Frank's funeral

So, yesterday was the day of Frank's funeral and a hard day it was, but I think we gave him the best good-bye we could manage under the circumstances. My brother Ken oversaw the proceedings and friend Chris spoke with affecting wit of Frank's renaissance-man life, love of Merrydown cider and house full of musical gadgets (many of which he'd made himself), while later at the 'do' a friend from work explained the significance of pink shirts. Afterwards we talked of our beloved friend and of ourselves, swapping family news and gossip, talking about the easy stuff because the other stuff was just too hard.

And despite the utter tragedy of the whole affair, it was a day of strange, almost guilty, pleasures: meeting up with old friends, some of whom not seen for decades, and finding the old connections still intact despite my neglect; being back in my beloved Black Country and hearing my accent echoed back to me in many voices; taking tea and cake on Stourbridge High Street, familiar from the days when Roy used to live there but strangely unfamiliar too; driving through the country lanes of Shropshire, most beautiful county in England, and remembering it as our old stamping ground from the Wolverhampton days; and finally westering home up the M6 with a huge orange sun beside us and Blazin' Fiddles on the CD. Not putting the 'fun' in funeral exactly, but reminding us of our connection to life.

You've got a friend

Husband has recently been fiddling around with Facebook in an effort to understand its appeal to the Young Folk. Not wanting to be left out I done got me one o' them critters m' self.

At first I thought the whole thing was a bit (a) fatuous (b) puerile and (c) pointless, but having played with it quite a bit when I should have been transcribing interviews or reading Very Hard Books I'm really beginning to warm to it.

Strangely, since Facebook is a so-called Social Networking Site, its appeal to me is directly related to my lifelong difficulty in making friends. Because I'm articulate and funny, people mistake me for an extrovert (if that binaried nomenclature has any real validity) when I am in fact a much stranger beast, an introvert in search of an audience. This is to say, I find the company of others both frightening and draining (the more so when they are strangers) but I'm driven to perform a version of myself to entertain these fearful entities, in order to feel part of the human race.

This need to 'dance my dance' has resulted in my keeping not one but four, count 'em, four blogs (all with pretty much identical content): A Lull in the Proceedings (LJ), Thinking of Wittering (blogger), The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (wordpress) and Celia Johnson's Enormous Face (blog.co.uk). Lull was my first foray into the blogosphere and initially the LJ friending mechanism drove me to distraction. I longed for friends but could never decipher the protocols for making it happen. I'd gaze enviously at other people's friends lists, darkly muttering 'nobody loves me, everybody hates me, going down the garden to eat worms'. Things got so bad that I had to lay off the whole blog thing for a couple of years until I'd calmed down. It only got better when I realised what I was doing and came to appreciate that, as in fleshworld, I am a creature who requires a few, close friends and a big audience.

So where does Facebook fit in? Well, with the fear of other people comes the retincence, the feeling that any personal communication from me could only ever be regarded as an impertinence and an imposition. My habit is, therefore, to lose touch with people, even those I really like, rather than engender in them an imagined irritation. Facebook, however, with its poking and message walls, aquariums and gardens, allows me to send gentle and not-very-importunate reminders of my existence that require no more response than the occassional poke back to let me know I'm still human. Furthermore, its endless array of personality-divulging titivations, which inform the world of your favourite books, films, TV show, backpacking holidays, llama farms and so on, have enormous appeal for my Inner Performer.

So now, while I still think Facebook is fatuous and puerile, I no longer think it useless.

MySpace though - that's just ugly!

Plant problems

It's a glum old day in the office this morning - everybody else is on holiday, so I am alone with just a fan heater and some ailing plants for company. My aloe vera plant, which was doing so well last year, has suddenly started to develop crispy brown bits. Could this mean it needs water? Odd, since it survived the last twelve-month on barely a teaspoon of liquid. Or am I perhaps overwatering? Eek - how do I tell? Add to this the fact that my trail-y creeper-y vine-y thing is looking a bit the worse for wear and only one conclusion is possible: I am NOT Good With Housplants.

Alternatively they might have Sick Office Syndrome. I do after all work in a location which requires cooling fans in the middle of winter and warming fan-heaters at the height of summer. Not the way to lessen our carbon footprint, is it chaps?

Something big in a small box

Last week I wrote that my friend Frank's wife had died. Over the weekend Frank died too. Official cause of death is still to be determined but we all know he died of a broken heart.

I first met Frank (whose given name was Neil) when he was 16, so I would have been 18-ish. A friend of my little brother Ken, Frank was notable for his fierce intelligence, extraordinary skill with maths, mighty sense of humour, encyclopaedic knowledge of what we would now call indie music, and for having, at 16, a full beard which made him look older than most of his teachers.

