How to Play Poker

 

The book Hat presents to me is beginning to shed leaves, its spine is collapsing, and the pages are glued together with age and the ancient escapees from many mixing basins.

It was mine, and the childish handwriting that denotes ownership indicates I can only have been seven or eight.

Look! I Can Cook! it says on the front cover. Not that it worked for me, necessarily, or I wouldn’t need to do what I’m doing now. But it was a lofty challenge delivered by my mother, I think, for a birthday. Perhaps my 7^th?

It sat squarely and brightly upon a kitchen shelf alongside Katie Stewart and the unassuming Kenya Cookery Book, and its jacket, for all the colour and the confident assertion of culinary success, made you want to pluck it out and pursue the baking of Lemon Meringue Pie or Lazy Daisy Cake.

Cooking with mum as a child brings back memories as warm-sweet as the jam tarts we made (with their syrupy-strawberry insides and papery-flakey pastry cases which we ate with a dollop of fullfatfarmfresh cream because we were little and cholesterol hadn’t been invited). Something about the togetherness and teamwork that came from being captured in the same small space and then, later, sitting down around a table, carefully laid for tea, to enjoy the sticky fruits of our labour.

My brother and I stood upon upturned crates so that we could see what Mum was doing on the too-high kitchen counter, we deliberated carefully about which recipe to tackle (and sometimes the deliberation was cut short because, as in the Outpost of the noughties, Kenya in the early seventies, lacked gastronomic delights). Katie Stewart’s Cherry Russe remained a figment of mouth watering imagination forever and eternally replaced by sturdy Scotch Pancakes. Which never sounded as exciting on the page but which – when warm from a griddle and saturated with treaclesweetness – were just as eagerly devoured so that the Cherry Russe was quite forgotten.

We assisted with the gathering of ingredients, sifted flour and left a dusting of snow across the floor, we beat eggs and sugar with an electric hand whisk and when we were done and our offering in the oven we licked the paddles clean, sitting on the kitchen floor and carefully regarding one another’s prize for any signs of unfair distribution of the spoils.

Delicious. The taste and the recollection.

And so Hat brings to me the same book and asks if she can make Chocolate Cake and I, because I am hell bent on some new sanity-saving exercise (namely to anchor my fleeting self in food and words) leap from my chair and offer my services.

Together we gather flour and butter and sugar. Together we seek the paddles for a similar hand whisk (not the same one but one almost as primitive to satisfy the craving to do things in precisely the same way I did with my mother 35 years ago) and together we begin to weigh flour and cocoa.

Hat beats the ingredients until the mixture is feather light and fluffy and so air filled it seems to sigh with pleasure as bubbles rise to its velvety surface and pop languidly. We tip it into two tins greased using newspaper so that the butter has blackened from the ink and we put them in the oven.

Later we sandwich them together with a butter icing stained with instant coffee. As a child we flavoured our own with Camp Coffee Essence.  But Camp doesn’t exist anymore, and definitely not in the outpost so Hat and I improvise with Nescafe. And with the two halves clinched together in a mocha kiss, we decorate the top with glace icing  and I show Hat – just as mum showed me – how to spread it with a knife dipped in boiling water so to iron it to a glossy satin sheen.

Hat doesn’t lick out the bowl – a long ago experience of giving all my children salmonella poisoning on account of raw eggs has left me nervous of bowl licking.  Instead it’s for the washing up, not the dogs as was the post baking habit of a friend called Sue who laid the empty basin on the floor for her Labradors.

We eat thick slices later playing cards by candlelight during a power cut and Hat announces that she plans to teach us how to play Poker.

And I thought I had her adult education in hand with cooking lessons?

Chocolate Cake

6 oz of each: butter, sugar, self raising flour (a bigger cake and you just increase proportionately)

3 big eggs (4 if you’ve been tempted to go for 8 oz of each …)

A hefty spoon of cocoa powder

Bung the lot into a basin and beat until smooth and creamy.

