September catch-up

Summer's on its way out, and boxes full of new English apples are appearing at Unicorn, our local Vegan supermarket. Somewhere in August I lost my blogging Mojo, and I've decided that the only way to get it back is to write, write, write my way through the blockage.

The last post I wrote was in the week leading up to the Great North Swim. I was ill, I hadn't been able to practise and as the day drew nearer I was resigning myself to deferring. I didn't feel well enough to drive up to the Lakes, let alone dive into one. Then, on the Thursday evening, a text arrived announcing that the swim had been cancelled due to unsafe levels of blue green algae. I was able to defer to next year, and as my health returned I have picked up my swimming, and I've decided to make use of the practice and preparation by signing up for the Great Salford Swim, taking place at Salford Quays next Sunday. I  was apprehensive about this. After all, a converted dock on the Manchester Ship Canal doesn't sound as appealing as a beautiful lake in Cumbria. Anyway, yesterday I went to a training session in the dock with my wife and we swam 800 metres in our wetsuits at 7.30 in the morning. It was amazing. I know now that I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy it.

The canal in the picture forms part of the course, joining the two dock basins that we swim around. I was amazed at the quality of the water, and I soon overcame my fears about putting my head under. I was able to get my breast stroke rhythm going, which was something else I was anxious about, as I'd been told that breast stroke is difficult when wearing a wetsuit. 

My aim now is to see if I can complete the course within an hour. I usually do a mile in the pool in about 53 minutes, so here's hoping. Roll on next Sunday.

Where do we go from here...

..Is it down to the lake, I fear? Thank you Haircut 100. Next week, I'm taking part in the Great North Swim, and I'm worried. I watched last year as my wife, my son, my daughter and her boyfriend, all took part and made it look, if not easy, then definitely fun. I was inspired. I'm not the most confident swimmer and up to that point the most I'd managed in a pool was between 20 and 30 lengths, not even half a mile.

I didn't learn to swim until I was 19 years old, at teacher training college. I was training to be an English teacher. I had wanted to teach PE but I was turned down because I couldn't swim. I had actually begun swimming when I was 4. I went with my Dad every Saturday to the Northumberland Baths in Newcastle, and I'd just begun to doggy-paddle my way around the shallow end when, one Saturday, I walked in and saw some older boys pretending they were drowning, kicking around and splashing in the water. I'm told that at that point I stopped swimming and became terrified of getting out of my depth. I remember that I struggled with this fear  throughout my childhood. I kept going to the pool, and I convinced myself every week that I would be ok, and as soon as the water came up to the top of my chest, or if I lifted my feet off the bottom and tried to float, I would panic and fight to get out. When we had swimming lessons at school, I had a fight with a lad who jokingly tried to push me in at the deep end. When I finally learned to swim I think I felt relief rather than joy, and I still retain some of that fear and mistrust of water, so resolving to swim a mile in England's largest lake represents a real challenge for me.

A year ago I knew that I wanted to do the swim but I still didn't know if I could cope with the distance, or the depth. I started going swimming regularly with my wife at the Manchester Aquatics Centre. 3 times a week we'd get up at 6am and go down there before work. The depth in the pool is a uniform 2 metres for the lane swimming sessions, so I can't touch the bottom, and 50 metres looks a long way when I first get in, and at the start I felt scared and clumsy in the water. However, by Christmas I was swimming 20 lengths of the 50 metre pool (1km in total) twice a week and 32 lengths (1 mile) on Saturdays, and, most importantly, I looked forward to getting in the water

We managed to maintain that regime until May. Since then I've lost my momentum. I ran the Great Manchester 10k, picked up a nasty calf injury and found it hard to get back into a regular training pattern. As swimmers have to wear wetsuits in the Great North Swim I should have had more practice in open water in a wetsuit. So far, I've only been in twice, once in Rydal Water and once in Lake Bala.

