Exuberant Glee

Forgotten days

Of rain and beach

Riding on our inflatable double-mattress

borrowed from our tent

with my brothers in Cranfield

You tried to stay in the centre

otherwise, the waves knocked you into foaming fun

The screams, the laughter

the realisation

That joy is not dependent

On blue skies and sunshine

It springs from endeavours on challenging seas

Alongside loved ones

Exhilarated by the stolen roller coaster ride

Skin numb with cold

Hair tangled dripping ropes

Face red and wind whipped

The only idiots

In the sea

On a grey rain lashed shore

Buffeted by winds and waves

We scream our triumph

To the sea birds above

Adrenaline pumped

We ride the rough Atlantic waves

With exuberant glee

Joy wrestled from

grey skies and seas

What a glorious day!

Burnishing the Soul, polishing the wood

The conversation around the table ebbs and flows. From laughter to remembered incidents designed to entertain. All ages are represented from grandchildren to grandparents. The food is good. The room massive and ornately decorated as if from an earlier period. Candelabra, fluted glasses on intricate embroidered white runners contrast with the dark shiny walnut wooden table underneath. Sitting 16 people easily, the large dining room set gleams in its splendour. Around the huge room sits antique furniture polished carefully and positioned precisely. The walls are covered in old oil paintings of ancestors who made good. Each piece has a place in the memories of all here. This is a great grandmother's rosewood writing table, over here a display cabinet of delph displayed on six deep shelves behind glistening glass. Everywhere mementos remembered from childhood. Voices pointing out where it used to sit older houses. As the courses come to the table one senses how much care is lavished on these pieces of history. How polishing has to be undertaken regularly, pads positioned to absorb the unnecessary bangs from careless users. The wood of the huge table shines unprotected in its beauty, but one feels those who love it, wince with every glass or plate clicked down with not enough elegance and respect. 

I have nothing of value in my home, but I recall my mother's table in the dining room. She would cover it its wooden top with thick blankets of woollen protection. Designed to cushion all serving dishes it hugged the wood in tight protective cotton wool. This was but the first layer. Like astronaut's suits my mother believed in layers of defence. The second layer was a specially designed thick rubber tablecloth and then the third layer was the intricate pretty tablecloth purely for appearance. But even with this bullet-proofing nothing was placed on her table unless a solid wooden platter was anchored beneath it. On some some rare occasions she would peel back the layers of cover to show the immaculate table top free of every blemish and glorious as the day it was created decades before. Then gauging my impressed reaction she would tuck the tanned wood safely back into its bed. 

I recognise in some faces around a table my mother’s concern. Yes, you want to show the piece to its best. Allow it’s living dark flesh coloured wood to glow but in doing so you have opened it to rape and pillage. One miss-placed coffee cup could damage that perfection. These faces show both their pride in this epic table combined with a fearful expectancy of risk. Fathers must feel the same when their daughter emerges out of adolescence into fresh stunning beauty. Suddenly, they glow in the evidence of their bloodline’s perfections but alongside looms the fear of predators. Why does beauty always instil such a powerful mixture of awe and fear? As people drink other emotions surface. Being teetotal, I am shocked at how quickly alcohol removes the veils of civilisation. Conversation descends into politics, corruption and bare breasts? Alongside this curious diminishing of quality other issues make their disturbing appearance. 

Resentments over historical family slights, possessions that were inherited are searched for like lost children. How could she have ended up with my aunt’s glorious sideboard? As more alcohol flows unhappiness and resentment are stirred up. There is love here and you sense it but also so much pain and disappointment. Strangely, it is the younger generation who seem to demonstrate the most damage. They sit as if among museum pieces with which they have little affinity. Aware that eventually they too will become custodians of all this opulence but resentful of the weight of expectations. All these things seem like anchors to their future keeping them here, marooned among the family history. Glorious, expensive, filled with ancient memories of greatness and position but not of them. They do not seem content in this landscape. Their spirits flutter to escape and are not reassured by the quality around them but wearied by it all. There is a depressing unhappiness that leeches from all that alcohol seems to fuel. I suspect we all hug our pains away from prying eyes.   Alcohol loosens our grasp. All this pain and resentment circles the once happy group and one wishes like table tops people could be wrapped and protected from harm and hurt. Remain  unblemished and pristine. But I fear our purpose here is to learn from the ring-stains of life. To be tested by the careless and thoughtless and yet to use it all to find quality within. To polish and restore what may have been damaged and burnish our souls with worthwhile deeds.

I seem to have been born not fitting in to my culture and then got worse with age

Am back in Malta after soaking up family and friends for three weeks in Northern Ireland over the Christmas holidays.  I didn’t get to see many friends and am amazed how the time flew in.  I also realized that I am a foreigner in my own country and find it perversely difficult to blend in.  Let me explain an incident that occurred which crystallises what is tricky to put into words.

My mother and my son were having coffee in a small café in the Whitehouse in Portrush.  It is a shop that sells everything from bedding to pots, clothes to furniture and on the upper floor there is a café overlooking the street.  I don’t shop there as when I once lifted a blouse to examine it I found that it was priced at a ridiculous price of ₤165 reduced to ₤99 and that put me in a foul mood.  Even looking around at the ridiculous ornaments, no one would want, costing hundreds, has me muttering, “Is this a joke, or what?” in outraged tones. 

It does serve reasonable coffee and that was why the three of us were having cappuccinos in the café high above the street.  A lady at the nearby table leaned across and said to my mother,

“That is a lovely colour of jumper.” 

Before I could stop myself I replied,

“Yes, shame about the face!” 

In our family we do routinely tease each other and my mother was not surprised.  The lady however was offended and her husband asked me, in cold tones,

“Have you been drinking?” 

Realising, I had offended these polite folk I tried to explain,

“No, it is just that I’ve spent years being asked if my mother is my sister and it has made me sensitive to people complimenting her.” 

My mother and son laughed and so did I.  My Mum’s recent holiday with her sister visiting me in Malta was typical.  Everyday we would walk miles along the coast and each day someone would ask, “Are you three sisters?”  We do have similar colouring but there is a thirty-year age difference, so you can understand my sensitivity.  As far as I was concerned the neighbouring table’s angry response was funny but also strangely admirable.  They felt I had offended my eighty-year-old mother and were stiff with fury!  Oblivious, the three of us enjoyed our coffees.  On my way to the toilet, I passed the nearby table and the man instructed me,

“You should swing by Spectsavers! (a local opticians)”. 

His upset was tangible and again I admired their heated defence of my mother.  After all, if an elderly person was being abused verbally, these people would not sit idly by and let it happen.  Surely, a good thing?  I returned to my mother and son and we collected our coats and began to leave.  My mother, always goodhearted and even tempered, wished the neighbouring occupants a merry Christmas, as did my son and received a warm response.  However, when I wished them the same, all three carefully averted their heads, stiff with distain, and ignored me pointedly. 

I found it all vaguely amusing but by now my son was irritated and wanted to go back to the table to speak to them.  I restrained him with a warm hug and said, “It’s not them, it’s me.  They belong here and I evidently don’t.”  At such times you identify how foreign you are, how much of an outsider you have become.  The worrying thing is, I seem to have been born not fitting in to my culture and then got worse with age!