Tip it into greased sandwich tins and bake until the cake has risen and is coming away from the sides.

When cool, remove from the tins and ice with whatever takes your fancy: cream if you have it or, as we didn’t, butter icing and a cocoa glace on the top.

Eat whilst playing Poker.

 

.

Why I Learned to Concasser Tomatoes

I did not know how to concasser tomatoes.

Concasser?

I can slice them. Dice them. Even strip them of impossibly thin skins.

But concasser?

I am referenced to an earlier page in my 500 Recipes for Vegetables and Salads (which is very old fashioned for its inclusion of a Carrot Ring Mould circa 1972, and supremely optimistic given that here in the Outpost I possibly encounter just 5, which includes, obviously, for I must learn to concasser them, tomatoes).

And so – as directed – I turn to page 63 which describes concasséed (and the accent persuades me I am dealing with something eminently grander than usual Outpost fare) tomatoes as skinned, quartered and de-seeded.

And I consider – as I begin to gather my ingredients together – whether the regular focus on something new to cook, to eat, will concentrate whatever loneliness I might feel, reduce it and boil it away to nothingness? Elizabeth Gilbert sought herself in her book, Eat, Pray, Love. Italy. Indonesia. India. The places she visited, all beginning with the letter I, and so she pondered, appropriate given that she was on a voyage of self discovery. I.

But I’m not. I don’t need to find myself. (I have always dismissed the notion as mildly self indulgent – well, it’d have to be, wouldn’t it?). But I need to discover some old facet of me and polish it to a new and enduring brightness.

Why not cooking? Can a failed domestic goddess emerge as an aspirant one?

In an effort to avoid insanity born of loneliness and a fractured identity and the flailing lack of direction that comes with the losing of direction and maps, why not food?

Mashed potato with butter and salt. Soul Food.

Words. Food for the Soul. Always.

Can I – then – not expect the marriage of the two to be a happy one?

The effort will prove challenging on two fronts.

I am not naturally an aspirant Domestic Goddess (despite eternal admiration of those who are) and the Outpost does not lend itself easily to domestic divinity.

You can’t get mascarpone cream here.

Or feta.

So I shall need to improvise.

To muddle along.

Which I have grown good at. I muddle a lot in the Outpost.

But I don’t need to muddle the tomatoes for I know, now, how to concasser.

 

Carrot, Tomato and Date Salad.

A handful of carrots, a couple of tomatoes and a few fat dates – I am not one to follow recipes closely, I have a greedy family: if a chocolate cake recipe suggests it’ll feed 8, it won’t, not in my house, so I manipulate measurements as much as I am forced to ingredients.

And a good slug of olive oil, a similar amount of vinegar, a pinch of salt, some black pepper generously ground and a few sprigs of basil (which grows – in my case – in the hollowed out bowl of a discarded canoe which I salvaged from the shores of the dam and which is valiantly battling the drought).

Grate the carrots, concasser the tomatoes, separate and save the seeds, chop the dates. Bung all that into a bowl. Then tip the seeds, the oil and vinegar, the salt and pepper and some shredded basil (never chop it, always shred it with your fingers, though I do not know why) into a small saucepan and stick all that on a low flame and bring to a slow simmer.

The kitchen will be filled with the delicate scent of basil and your eyes with well as they are stung by the piquancy of the vinegar. When it’s reduced a little, tip it through a sieve to get rid of the flotsam and jetsam and then pour the resultant dressing, which should be honeyed pink, onto your salad so that it can marinade in the warmth and the sharpness of the vinegar be slowly mellowed by the sweetness of dates.

Pop it in the fridge until supper time when it’ll be prettily glazed with the chill and striking for the psychedelic combination of never-wear-together red and orange of tomatoes and carrots, and bedecked with ebony shards of date.

We ate it with fillet steak and big floury boiled in their jacket potatoes. Hat and husband were very kind, which means they will get it again which mightn’t have been what they meant.

And I made a dent in my longlonelyoutpost day and felt a mild sense of something like achievement, a small, warm glow of happy satisfaction.

