Category: The Green Diary

It’s our 40^th Anniversary at the end of this week, on The Ides of March. Incredible to think. As you know Friends, we have not been anywhere for the past eight months but to celebrate this, for us, momentous event we are venturing forth with nappies, CPAPs, medicaments and walking sticks to the Victoria Hotel at Holkham in Norfolk, one of our favourite places in England, for just two nights. 

We usually stay further east in Blakeney and always eyed the Victoria but could never get into it – usually booked out – until this time. That Norfolk coast with its huge, sandy beaches and flat skyline is beautiful.

I have not posted since Christmas.  

I have sat down often enough , fingers hovering over the keyboard, only to be overcome by a sort of paralysis.

At home things are not good. Tony’s Parkinson’s seems to be getting worse. Even his teeth chatter. He is not in a happy place while the incontinence continues and a private urologist confirmed that the NHS is right not to saddle him with “a sling” for at least a year and that he did not think this procedure would suit Tony anyway. He spoke of other options, none of which can be applied yet: nature might slowly improve things first, with time,  and must be given a chance. 

This serves to undermine self-confidence and there is not much enthusiasm for going anywhere or engaging with anyone; for us who have always embraced our friends and enjoyed an outgoing approach, this has been a depressing time to say the least.

are Friends of various  theatres and have kindly shared access to venues which are difficult to get into. They also keep me on my jazz toes and are brilliant at alerting us to events! We saw The Lonely Londoners with them at The Kiln one evening, a powerful dramatization of Sam Selvon’s 1956 sprawling story about Windrush-era arrivals in London. 

Flempots urged us to “kill for a ticket” but we couldn’t get in to The Importance of Being Earnest even for ready money! Totally sold out, not even standing room. Our own fault really because if we’d booked on the mailing list last year we would have got in but were, wrongly, put off by the threat of re-invention.  It is not re-invention but rather adaptation, a different thing. 

It was fantastic, hilarious, moving and remains a commentary on class, money, marriage, economics, social hypocrisy, the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of commerce whether Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell hails from the Caribbean or not : she is an exquisitely dressed battle-axe with a head-wrap beneath her enormous yellow hat, and outfits which render the words ‘camp’ and ‘extravagant’ redundant. We caught up with this brilliant, colourful production in the cinema when they started streaming it there in February. Ncuti Gatwa, the 15^th Dr Who, an unlikely Rwandan-Scottish actor, escapee from the terrible slaughters between Tutsi & Huti thirty years ago, was an outrageous Algernon. 

But it all made complete sense and was true to Wilde’s original, mischievous intentions of 1895 when it first opened mere months before his famous trial and subsequent conviction and imprisonment. We thought he would thoroughly approve of this latest version so beautifully staged at the National Theatre.

We couldn’t get into Churchill in Moscow at the Richmond Orange Tree either and had to make do with streaming in that case as well. Despite its rave reviews, the deft staging and the performances of Roger Allum and Peter Forbes as Churchill and Stalin, we were both underwhelmed and found it difficult to see what its point was? It certainly didn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know though the temptation to replace Churchill and Stalin with Trump and Putin lingered in our minds!

And abroad? World affairs have not helped either. We witnessed Elon Musk brandishing his chainsaw on television the other day, the new DOGE of Washington! 

For me what we are seeing is a betrayal of all the values our baby-boomer generation have venerated. The liberal, post 2^ndWorld War consensus which has underpinned our whole lives, our beliefs, our hopes , have been consigned to the rubbish bin by the likes of Donald Trump,  Vladimir Putin, Bibi Netanyahu, et al. The deceit, the lies, the utter craven nonsense that Trump has unleashed is nothing short of criminal.

I was taught history at school by two engaging and enlightened teachers. They instilled in me all the tenants of that postwar liberal consensus. They used text books not prescribed by our Christian Nationalist apartheid Masters, especially as far as South African history was concerned; they fostered fairness; truth and decency. For them it was the rise of the totalitarian regimes post World War 1 that interested them and by osmosis, me too. Their views were Churchillian. When they dealt with the rise of Nazism for them the cornerstone of the rotten rise of that party  and to the war was the betrayal by France and Britain of Czechoslovakia at Munich when Edward Benes and Jan Maseryk were not even allowed to be present to see their country destroyed by Neville Chamberlain and his little piece of flapping white paper bearing his signature and that of Herr Hitler’s on it. Churchill was aghast. Had Hitler been stopped in his tracks there would be no world war for certain. Munich made it certain that there would eventually have to be an accounting with Hitler and that it would be very tragic, very prolonged and very, very bloody.

Now we have another Munich. We have a monstrous betrayal by the US of all of us not just the Ukraine. And it makes me sick. Literally.

