — not bad at all, and they’ve got a nice thick medical tap root in their soul. Gollancz: Even though they’ve lost that plain yellow dust jacket, I’m pretty much a fan, even if the new stuff does get pretty scary. If there’s no publisher, then I’m very wary indeed. Why ever not? If they’re that good, you’d’ve thought they’d’ve been picked up by now.

This was the factor which initially prevented me from purchasing This Place of Men by Doug Cooper Spencer. I felt its price was steep. Yet never have I been so pre-judgmental, never so cautious in making my purchase, and never have I been as delighted as when on that unforgettable morning I pressed the download button for this book and began to read it. I didn’t warm to it gradually, I didn’t find my protective shell of withering ice gradually softening ….what happened wasn’t even some mid-point between these extremes. For me, it was... Well let’s say that were this book a pavement and I was taking a stroll on its cover, a crack opened between the flagstones and I suddenly fell right down into the gap. I was Alice in Fiction Land, except that the roles were reversed. It was all so very real for me. The lovely Terrell with his good wife Karen and her spiteful sister Tess, their huggable kids Kenya and Abassi. Karen with her Director of Studies and the beautiful troubled student Luther — all were people I felt as if I knew. Even though they all bore their own weight, I continued to feel, on my second visit, welcome to be the invisible budgie perching on their fictional shoulders, even if the problems they were undergoing were private, painful and nothing to do with me.

It’s a world of heart-break and pain. Terrell is a thoroughly good man and an excellent Dad to his children Kenya and Abassi and his wife Karen is caring and full of love too. Yet all this is spoiled by their church’s attitude to homosexuality. Somewhere in the murky past, the community church has worked its malice by splitting up the love between Terrell and his teenage chum Otis. Lovers in their mid- to late-teens with Terrell just six months younger, the Community Church hierarchy waits for Otis to reach the age of majority before pouncing on Otis who is taken to court where he serves a prison sentence for having an inappropriate relationship with a minor. Terrell is deeply programmed into changing his sexual orientation, and introduced to Karen, who’s to become his wife. I dropped into the world of the character and the Kindle disappeared, as did the mundane domestic chores I needed to attend to.

In an agonising sequence which sees Terrell chucked out by his wife (I know what that’s like!) he ends up renting a room in a poorer part of town, among the down-and-outs, hustlers and drug pushers. Bleak indeed compared to the plush home which he and Karen had built up over the years, with the cream filling of the children holding the sponge cake of the marriage together. Gone are the Sunday roasts with Terrell carving at the family table, gone the land line telephone and gone the car. In comes the draughty room with its bed-bugs and and their acrid whiff, the flickering shadeless light and the moody money-meter, economy buns, tinned baked beans and just-pour-hot-water snacks.

Memories of hardship always bring their smells back to me: Damp bedding, stale cigarettes and rotting tomatoes when the Soho veg market sweeps up its peelings at the close of the day, sparring with the thrill of the monthly cruise where the under-whiff of males in rut contrasts sharply with the sudden ammonia tang of the unzipped fly. The following day Terrell rises to survey the street from his window. Opposite doors are opening in other houses as commuters prepare to go to work, most by ’bus or tram and a few by car. Others like Terrell don’t go anywhere. He doesn’t have a job now. His three weeks of 50% compassionate retainers have now expired and he doesn’t have a job any more. Winkling a hermit crab out of its very own shell will have that effect. With no job and no respect any more his home diet is now one of scorn and ridicule, his new digs are unhappy and ill-fitting. The door opens opposite and an old lady lets out a middle-aged man and waves him good-bye. She doesn’t shut the door behind him but scans the street with her ancient X-Ray eyes. The street and its doors having passed her scrutiny she levels her gaze up a plane and inspects the windows. A friendly wave is made to Terrell who cautiously returns it.