Shirley Conran, who wrote Superwoman in 1975 claimed ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’.

But then she didnt’ live in the Outpost where stuffing a mushroom or for that matter, concassering a tomato might be all that stands between you and the madness wrought of isolation and redudancy.

I wonder if I can find one here …

 

Empty Promises. Emptier Ponds

 

BEFORE

 

The lawn (and I use the term loosely, so loosely as to be almost completely untied from the truth) is popdom crack dry.

And the termite tunnels, like a busily woven subway engineered for – by – a population of insects which, when the rains comes, will take energetic flight only to die upon a damp morning or be eaten by the cats, are meringue fragile beneath my bare feet.

And the succulents shrivel and atrophy. I thought that was the whole point of cacti: that they could survive the fiercest heat, the meanest drought.

Unless they’ve had the misfortune to be planted in the Outpost.

Clearly.

Showers are short and furious and quick. I grapple for the tap to rinse the soap from my eyes. And I curse.

And every morning I wake to high, high blue skies unsullied by even the tiniest smudge of a cloud. Bugger it, I say. (For I am more polite than Alice de Janze).

The water department comes to lay a new pipeline. Because the old one, the one this particular house has depended upon since the days of colonial administration, has died a death. Given up the ghost of whatever faint promise of water it once held. And occasionally, very occasionally, twice or (when you were really lucky) thrice a week and for 25 minutes at a time, delivered on.

So the water department digs an untidy trench (when they are not leaning on jembes and smoking cigarettes) across the desert that masquerades as my garden and they lay a line which they optimistically fit with taps. And a meter. To measure the gushing torrent that they swear will come surging through.

They tell us the price of the water (Christ! Says husband, you could wash in petrol) which, they assure us, will arrive on Sunday morning. At 6am. Not a minute later.

Husband and Hat and I lay elaborately drenched plans.

We will fill the pond where the guppies are gasping and the lilies dying.

We will fill the pool which is low and green and swimming with boatmen and scorpions.

I will do three loads of laundry, in flagrant twofingersup to my usual once-a-week and please-wear-your-shorts-for-more-than-a-single-day regime.

We will give the succulents and the portulaca and the spinach a long, cool drink at sundown.

We will have recklessly lengthy, hot showers and the shampoo will not sting my eyes for I will rinse long and luxuriously without turning the taps off once in between. Not until I’ve well and truly finished and am squeaky clean.

At 6am on Sunday morning 17 drops of water fall feebly from the newly laid line into our cavernously empty tank.

Drip. Drip. Drip. I can hear the applause at the bottom as they hit the concrete depths.

And then silence.

We have tipped the guppies into the pool, to join the boatmen and scorpions (what will they eat, Hat asks? I promise her there is sufficient fish food in the flora and fauna that thrives in the unseen aquarium green). We closed our eyes to a garden wilted beyond rescue. And I mine to a laundry basket suppurating gluttonous and overfed across the bathroom floor.

The succulents and the portulaca and the spinach won’t get their evening drink.

But I will. A long, cold beer.

Which I will sip from a sweat-beaded bottle as I gaze across a lawn baked to the colour of biscuits and a sky shot with all the peachy radiance of an unblemished sunset so that you know tomorrow will be just as high white hot as today.

AFTER

Shortening Shadows

 

The flamboyant drips red into the pool below. Like blood.

I’m glad it’s in flower. Full fat flameflared flower. It bore only a few shy blooms last year.

And then the tree next door fell down and, as if to make up for the loss, or just because it no longer had competitive, crowing, colourful audience, it has come into glorious hot blossom.

Stark redblooded contrast to the dead baked biscuit grass.

We have been home for two weeks. Hat and I.

Our feet barely touched the ground, our suitcases barely opened and we were off again.  Sometimes Outpost life is so slow moving you can barely hear it breath. And sometimes it whizzes past in a blur of bags and trying to remember to pack your toothpaste this time.

