Bonus Post: report from the ground in Christchurch

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Many of the dear readers who live in New Zealand or have friends or relatives there have left moving comments on the blog this week. If I did not have a blog, I would know none of this, only the more impersonal reports that I read in the news. It does prove to me that blogging is an extraordinary medium, in that it can make an intimate community of strangers from all parts of the world. That is one of the most remarkable things about it.

Michelle Trusttum has her own blog here. But she left some extraordinary, immediate and incredibly touching comments on my blog, which she has given me kind permission to reproduce. It sounds beside the point, when there is devastation and loss of life, but one of the things that most struck me, when I got over the initial shock of her descriptions, is how well-written they are. They have all the vivid simplicity which I urge my students to strive for, when I teach my annual writing workshop. Most of all, they take a big news story, and make it human. The first one is a story of fear and sorrow and shock, while the second has a lovely ray of hope.

From the 23rd February:

Tania - we are forever changed here in Christchurch. It is devastating - so much worse than the Sept 2010 earthquake of 7.1 magnitude. The CBD is unrecognisable - bodies are lying in the streets, under rubble and in crushed cars. And still the aftershocks come - relentless, frightening, unbearable.

It took my husband more than two hours to drive the five minutes between his office and our girls' school. He is out now, driving with the last precious petrol reserves looking for water. We have no water, no waste systems, but power - thankfully - the internet. We have no money. You can't use ATMs - you can't get cash - systems are down - his salary did not go through. Our garden is under sand and silt - liquefaction - thrown up by the force of the quake.

Our contents are strewn throughout the house - so much broken glass. And we are the lucky ones. Wooden houses flex and move and groan with the quakes. And our 100 year-old house is hanging in there.

The children are terrified and aftershocks saw them screaming through the night - almost hourly. The dog is crazed with fear. We want to get out, but we can't mobilise resources yet.

The stories of loss of life are heartbreaking. And the air force helicopters are continuously overhead - ferrying trauma patients out.

Buildings continue to fall.

It is desperately, desperately sad.

God... Another massive aftershock...I think one of our chimneys just collapsed.

 

From 24th February:

Tania - thank you (and your readers) for your kind words and thoughts.

The sun is shining in Christchurch today and heartening signs are everywhere in the suburbs. I saw a home-made poster at one person's gate: We have water. Please come in.

And elsewhere, another sign leaning up against a small table in someone's driveway with an extension cord and power-board: Charge your cell phones here.

Four young men were driving around towing a trailer-load of wheelbarrows and shovels, offering help to complete strangers - pitching in where needed.

For the vast majority of us who have come through unscathed, the little things will get us through.

Thoughts

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I drove the dear stepfather to the hospital in Aberdeen this morning. He must have a procedure. It is not a big operation, but still, hospital. Of course I worry most about the filthy food. 'Should we send him food parcels?' I ask my mother.

The drive home is extraordinary. I had not done it in a while, and I had almost forgotten about the view. There is some rolling field and forest, the trees all in different colours, from dark green to a sort of cooked golden. And then you turn a corner and an entire range of blue mountains opens up like a book, running along the length of the horizon. They are the darkest, thickest blue, a blue so deep that there is not really a name for it. Then they shade into purple and almost black. There is snow on the high peaks. These are the Grampians. I always think that Grampian is no name for a mountain. It sounds like a gloomy monster in a children's book. It has none of the high musical majesty of the Cairngorms. The Gaelic name is better: Am Monadh. For all their prosaic name, they sing with a timeless beauty that defies words. They make me feel that everything is all right.

I always think when I drive. I thought about the nature of success, and the comforts of family, and how it is that a cheesy old song on the radio can suddenly transport you back to a perfect memory of childhood (someone was playing dear old Leo Sayer, and it made me laugh). I thought about the people of New Zealand, about whom I have been writing, a little. I thought about Libya, about which I have not written. I thought: I must write about Libya.

I do not know why these imperatives come. I sort of know why I have not written about Libya. Every newspaper and arm of the BBC and political blog has covered it extensively, so there is that. It is so horrifying that my mind shies away from it, instinctively. The geopolitical arguments are practically and ethically complicated, even though people are trying to boil it down to black and white. I wondered if there is anything I could say which would add anything at all.

