A dance of domestic abuse

One of my Dad’s carers, who used to do ballet, having finished dispensing pills and tea, suddenly breaks into a spritied performance of Knees up Mother Brown in the living room.

Knees up Muvva Brown, knees up Muvva Brown

Under the table you must go, E,I,E,I,E,I,O

If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off!

Knees up! Knees up! Gotta get a breeze up!

Knees up Muvva Brown!

Oi!

Makes you wonder about the lyrics. Under the tabke you must go! Definitely some coercive control going on there, but to what end? And, If I catch you bendin’, I’ll saw your legs right off! Seems a bit extreme. What’s that all about?

Crooning in the Chemists

At the top of Grays High Street, just before you get to the station, there is a slightly eccentric chemists. The pharmacy is at the back, looks swish and modern, is well staffed and stocked and has done a steady trade every time I’ve been in there. But you have to approach it through an empty front area that at one time was a cafe, now closed but still with its counter intact, scattered with a few random leaflets from the health side of things. This gives it a slightly random and precarious feel, with what could have been a lively addition to its operation left derelict as a reminder of its failure. A battered looking bloke in the queue behind me grins and starts singing, tunefully, at one of the pharmacists… “Hello…Is it me you’re looking for?” …and she joins in.

Maybe they’ve done this before…

Poetry on the tube

On the Northern Line on the way back home, one of the wonderful poems on the underground – pasted up where the adverts for all sorts of forgettable things usually are – makes me visibly well up. A few people look momentarily concerned, so I compose myself to maintain the social solidarity of mutual indifference.

This one by Marjorie Lotfi.

Packing for America — my father in Tabriz, 1960

He can’t take his mother in the suitcase,
the smell of khoresht in the air, her spice box
too tall to fit. Nor will it close when he folds
her sajadah into its corners. He can’t bring
the way she rose and blew out the candles
at supper’s end, rolled the oilcloth up, marked
the laying out of beds, the beginning of night.
He knows the slap of her sandals across
the tiles will fade. He tosses photographs
into the case, though not one shows her eyes;
instead, she covers her mouth with her hand
as taught, looks away. He considers strapping
the samovar to his back like a child’s bag;
a lifetime measured in tea from its belly.
Finally, he takes her tulip glass, winds
a chador around its body, leaves the gold rim
peeking out like a mouth that might
tell him where to go, what is coming next.

The world’s weirdest Gooner dancing by the subway

Outside Hendon Central Station, at about tea time, an eccentric Arsenal supporter has erected a structure framing a couple of AFC banners, topped off by a Charles III Coronation flag; all flapping in a brisk breeze. He stands to one side of it with a serious face, leaning over the fence to the subway below and dancing jerkily to an eruption of rhythm from a busker playing the sax. The busker looks like Bob Mortimer on a slightly rough day, but is enjoying himself enormously, bopping about from side to side. The tune is a hurtling series of distinctly East European staccatto sounds, flowing with an incredible velocity. Up tempo to the point of mania. As little squads of tired and dusty workers, who have just knocked off for the day, walk into the tunnel at the far end, their weary trance like expressions turn into surprised smiles as they are ambushed by the music; and the workaday functional passageway from one side of the A41 to the other is turned into an unlikely venue for a moment of joyful reprieve that creates a complicity in everyone there as people turn to each other seeking eye contact.

Stair chair fanfare

Having a stair lift put in is like having the world’s slowest Thorpe Park ride on tap. The chair is made in Holland, and I’m told by the engineer – who comes to uplift the bannisters so they don’t knock knees or pinch hands as the chair progresses onwards and upwards with its air of inevitable gradualism – that the speed is set by EU regulations. At some point, no doubt, the Daily Telegraph will cotton on to this and campaign for speedier chairs, to express the exhilarating freedom of the Brexit experience that we have all, no doubt, shared. And to cut the Nanny State red tape that stops it moving without the seatbelt done up first and dispose of that health and safety gone mad emergency stop button. As it is, this is a chair that pauses and thinks before it does anything. And clunks very deliberately when it does. Operating it is a school of patience. But thats cool. It is slow, steady and inexorable. It should have a musical accompaniment.

The tall, relaxed Dutch bloke who delivered it first thing on a misty morning – with the kids drifting slowly past, up the road towards the Hathaway Academy – had driven it from the factory in Holland. As he lifts off the huge box that contains all the smaller boxes with components in, I feel there should be a fanfare. On a two day UK tour, delivering bespoke stair lift systems to houses up and down the country – then back across the North Sea on the Harwich ferry with the empty van, he delivers all over Europe; Italy, Spain, Germany. I chat a bit about visiting Amsterdam last year and he says “EVERYBODY visits Amsterdam”. I think I manage to persuade him to visit Keukenhoff in the end, with the line that the effect of all those flowers is almost hallucinogenic, even though he starts of by saying “Visiting there is almost TOO Dutch!” and “no one who actually lives in Holland ever goes there”.