And the awful irony? Maseryk and Benes were betrayed twice – to the Nazis in 1938 and by the Communists in 1948. At the behest of Stalin’s evil state. Maseryk was defenestrated and Benes died of natural causes though they were pursuing him to kill him too. Airbrushed from Czech history. Will this be Zelensky’s fate?

Would that Elon Musk and the Trump Court with all its terrifying jesters could have been taught some history. Their collective insensitivity and ignorance is staggering.

Talk about airbrushing: not satisfied with closing everything down,  THE DOGE, that Narcissistic ignoramus , is dismantling even America’s history : Books on Slavery removed from libraries, and other censoring activities designed to airbrush History and distort the truth. Women’s Rights? Gay Rights ? The “liberal consensus” is being kicked into touch.

What is happening is sickening and heart breaking and there appears to be nothing to be done about it.

And The Rest :

Hunkering here on the edge of our little Green as Winter gives way to Spring and the glorious green haze peeks at us on our walks, the birdsong loud and cheerful and life-affirming, we have found ourselves becoming more reclusive. Tony prepares for the re-launch of his brilliant biography, Derek Jarmen about to hit the shops in a handsome new edition along with the usual fol-de-rol, book launches, interviews and Q’s & A’s and there is a lot of reading and research going on. Getting his head around websites and promotions and all the electronic regalia!

I cook and watch far too much television – too numerous to recount or review as I sometimes do; but this is a diary and I need to keep some sort of record so I’ll cover some things quickly.

Films

Nosferatu : I. never saw the original 1922 silent version but certainly saw Werner Herzog’s which I thought was far better than this latest offering leaving one wondering why they bother to do re-makes. This latest homage is handsomely produced and shot, with some good performances but I’d not rush out to see it.

A Complete Unknown made me weep. I know many didn’t like it but I just couldn’t get over it. Timothée Chalamet was brilliant and I loved Edward Norton, one of my favourite actors. Perhaps because of how this new Trump era is unravelling all our values, this film for me had a poignancy that made me feel a deep regret for a passing age.

Anora – there are 479 ‘fucks’ in this film. Overstated? Perhaps ; but very powerful and engaging and very, very funny. 

I then discovered that back in 2016 it had been made into a film  with Steve Coogan and Andrea Riseborough and managed to track it down. Strong performances all round and a tight screenplay that does justice to the original story, I found it shocking to say the least. 

Pretoria Central is now a museum and you can visit the execution chamber there where since the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and the abolition of the death penalty in 1995,  there have been 3,840 legal executions : latterly seven at a time.

PTV

Oh so much television Friends. So much. I can’t remember all of them. I am a binger I’m afraid and once I get my teeth into a thing I have to see it through no matter how ghastly it is. Severe case of FOMO ? I don’t know!

But here are some:

Schama’s documentary The Story of Us was brilliant. BBC

The Gangs of London ; Jeepers-creepers. Such violence. Unbelievable. And you would be led to believe that there is no police force in London and any there may be are utterly corrupt! Do not ever go out again in London after you have seen this series. London like Stalingrad! As if!  And the plot? Labyrinthine doesn’t quite do it! But my friend Lucian Msamati is in it – I worked with him once at The Almeida – and his career has been meteoric.  He is in everything at present. I enjoyed the series and await the next. NOW TV

It was indeed brilliant and I am trolling through it once again at present with my heart breaking for Guillaume Dubailly and Nadia El Mansour. Well worth a revisit, Friends. Paramount+ on Prime Video

Phew! You got here! Nearly time to wrap up. Can’t think of anything else to enthral you. Probably because my memory is shot!

Actually my health is fine except for sudden rampant osteo-arthritis in hips, knees, knuckles and lower back. I see physio therapists, swim in special pools and get to visit pain management clinics which is a euphemism for waiting in line for hip surgery! That could take years.

Next Monday I fly solo to Cape Town for nephew Matthew’s marriage to his gorgeous Canadian lady, Kellie. Just for a week. And then onwards to Auckland for Niece Laurien’s wedding and to celebrate the arrival of Brother Michael’s first grandchild, Theodore to “other niece” Caitlin.

Tony stays here to launch his books.

All of this is for another time.

Thanks dear Friends. 

PEDRO

It is December 2011. We are in India for six weeks:

Tony and I are visiting Pushkar the Temple Town near Ajmer in Rajasthan.

We are travelling with our dear friend the Booker Prize-winning author and Indophile Damon Galgut who knows the country extremely well and has travelled in it with us before.

We are here for a few days.

I tell this story as an illustration of the extraordinary difference our cultures have when it comes to hygiene and bodily functions. Personally I could never get used to the filth in India.

One morning we are on the Main Market Road exploring; we walk on as far as the turn-off to the Kharekhari Road where the town has gradually given way to countryside. It is a well made road of piste and there are grass verges.

There are three ladies walking in front of us talking nineteen to the dozen. They are dressed in colourful saris and have been in town. There is no one else in the vicinity. Unusually in a country as crowded as India.

