Monthly Archives: June 2020

Georges Perec, I Remember: a personal memory

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I just read a fascinating review by Karen at Shiny New Books, via her own blog, Kaggsysbookishramblings (link to her review there) of the French Oulipan writer Georges Perec’s idiosyncratic autobiographical I Remember. It was published in 1978, and consists of 480 short sentences, each beginning with the phrase ‘I remember’. In this way a sort of fragmentary picture of his life emerges.

There’s a link to her post HERE.

She says that Perec’s text ends with blank pages, with an invitation for the reader to fill in some sentences, structured the same way, of their own. My immediate thought was a conversation I had with my brother on Sunday.

He lives in Cyprus, so we converse on Skype. As I read Karen’s review, I was thinking, I wonder if Perec really is recounting memories, or are they something else. My recollections of my past, especially of my childhood – which is becoming further back in time than I like to acknowledge – are often hazy and dreamlike. In fact, I can’t distinguish between distant memories, that I’m not sure actually happened, and may in fact be dreams – or what might be called ‘real’ memories of events that did happen.

The ones that came up in conversation with my brother were about Cyprus. We both lived there as children (our father was in the army, and had been posted there around the time of the Greek EOKA ‘uprising’). I had memories (or dream recollections) of several mishaps that befell me while there (I was about five).

In the first, I fell into a lime pit. That’s it. I don’t know how I came to fall in, or how I got out – or even if I was injured.

The next involved my wandering away from our house and ending up with a group of (I think) Turkish guys, sitting on the floor of a cottage and drinking coffee. At least, they were drinking coffee; I don’t know if or what I drank. I also recall a flustered British MP rushing in and scooping me up and away. Potential terrorists, perhaps. So maybe they were Greek. If this happened.

Finally, there was a huge pig. Probably a sow. I either fell into her pen, or something else untoward happened with this pig and me.

My brother confirmed the lime pit incident, but had no more detail to add to my own partial memory. He didn’t remember the coffee-drinking episode. But there was a memory of his own about the huge pig:

He said he and a group of his young friends (he’s six years older than me) were hanging around near this pig’s pen, when the owner, an elderly Greek man, said he was going to slaughter it, if they wanted to watch. Of course, they did.

He said the guy then took a metal wrench, like the ones car mechanics use, and proceeded to beat the pig to death with it. ‘It was pretty brutal,’ my brother said.

He didn’t recall my falling into the pig’s pen.

So: to go back to Perec. I remember the lime pit. I remember the coffee-drinking rescue. I remember the pig and my peril. I don’t remember what happened.

Whether they really happened or never did doesn’t matter. Memories distort over time, refract or bleed into other memories – or dreams. It’s the place, perhaps, where memory intersects with fiction or fantasy. It’s such stuff we’re made on, to paraphrase another magician of memories, Prospero.

Fingle, hirundines, navelwort and squirrels

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Our government relaxed the lockdown regulations a little last week. We took advantage and met with our daughter, son-in-law and their two children yesterday.

Fingle Bridge

Fingle Bridge

We met at a place roughly equidistant: Fingle Bridge, just outside Exeter. The River Teign runs through a beautiful wooded valley. The bridge arches over the tea-brown waters of a River Teign from the bridgeriver stained by the peaty soil of Dartmoor. The building in the background of my picture is a picturesque pub, closed during the pandemic, but serving takeaway drinks and food from a stall outside.

It was lovely to see the family: February was the last time we saw each other face-to-face. We walked through the woods, socially distancing, and watched an exuberant black labrador leaping gleefully into the water after sticks thrown by his owner.

After a month of almost daily sunshine in May, June has been wet, grey and blustery. We drove up the A30 through squally showers, but fortunately the sun came out during our reunion, and we had a picnic beside the river.

CalfToday the exiled routine returned to normal. A long walk in the country this morning. Saw this serene little calf, wearing what looked like yellow earrings.

The foxgloves are nearly finished, but the pale yellow spires of navelwort are springing up. It’s another wild plant that’s said to have medicinal properties. The 17C book by Culpeper on such matters claimed navelwort (or it might have been something similar) was good for curing St Anthony’s fire or ergotism, a common ailment in the middle ages. Also known as ergotism, it was caused by a fungus that grows on rye grass, and was ingested in the bread made with infected flour. Its sufferers went mad, hallucinating and writhing in agony.