What a nosey old so-and-so I think to myself, wondering what business it is of hers logging everybody in and out as they come and go about their own affairs, never thinking that in this new arena of loneliness there have to be events apart from the interminable telly, the arranged fortnight of being allowed to take your own kids and the occasional street prowl when hunting for a mate for a few moments of ersatz affection and mutual sperm release. Returning home with cold bones and a starved heart, Terrell is seduced near his own front door by an aroma of something cooking. It sure smells good. A car comes home and parks and another wave is given to Terrell. Introductions take a little loner than usual. The smell of cooking increases as the door opens. It’s the nosey old biddy again, who is making something and seeing the two men in conversation she invites them up. Just stew and dumplings with a bit of leftover veg, she says, but she’s made a bit too much and would he like to join them? Who feels the cut of a sharp pang of guilt at writing off the lady opposite as a ‘nosey old biddy?’? It certainly isn’t Terrell who hasn’t got that kind of blood in his veins, so it must be he reader and the reader is me, I only am the one who needs to learn to tread far more carefully through the story, even if the author writes it and the reader gives it life.

15/11/12 Many days now have passed since I first read this tale. At some point I dipped in again to note the beginning. As the story unfolded I noticed little details, marvelling at how I’d missed them the first time. Before I knew, again I’d reached the end. I saw details I’d never noticed before, felt sad yet also there was hope. Before I knew it I had reached the end again. Now the final volume waits for me. I think I’ll begin it when I’m settled back into my nest in India, stretching in the warmer mists, a bag full of electronics and reading material at my side. I think it could be rather painful, yet pain is something which I’ve come to know, is not a thing to be avoided or welcomed. It has to be taken as it is. If any weight can be lightened by helping to carry Terrel’s burden I, the humble reader, will gladly take my share.









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The Vanishing Girl

I’ve seen it happen so many times, it shouldn’t surprise me, disturb me or affect me in any way, and yet it always does. I’m thinking of the vanishing Indian girls I have met over time. Here in the West we see see them growing up in the usual way. The fits, the starts, the moods, the dresses, the parties. They stamp their feet and scream “I hate you” before storming up to their rooms. You know it’s all fine when that happens. At least that’s what I’m told that happens, in a circuitous kind of way, over here in the land of the setting sun..

Nadhaswaram
Courtesy The Hindu

Yet in rural India it’s all very different. When the girl goes into puberty, a lot of things start to happen very quickly, not only within the complicated chemical circuitry of her own body, but in the family body too there’s a whole load of frantic activity taking place. The family store room is raided for camphor, turmeric and kumkum red powder. There is great excitement generally as older sisters and carefully selected aunties are summoned to the family house. Senior male members gather together bundles of rupees and cycle or motor themselves to the out-caste village where the Drummers and Nadhaswaramare summoned to attend the house at 8 pm.

All through the night drummers are drumming and people are excitedly talking about the fact that the girl is now technically, biologically ready for marriage. Nothing is really going to happen, apart from all the clamour and excitement, but the gossip, even though marriage is a long way off, is mostly about who the husband might be. Nothing is known, nobody usually knows as only a few days earlier she was a girl, but over here, people will speculate further down down the road. The more uncertainty there is, there more is there talk, and when eventually a husband is decided upon, even more village talk is generated, most likely all about the nest of future uncertainties this might create.

I wake up groggily from such interrupted and clanging sleep, worried at what it must be like for the poor girl who has been kept awake all night, seated in the small throne they have created for her. I need to go to see her, for the last few minutes she is with us. I approach the throng and the crowd gives way as I approach to have a look. She smiles a little wanly at me and asks if I am all right. I return the courtesy, asking if she got any sleep, even though I know she didn’t. She is really fazed by now. She’s getting ready to boost herself into another bout of false, second wakeful day, a day which is to be her first as well as her last.

Aunties, sisters and cousins suddenly appear to be thick upon the ground. Gathering thicker and thicker they begin to swarm and cluster round her. The men are thinning out. You begin to notice that they are paying their respects and beginning to walk away and go about their duties. It’s time for me to pay mine and I look upon her for the last time ever. Childhood memories flood into my mind, and perhaps they do into hers as well. She rushes forward for a hug, which I return as best I can before giving her a peck on the cheek and wishing her good luck: a select gaggle of women will be gathering round her now, making preparations to take her completely away.

And then something very mysterious happens. She’s carried off to an unknown place, known only to a few select female relatives. She will be moved to this secret location for 3 or 4 days. No man is allowed to know any detail of the process which will be taking place. The women are so tight-lipped about what happens during those few days, you couldn’t slide in a sheet of rice paper, and even if you could the moisture from the lips would turn it gradually to pap and only form a tighter seal.