My middlefordiddle is ensconced in her Home Counties boarding school and braving her first imminent winter and I am trying to distract myself from long shadows. It feels all wrong that she is not here: a gap where we should be five. A full house five.

 

 

But eldest is home for halfterm. And I have a writing gig.

It meant four days in the glorious bush bound seclusion of Katavi, in Tanzania’s Wild – wildest – West.

Where the sun is high and shadows are shorter.

 

 

So from England’s autumnal winter and ever thickening woollies, it was to still, steaming afternoons which melted in the broiling heat; you could hear the hiss of cicadas, like too many insistent pressure cookers on the agitated boil.   Sometimes the breeze gave an impatient sigh. But that was all.   One tiny, tired puff.

 

 

Lions lay somnolent in the deep shade of Tamarind trees; hippos hunkered as low as they could in chocolate mousse mud and crocodiles’ smiles grew wider as they lay inert, hideous, jaundiced mouths ajar.

 

 

‘Is that so that they can catch a passing bird?’ asked Hat.

‘No’, I said, fanning myself with a road map, ‘that’s so they can keep cool’.

‘I think they look mean’, observed Hat, and she began to sing, never smile at a crocodile …

She missed three days of school. She learned to tell the difference between a male and a female hippo; she spotted a python in a tree, an owl on a dust spangled evening game drive, four lionesses crossing a river (hop, hoppity hop they went: cats on a hot tin roof, or over a murky water way where they could not see crocodiles lurking log like and treacherous in the shallows).

 

 

She lay in her tent at night and listened to the soft tug and pull as passing elephants grazed close to where she was trying to sleep. She wasn’t scared.  ‘Isn’t it funny’, she observed at breakfast the next morning, ‘such big animals and you can’t hear them unless they’re eating’. Cushioned pads pillow their footfall and muffle the sound to softest silence.  

Three weeks ago she was listening to the rush of London traffic, the beat of feet on fast city streets, the reverential hush of the National Gallery, the entertainers in Covent Garden …

 

 

And now we really are back. No more safaris on our immediate horizons. Just a powder blue sky which yawns to white hot as I scan optimistically for scudding clouds: it’s that time of year. It’s the ‘when’s it going to rain’ time of year.

And Hat is doing maths homework.

And I have finally finished unpacking.

And the flamboyant is dipping her scarlet painted fingers in the pool and tracing a crimson pattern.

 

Old Photos

I need old photographs. For a project. Mum and I return from a walk and mum digs out albums and dog-eared envelopes and we scatter pictures across the floor. Hat, immersed in maths homework, is quickly distracted.

Awww mum! Is that you? She asks, and points to a photograph of me circa 1960something.
Look how blonde you were!
(I pay hairdressers fortunes to emulate what I had aged 3 ½)
Cast back in time.
My mother with a beehive and a cinched in 23 inch waist. My dad all buff and bare-chested. Paul Newman blue eyes.
We laugh at pictures of my brother perched in the birdbath; my baby sister birthdaysuit clad and bald as an egg; myself screaming indignant, red faced and cross, into the lens.
‘Which one next?’ demands Hat, reaching for another album, Pythagoras Theorems’ abandoned.
And so for two hours we are thus immersed. ‘That’s your mummy when she was six, that’s your mummy when she started school … and that’s your grand-dad’.
And then there’s a gap.
A few empty pages, a cold white hiatus between sunny 1985 Africa and the marbled chill of our first Christmas in England.
And Dad is gone.
There is a photograph of him and me. I remember when it was taken: at the airport when I flew to London to seek my fortune. I am wearing a jumper mum had knitted for me. It is grey and pink. And far too thick for a sultry February evening on the equator. But I wear it anyway. Out of loyalty. Dad is beside me. His hand in mine.
For a moment we are silent. ‘That’s the last time I ever saw Dad’, I say to mum.

I know, she says.
And then, ‘is that a cigarette he’s holding?’.
‘Mum’, I laugh, ‘you find me a picture where Dad isn’t holding a fag’.
And she laughs too.
And we turn the page.
Because life goes on.

