We spent Easter redecorating the living-room, as the institutional Magnolia colour it had been done in after the floods was getting on our nerves, plus our local DIY store was having an Easter sale. Fortunately this work was so tiring that I was too knackered at bed-time to worry about night intruders, although it has to be said that I did fix extra bolts to the front and back doors, and make sure all the windows were shut and locked before we turned in. But I know in my heart of hears that this wouldn’t necessarily keep whoever it was out.
We kept the radio on low all night, to help drown out the silence, as silence is not always helpful when you’re in a state of nervous alertness. It meant I woke up at 4 o’clock one morning and wondered why there was a strange woman talking in the room, and then I realised she was reading the news.
My sister Stella continued to be a sore trial. In one phone call she announced a mad wish to bring the fat slob to Shingle sea (to stay with us if you please!) for a short break. I managed to squash this horrendous proposal by pointing out that we were in the middle of decorating, which reduced her to a humble “oh”.
I should have known that this wouldn’t be the end of it though, as she returned to her earlier theme of how she wasn’t coping, and she really needed somebody else in the house to help her. And this time there was a new duty to add to the already extensive list of chores: selling her clothes on eBay. So now, on top of being Mary bloody Poppins, I would have to be Gok Wan as well!
My fuse was getting shorter by the day.
I announced to Misty that I was going to the shops to buy some bleach, and bumped into Xanthe outside, who told me she had a bizarre dream in which she had travelled all around the Solar System in a Mini (car, not skirt). She said it was almost as weird as the one in which she had helped a polar bear to give birth in a bath.
“I’m now going to watch my dvd box-set of ’Crossroads’”, she said “Noel Gordon was a legend!”
Xanthe is a complete barmpot most of the time, but at the moment I’m finding her to be a breath of sanity in an increasingly mad world.
April had been an odd month, with a sort of hysterical, apocalyptic feel to it. It had begun with dear old London showcasing our police, dressed up like some kind of camp crack squad of storm troopers-cum-traffic wardens, beating up protestors, fatally shoving a passer-by, and bragging on YouTube that they were going to punch some hippies. To which I felt like saying “alright come and get it, but it’s got to be a fair fight (for once), and so you’ve got to leave your crash helmet, riot shield, jackboots, and big rubber stick behind”.
All that was bad enough, and now, at the end of the month, a new pestilence had broken out. Swine flu. At first I kept thinking (with a bored resignation) that this was just the latest new plague for our dear media to wet its knickers about. I still have clear memories of the bird flu nonsense from 3 years ago, with Henry threatening to lock himself in the house. Now, the Henry clones were donning paper face-masks a la Michael Jackson. Where it’s all going to end is anybody’s guess.
We seek out places of peace, to restore the psychic batteries. We tried Chantley Stones at sunset one evening, as good Pagans should, but any potential special atmosphere was ruined by the presence of an American woman, with a voice that could strip paint , and who used the word “frigging” as a sort of punctuation mark. At one point she barked at me that there was a dead chipmunk lying near the stones.
“It’s a hedgehog”, I said.
“Regardless”, she snapped “It’s frigging dead!”
I’m still not quite sure what I was supposed to do with it. Take it home in a plastic bag? Organise a state funeral? Apologise profusely for this total lack of efficiency in leaving it lying around where sensitive Americans could see it?
We had much more success at Fobbington Church, which felt like an oasis of peace from another time. Not just the building itself, but the people who work there who always seem so refreshingly calm. I wondered if I was falling more for the Christian church, but though I might love its buildings, I still have trouble with the whole concept of A God. I lit a candle anyway, and Misty scribbled a message in the Prayers For Peace book.
In the end the spiritual restorative came where it always does for us. The beach at Shinglesea. A place where you can drop out of the world entirely for hours on end, where people leave you alone to be yourself.
There is something of the perennial endurance of the human spirit about the British seaside, that triumph of hope over experience. It’s summed up best in the way that even when the rain is lashing down and the wind feels as though it’s coming direct from Siberia, that people still put baskets of brightly-coloured beach balls outside their shops, and advertise a boat trip through the turbulent grey waters of the English Channel as though it’s the closest thing to Paradise on Earth that you can possibly get.
Anyway, it’s my real religion I suppose. From it I get the peace of mind, and that sense of continuity and rhythm of life that I know other people get from religious services.
Plus, the smell of fish-and-chips is one of my favourite smells in the whole world.