When she makes her return to society the little girl has gone. The walk is different, the entire body-language, the dress the face itself. From the inside out she has gone and in her place stands a confident young woman who will greet you in Namaskaram. From this point on, she will tend to shun the company of men, and all her dealings with them will be in a lighter, firmer, altogether more respectful mode. It leaves you feeling kind of stunned, until you start to look at other folks. Any hunt for the ones you knew may well end in failure. No-one’s quite the same. Society is changing in every direction. Nothing remains the same for very long.

Our Hilarious Monarchy

The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish by Christopher Hitchens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One day early in the morning I was feeling ever more broody as I mooned around the landscape of my Kindle. I’d been clicking and sniffing between books I could read next, in that horrible in- betweeny mood in which I found myself. I’d just finished reading the second volume of an excellent trilogy and I needed a break, a breather, a period of recuperation and recharge before plunging into the explosive third volume and it was in this ‘need a short, sharp break’ frame of mind that I browsed my 5-way button to The Monarchy ~ A Critique by Christopher Hitchens, for no particular reason apart from the need for a total change. By the time I’d reached the end of the free sample I was chortling away as I hadn’t done for many a merry month and rarely have I clicked that ‘buy’ button with such eagerness. ‘After all,’ I reasoned to myself, ‘£1.49’s just over what I paid for a pint of IPA draught at the local when I moved to this village 30 years ago.’

So without further ado let’s take a look at the The ‘News’ presented as if it’s set in stone. As Christopher Hitchens (1949—2011) writes: “We know that this strident, bombastic noise is a subliminal appeal to think of ‘News’ as part drama, part sensation and part entertainment”. The beauty of this opiated numbing show is that you never know whether your trip is going to be good or bad. The same thrumming monumental brass rhythms will tell us either that the Queen Mother has got a fish bone lodged in her throat, or that we’ve just severed diplomatic relations with Iraq. YOU are left to decide which item carries the greater weight.

Already long, our Prince's face lengthens
even more as the news worsen

Chris (Yes, let’s hob-nob for a bit!) invites us to look at absurdities like the ‘Investiture’ of Royalties which to most of us mean a lot if we don’t think about them, but examined closely they amount to absolutely nothing. Just look at this on the myth of the ‘Investiture’: “The official guide to the ceremony dissolves in contradiction here, because it says of the sacral moment that it comes from Zadok the priest, who anointed Solomon as King of the Jews, and that the ceremony follows the old Saxon ritual, and that the moment is to be accompanied by the singing of Handel.”

The more we bring our pet-theories into the light, the more threadbare, nay mendacious our propaganda seems. ‘Invisible earnings’ may indeed be comforting dummies to suck in times of crisis, but in these days of costing everything up why do the powers that be seem incapable of coming up with an estimate? And while we’ve revelling in contradictions, what exactly is this ‛special relationship’ which we apparently hold with the USA? — What does it amount to? In these days of costing everything up, listing and categorising every aspect of our lives, which boxes does it tick? And what exactly is the ‘unseen hand’ of the money market?

The End of This Post
Back-chatter :
End, what do you mean, ‘End’? Monarchies and Dreams don’t have an 'End'. They dissipate in the morning mist when the sun rises, only to re-form with the coming of the night. Monarchies keep folks dreamy, happy ready to chase the rainbow to its end.

