Blessed are the Cheesemakers
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: foundspeech, southeastlondon, naturalhistory
Date: 24 March 2006 20:04:10
Spring is late this year. The plants obviously believes all those TV news scares about us having a cold winter, We didn't - well not here in London anyway - but things are growing later than before.
None of the main kinds of street tree round here in leaf yet, not anywhere near, not even breaking bud. There's a frosting of bright green on the hawthorns along the railway line around New Cross, and Buddleia is just about in leaf, but then it was never really out of leaf in the winter.
Weedy stuff is a bit behind as well. There are a few ragworts along the track that look as if they have flower buds on them, but no flowers yet. The annual mercury is in flower ("How can you tell?" they ask) but then it flowers in just about every month (is that why they call it "annual?") Its taking over my grotty garden, as it does every winter when there is little competition from more robust plants, except for the ivy which is creeping along from the other side.
It was a lovely morning though. Cool and over-cast just as I like it. A cormorant flew over the 188 bus as we crossed Waterloo Bridge, and there were flocks of herring gulls calling overhead when I arrived at work.
The magnolia outside the front door of the college hasn't broken flower bud yet. It usually blooms before it leafs. Last year the buds broke on the 13th of March so its already over ten days behind. The rather lovely magnolias outside St Mary's in the Strand were blooming on the 19th last year - no sign yet from the bus (I didn't look that closely)
On the train up to Waterloo there were a couple of women talking (I almost said "old women" but the chances are they aren't actually that much older than I am nowadays. Self-image seems to take a few decades to catch up with reality). One seemed to be talking about a divorce or similar, she kept on saying how it was useful to meet on "neutral territory" - that's the word that caught my attention and turned my eavesdropping on. She said it loudly and significantly. Its good because you can meet and talk in public, with no shouting (tell me about it). She was telling the story of her last meeting: "He came round to the house but he didn't come in. I met him at the door and we went to the pub. He did come back to the house for a coffee as far as he was concerned"
"...as far as he was concerned"? What does that mean?
And then she was worried about food. Someone else came round to her house for the first time - someone who apparently was going to be visiting a lot in the future. I couldn't catch who. A new boyfriend? A son-in-law? A work colleague?. She was worried about what to feed him. Another friend is - horror! - a vegetarian and she had reason for thinking this new person might be too. Apparently this makes it almost impossible to know what food to give someone. It seems to be a real problem, a cause of panic, sufficient reason not to invite someone to the house. She talked for a while about planning menus, all sorts of reliable advice about re-using some things and freezing others and chicken and lamb and stew and curry. And then said that she had asked X out for a meal and he had ordered steak and eaten a huge portion "so I've got no problem there". My mood changed from fellow-feeling to perplexity. What was she on about? How could someone else not eating dead animals cause her such self-doubt?
But while I was feeling superior I began to have my own self-doubt. What if I read the whole conversation wrongly? What if this mysterious meat-eater was in fact the same person who had to be met with on neutral territory, and I had misread her anxiety about not being able to feed him with large amounts of meat as the emotional baggage of a messy break-up? What complexities life on the Bexley-Sidcup Borders must have. People are hard to read, or else I'm bad at reading them.
A little later, on the bus, there was a dark-skinned young woman with a headscarf and a long dress and long coat down to her ankles. She was reading from a book and writing notes in another. "Ha" I thought. "Obviously a Muslim" Perhaps she is reading some devotional book about the Koran, or how to wear long dresses. Obviously she is in thrall to oppressive society that keeps her wrapped up in such clothes. When she got up to go I saw it was A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power, and the Subject
Which reminded me of an old woman, a genuinely old woman this time, perhaps in her 80s, a sweet granny type, who was reading on a bus I got on at Lee Green after having a pint in the The Prince Arthur where the local police used to hang out after hours. I was trying to guess what she was reading. Some romance? Maybe The People's Friend? No, it was what is to be done by V.I. Lenin.
Blessed are the Cheesemakers.