Guess Where?

 

 

 

Sun, sea, sand, sky, white wine (too much of it), sunburn, cold nights, warm evenings, long drives, short flights, oysters, chocolate, old friends, young family, spinach, the black stuff, the red stuff, the right stuff, a lot of laughter, a few tears, hellos and goodbyes, socks and sandals (but not together, obviously), forty shades of green, bright lights, street fights (only kidding), dairy cows, funny accents, silly hats, designer shoes, no smoking …

 

Guess where I’ve been?

Season of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

And the blackberries lie crestfallen at my feet. The sloes are fatly bruised-blue in their place. I’d collect them if I had a bottle of gin to drop them into.   I’m fearful to buy one for myself, though A bottle of gin, please. Mother’s Ruin, that’s what my grandmother called it. (And Chardonnay isn’t?)

We gathered blackberries one hot summer evening. The girls and I. The branches hung less heavy; the fruit was beginning to drop where it lay on the ground, crushed, dejected, to bleed into my hems. Amongst the thorns, though, there remained a few, plump and jewel coloured and difficult to pluck without risk of spiteful thorns dragging at our skin, clutching, as if resentful of the small, last bounty we stole.   My bowl remained empty. My fingers blackened.

Mum! Stop eating them, my daughters admonished, they’re for supper!

I carried on regardless, popping fruit into my mouth and savouring sweet, late, warm summer on my tongue.

You’re going to get a sore tummy, they warned crossly.

I didn’t.

Which just goes to show how often, as a mother, I must have been wrong.

 **********************

I have been sewing on iron-on name tapes. Sewing because they resist my ironing, curling in complaint, refusing to lie obligingly flat and still.

Name tapes and shoe cleaning kits and regulation sports shirts.  Boarding school looms.

My daughter starts at hers on Tuesday.

I have taught her how to use the ATM. I have watched her describe her first formal signature. I have failed to teach her how to iron. I have bought her tights. I have argued with her over which winter coat is appropriate/affordable/adequately warm.  I have giggled with her as we packed a bag of toiletries. I have watched television with her head in my lap.

I have shared my English telephone numbers with her: your gran’s; your great aunt’s; your Godmother’s – the contacts I hope will fill the gap my going home will force.

And I wonder what will stop up the one she leaves behind?

**************************

And on the subject of schools, I’ve got a post at Schoolgate at The Times today which explores the argument between the IB and A’levels …

On Being English

 

We attached ourselves limpetlike to Englishness on Saturday.

The girls and I.

They are more English than I; the girls They - at least – have traces of it coursing through their veins; their grandfather was English. Real-life from England. Not dislocated in the way their grandmother was. (English but born in a nomadic village in the Congo).   I’m not a bit English. I’m a Celt. Halfscottishhalfirish.   But I travelled here, to England, on my maroon British passport: courtesy of my father. Who never visited Britain in his life.

Funny old thing: patriotism.

See. I think it’s necessary. And necessarily it attaches us to wherever – and whatever – it is we call Home.

It’s hard to be patriotic about Africa when your skin’s white and your passport’s maroon. You can’t be white and an African. Everybody knows that.   The immigration officials at the border comment on my Swahili.

Where are you from?

Here.

Here?

Here.

Yes, but where did you come from?

I didn’t; I was born here.

Ah. But your father? Where did your father come from?

Here.

And – like that, their inquisition, my determination to prove I belong – we trek tediously back through one hundred years of familial history until we get to my itchy-heeled Scottish grandfather.

So we have learned, the children and I, to stick that need to be – and to belong – to whatever passing thing feels right at the time.

Saturday evening.  An open air concert. And a big English late summer sky. And warm beer and cold Pimms. And Union Jacks and St George flags fluttering on a light long evening breeze. And fireworks and Rule Britannia.   We didn’t know the words, the girls and I, but we stood up and sung-shouted the bits we thought we did. Loudly.