Think Barbara Taylor Bradford, man, finish with all this Woman of Substance fantasy and begin to Hold That Dream. Never mind about subscribing to The Sun or Mail, just keep to the news for your daily fix. Suck the curate’s egg of the ice-cream cone, starting with the sickly raspberry ripple and the tang of the lemon twist. Lick your way through the chilled artery-clogging fat of the ice cream and don’t stop until you reach the sickly nugget of treacle at the end. Worry not, you’re in the Ukay. Just keep taking the tablets and watching The News.... Dang, dang, Dang 16/08/12 13:51:10 Stop Press (Dissected) (1) The Duke of Edinburgh has been admitted to hospital because of a bladder infection. (2) This is just a routine and it’s giving no cause for concern. (3) He’ll be in for a few days he’s receiving intravenous antibiotics. In juxtaposition to this we’re asked to also know that: (a) The Duke is 91 years old and it’s always serious at this age. (b) (Invisibly: He obviously can’t swallow tolerate tablets, hence the anti-bio’s) (c) This is the 3rd time he’s been in hospital in the past 9 months, the first time being before Christmas when he was admitted because of a heart problem 20/08/12 06:24:36 The Duke is having to spend a fifth day in hospital. Remember it’s (a) Just routine and nothing to worry about. (b) He isn’t allowed any visitors (Only one telephone call from The Queen so far) (c) If the stay extends to a sixth night, there will then bee ‘cause for concern’ Despite their apparent longevity, (Long-faced Prince) Monarchies are really a transient and ephemeral phenomenon which are lent their solidity solely by the careful presentation of choreographed images flashed onto our retinas, much in the way that ‘movement’ in a movie is really a sequence of still images. The images presented here now need to be frozen in aspic, at a time when very little appears to have happened. Let’s keep in that way before the routine of the fifth day lapses into the concern of the sixth. If it gets to that, matters will be a little more serious than the tragedy of our Duke missing The Boxing Day Shoot of Christmas 2011. Hurried Royal Notes scribbled frantically as I try to close this blog entry (again). I blink my eyes awake after a late night, first carefully checking my limbs and hair to see whether I’ve woken up as Nicholas Witchell. Fortunately I haven’t, as my hairs have no trace of gold or red in them, they’re just showing me an agéd grey and I’ve woken up as me, the same me as I’ve always been:

Will The Duke have to miss the
Boxing Day Shoot?

(** Prince Philip has been taken to Papworth Hospital rather than a local cottage hospital. Rather. Rather. What on earth do they mean “rather”. There is no RATHER about it! Cottage hospital are totally incapable of inserting stents into a coronary artery. Papworth Hospital is the main, the only hospital in the area which is capable of performing the procedure.) STOP PRESS: The Queen’s corgis have got into a scrap with Princess Beatrice’s dog Max. I don’t think I can stand any more of this. Off with them, all you get out of my sight! Mad Hatter, I call to you. Please make yourself welcome in my house any time you want...


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Killi’s Very Civil Ceremony ~ A Sweep Through Time

 About 20 years ago, in some middle of nowhere track in India I met an eleven-year-old boy who said his name was Killi. Killi attended (from time to time) the local village school and his favourite lesson was called... Truant. “It’s simple,” he explained to me, “School is about learning things, and when I go to class I learn nothing, apart from the fact that the teacher either isn’t there or doesn’t do anything when he is. Even were he to beat a boy one day, we’d all have a little entertainment spiced with our resentment, but more often than not he can’t even be bothered to do that. He just tells us to carry on studying.”

Not Really 11

It wasn’t long before Killi’s lost the isolation of his Jungle adventures. “After all” added a school-chum, you need to have a buddy with you in case of snakes.    “And I suppose my parents would miss me” said Killi in reply. “More like they’d miss someone lugging jars of water from the village tap at 3.00” a.m. grumbled his mate Vibhu. You know  how we stand in there in all weathers keeping each others’ places in the queue before grabbing a bit more sleep until we go to attend classes that aren’t there!” Killi simply didn’t reply to this, but he welcomed the company nonetheless, and soon there was a gaggle of four or five boys playing hooky as they explored the jungle nearby.

In the course of time, Killi and his mates would come back with many things, mostly Nellikai or wild gooseberries, their ragged pockets bulging with the hard green fruits along with string and unprotected razor blades. These became a currency with the boys as they emerged from the forest, sharing them round, but only with kids who were prepared to do other work in return. I swear these children had several sets of eyes. They’d shared and bagged the prestigious job of pushing the wheelchair, so I would use this free form of locomotion to explore as much of the mountainside as I could with wheels permitting. It wasn’t long before I’d scream out NIL (STOP!) because I’d seen a wiggle of movement under some plant and ordered them to bring it to me. Astonishingly, most boys were terrified of some of the creepies like bristly devil-headed caterpillars, advising me to be careful and not to touch. Persuading the diábolo to leave its stalk and wander along my hand while I blew mock kisses in its direction. That raised my social status even more, and I must admit I much enjoyed the power which was heaped upon me.

It wasn’t long before my room was filling up with bugs, millipedes and inch-worms, not to mention the odd sweet-jar which contained soil and ant lions, and occasionally a flower-pot snake or two. As the specimens poured in I soon realised that I was biting off more than I could chew, or indeed feed. And what is more I saw that all this gathering and collecting “for John” had very little to do with me until the small runnel of regular absenteeism from the village school turned into a river. John would be well and truly in the spot-light if it was traced to him!

It Was Like This: Thanks Getty!

Matters came to a head one day when I found that unasked, a boy had cycled a further 12 miles into the depth of the jungle and came pedalling furiously back.  He presented me with a live chameleon he had captured there and thought I’d like to keep it as a pet. A live chameleon was something I’d never met face-to-face before; I’d always wanted one as a child and now my wish had been granted in a quite unexpected way. Even so, I had a strange surge of emotions sweeping through me at the moment; Deeply touched that a boy had cycled so far on my behalf and that he’d correctly guessed what I would love. At yet at the age of 44, I’d also learned that the creature would be thoroughly accustomed to the deeper jungle world which was his home that very morning. After giving the boy a hug of thanks, I told him that it could not be.

On opening the little box, the lizard had done its utmost to convince me that it was a Fischer-Price Plastico-rubbery toy which had pipe cleaners embedded in its limbs. The creature seemed frozen & dead, but after leaving it alone a little it started to move jerkily and roll those googly eyes. The boy pleaded for me to keep it but I explained through my friend that back home in Tiruvannamalai the conditions were totally different. There wasn’t the humidity and the greenery there, and even if he lived he would never find a mate. Without his jungle cover he’d soon become a target for a hungry crow and rat, or perhaps he’d simply die to have his flesh picked off by ants. I think that of all the futures I saw, that was the saddest possibility.

Killi With Brother Ramana

And then one day he decided to clean my floor with a brush, push the chair even more and make my breakfast. Jungle adventures were left behind as time’s broom swept us all on. I missed him sorely when I returned to England I determined   I would bring him, with his brother, to help me throughout the year. Inevitable difficulties followed, the most formidable of which were the Home Office Dragons who made it an almost forgone conclusion that entry to the UK would be referred. “Highly unlikely” was the term used in their letter to my MP.

Surprise followed on from surprise. Who knows what happened in the intervening years. Somewhere along the road that chameleon lizard must have traded places with an axolotl. In the course of leaving the watery humid jungle a veritable dragon has emerged to begin his life as a fully-fledged UK Citizen.

Killi's UK Welcome Ceremony.

 In the picture, in front of the portrait of Her Majesty the Queen, we see Killi with the High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, Penelope Walkinshaw as well as Councillor John Powley. Killi has just received his Certificate of Nationality.

"YOU" ~ It Had Its Moments

You by Joanna Briscoe

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Sat Jul 28 09:06:41 BST 2012
    I need a little bit of intrigue in a book to give me the energy to read through the following acres of prose. Unless the prose itself has such entrancing properties that I can wallow in it at any and any point, I invariably I need bribing. I'm a fish who's too lazy to swim any distance unless somebody's dangling a worm on a hook to pull me through, and the first little worm was the snippet that a school-girl has a raving crush on the English master, whilst her mother  carries on her first lesbian affair with the English master's wife. What a delightful set of ingredients, I thought. With those items loaded into my trolley it wouldn't matter too much at the checkout which plot I selected from the range dangling on their hooks for to select. If plots were sweets, Maltesers would guarantee a thoroughly enjoyable read.

     However, I noticed that the Publisher was Blooms bury and they are a firm with whom I feel that (despite the fact that they do the Harry Potter series and are consequently swimming in far too much money) you can hardly go wrong. My prayer that Maltesers would be the dangle-plot for Ms Briscoe to adopt were swept aside as I looked for something more obscure. I needed a sweet I quite enjoyed as a child but wasn't really sure about. Something like marzipan which I convinced myself I would love once I'd become a proper grown-up. Newberry Fruits sprang to mind. They were a sugar-crusted jelly in lime, orange and lemon and they had a liquid centre which gushed all over your tongue when you bit into them. For some reason I fancy I'd plumped for those. Or had they been pre-selected for me?

     I slogged and groaned over this book, wading heavily through the chick-litty e-pages, which stayed drearily parochial at their best or navel gazing at their worst, not that I have anything against deep contemplation. But you are, I feel, to come to an inner peace, love and understanding when you do that.

