In recovery mode

 The couple of weeks back from Sri Lanka were sufficiently quiet to allow me some real recovery time. That was just as well because the prolonged absences of the past couple of years have only allowed the minimum in house and garden maintenance. This in turn has meant just rolling on arrangements, without checking if they were still convenient or appropriate and putting up with decay unless physical collapse seemed imminent.

The front porch is a good illustration. Because I am chronically short of storage space and shelving,  it’s where I keep past copies of journals. Skimmed over, maintenance wise, they and the porch provide a paradise for ants, spiders,  woodlice, and even the odd slug – though I have no idea how they get in. These invaders have even been known to penetrate the second door and get into the front hall and sometimes my study. They make use of my journals, but not for reading. So that’s quite a big restorative job waiting to be done. In the meantime, past journals have been piling up all over the place. Once, long ago, they were put aside for a later reading that has never happened. Sorting them out and discarding as many as I can is a related task. All very time-consuming, which is why it hasn’t been done, but increasingly needs to be.

Much the same applies to my books, and I sometimes worry that the library in the first floor computer room might come crashing down into the kitchen below. The urgency of the need to do something about them so I can just ‘get straight’ was underlined by a second trip to Dartmouth. Here the incentive was to unload some of my historic papers into the College archive. They were a set of letters written by naval officers in the First World War to their history master at the College (when it was in effect a naval public school). They were given to me decades ago by a departing colleague.  I made good use of them, but were now surplus to requirements. Locating them meant clearing one of the lofts – and dealing with the mice and worse that tenanted it. 

The problem was that my very kindly and welcoming hosts insisted on giving me quite a few books, which I could hardly refuse to accept, so as an exercise in load-shedding, this was a decidedly counter-productive transaction !  Worse was the fact that I simply didn’t have anywhere to put the said books, and this led to a total refresh and restack of the whole lot so the new ones could be slotted into more or less the right places. Another couple of days of R&R gone, but at least a few surplus books in the box for Oxfam !

However, the Dartmouth trip was thoroughly enjoyable even so.  I stayed again with the Alexanders, old friends from the time we were there. So once again I had opportunity to enjoy the quite fantastic vista from my bedroom window of the River Dart. What an amazingly beautiful place it is. We had half planned to retire there.

While I was having my cappuccino in the wardroom at the College, the sun was shining straight into the window so I couldn’t photograph the River view, but this shot of the Boatfloat in the town shows the sort of place Dartmouth is. 

But out of a side window in the Wardroom,  I got a shot of the young people (mostly graduates these days ) busy on the parade training.

I remember my first ever lecture at the College – on the ‘Tactics of Trafalagar’ to about 200 Libyans and Iranians (which shows how long ago it was). They had been doing parade training since early that morning. Not for nothing was the Caspar John Hall known as the ‘Z Shed.’ It certainly was that day. Afterwards my new boss the Director of Studies who had been observing my effort, said sympathetically, ‘…if you can survive that, young Till,  you’ll survive anything.’ The visit inspired many such memories.

But it also provided me with the consoling knowledge that I was not alone, working in conditions that envelop one in chaos. My colleagues in the Museum and Archive live and work surrounded by piles and piles of things to be sorted that make my storage and stacking problems seem utterly trivial. This included the two boxes I had months ago sent over from Newport, which I spotted on one table ! They had been opened at least ! The task before them is simply stupendous.

The same point emerged last weekend. Living on one’s own tends to encourage the notion that one’s situation is unique, when it clearly isn’t. This was again brought home to me on a recent visit to Team Powell in order to watch Grandaughter Number One’s superb dancing in a production of Coppelia. People often remark on how busy I seem to be, but my activity rate pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the frantic and full-on equivalent in the Powells’ existence. Everything was happening all the time – constant comings and goings as all manner of members of the dynasty appeared and disappeared amidst a vortex of rehearsals and performances, shopping trips, cooking and meals, music gigs in Brighton, no 1 Grandson being man of the match in hockey, dancing exams in Southampton (passed with distinction of course), and a physio-therapy session in the living room. All this in two days. My role in this was to sit open-mouthed while all this swirled around me, and then inadvertently let the un-belled cat out of the front door – a cardinal sin. To the consternation of some passers-by I manged to wrestle her to the ground, but fell over in the process, damaging both knee and dignity.  Nonetheless the whole weekend was an absolute delight. But it all served to show how prosaic my life is by contrast.  So, I came away with a bruised knee and a little humbled.

The fallibility of memory and perception was also demonstrated in the Dartmouth visit, when the Quarterdeck in the College looked to me much smaller than I had remembered it to be, and our first house in the nearby village of Stoke Fleming seemed both tiny and poky, not the palatial ‘Bag End’ we had both thought it all those years ago. A big van parked in the very small drive obscured most of the bungalow and I was sad to see my carefully landscaped front garden, complete with Dartmoor style dry-stone wall,  now disappeared and just weedy gravel in its place. But the big beech hedge, at least, was a living testament to our presence.

We started it with tiny seedlings taken from Grandma’s garden in the late 1960s. Now it’s a solid and healthy-looking green wall eight feet high, an apparently indestructible survivor.

And as another bonus in the whole Dartmouth trip,  I found in the College Chapel I could light a candle to Cherry, now gone for almost six years, incredible though it seems. My daughter and I have an informal competition in who  can light the most in different places. She of course is ahead, in a manner entirely consistent with life-style.