And now I've got a horrible cold. 5 days to go and I feel lousy. I've felt so confident until the last couple of weeks. We went on holiday to Majorca earlier in August and I swam at least 40 lengths of the hotel pool every day. I even swam in the sea, and dived off a pontoon moored out in the bay. That was a major event for a water-wimp like me. I know I've come a long way, and on Saturday I really want to be part of that wave of swimmers splashing their way around the course in Windermere. Time to feel the fear and do it anyway.

The first dog

This is a picture of Moss. He was given to my dad when he was a few months old. He'd been taken from a litter on a farm and given to one of dad's workmates, who was nearing retirement. That was a doomed relationship from the start, given that Moss had a propensity for nipping heels, chewing soft furnishings and scratching deep claw marks in every door he came across. The old guy and his wife figured that Moss needed a livelier pack and that 3 boys under 10 would be the best companions for him. He became our brother and, I now see, our pack leader. Dad was the alpha, and Moss would never mess with him, but with us he was always jostling for position and putting us in our place. And we loved him, played with him, fought with him, and protected him, as brothers. 

In the late 60s and early 70s dog owning was, in many ways, a more casual pursuit than it is now. Although we would take him out for walks, we would also, like all of the other dog-owners on our estate, open the front door in the morning and let him go off on his own. It seems bizarre now to think of that. We'd quite often have packs of dogs, Hairy Maclary style, roaming up and down the street because there was a bitch in heat. Moss would regularly get into fights, especially with a large Alsatian 7or 8 doors down. In those days people didn't seem to have Pitbulls, Rottweilers, or any of the macho status dogs that are around now. However, it wasn't unusual for them to have German Shepherds, or Alsatians, as a guard dog, sending a message out that these were people not to be messed with. Moss's nemesis was a big, mean bugger and he would attack him at any opportunity. We'd usually hear the snarling and barking, and possibly screams and shouts from bystanders and we'd have to charge up the street and try to stop it or, more likely, wait for it to end. The denouement was predictable, and painful. Moss would be left, shivering and bloodied, his back legs unable to move because the big fella would bite his back in a way that caused temporary paralysis, and I'd have to carry him home. He'd recover pretty quickly, and would often be game to go back for more.

When dad died, he grieved, in his own way, with us and maybe for us. He became meaner, his bites more likely to draw blood. We would still occasionally tumble around together, but we'd all been exposed to a horrible truth that meant that we couldn't be pups any more, and maybe the grip of his teeth gave us a way to feel the pain, anger, and resentment of our loss. While we were all adapting to the instructions of well-meaning adults and trying to be good boys for our mam, Moss was taking the occasional lumps out of us, giving substance to something we were all feeling, the shittiness, the unfairness, the hatred. 

I'm reading The Philosopher and The Wolf, By Mark Rowlands at the moment and it's helping me to understand and appreciate what I learned from my brother the dog. I resisted getting another dog for a long time and, although I love Benji, I've not let myself get as close to him and in many ways I'm glad of that.

One of the seven great dogs.

When I finished reading Straw Dogs I did what any man who has been exposed to the wilful hopelessness of the human animal would do. I took the dog for a walk.

Our dog is Benji. As you can see, he’s a handsome character. We got him from a rescue centre 5 years ago and he’s now 13 going on 14, or mid 70s in dog years. He’s completely deaf, but he’s sprightly and affectionate, a good companion. Having him as part of our family has, I think, brought out the best in all of us. It’s put us more in touch with our immediate surroundings because of having to go out for walks. He’s also helped us to brush up on our pack mentality. If we’re all in a room and he’s not there we feel incomplete, and we’ll bring his bed in so that he can lie there, sleeping and twitching and farting. And we feel good, being together, and having him there.

Our walking territory is the Mersey Valley, riverside woods and meadows reclaimed by nature from their former purpose as a sewage works. The area is now an urban country park, bordered on one side by the streets of Chorlton and on the other by the M60 motorway. We’ve now spent 5 years walking its paths in all seasons and all weathers. Although I now see them on a regular basis, I’m still thrilled at the sight of Jays, Herons, the Canada Geese nursery school that appears on the river every spring, and the kingfishers that we very occasionally spot on the brook that feeds into the river. We’ve seen all manner of small, and not so small, rodents, including a mink that stared defiantly at my wife from the opposite bank of the brook one day. We’ve heard, but never seen, woodpeckers. The electricity pylon in the distance in the picture below is a landing point for the Cormorants that frequent the river and the Water Parks, so we've come  to know it as the electric cliff. 

It’s a whole world of nature that Benji, in his understated way, has gifted to us. And now he’s a bit off colour. He’s old, and in many ways content. He has good days when you could easily think of him as a frisky young dog, just past being a pup. And he has the other days, like yesterday, where he’s reluctant to leave the house to go for a walk, and his breathing can be a bit wheezy, and I hate to think of him not lying there in front of the TV, dreaming and whimpering. Our stinky old friend. Our dog.

The title of this post is a reference to a film that came out in 2008, and which has become a family (pack) favourite. It’s called Dean Spanley. Any attempt at a synopsis wouldn’t really do it justice. It’s about life and death, loss and grief, and it’s funny and sad. One of the main characters confidently states, more than once, that there are only ever 7 great dogs. For us, Benji is the greatest of them.   

A thinking chap who's up for a (thinking) scrap

I’ve just finished reading Straw Dogs, by John Gray.  Jim, a friend of mine, told me to buy it and read it and that if I didn’t like it he would pay my money back. His money’s safe. 

I was initially confused because the book shares the same name with the Sam Peckinpah film starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, and I couldn’t see how that linked to the existential meanderings that had led Jim to suggest that I read it. There’s no connection between the two, apart from the fact that they both, each in their own way, address the issue of men as animals.

Gray’s book is disturbing, provocative, insightful and argumentative. When I saw him in discussion with Martin Amis and Blake Morrison, he seemed a thoughtful and cheery bloke, which seemed at odds with the unrelenting and apocalyptic polemicist that he can be on the page. I found reading the book to be a journey, from ‘What’s the point?’ to ‘See the world around you, see what we’re doing and question everything.’ As somebody who values questions more than answers I revelled in Gray’s willingness to see nothing that men pride themselves on as a given. Paradoxically, he seems to be a guy who has an answer, or maybe a response, to everything. One of the notes I made at the end of the Amis event was that John Gray would be a good guy to spend an evening at the pub with.

Rumblings

So, following on from an evening with Messrs Amis, Gray and Morrison talking about violence and death in literature, film and in general, I've spent the day thinking and remembering.

When I was a kid, fighting was something we did a fair bit on our estate, often as play but sometimes becoming more serious. When I was 5, I refused to let the 3 year old across the road drive a pedal car that I was minding. He went around the back of his house, found a broken bottle and stabbed it in my face. I had to have three stitches in a cut just below my right eye. I've told my own kids that story hundreds of times and I don't think I've ever really understood how horrific it is.

There were other crazy incidents. When I was about 7 or 8 there was an older boy around the corner who would bully me. He and his friends once put me on the rocking horse in the park at the end of the street and rocked it so hard that I flew forward, cracking my forehead and the top of my nose on the metal mane of the horse. I remember my mam putting butter on the bruises, and I remember feeling furious and humiliated. One day when my dad was back from work and was washing his hands at the kitchen sink I saw the same lad walking past our house. I ran out of the back gate with a broom handle and whacked him across the back. I dropped the stick and ran back into our back garden with him in pursuit, brandishing my abandoned weapon. Of course my dad saw what was happening and came running out. The other lad legged it. Dad went straight round and had words with his dad and he got a leathering and never came near  me again. Even as I'm typing this I can feel myself hitting the keys with force - 'Serves you right, you bullying bastard!'- and yet I'm writing about an 11 year old getting a beating from his father. Real violence is never anything other than ugly and painful.

I was a prolific reader throughout my childhood. By the time I was 11, I'd read Tarzan, Biggles, G A Henty's historical novels, Tom Brown's Schooldays and, my favourites, Rosemary Sutcliffe's stories about the Romans in Britain. I was into chivalry, stiff upper lips and codes of honour. The Sutcliffe books caught my imagination because the characters were well drawn, the battles were brutal, and people died. At the same time, I remember watching  TV programmes compiled from newsreel footage, much of from the 2nd World War. One Wednesday I watched old film of bulldozers piling up stacks of naked, emaciated bodies. I feel choked writing this now. I was shocked and fascinated. I went through a period of struggling to get to sleep at night. Mam would come and sit by my bed while I worried out loud about the existence of God and the beginnings, and endings, of life. The real horrors began when she left and the lights were out. I'd lie in the dark, wrestling with the dilemma of who I would choose if one of my parents had to die. I was a serious and troubled boy, although on the outside I still did all the rough-and-tumble. However, I introduced a rule that I would only fight if the other guy hit me first.

I stuck with the rule until my world was shattered by the death of my dad a few months after my 13th birthday. He had a brain tumour, and in 1969 there wasn't much on offer in the way of treatment. He weighed around 6 stone when he died, at home, mam having chosen that he should be with us rather than in hospital. His head had been shaved, he couldn't speak, and it was hard to tell if he knew who I was when I went into the room to see him. I remember the guilt and horror that I felt because he looked like the people I'd seen in the newsreels, in the concentration camps. That couldn't be my dad. And now, I'm glad that he was there, at home, and that I could be with him up to the end.

After that I spent the next couple of years engineering and provoking fights. I wanted to hurt and I wanted to cry. If I couldn't get somebody else to hit me, I'd scrape and bash my head and my fists against walls. Football, a girlfriend and the codes of honour and fair play that I'd picked up from my pre-teen reading were the things that saved me. I didn't want to be a bad boy, I knew that this life was it, and I wanted to be around for as long as possible.

What does all this mean? I guess for me it means that my ordinary life has already accumulated its fair share of pain and death, and yet I am a lucky man to have lived in this country at this time in our history. Violence is part of the human animal condition, a drive which needs to be considered and understood. It is complicated and painful and I think it is important that we all know and are prepared to face up to our capacity to take part in it, whether as protagonists, protestors, bystanders or victims. It is ironic that since the Second World War so many of us in the West have been able to avoid a direct involvement in it, while at the same time we humans have managed to efficiently industrialise and commercialise the process of killing and maiming each other in large numbers. To get back to what started this post, we need artists, writers and film-makers to provoke and remind us, to get us to think about and engage with what we'd rather avoid, or deny.

A curmudgeon? I think not.

Three years ago I renewed my passport. This was a blessed relief. My previous passport photograph showed me with a full(ish) head of hair, something I've not had for a number of years, and made me a target for comedy double-takes at border control on the rare occasions that we went abroad. In the time since my previous passport was issued photobooth technology has advanced and, when the time came to renew, I was able to reject images until I got the effect I wanted. In the chosen picture I'm leaning very slightly towards the camera, stony-faced and perhaps a tiny bit menacing. I think I look manly, mysterious, somebody to be taken seriously. My wife and children think I look like a thug, a terrorist, a comedy bad guy. The picture gives no hint of my warm and cuddly side.

My reason for telling you this is that yesterday I went to the Martin Harris Centre at Manchester University to hear Martin Amis talk about literature and violence. He was joined by Blake Morrison and John Gray. I've read a couple of Blake Morrison's books and I'm currently reading John Gray's Straw Dogs, so the opportunity to hear the two of them talk was what attracted me to the event. Amis, on the other hand, was somebody I felt an antipathy towards, based on the maelstrom of controversy that seems to follow his every utterance and, more unreasonably, on the scowl that he always seems to have on his face in photographs.

Do you see what I mean? He looks all moody, middle-aged attitude and
I find myself wanting to give him a slap. So. Literature, violence, Martin-bloody-Amis and his superior, brooding up-yours attitude. I was ready for a full-on rant. 

In fact, in person Professor Amis was warm, thoughtful, considerate and vulnerable. There was nothing macho in the way that he and his fellow panelists considered and analysed violence and the way that it is portrayed. They were stimulating, thought provoking and deeply moral. I came away with a list of books that I wanted to read, films that I wanted to see, and a reminder to myself of the power, and limitations, of the photographic image.