     It dragged on and on. I kept looking for something else to do, something tantalizing to read, and managed to get myself thinking, madly, that if I left it alone for a bit it would somehow have magically have read itself on a bit further. The Siren whispers advised me to dump it as there was plenty else for me to enjoy. But I don't do that, and at the time I firmly believed that 'proper readers' simply didn't do it. Nonetheless, by the time I’d reached the halfway mark I was as teed-off as ever and sorely tempted to dump it as 'failed to finish'. When a book does that with me it's in serious trouble.

     It perked up quite a bit at the 60% mark and I sailed through the batch of pages, deciding that I was quite enjoying it really, and that it had reached the 'all forgiven' point, as long as it kept up the pace and didn't slacken its hold. Something more needed to be dangled on the hook now, and I demanded a diet of shrimps followed on by succulent high fat low cholesterol Dublin Bay Prawns.

Unfortunately there was no tasty diet. In true seventies style I found I was munching my way through a slice of wholemeal mung-bean pie, and all I really got was he ocular equivalent of jaw ache. As the story dragged its fuggy hash fog, I began to care little what or who Cecilia’s mystery baby was and by the end of the novel, despite the occasional description which held me captivated, I found that I simply couldn’t care less.


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Our Gay Son

Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.

I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.

17:43:50

Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.

Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.

What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.

Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.

The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.

Finished!

At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic] . I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff.

Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*
Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).

My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.

SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.

The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.

~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).

† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire

Our Gay Son ~ I Was Gripped

Our Gay Son: A Christian Father's Search for Truth by David Robert-John

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



  Tue 03 Jul 2012 17:43:26 BST>
I spent a day feeling stunned after the completion of The Assassin's Apprentice, followed by a day of shivers as I underwent withdrawal symptoms because the story had come to an end. The following day I pointed my quivering finger at The Royal Assassin and pressed "Buy Now" followed by "View Downloading Items" and as the cyberdrug infused its way into my system, the shaking stopped, my head cleared, and I was able to carry on with normal conversations and think about my next meal. After that, I left-clicked and selected "Remove from Device", fancying it was one of the notes I used to write to Father Christmas scrawled on tissue paper sucked up the chimney flue and making its way to the Cloud.


I felt unable to handle the events held in that shiny new volume today. I needed an interlude, a little break, a light visual to fill a corner of my hungry mind, but only a corner of it as I needed to increase my capacity for handling tension and pain before moving on to volume two.


17:43:50


Just over 50% of the way through. I'm finding it so honest, frank and open and I have rarely nodded and underlined as much as I have in this Kindle book. It surprises me. It delights me, and by that I mean it has my undivided attention. By 'delight' I don't mean enjoyment in the normal sense of the word, but I go with it. I suffer with the author's pain of what he must have undergone when his youngest son, whose life hung by a thread when he was very young, came out to his parents as gay.


Exactly why I am enjoying so much I find much harder to understand. I am not a Christian struggling with my sexual orientation and I haven't jettisoned Christianity because of its stance on homosexuality. I jettisoned most of it at about the age of twelve when I attended a Billy Graham meeting which our school took some pupils to see. I went through curiosity, because I wanted to see angels appearing, or Pentecostal flames lighting upon the heads of the ones who were called. I tried, oh Lord how hard I tried to go along with what Billy was saying and to believe whatever he was saying, and when he got that glazed but somewhat sweaty look upon his face and asked for true believers to "Come Forward", I asked to be pushed up to the front, not because I had felt anything, but I because I wanted to see what would happen next.


What happened next looked very promising to me: dapper smart young men in crisp suits circulated amongst our select gathering and asked us, individually whether we believed in Jesus Christ and accepted him as our 'Savior'? I was very tempted to believe in Billy's pitch, especially if it meant moving a world with such pretty young men, but true to what my Dad had told me — not to fall for anything without checking it out a bit more first — I replied that I wasn't really able to 'believe' on the results of listening to one preacher. (Privately I saw Billy Graham more as a show doll with plenty of make-up on his face, and little if anything beneath that). One of the cute little men then opened his Bible and said, "Perhaps you'd like to read what The Bible says about unbelievers, John?" and there it all was, held out for me to read. Hot fiery nasty stuff which would happen to me if I didn't believe in the Bible. If there was any prefabricated self-contrived bubble about this meeting which I'd made up before attending, it had now burst, pretty young men and all. I suddenly found the entire affair highly amusing, and I couldn't stop myself from smirking. With words like "My God is much bigger than all that" I turned my back on Christianity, and to this day I have never really turned back.