But for some reason I felt it almost a duty to have some serious thoughts on the matter. That is the part which I find slightly odd. Why must I? Some confused notion of being an engaged citizen of the world, left over from my younger and more idealist days, I suppose.

I have three main thoughts.

There is sheer shock, that the numbers of dead are not in the hundreds, but, according to doctors in the two main hospitals, thousands. It's not just that the part of the army still under Gaddafi's control are shooting people, but that hordes of mercenaries are roving about, firing at random.

There is the oddity that for a long time Gaddafi was regarded as a sort of comedy dictator. He was such a strange creature, with his crazy clothes, and his odd dyed hair, and his suspicion of a bad facelift. It was so easy to point and laugh that people overlooked what he was doing to his benighted subjects. News outlets would run articles with funny headlines like: Seven facts about Gaddafi's beautiful virgin killing machines. He employed a personal guard of Amazonian women, all highly made-up, with glossy hair and painted nails and uniforms dripping with gold braid; they all had to take a vow of chastity. How we shrieked. Actually, it's quite a good lesson for a dictator. Be as peculiar and comical as possible, and no one will take you seriously, or look too closely at your human rights record. They will be far too busy chuckling at your latest absurdity.

There is the furious and simplistic argument, now the regime is falling apart and the full horror show is becoming apparent, that is it all somehow the fault of the West. Cameron and Obama are not being butch enough, the United Nations allowed him to come in, out of the cold, into the international community, Mr Tony Blair made him respectable with his own bare hands, in his crazed thirst for oil. It was partly about oil. It was also about the fight against terrorism, post 9/11. Some hard-headed and unpalatable decisions were taken. There is no doubt that if Libya grew brussel sprouts instead of producing huge amounts of oil, the policy would have been very different.

It's easy to get pious about this, post facto. Many commentators cannot resist the temptation. Up on their pristine soap-boxes they clamber. I am an idealist in my heart, but understand realpolitik in my head. Governments can only be as pure as their citizens. If we want to roar about in large cars and fly off to exotic lands and use plastic bags, we have to expect that our leaders will sometimes make messy compromises. I wish that my elected representatives could always live up on the moral high ground; I hope they will come down on the side of the greater good. It's just that I'm not sure I can make cheap, judgemental arguments as long as I drive around in my car.

Today's pictures are on a happier note. It turns out that someone has found an excellent stick:

While her sister gazes nobly into the middle distance:

Crocuses and snowdrops are growing out of the black winter earth:

The box and the Portuguese laurel provide cheering splashes of green:

The heather is heathery:

I have found a new, extraordinary piece of tree bark over which to obsess:

The view to the south, taken over my garden wall:

Another bit of heedless beauty:

The weather has grown suddenly mild, so the Duchess takes the opportunity to do what she likes doing best, apart from digging for moles, which is lying regally on the soft grass of my garden. She would lie there for hours if I let her:

The problem is, I can't let her, because she has a tendency to wander off, and I worry she will be run over by a tractor. This is the face she makes when I call her in:

That one is clearly the 'if I close my eyes then I can pretend you are not there' tactic. While this reproachful one is the 'I'm going to call the RSPCA on you' approach:

At this point I give in and bribe her with biscuits.

And finally, today's hill:

Bonus post: something to bring a smile to your face

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I love Ezra Klein, and now he has found easily the sweetest funniest thing on YouTube today I love him even more.

Click here for sheer joy.

Best line, for my money: I don't even know how to write.

The strangeness of magical thinking

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The regular readers will know that I pride myself on being a child of the Enlightenment. It's odd, the things that you congratulate yourself for. I take idiotic satisfaction from a variety of irrelevant matters. I like that I can make soda bread, type at 70 words a minute, have read every word F Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, know about the repeal of the Corn Laws and how Peel split his party to achieve it, and can recite Yeats. When the financial crash was at its height, and it was all anyone could talk about, I held a ridiculous pride in the fact that I knew what the Glass-Steagall act was. (I remember sitting next to some flash money fellow at dinner and having a terrible flush of triumph because he had never heard of it, and I could cite chapter and verse. I hang my head at the memory.)