 

It was a good weekend to be English. We brought the Ashes home wrote my son in a text from his school in Africa.

Home? We?

From the same boy who is hopeful of a university place in Ireland.

Because that’s where he’s from. This week.

Sometimes I think our fractured identity is muddy and sticky and mires us in complicated equations.

And sometimes I think it is a useful camouflage to be whatever it is we think feels right. At the time.

And on Saturday night, being English felt right. 

Even if we didn’t know all the words.

When I was Young …

 

This time a week ago we were on our way back to school. And our hair was thick with Tsavo dust, standing up on end with that and the wind and not enough clean water or shampoo.

What do you want to do the last weekend of the hols, I asked my son?

(the last weekend that I still have you as a boy not the man you will be when I next see you: I complete a passport application for him and sign the section that says If your child is under eighteen … I forgot, you see).

Go camping, he said, in Tsavo.

So we did.

And we drove and kicked up the dust that got tangled in our hair and wondered if the rock we could see was a lion. (It wasn’t; we scrutinized it long and hard through the binoculars).  And we ate biltong and drank cold beer and too many cokes. And we counted loglike crocs sunbathing on sandbanks growing ever larger with each passing desiccating day and fat hippos slumbering in warmbath water (not that I stuck my toe in: not with crocs snoozing with jaws agape).   

 

 

And we wanted to cry when we saw a dead baby elephant, its mother and sisters standing sentinel over its silent, still, small body. Elephants feel grief acutely. I don’t know if they cry. I don’t know if their long elephant lashes are wet with tears. But I know that they sway hopelessly and wave their trunks as fists in the air to some god unseen or Mother Nature: Why ours? Why our baby? That’s what they seem to say.

Do you think the baby elephant died because it was hungry, Hat wanted to know.

Quite possibly: a lot of animals are going to die because they’re hungry this year. And if the diminished browsing and grazing and water doesn’t take them, hungry poachers will. Another elephant lay, its prize hacked from the front of its face. 

 

 

When I was young, I had a sticker plastered to my school tin trunk: Only Elephants Should Wear Ivory.

When I was young you could see elephants from the main road. And rhino too.

I tell my children that. But I don’t think they believe me.

 

 

My eldest daughter is packing to leave home. She has packed her bikini. She is arriving in almost-autumnal England.   I frown and question her choice of nearly-winter wardrobe.

‘I can but hope’, she grins.

She’s a  good example.

I can but hope the days until the Christmas holidays pass with smudge-blurred speed so that my little house will quickly fill with the sound of scraps and laughter and chairs will be overfull with long flung limbs.   I won’t mind that I haven’t a clue where the remote control’s gone.

I’m taking her to her new school. So I pack too. I try on unfamiliar shoes and the dogs go wild assuming that being shod means I shall take them for a walk.

I laugh. And then I want to cry: no walks for more than a month and I bend low to scratch their ears.  I think they know though: they’ve seen the suitcases and the sulks have set in.

My brother tries to salve my anxiety of my daughter’s soon far flungness.

‘Remember when we were  young’, he prompts, ‘no emails or mobile phones: remember how much further away that made us feel. At least you can stay in touch at the press of a few buttons.’

When I tell my daughter, she crossly says, ‘I know Mum, everything was much harder when you were young’.

But that’s not what I meant.

 

 

When I get back to the Outpost, it will be panting high-hot summer. I’ll swim at dawn again, I’ll slip into the pool as the sun lumbers up above eastern horizons and brands the sky pink and chases the stars and the moon racing away before they’re melted to nothingness by mid morning heat.

They’re talking El Nino. The drought, says the Met Department, will be followed by heavy and unrelenting rains.   Last time El Nino struck the Outpost, years before I got here, it was cut clean off.  The railway line was washed away; the roads were impassable and the airstrip a quagmire. Nobody – and nothing – got in or out for three months.  If that happens this year, I shall surely go quite mad.

