Home Again

Being realistic, I had put aside two weeks after my return to the UK to get everything sorted out and ship shape after five years off-and-on of less than necessary house and garden maintenance. Now two weeks into it I realise how hopelessly optimistic this was. Despite the attentions of my (very good) gardener, the garden was in a pitiable state. No doubt this was thanks to his having inadequate time, my roe and fallow deer visitors and a long period of drought, plus of course the fact that his priorities for the garden and mine don't always quite align. The house was structurally sound and hadn't been flooded, but had a very large number of spider residents in every corner. At least this time (so far at least) there hasn't been those disastrous water-leaks which were such a hassle last time.

The immediate priority was to find somewhere to put away all the stuff I had brought back with me from Newport. It was when I discovered that I literally could not get the two suits that had been away back into the main wardrobe, that I realised that after all these years the time had come for a grand sort out and, frankly, chuck-out. This was clearly going to be a much greater campaign than I had envisaged. The process of normalisation that I guess will probably linger on into the Autumn. Another illustration of the same sort of issue has been finding places to hang the pictures I had brought back with me from the US. Many of these had gone out to the US largely because they used to be at my office at the JSCSC and when that closed (the office not the JSCSC) I had put them in store until inspiration struck as to what I could do with them. On my return from the US, part of the solution was simply to abandon the bigger ones and leave them at Newport for my successors to do what they liked with them. This had been a wrench, particularly one large one of naval manoeuvres in the 1880s which had already suffered in its journey out there. I remember being delighted by it, years ago, when stumbling across it with an unenthusiastic Cherry in tow in a junk shop on the Isle of Wight !  Instead of consigning the survivors  to the stables/outhouses I thought I would devote time to rethinking where some at least might go. Then something rather weird happened. I stood in front of one picture thinking, maybe I could replace it with another from Newport. I didn't touch it, but thought I would mull over the issue for a bit. During the second night of mulling in which I decided not to move it, the picture in question fell off the wall, strangely enough. Anyhow enough pictures have been successively slotted away for me to think the time well spent.

And so things are slowly falling into place. Another constraint on original plans also to devote time to the family and local history projects that have been neglected for so long is the fact that current events  and a continuing stream of invitations or requests of one sort or  other are combing to make it very difficult to cut back on the kind of academic activity that has been responsible for so many past neglects. The sudden, but totally predictable, upsurge of interest in the naval side of the Ukraine war of the past few weeks in the wake of Russia's withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative for example demands attention from people like me. I feel an op ed perhaps for Singapore coming on. 

Although it doesn't look or feel like it to most people who are focussed on the immediate effects of climate change or the cost-of-living crisis (both of which are made far worse, of course, by what's happening in Ukraine) we're very nearly at war with Russia and this won't help. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the next few years could be the most dangerous since the early 1980s. Understandable that there's a reluctance to accept this and its consequences. Perhaps that's why, a week or so ago and on the day after it was announced that the US would be supplying cluster munitions  to Ukraine, and there was a particularly gloomy report on climate change, the Guardian chose as its main headline that one third of vegan meals had dairy in them. I mean no disrespect to Vegans (for they include some of the closest members of my family !) but it did seem to me to reflect an odd sort of priority. But maybe it also reflects that very human craving only to think about problems that you can do something meaningful about. Like gardening, or hanging pictures.