The irrational shames are equally odd. I still have a slicing sense of failure that I cannot speak French or play the piano, even though I was taught both as a child. I am embarrassed by the fact that I cannot keep my office tidy and I must finally admit that I shall never really understand quantum physics. I can't make good mayonnaise. There is a distinct possibility that I shall never read James Joyce. (Even as I write that sentence I can hear the CALL YOURSELF A WRITER? klaxon going off in my head.) I will never be that kind of stylish woman who can transform an outfit with one witty accessory. In fact, most of my favourite clothes have actual holes in, and of course I do not know how to darn.

But at least I am the queen of Rational Thought. Well, perhaps not the queen, but certainly a princess of the blood. I know all about not being led into the morass of things which cannot be proved by the scientific method, which have no peer-reviewed studies to back them up. I won't be led astray by astrology, or homeopathy, or the laying on of hands, oh no. This is surely a Good Thing. Look at me, with all my empirical rectitude.

Then, this morning, I go out into the low, quiet day, thinking very much of the people of Christchurch, whose city has been devastated by random natural forces. One of my dear readers lives there, and has sent me a heartbreaking despatch. I find myself taking many, many pictures of the dogs, who happen to be looking particularly beautiful in the low light. As I do it, I think: I can put these on the blog and this will cheer up my readers in New Zealand. I actually think that thought.

This is INSANITY. If your entire world has been literally rocked by a senseless earthquake, if your streets are filled with rubble, and nothing works, and the hospitals are overflowing with casualties, will some snapshots of two elderly lab-collie crosses really make you feel even an iota better? What is wrong with me?

I think it's the helplessness thing. Because of the combined miracle and curse of the internet, every bit of the world comes into my quiet corner of Scotland. I get all the news, plus the blogs from the ground, and the tweeted reports and the Facebook updates. The bloody events in Libya do not take the form of some distant news story, filed two days later, from a faraway country of which we know nothing, but immediate, real-time happenings. New Zealand, which is ten thousand miles away, feels as if it is in the next county. And yet, for all this sense of closeness, of being a global village, of connectedness, there is absolutely nothing that can be done. I still live in a small village in Scotland. One can send money to disaster relief funds, put up faltering words of sympathy and empathy on a tiny blog, watch with attention as the news rolls by, but, in the end, the world swings on, in its gaudy, tragic way, and there is nothing in my puny plan which makes any difference.

When I was young, I thought I was going to change the world. Come on, that's what we all think, when we are fifteen. We shall fight injustice with our bare hands, take to the barricades in fearless triumph. Now I think: I can only concentrate very hard on the small things. It turns out that this is what this blog has become about. That is why there are daily pictures of canines and lichen. It is why I write of chicken soup and the nieces and my dear old mum.

So, here are the pictures. Even though I know my magical thinking is palpable nonsense, I am putting up extra dog pictures today, after all that. They cannot make any single thing better, but they are a few extra seconds of loveliness on which to rest your poor, tired eyes.

The snowdrops:

The new crocuses, the first of the season:

Here I was experimenting, not entirely successfully, with different kinds of focus:

The grass, which has been old and brown after the long, snowy winter, has suddenly gone emerald green:

The first little geranium leaves are pushing through the brown, leafy earth:

The beech leaves, which have clung to the bare branches since the autumn, continue to fascinate me:

This little clump, for some reason, is much paler than all the others, the colour of biscuits instead of bright amber. You can see I am playing with the focus again:

The lichen, of course, of course:

The view to the south, against a flat white sky:

And now, the promised canine loveliness. I do not know why they were looking quite so ravishing today, nor do I know why they decided to lie down and do some serious posing. I did not instruct them. They just decided it was time for their close-up:

Duchess looking very duchessy:

And Pigeon very pigeony:

A delicate clump of long grass:

And the hill:

It is a thin sentence, and a sentiment so paltry that I hesitate to write it, but: I wish you well, wherever you are.

Here comes the sun

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is an odd little scratching voice in my head which says this blog should not really be about me. For a start, it was begun as an adjunct to the book, and it was supposed to be Sarah and me together. That did not really happen, because Sarah has two jobs and a husband and two children and a dog and a social life. It turned, insensibly, into my obsession. Then the dogs pictures began, and the thin end of the wedge was firmly inserted.

