Back in the High Life Again

Observant readers will notice that I haven’t been here for a few days (although sadly, this makes no apparent difference to my site statistics, which total the same daily tally whether I update or no). My right maxillary sinus’s dangerous liaison took a lot out of me, and in the medicine/work/writing balance, the latter had to drop away. Even at work I was a shadow of my usual busy self, although no-one seemed to notice the number of hours I wasn’t there (“working at home” has rapidly become a euphemism for “resting” in my life).

However, the course of antibiotics is finished, thankfully without the usual round of, erm, women’s troubles that usually accompanies such medication, and I can breathe again with all the conviction of a young Toni Braxton.

In fact, my first return to writing this weekend has been over at my lit crit blog, where I have spent much of this afternoon trying to think my way through matters of moral import, specifically, the challenges to thought posed by recent horrible world events. A lot of what I think is stimulated by remarks in various comments threads, but I’m no master of the snappy comeback, and that, combined with the fact my feelings get easily hurt, tends to mean I go away and write up my own ideas at length. (This is also the way I conduct personal arguments. You upset me, and I have to think about it and write a chirrupy email explaining why your sorry arse is wrong wrong wrong. It’s a less-than-endearing habit, I fear.)

While my recovery is down to drugs, natch, it has been much assisted also not only by my dawgs, of course, but also the world’s greatest sofas, praised elsewhere in this blog but here photographed for the first time:

Should you wish to buy your lounge furniture from Christchurch, New Zealand, then Kimball at Kozi Furniture is your man. Normally I avoid anything spelt with a “K” in lieu of a “C” on principal, but for this business (and the band Katchafire) it is worth making an exception.

On Thursday I went with my mother and my grandmother on my grandmother’s monthly trip to Oxford, North Canterbury, to visit her cousin. My great-grandfather and his sisters grew up and lived most of their lives there (his parents were migrants from Newcastle and Lincolnshire who met in New Zealand). Before we dropped Grandma off at the rest home we drove out the back of the township to see the house where my grandmother spent the first eight years of her life–her cousin had heard it had entirely fallen down. This proved not to be true, but its dilapidation continues, as you can see:

The house is in the corner of a larger farm, bordered by pear trees which were there when my grandmother was a child, and two local roads. These are its current inhabitants (below left):

Those early years of my great-grandparents’ marriage were characterised by a fair amount of heartbreak. My great-grandfather was invalided out of the western front during World War I and seems to have met my Nanna (my great-grandmother) in Torquay, where she and her sister were working, although her family was from Peckham. They married at the end of the war and left almost immediately for New Zealand. Nanna was eighteen and my great-grandfather thirty. He had previously worked as a farm labourer but they were settled on their farm as veterans by the government. It was unproductive land, prone to flooding. Nanna had a tubercular lung injury that meant her four pregnancies were spent in town at the sanatorium. When recently we got my great-grandfather’s war records we saw he too had health problems with his lungs. When my grandmother (the eldest child) was eight and the youngest of her three siblings still a baby, the family abandoned the farm and moved to town, living in poverty in a beach suburb.

A few months after they moved to town, my grandmother’s five-year-old sister was hit by a car while crossing the street and killed. My great-grandparents’ marriage broke up shortly after. My great-grandfather went back to Oxford to live with one of his sisters and her children, and Grandma saw him only one or two times before he died some twenty years later. It’s only in the last fifteen years that she’s been found by her Oxford cousins, through a complete coincidence–one of them came door knocking for the National Party and their relationship was revealed in the conversation that followed.

I like it out in Oxford now: it’s quiet, green and close to the mountains. Some dog people I know already live out there; I could see myself in future on a ten acre block out the back of the town (the area known as West Oxford when my grandmother was a child). While we were there my mother and I called on a friend of hers whom she knows through the craft world. It was an afternoon spent hearing about the speed with which oven gloves are selling locally at the moment, in a kitchen filled with beautifully-made decorations. We went into the local craft shop next door and I was taken both with the lovely objects–none of the tacky ephemera the cynical might associate with a small town craft shop–and the prices, which must barely have covered the materials in some cases.

It’s a rare thing for me to spend time like that in the worlds of both my mother and my grandmother, and it was a centring experience. Living and working in the relative isolation that I do–keeping a gentle distance from most of my colleagues and a big distance from my family on harvestdad’s side–it’s rare that I get the experience of being part of a community of people, and getting out to Oxford amongst my grandmother’s family–my family–and my mother’s friends was really something. I’ve had people (understandably) misunderstand me when I say “my grandmother’s family comes from Oxford”, but I’ve had to become an adult and lose my younger sense of “small towns are of no consequence” to get a feeling for what that statement might really mean.

More pictures: the precious and stately lady (okay, bitch) in the image below was the object of our visit yesterday. She is Meg, Arthur’s mother (okay, dam). The dogs and I had a great time with her and J, her owner. Did whoever came up with the idea of indoor-outdoor flow have a houseful of small dogs, I wonder? Once in her company, Arthur never leaves Meg’s side. (It’s an entire coincidence that her given name is in fact my given name, but one that I much like.)

This week’s DVD adventure has been a remastered version of the Run Run Shaw film Invincible Shaolin, which could be subtitled, Kung fu for kung fu’s sake. Three disciples of Northern Shaolin are brought to Canton by an evil Manchu general, who arranges a duel between them and three disciples of Southern Shaolin, whom he then secretly assassinates in the hope of starting an intra-Shaolin war and destroying the movement. Watching it made me think again of how our experience of film is governed by dramatic conventions that we are largely unaware of until we see something governed by different dramatic conventions. The mistake is to think that what we know is “realistic” whereas what we don’t is “unrealistic”. I was talking about this to Dangermouse last night, who remarked that the same could be said of special effects in older films. He praised the original King Kong and commented that some people’s inability to see the art at work there might come out of a wedding of the idea of “good” special effects with the use of current (rather than contemporary) technology. (Well, that’s my paraphrase; D didn’t use the word “wedded”.)

An unadvertised bonus in the special features menu on the Shaw film was a documentary about Wu Xia (swordfighting, as opposed to kung fu) films. I think I’ll show it to my students as a reward for sitting their film studies test in a couple of weeks, although whether they get as excited as me about seeing Lau Kar Leung demonstrate traditional Chinese weapons (and their various eviscerating powers) remains to be seen.

It was good to talk to Dangermouse, who is off to Madrid for a few days before the new term starts. The ability to nip off to other countries at a moment’s notice, on the lowest of costs, is something I do wish we had here. Even a cheap fare to Australia is $450. I have seen much of Britain, some of Paris and a small part of the south of France, but none of the rest of Europe and nothing of Asia other than Singapore. These facts do not always sit lightly with me. Patience, etc.. (I can say that because I got last week my second pay at fulltime rates, meaning the extent to which I can’t afford my lifestyle is smaller than usual.)

My final anecdote is this: as I came in my backdoor on Friday night, thinking about my day, I heard my mind say, “god, I love teaching”. Where did that come from, I ask? It was as unexpected as if I had said to myself, “god, I love meat”. I wonder if the fact I’ve been missing the taste of bacon lately (not enough to eat it, mind) is in any way connected. On the pigs that greeted us with the fiercest and most inquisitive of grunts at the gate to my grandmother’s childhood home, my mother later said, “I’m used to seeing pigs in shrink-wrapped rasher form”. I’m used to thinking of teaching in shrink-wrapped necessity form. Please don’t tell The System about my new feelings. I don’t want it to think it owns me.