Like comfrey, mentioned in a recent post, it is also a vulnerary.Navelwort

Hirundines have arrived: swallows, martins and swifts. I remember when I was much younger there was a brand of cheap French wine that tried hard to appear sophisticated by sporting the  gallic name ‘Hirondelle’. The wine was disgusting.

Another summer without hearing a cuckoo. I still haven’t spotted a kingfisher on riverside walks this year, but have seen several dippers, with their weird bobbing curtsey and darting flight. Grey wagtails, too, busily exploring the shallow water and tapping their tails (surely ‘wagging’ would be side to side, like a dog’s tail, not up and down?) Taptail would be an apter name.

My squirrel skirmishes continue. I remonstrated with one the other day for sitting on top of the pole from which my bird feeders are suspended, and trying to unhook one of the feeders. It ran off half-heartedly, turned as it perched on the fence and flounced its tail, like an English bowman taunting the French at Agincourt, chattering its squirrel insults at me.

 

Kingfishers, halcyon days, and walks

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Last time I mentioned the painted kingfishers on a branch above the river just below my house. In Greek mythology, the bird is known as halcyon. Our expression ‘halcyon days’ derives from the legend that Alkyone or Alcyone and her husband Ceyx angered Zeus by setting themselves up as his equal. Zeus wrecked Ceyx’s ship while he was at sea and he drowned. When she heard the news his wife drowned herself. The gods took pity on them and transformed the couple into kingfishers.

According to other legends, the halcyon laid her eggs on sea rocks or the beach during the winter solstice. Alcyone called upon her father Aeolus, god of the winds (hence Aeolian harp) to produce this period of calm to enable her to care for her brood safely. The expression therefore referred originally to any period of calm weather, then, by extension, to any period of calm and tranquillity.

It’s the feeling we get when we witness a scene like the river in those pictures in my previous post.

A few days ago, when our government in its wisdom relaxed lockdown constraints to allow us to drive to remote places for our walks, I went with Mrs TD to Goss Moor, some ten miles away. It’s a nature reserve on the edge of the area where china clay was once extracted, leaving the landscape scarred with quarries and spoil heaps. This moor is a huge, Fluffy seed headsswampy, pool-filled area of wilderness: lichen-draped trees, reeds and wildlife abound.

It’s a popular cycle and walking trail, being so flat. We saw plenty of these strange fluffy bundles like cotton wool balls. They seem to be the seed heads of certain kinds of reed.

My trusty plant identifier app confidently informs me that the pretty purple-violet flower here is a marsh orchid.marsh orchid

Another day we drove a shorter distance for a walk to one of the tidal creeks on the coast. Not quite the sea, but almost. Many of the neighbourhood houses were guarded by these peculiar plants that resemble miniature Thai temples. They’re called echium pininana, aka giant viper’s bugloss. This popular name apparently derives from the alleged Echiumresemblance of parts of the flowering stem (a favourite haunt of bees) to the head of this snake.

They flourish here in Cornwall, but are more striking than handsome, in my view.

Today we ventured further down the county and had our first walk by the sea since lockdown. This area of dunes is called the Towans. The lighthouse is Godrevy, across the bay from St Ives. This is the one that Virginia Woolf and her family would see from their holiday home Godrevythere. In her novel To the Lighthouse she transposed it to Scotland.

The beautiful weather of the last weeks (halcyon days during the pandemic?) has gone, and it was grey, blustery and much cooler. Still lovely to see the surf and breathe the ozone. A handsome stonechat sat on a gorse bush a few feet from us and sang us a song.

I’m still making glacial progress through Phineas Finn. Just reached one of those tedious foxhunting scenes that Trollope is so fond of. Wish he’d stick to the more interesting parliamentary shenanigans.

Which takes me seamlessly to our illustrious leader of the house of commons, the unctuous Rees-Mogg. He insists on returning to physical co-presence during parliamentary debates, risking the lives of the MPs, and disenfranchising those who have to isolate or who can’t attend for other reasons (carers, etc.). It’s his way of trying to cover up the haplessness of the PM, which has been badly exposed while the chamber is nearly empty for sessions to ensure social distancing, and when the usual braying claque of sycophantic Tory toadies can’t drown out opposition while cheering on the inane blustering of their leader.

With solipsistic narcissists in charge, who will care for the people?