But still, the idea persists that I should write about things:  what is happening in Libya, the state of the government, the madness of the GOP, whether or not there will be a second great crash (on gloomy days, I fear there might be). I must must must NOT fall into the Great Blogging Trap, which all the grumpy critics cite ad nauseam, and do the solipsism shuffle.

There is also an idea that I should not talk about the medium itself too much, or the serpent will eat its tail, and everyone will run for the exits. But I do find the process absolutely fascinating: because it is so new, because everyone does it in different ways, because the blogosphere is, unlike newspapers and magazines, so various, so unruly, so anarchic. There is no accepted template to which everyone must cleave; hundreds of millions of people are  making it up as they go along. This really interests me.

Yesterday, after I did my riff on the question of gay marriage, I completely freaked out. I sent an emergency email to my friend The Man of Letters, who is my touchstone in all matters literary, saying: Have I Gone Too Far? He wrote back, rather sternly: if your writing is not stirring people up, you are not doing it right. What I realised, oddly, is that here, in this place, I do not much want to stir people up. I know that whenever one wades into matters Biblical, one risks controversy, and I have discovered, rather to my surprise, that I do not want the blog to be a controversial place. On the other hand, I also know that I cannot sit by and let people like Melanie Phillips cast aspersions on people I love.

In life, I have some pretty trenchant opinions. I wage a daily battle against dogmatism, and crank my mind open with a wrench so that I do not become one of those annoying smug set in stone liberals who think they are right about everything. But I have a fatal tendency to what my old dad calls 'making statements'. I do not crave confrontation, but I have a complete inability to let things go. I am always rolling up my sleeves and wading in. Now I have my very own blog: what better place to start hares running?

And yet, and yet. Generally, I don't. Quite often, if there is some big controversy which everyone is shouting about, like the Sky sexism row, I'll do a recipe and some dog pictures instead. Sometimes this is because whatever the yelling du jour is about is so complex that I cannot fit it into a neat 800 words; I don't want to bang on and bore people. Sometimes I feel everything that has to be said has been said. But sometimes it is because I simply do not want to get a huge debate underway.

I think, and I am still working this out in my head, it is because, most oddly, this has become a safe place. Obviously, the radical in me despises this kind of bourgeois sentiment. Who needs safety when the world is so oppressed? Yet because the internet and the new media and the relentless 24 hour news has created a maelstrom of sound and fury, I love that my dear readers are so kind and polite. I love that we are not yelling at each other about ideological shibboleths. I love that in the almost two years I have been doing this there has been only one mildly disobliging comment. I love that you appear to love the dogs and the hill and the lichen.

After all my frets, it turns out I need not have worried. The response to yesterday's post was as generous and thoughtful as always. The blog remains a place of courtesy and good hearts.

I can't work out if all this is a massive cop-out, or a fairly sane response to a sometimes insane world. Maybe it's a little bit of both. I'm not sure there is a definitive answer. I really just wanted to write about it because it was not what I expected to happen, and I find it interesting.

But just at this very minute, none of it matters very much because - THE SUN HAS COME OUT. After days and days of determined dreich, there is light and even warmth. I ran into The Man in the Hat, and we walked our dogs round the block together, and I was so excited that I shouted at him for twenty minutes. I have a terrible habit of yelling when I am happy. He did not seem to mind too much. The dogs ran about in the woods, and sniffed the air, and picked up enormous sticks. Above us, the birds were going crazy, flirting it up, and chasing each other over the dogwood like shameless hussies. I started to believe that spring really will come.

PS. Am thinking of the earthquake in New Zealand. At least two of my regular readers are from New Zealand, and I know more of you have family there, so I am hoping that you are all alright. Send me a line to let me know.

Now for the pictures; for once, not of the murk.

The light on the tree trunks:

The burn and the bridge. Yesterday, that water was the colour of old mud; today it is blue:

The light, the light:

More snowdrops:

The woods:

My favourite pile of logs:

The viburnum, clearly proud that it is still the only flowering plant in the garden:

Off go the ladyships:

They have spotted something:

Yes, yes, it is the Man in the Hat (see the yearny looks of love he gets):

And, wonder of wonders, the hill has reappeared. I was so excited I took it from several different angles: