Babies, wonderfulness

I have just had an email with my first photos of my little cousin, born last week. The grandparents look so thrilled. I am bouncing around telling people, just like last time a few weeks' ago when my other new cousin was born.

Time to use my coloured ink to print off A4 sheets for my wall of photos.

Between a film and a poetry workshop..

..I was able to phone my brother, father and mother. I leaned over a stone bridge in the sunshine, sat on a bench, sat on a wall, found a quiet street with another low wall to sit on. So lots f chatting and catching up until my phone ran out of power. I was probably speaking rather loudly but who cares, the traffic was doing its best to drown me out. My brother sounded as if he were underwater so w were repeating everything to eachother several times. I did say it would be better if we texted eachother.

My brother was on the Strand in London on his way to meeting a friend, my parents had just got back from a day of travel and excitement including lunch at The River Cottage. I asked my fatherctontell me exactly what they had eaten. The soup was celery with some little gooseberries included. My mother was on the sofa with her legs stretched out. I was with her when the phone died on me. I am sure she understood.

London - People - Places - Decision

So much:

Friday: Tate Britain, including the Blake room, hundreds of Turners, cardboard and wood in the massive halls, other great things I just love walking around. The Letitia Dean film made at Kodak, just my thing.

My cousins in North London, expecting a first baby and loving their garden.

Saturday: The British Museum, plus many streets I walked along, convinced I knew where it was, I didn't! Mesopotamia, Ancient Arabia, Islamic section, why is it in the basement?? Met a fellow student of Arabic, she is exactly at the same stage as me, but without a class or teacher to continue with. We had a guided tour together. I decided to buy the Arabic guide to the museum, it is surprisingly suited to my level of reading. No translations, just pictures.

My cousins in West London, the flat is full of pictures and feels like being at home. At one point my cousin was on skype with a relative I like in Belgrade. I shall have to learn how to skype before T goes to university.

Sunday: Tate Modern, lots of short films, I leaned against a wall and it fell open, it was a very tall internal door. Space, vast unmitigated space.

Easter Lunch with my brother plus friends of my parents. We even had a chocolate course, my parents like their food, but this is off the scale! It wasn't meant that way, but there were so many tidbits to go with coffee that it deserves a name. My brother had made some chocolate with ginger in it. That went fast.

Before lunch I tried the closest church to us, St Saviour's St George's Square. Their bells used to keep me and my friends company as we talked into the night on my parents' roof garden way back in time. It was so friendly, I had arrived in the middle of the sermon, that I rushed back home to encourage my mother to give it a go. She was game and we made it for the second half. It's a good alternative if going to their favourite isn't possible, St Mary's Bourne Street.

Monday: The Photographers' Gallery, an old haunt from my late teens, only it has moved to another building. This was my first visit there. Many different styles of work, revealing the concerns of the photographers. Syria was represented, huge square photos of squares where executions used to take place at dawn.

My cousin who was the body double for Sophia Loren in a film made in Spain. We talked family stuff for ages and have finally met properly after all these years of being in the same family. It is good to be able to tell her how things really are. We really enjoyed the restaurant her son had recommended.

Decision

Next time I shall just go to new places, but will continue to see family as much as possible.

Languages, marriages and first births

Both of my grandparents' marriages involved 2 languages. English with French and English with Serbo-Croat. How did they deal with things when they were cross and couldn't think straight? It's impossible enough with the same language.

There were religious crosses (!) too, Catholic and Church of England, Serbian Orthodox and Church of England. They were called 'mixed marriages' then.

Both my grandmothers went back to their families to have their first children and have them baptised presumably. Their birth stories weren't encouraging though!

Not even an aspirin for my mother's birth, though there was a midwife sitting there knitting in Fontainebleau, as my French grandmother pointed out to me bitterly. She had her second child in the UK after that experience.

In my Serbian grandmother's case she took the decision to have all the drugs in New York for the next 3 children. So that tells me quite enough about her first birth with my father in Belgrade.

I'm working on an exhibition of poetry

I am moving on from my 2nd event, the Christmas Tree of Poetry. It had books underneath it just where the wrapped presents would go. They got rather damp and curly, but it was worth the sacrifice to hear that people were walking around the church reading from them.

The 3rd event is to be an exhibition in my house with the theme of written portraits of older relatives. Prose would count too and the concepts of relatives can be loosely interpreted. Mine is not a portrait at all! It was meant to be, but went somewhere else entirely.

It doesn't matter at all if it is a micro-exhibition with just 2 or 3 items. I'm thrilled to be having ideas and creating something from scratch.

Sonique - It Feels So Good

Walking over a bridge

After Great Aunt Militza died I was thinking in the kitchen. I was standing up at the time and looked behind me as part of my thinking.