When I was young they didn’t talk about El Nino. They talked about the Floods of 61. Which was before I was born.  Mum said, ‘the roads and the railway got washed clean away that year.  We couldn’t get off the farm …’

********************

There is a heron in the garden. He, or is it she?, stands and watches for fish and frogs in the pond.  She, I think, for the elegant pose she strikes, all Parisian model composed in an oyster grey suit (can I see pearls?) and perfect posture with her long, thin legs, takes to the air when I try to get close for a picture. Will she still be there when I get back? Or will the pond have quite dried up?

And will the family of Marabou storks which has nested on a tree over the road have moved out.

They aren’t nearly as lovely as the statuesque heron.

When I was young we had a tortoise in the garden, it used to feast on bright pink hibiscus flowers. I tried some once, hibiscus flowers, they tasted of nothing. Much like lettuce. Which is why, I suppose, the tortoise enjoyed them and I didn’t?

************************

Yesterday I met a man called James. Met as in collided with online whilst doing  some research for my coral conservation project.  During the course of our conversation he suddenly exclaimed wait – you’re the memsahib lady, dammit!?

When I was young you couldn’t meet people like that – you couldn’t have a conversation through the sweet syrup of the ether. You couldn’t keep in easy, affordable, instantly gratifying touch with your children half way around the world, you couldn’t write stories about your funny old African Outpost life and pin them up on an intangible notice board called a Blog and benefit from company you otherwise wouldn’t have.

Sometimes, despite the wrinkles and the obligation to be Grown Up and the school fees I must pay and the way I squint at the contraindications listed for medicines because I am too vain to wear my glasses, I’m glad I’m not as young anymore.

 

Mum’s an Onion

 

Two thousand kilometers is quite a school run. And it gives you too much time to anticipate goodbyes. Once I hated them for my smallson’s tears. He’s big now. Now I dread them for my own.

Which I hide behind sunglasses and forced smiles.

You can’t cry when you say bye to your nearlyeighteenyearold son.

Because you are supposed to be Letting Go.

Especially as he begins his last ever year at school, for God’s sake.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote Valentine, a metaphor of love and marriage and onion rings. Read it. It’s clever and beautiful and it made me think that the onion analogy extends to life as wife and mother …

Motherhood’s an onion.
I’ve built by layers,
Several skins.
Of myself
Since I began.
Wife. Lover.
Friend. Mother.
And what do you do?
Oh. I’m a writer.
Another skin.
(That one’s a bit paperflaky).
My son’s birth,
A long, long night.
(A long time ago.)
I howled.
Where’s the F****** epidural?

I cried
His arrival made my eyes water.
Oniontears and obscenities
A mewling, cross baby boy
Lay at my side and scowled
At the intrusion
On his peaceful watery world.
And then I wept.
Pleased to meet you.
Another child. And a third.

More tears. More skins.
More of myself.
And less to go around.
Sometimes you cry because life is good.
And sometimes you do because it’s not.
Wife. Lover.
Friend. Mother.
(Pretendwriter).
That’s a lot of
Reasons to make your eyes
Sting and well seawatersaltedgreen.
Especially when your son,
Who fixed his hourold
Wiseoldman stare on you

So that you cried,
Smiles, dry eyed and says,
See ya Mum, Stay Cool.
Rip the layers from a round
Whitefleshed redskinnedonion and

See if you don’t weep.

 

 

And two thousand kilometers from the western reaches of Tanzania to the far flung eastern corridor of nextdoor Kenya and back again gives you alot  time to stare out of the window and watch a dessicating world go by.

 

A waxwhite sky stretches
To touch fingertips with an
Ashen Africa.
She’s dying.
That’s what they say.
On the news.
Drought stricken.
Strangled
Lifeless leaves hang limp
From trees.
An imperceptible sigh.
Death’s rattle.
I can’t hear her breathing.
I can only hear a thirsty earth
Suckle greedy
So that rivers sink.
And all we’re left with is hot sand.
Which escapes on a hotter breathed,
Tightchested, wheezing wind
As dust.
A shroud.
Ashes to ashes.