I have named them Akanksha, Poomina and Laila:

At this point, without drawing breath she stepped onto the verge, lifted her sari, squatted and laid almost in front of us the biggest turd you ever saw; the others paused; then she stood up, dropped her sari and the ladies continued on their chattering way.

“Twice around the pan and pointed at both ends” as an English doctor once said to me in a cutglass, Sloaney accent, giving a graphic description of, in his view, the perfect turd.

I couldn’t resist this extract from a piece I wrote years ago, I think on our second visit to India!

…….We have survived Calcutta; and Varanasi, Lucknow, Agra, Jaipur and Pushkar; and all the trains, buses and lying, cheating taxi drivers in between.Not to mention the filth, the faeces both human and animal; the dirt,the rubbish, the plastic bags and bottles, mud, corruption; and the pollution from car and dung fire alike; the bar-b-que’d, oleagenous stink and haze from the endless burning Ghats which operate 24/7 round the year. Choking, sickening. APPALLING. The unnecessary poverty and merciless caste system – everywhere millions and millions of clamouring, hungry, tired people whose only imperative is to survive.

Among this heaving horror of filth and stench we encountered jewels of perfection faintly dotting the darkness of India’s crisis: beautiful architecture, art and poetry. The matchless Imumbara’s of the Lucknow Ouds; the great Moghal artistry in Fahtpur Sikiri and Agra; the delicate traceries of the Rajputs in the Amber Fort and the Palace of Wind, the holy city of Pushkar and many more. With the “Tear on the Face of Eternity”, the Taj Mahal ranking as one of the greatest pieces of art I have ever seen or been moved by and almost toppling Petra in shear beauty and extravagance…….

At the time I never wanted to return to India but they say it’s like childbirth! You forget the pain….and go again!  And so it will probably be though under the current circumstances, who knows when!

But here is perfection!

Last week on Thursday the 22nd September I was to have met my brother, David, in London. We were to fly to Los Angeles to connect with a Princess cruise across the Pacific to New Zealand to visit our other brother, Michael and his family, not seen for seven years.

This was a journey I would have shared with you, dear Friends, as I always do. It was long in the planning and much anticipated by us both.

But last week on that same day, Brother David died and a new and very sad journey has been undertaken to KwaZulu-Natal instead. He was 65.

Tony and I flew out to Durban last Sunday the 25th coinciding with the arrival of Brother Michael and Janine after a gruelling 38 hour flight from Auckland.

It has been a great shock to us all.

You think that in life you know someone well, especially a brother, but in death you find out how little you really do.

David was a private man; he was a bachelor who, though he wanted so badly to share his life, never found anyone to do so. He was lonely and to a certain extent a recluse and our family shared in wishing him happiness and fulfilment but were saddened that this never happened.

During this horrible week dealing with the bureaucracy of illness and death, we have uncovered some of the life of our brother we never knew. He seemed to have few friends; we agonised over what to do to celebrate his life? Would we have a wake? If so, who would come? His Will indicated the simplest of funerals, no services, no church and no medical prolongations that would lend indignity and pain to what turned out to be a horrible end, gasping for air after a long struggle with emphysema.

He chose cremation and the Funeral Company, Doves, performed this rite, slotting in a “viewing” at 12.30pm last Tuesday the 27th., in the absence of a chapel service.

It was ghastly.

Even accessing the Doves facility on the east side of the Greyville race- and golf-course had a grotesque, Kafkaesque quality. Everything in South Africa is behind bars, electric fences, coded entry pads; nailed down against theft, vandalism, corruption and death. We drew up outside the facility before an iron gate barring entrance to the dedicated car park on the roof. It took a phone-call and a visit to the front desk to get this opened remotely before would could park – the only two cars on site. The gate slid shut, effectively imprisoning us. It was impossible to gain entry to the premises through the small, revolving gate without biometric recognition, a thumb print, and eventually a phone call had to be placed to central office in Johannesburg who in turn alerted the front desk in Durban as to our predicament.

Someone came and let us in to what I can only describe as a broken down, empty factory, reminiscent of SingSing. We were eventually ushered into the “viewing” room, a small, bare, unadorned, scruffy space in corporation colours where David was perched on a plinth in a cheap, deal coffin.

I have never witnessed an open coffin before and I never want to again. I do not know why we agreed this awful procedure. He was ice-cold, not defrosted, the coffin still perspiring. Sister Sally said that at least he looked more peaceful than when she had last seen him struggling for air, ashen faced, thin, exhausted, pipes protruding, and had whispered in her ear, “Please put my shoes on and take me home”.

We were ushered out and returned through the complicated security to our cars and let out through the sliding gate to the humid heat of a dirty Durban street.

Then an extraordinary coincidence occurred. My niece, Caitlin, messaged Michael from New  Zealand. A friend had texted her from Durban to say that she had seen in an Instagram that Tina’s Hotel were arranging a farewell get-together for David that very evening. We knew nothing of this at all and this underlined the disconnect between the various parts in David’s life.

Tina’s is a small hotel in Kloof where David or ‘Doc’ as we have always known him, always came for drinks. It was his watering place. We’d known he went there but had no idea how often, for how many years or how many friends he had there.

We went along to what turned out to be a most moving and revelatory wake. About thirty people, none of whom we knew, attended; the manager of the bar, Rachel, was a sweet person who knew Doc well. She gave a spontaneous eulogy. She explained that for years David would attend at Tina’s, he had a reserved stool at the bar, his own beer mug and shot glass kept behind the bar, a heater specially installed on the wall behind, for he felt the cold; he would sit there quietly on his own, pen in hand, with the newspaper, the crossword or sudoku on the go. Windhoek was his tipple and he always ended the visit with a shot of Zambucco. Everyone liked him. She described him as a gentle man and a gentleman, with a sense of humour and a kindliness. Everyone there agreed with these sentiments. They agreed he was a private, sensitive man who had let on that he had been much bullied by life, that he had loathed boarding school where his physical disability had been much mocked, that he had extraordinary knowledge about many things.

We knew none of this. The evident respect and affection in which he was held was very moving indeed. That he had loathed his time at Michaelhouse was news to us though we knew that his disability had always figured largely in his life, forming much of his personality.

His disability precluded much of the obligatory sporting activities at school but he was an enthusiastic member of the Michaelhouse Venture Club which arranged weekend expeditions to the Drakensberg and other places in the Natal Midlands and was run and often led by his Housemaster, whom he liked very much, Hugo Leggatt. Longer more complex expeditions were mounted during school holidays and Doc very much enjoyed these too. He grew to love the Midlands and the Midland Meander was one of his favourite routes when his breathing difficulties forced him to rely on his car. When we started clearing his home we discovered that his new BMW bought exactly two years ago had clocked up 93,000 kilometres during the pandemic – many of these on solo trips visiting and revisiting the wilder, higher places in KwaZuluNatal.

He loved travel. Cruising worked well for him because of his health issues. He visited, usually alone, many places in Europe, often along rivers, and seemed happy with his own company although I joined him enthusiastically on a successful cruise round the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal – which excited and impressed us both very much – up the west coast of Mexico, Baja and San Diego. We very much enjoyed each other’s company and loved the whole experience; it was good to be so close.

It was a similar plan we hatched together now, though this time to New Zealand, to visit family, which was aborted the day before he died.

Doc caught polio from his Godfather at his Christening six weeks after his birth. He had a pronounced limp and a weakened left side, had always had balance issues and could fall easily. This lead to many scrapes. Mum was a physiotherapist and worked on Doc during his childhood so that at least he never had to wear callipers. But the scars from this disease had a lasting effect.

The staff at Tina’s all came up to speak with us and all his friends too. Here at least was a genuine wake filled with affection which by sheer luck and a message from New Zealand we stumbled across and found a side to our brother we hardly knew and could celebrate.

We decided that there would be no further service and that we’d scatter his ashes when they were “ready for collection” at a site to be chosen.

In the meantime it has been a week of packing up a life, rationalising belongings, visiting lawyers, making claims to insurance companies. Uncovering little projects Doc was working on, discovering other characters in the great drama that is Life. We have laughed too and reminisced well. There have been many tears for this was a life cut short and Doc was very much loved by us all.

Today we scattered his ashes. 

When our family moved to Natal from Cape Town in 1957 and Doc was only four months old, my father found a beautiful house in Kloof on the edge of the escarpment with views to the south east towards Durban. Our parents made a garden out of the large tropical grounds and outside the wall planted six London Plane trees, saplings, carefully transferred from the nursery to the garden in the little Fiat Topolino they owned, with its canvas roof down.

These beautiful trees have flourished and grown tall in the sixty five years since then and it was along this shaded line that we sprinkled Doc’s ashes today. He loved our home there where he felt happiest and safest – at 53 Peace Road, Kloof. 

Dear Friends this has been our latest journey then. So unexpected and unwanted. Many of you did not know Doc but many did and I thank you for you all for your kind thoughts and condolences at this sad time. 

This is a new era. The Queen has died, a madman is running Russia and in England we have a nutty Prime Minister with idiotic policies presiding over a broken down Britain. The seas are rising and everywhere there is anger and protest, cruelty and greed.

And My Brother David has died. I am glad on two counts, that he did not die on our cruise and that he does not need to see any more of the mess that the world is in.

Tony and I are returning to Blighty this week on separate days.

Thank you all for listening.

Dearest Brother Doc, Rest In Peace. With love from your boeties Peed & Miggy and Sister Sal.