The sensation or image I had was that I had thought I was passing through life, as if walking at my own pace over a long widely spanned bridge. As I stood there I had been looking towards my desk as the far shore I would reach in due course.

Then I turned and looked behind me towards the kitchen door. All of a sudden I realised that a big chunk of the bridge I had walked over safely had just fallen into the waters, all at once. So instead of having the whole expanse stretching behind me, just there, showing how far I'd come, I had a big gap which came close to where I was standing.

Would I be able to get to the other side in time, before further sections of the bridge collapsed, with me on it? Getting to the far side seemed perhaps out of reach, instead of a certain goal which I could take my time with.

'My time' - what an assumption.

Born on the road to exile

I found out that my great aunt Milica (Militza) was born while the family was escaping from Belgrade to Salonika in Greece in 1915, in the middle of WW1. They had to stop so my great grand mother could have her 2nd child, the first was my grandmother, who was a toddler at that point. What a story! It makes Christmas look tame.

Counting heads

I mentally think of where my parents are: Dumfriesshire; T: Cambridgeshire; the rest of us: right here.

Sometimes I think of a relative and wonder for a moment whether they are still alive. That is a version of counting heads too.

The South of France - Le Midi

My writing group always gives me ideas. This time a door was opened into a chunk of my childhood which smells of Ambre Solaire and the very hot, dry sand at the private beach of St Tropez in the 70's. Wow, the sand was so hot. I'd have to almost dance across it, then it was just as hot on the wooden walkways, also partly covered with sand.

The house of my great aunt and uncle had a 'cave', ie a wine cellar. I was taken down there once. This blog post reminded me of that. It was damp and cool. What a great place to have as a back up if it all got too hot. Somehow the house always had cool places though. It must have been designed for the summers. The floors were tiled and the corridors were always shady and slightly dusty and cobwebby.

There was a garage down the slope which didn't have a car in it, but was for playing ping pong. I didn't fancy that, but it was cool there too.

My great uncle, Oncle Pierre, used to go out with the hose and water the base of the big shrubs all around the house each morning. I wonder whether he did it in the evening too, or am I getting mixed up and he only did it in the evening.

There was a path with trees and more shade down to the pool area. beside the pool there was a modern, stone built guest house with a kitchen/bar for drinks and having lunch with a built in barbeque oven in the wall. Behind there were loos and showers. How amazingly luxurious and civilised this all sounds. Rather James Bond. I stayed in the little guest room once I was 16, old enough not to drown in the night. When I was younger I knew that my grandmother, Raymonde, my great aunt's sister, stayed in that building and it sounded very mysterious. The window was made of thick pieces of glass, all different colours. So being in there was peaceful and beautiful, particularly during the sleeping time after lunch each day, when the day light came through.

The glasses used at table were quite different from in Paris. They were thick and of different colours. The glass was uneven and had bubbles in it. What a thrill! When I was older and spent time with my great aunt in Paris she explained how you wear different clothes in the 'Midi', ie the South of France and couldn't wear them back in Paris. I guess that went for cutlery, glasses etc. The whole life style was a break from the precise requirements of the capital. Village life here is not the same as London...

There was a whole wall of book cases in the main open plan reception room, filled with art books and magazines. For some reason I didn't look at them, maybe they were for adults and too good for children to handle and 'abimer', spoil or ruin. Running up between the bookcases and the wall was a staircase with hard steps, going up to the corridor for the bedrooms.

It is amazing how I can remember all these details. It feels so close, as if I could just walk into these scenes. I have no wish for travel at the moment, nothing could compare to these glimpses of the past anyway. Village life has its own sensations I don't have to travel for, just breathe in as they happen.

Family Friday

Since we don't have a weekly drinks party or Saturday dinner together as we did in those not so glorious 1970's......memories of smoky Ovington Square coming back....I have decided to try an email catch up with my 2 parents and my brother.

Will they tell me my news is too much, not frequent enough, not enough info about the boys?

At least I will not be circulating those annoying jokes people used to send to their whole address book, sexist, everything-ist.

When my father was very ill I did a brief and encouraging daily update on him for the wider family. So this is a version of that, but meant to be sustainable and just for us 4 to start with.

Voices and faces

Over this summer I have heard my father I's voice in H's as H calls me on his mobile from upstairs!  I saw my cousin S in T's face, hair and way of holding himself as he sat at the table.

Once my grandfather P told me, as I made a gesture with my hands, that his mother in law, who I never met, used to make that very same gesture.  So that wave of the hand had been transmitted genetically, lain dormant for 2 generations and then surfaced as we were chatting in the hall!

After my grandmother R died I would get a shock when I'd look at myself in the mirror.  I could see the same facial structure and could therefore tell what I might look like once dead.  Hmm.  When I smiled at myself the resemblance would go, so I smile at myself a lot now!  I'm also a bit plumper and that helps me look more lifelike.