Until Now. This little book, this painful writing out of the author's deep hurt and anguish, has caused me to think again. A little. The author spent 40 years of his life serving as an evangelical Christian, with many years spent in Africa, and there is no doubt that he was thoroughly sincere and that he achieved a lot of good, working as a missionary during that period in Uganda.


The pain started when the author's good wife got her contractions early and was rushed to hospital. She gave birth to twins, one of whom died and the remaining child, a little boy, was premature, his life held in the balance. So he was much cherished.  It was in his late teens, flanked by his heterosexual and highly supportive brother and sister, that he came out to his parents as gay, which was, understandably, a tremendous shock to his parents.



  Finished!


At the conclusion of this short book I could not but be struck by the resonant similarities yet very marked differences in our two spiritual 'journeys', —as everyone seems to be calling their life stories these days— : The similarities were days spent in the tropics, but the author had a far worse time of it than me, as he witnessed more beatings and deaths than me as well as undergoing a severe bout of malaria. Mr Robert-John spent years as an evangelical spirit-led Christian who perhaps included hell fire threats in his eagerness to make conversions along with possible episodes of homophobia, made in the conviction (as he saw it) that homosexuals were an abomination in the eyes of God. Strangely enough, I had also decided by the time I reached puberty that I too was an abomination under the Christian ethic, but this belief had nothing to do with sex, as I didn't know at the time what the Christian stance on homosexuality was. I just remember believing that I was chaff because I was an unbeliever, or simply not good enough for Heaven. By the age of nine I had decided that because I didn't believe in the way The Bible wanted me to, I was chaff [Insert pic]. I was the useless husk that surrounds the good grain, and The Bible told me that I was going to be burned in the fire†.  I decided that there had to be a use for chaff. If it was no use to The Bible and its adherents then perhaps there was another religion which found a good use for chaff. Paper and straw dolls came to mind, but I was sure that cleverer minds than mine would have more ingenious ideas.*


Years later I grew into the way of Hindoo-ism learning to forge a pathway through to Yoga and the East, and it wasn't long before I discovered the health benefits of bran. I then found a much bigger God than the bigoted bipolar trucculent brat of the Old Testament. He was unbelievably great, so great that he didn't live in some far off inaccessible corner, so hard to reach that so far the only two persons have made the trip: Jesus Christ and The Virgin Mary. He was so great that you couldn't even limit him to being inscribed with a name. Yet this bigger God was closer than we can imagine, 'closer to you than your jugular vein', to echo the Qu'rân (50:16).


My early truancy from the Christian Faith led me to the pathless path and I was often bruised and scratched by the thorns I encountered along the way. The author of this book was far more secure in the tenure of his faith. Yet the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was uprooted when his son came to him and his wife on Boxing Day 2005 and announced that he was gay. Prayers and therapy were not tried because the son had no intention of going along with all this evangelicism. The young man was flanked by his fully supportive heterosexual sister and brother when he came out to his parents, so Mum and Dad found themselves rather isolated.



  SURPRISING OUTCOMES
I was surprised to learn that the outcome of the author's journey was that he became a reluctant atheist. I wasn't disappointed. I have no problem with atheism whatsoever and I find it an excellent position to start. Sometimes I wish I could be one myself, but I'd only feel more able to do that when I find someone who's able to explain to me what they mean by atheist and what they mean by God. And when I find a few definitions which match up.


The other surprise, to say it again, was that I found myself enjoying the book as much as I did. I was after all just taking a break from the spell which had been cast upon me by volume I of The Farseer Trilogy and I wanted to read something on the small side, but different in subject and mood. Certainly I didn't expect to get quite as deeply sucked into the author's cathartic story.


~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~    ~~~~~
*In my maturer years, I learned that chaff can be turned into bricks for fuel; it can make a wonderful insulating material. Furthermore my doctor prescribes me little sealed sachets of chaff (ispaghula husk to mix with water and take after my meals. It keeps me nice and regular and I feel fighting fit. I just *knew* that chaff was a valuable commodity indeed).


† Matthew 3:12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing floor. He will gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire





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