When I left University in 1979 I was honoured to join the group of Ken's friends of which Frank was a part. Together the group made regular trips to The Trumpet in Bilston, sought out the weird and wonderful pubs of the Black Country, played hide-and-seek at midnight up the top of Clent and, because Frank was married at 18 and therefore had his own place, had many wonderful parties.

Even now Frank-isms litter my speech. Because of Frank I say 'Cheers Chief' (sometimes abbreviated to 'CC'), and 'awroight maaaaayt' (trans. 'Alright mate') in an exagerated Blackheath accent. Because of Frank I call underwear 'unterwegs', and quote one of the best jokes he, or anyone, ever made: 'Ah, the badger's sett ... but the weasel's still a bit runny'.

He shaped my musical tastes as well. With him I went to see The Fall, and The Residents (speculating in the pub afterwards that under those enormous eyeballs lurked Eric Clapton, George Harrison or other rock legends). He lent me bootlegs Elvis Costello tapes and introduced me to Little Feat. And because of Frank I listened far too many times to a rather odd piece of contemporary clasical music called The Sinking of the Titanic, which he used to play as a way of getting rid of people at the end of a party.

In the early 80s he invited me to sing in The Leisure Pets with him and Paul and the drum machine (called Ronnie) - I was pretty rubbish really but Frank let me keep on singing. So, fragments of his songs are part of my consciousness too: 'son, don't vote - they all make you wear funny coloured shirts'; 'something small in a big box'; 'pointless packaging'; and the drum machine programmed to sound like the steam hammer at Lench's chain works.

So, even though I haven't seen him since we moved north, there he is, fragments of Frank cropping up in everything I do - sadly missed but never forgotten.

Frank Skidmore
Rest in peace, m' dear old thing

Big head

If you go here and watch the Short Cuts Documentary Video, you will eventually see me coming over all rhapsodic about Celia Johnson's enormous face. Rather confusingly, the preceding bit (shot in almost total darkenss as an accidental homage to Clint Eastwood) features one of our esteemed Film Studies Lecturers talking about the 1979 gang movie The Warriors and the doc is cut such that I appear to be talking about that film and not, as I actually was, Brief Encounter. I am however mightily tickled by the idea of an archetypal icon of the English middle classes going all hard-assed on the gangs of New York. Bet old Celia had a mean left hook, and woe betide if you got on the wrong side of her broken bottle, eh, Trevor!

Surprised by joy

So, to banish gloom, I have been working on something to present tonight at my Quaker Meeting. Every month a few of us meet for something we call Creative Listening, taking it in turns to bring a poem or snippet of some writing we think might inspire us all to deep thoughts. Flicking through my poetry books I came on this one, a rare thing in that it is about (among other things) a Quaker Meeting for Worship. Appropriate for its Quaker-ness then but also because both it and a good friend have reminded me that joy is a pretty special thing and not to be sniffed at.

Daffodil Ministry* by U A Fanthorpe

One of the more difficult denominations.
No artless formula of psalms, collect,
And-now-to-God-the-father; unrelenting ministry
Of the solo conscience. Mankind’s cheerless concerns
Can drop in here like friends

And yet the daffodils, she says

And yettishness: a state of mind.

O yes, of course the world is harsh
And suffering, O yes — and yet
This morning, as I walked along
And saw the daffodils, I thought —
And so forth, daffodilling on.

Easier not to meet each others’ eyes.

And yet, and yes, the daffodils
Making their point, in scurfy gardens,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Municipally distributed, like grit.
Wherever a bulb can lodge and multiply,
Long-legged, gape-mouthed, a yellow hop in air,
Daffodils are.
Homelessness, poverty,
Injustice, executions, arms trade, war
Are too.

The stillness isn’t easy with itself.

And yet, and yet.

*Daffodil ministry - every spring a Friend notices how lovely the daffodils look as they come to meeting for worship, and they minister about how lovely the world is. Generally a pejorative term to describe uncritical and predictable ministry.
from Quaker Jargon Buster

Dying - hate that stuff!

Am not the cheeriest of mortals at the moment. On the same day my aunty died last week, I found out the wife of an old friend (one of the original Scouts-in-Bondage shareholders) had died of pancreatic cancer. She was no age, not much older than me in fact.

Time was when all the significant life-stage events I celebrated were weddings and birthdays and other happy stuff. Now, the only time I see my extended family en masse is at yet another funeral. And that wedding we went to a couple of weeks ago was the first we'd attended for about 7 years.

Aunty Muriel
Rest In Peace

meanwhile in Emmerdale ...

(haven't been here for a while)

... Rosemary, The Black Widow of the Yorkshire Dales, has come over all Mrs Danvers on her mournfully baren daughter-in-law Perdy, doping her orange juice, hiding her kitten and bestrewing the attic with baby clothes. Why the sinister old bird is tripping merrily down the Gaslight path to Charles-Boyer-Ville I have yet to determine. Could be she has some sinister outcome in mind or could be she's simply run out of spiders to de-leg.

Damned fine telly, though.