Unusually Perfect

There was a moment that happened in this year’s Olympics where I discovered my own prejudice and was floored.  I’d thought of myself as a fair sort of person.  Believing in free speech, anti racist, pro humanity generally a sort of “one people, one planet philosophy.  Then, this year while watching the Para Olympics there were endless close ups of disabled athletics competing and I found myself admiring the perfect physic of these highly trained Olympians.  Perhaps it was seeing for the first time a disabled athlete also in the main Olympics that reinforced the thought. 

I was aware that all too often my mind would be uplifted by their talent and strength and then register that missing limb and think, what a pity.  Perfection spoiled, as if a work of art had been damaged by a vicious assailant and lost the beauty that it possessed by right.  But this year their enthusiasm and talent suddenly blew that out of the water.  I don’t even know exactly when it happened but I remember the realization that this human is in better shape than you, faster, stronger, more talented and has made more effort in their short lives than you will in your entire life span.  I found myself seeing them as incredibly, beautiful, inspirational human beings, full of life and laughter and unusually perfect. 

Monty

He was the runt of the litter, that was obvious.  All the rest had already been sold and here was the remaining pedigree black Labrador puppy, a little smaller and a lot less smarter than his siblings.  But we were ecstatic.  For years my father had stopped on innumerable journeys and announced that he was going to see a man about a dog and my juvenile heart had soared in happiness every time.  Perhaps we were going to get a dog at last, but of course it was a euphemism for taking a pee.  Such was my longing for a four legged pet, that my heart still hoped that just maybe this time my Dad was actually stopping the car to see a man about a real dog.  So to find ourselves looking at this real little fellow was heavenly.  We didn't mind if he was the runt, he would be our Monty.  And so it was we took him home and into our hearts and he filled our hours, days, months and years with glee. 

His stupidity was legendary.  All it took was my Mum to go to the hairdresser and he didn’t recognise her.  He either forgot when he’d been fed or just remained ever hopeful because he invariably greeted you with a huge empty biscuit tin in his mouth looking both mournful and yet eager.  When we left him at my grandfather’s farm he consumed an entire bucket of pig meal and swelled up like a balloon and had to be raced to the vet to be saved.  For years after that, my grandfather shook his head and muttered that he’d never met a more stupid animal, every time Monty’s name was mentioned. 

He was also the smelliest dog and I remember using roll on deodorant on him to cover his natural aroma.  Washing served only to urge him into a sweat of feverish excitement, as Monty found water second only to food on his list of favourite things.  It could be a puddle, a river, the sea, an inflatable pool, a bath of soaking sheets – he was not fussy.  He loved them all and would throw himself in head first in total abandonment.  Despite threats and shouts and curses hurled at him he would jump in with a yelp of, “I know you don’t want me to, but it’s gonna be so great!” 

His good nature was equally legendary.  He forgave everyone anything.  He was simply incapable of holding grudges.  Either that or his brain capacity was such that it could not hold on to information for long enough to remember the offence.  His approach to the world was a combination of ecstasy,  “there is my food bowl” and complete abandonment to the moment,” here is water, it’s a river and I’m diving off this bridge”.  Restraint was just not in his vocabulary.  Even when told to sit he would do so at an angle with his hind leg hanging out and his tail beating furiously.  Come on you are killing me with laughter, he seemed to be saying, and gradually the shaking tail would become a moving body and then he’d be on the move towards you, so grateful that you were speaking to him.  Then, he couldn’t stop himself jumping up on you, to show how much it meant to him that you spoke.  Sports were also popular with Monty.  He took down my uncle Junior with a flying tackle during a fun game of rugby.  Poor uncle Junior was fly swatted by six stone of flying Monty and lay winded and bruised in the long grass. 

You know, when it’s said that animals are better than people, I get it.  Monty was by far the most good-natured member of our family.  Heads and shoulders above any of us.  He bestowed his love lavishly, slavishly.  If you were not careful you could indeed drown in the saliva of his love.  I am grateful that just once in all the car journeys and stops we made, one memorable day my Dad actually did stop to see a man about a dog.  A really lovable dog called Monty.

As pernicious as nose picking

Tomorrow, I must hustle for a job.  There was a scene in a series, Auf Wiedersehen, about English builders in Germany where one of the main characters says aggressively to everyone he meets, “Gi us a job!”, followed by, “I can do that, and then “Gi us a job!” repeated.  Well, thought I’d try that approach tomorrow.  I’m far too shy, it will do me good.  Face to face, it’ll be harder for them to say no.  Mind you, face to face, it will be harder to hear them say, “Sod off!”  The thing about most small islands, in my experience, is that jobs are rare and when available  naturally go to the locals.  On Rhodes in Greece, I tried for a job in a hotel.  My appointment with the personal manager went something like this.

 

Me, a bit nervous, knock on the door of a swanky office.  He grunts from inside and I take that as an invitation to enter.  I walk in to find a middle-aged man picking his nose and talking on his phone while seated behind a desk that should have belonged to the president of some Middle Eastern oil state.  At least he can multitask.  There was a running gag about a certain American president who was reputedly unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Anyway, he gestures with his phone for me to come in, while continuing to mine for gold. 

 

I approach his desk and decide I’m not going to shake his hand.  Then, I compromise, if he offers me the nose picking hand I’ll demur, but if it is the phone hand I’ll go for it.  Then, it occurs to me, what if he is an ambidextrous nose picker and I’ve arrived at the tail end of an orgy of nose picking all morning with both hands?   I decide it will be safer not to go for a handshake at all.  

Approaching his desk, I make sure I am not close enough for a handshake.  That feels much safer.  I needn’t have worried Mr Manager of Personnel is still talking on the phone and drilling a second shaft with his little pinkie.  I have a young nephew, who, when speaking on his mobile begins pacing up and down the room as if in a walking race.  One of my sons, who will remain nameless, will talk on the phone while scratching his ass.  Perhaps, we all have these little oddities when we are using the phone and only notice other peoples and not our own perversities.  Poor guy, perhaps nose picking is his phone thing, suddenly he hangs up and says in Greek,

“Well, what?”

Understanding him but not able to speak Greek in response I explain in English that I’ve come about a job they’ve advertised.  He leans back into his mammoth chair and gives the Greek no, which consists of a clicking noise made with the tongue against the top of the mouth followed by a quick nod back of the head.  Well, that’s a pretty clear no.  I thank him; Anglo-Saxon civility is as pernicious as nose picking.  It’s programmed in.

Leaving the office, I feel like I am in a different skit from the two Ronnie’s where one of them goes in to ask for a pay increase only to be rejected and humiliated.  As he leaves the same office, he is transformed into a schoolboy and his suit has changed into a school uniform complete with shorts and a cap.  He is so small he cannot even reach the handle to get out.  A wonderful image capturing all the vulnerability and feeling of smallness of the occasion.  

Later on, I’m talking to a friend who knows everyone on the island.  I describe my encounter and he explains that the personnel manager is the hotel owner’s cousin.  That is why he got the job.  And then in dark tones, as if this explains everything, “from one of the villages” waving his hand as if to some dark tribal outback. 

I am taken back to another conversation about the island being like a dog’s dish and no one likes to see another dog at the dish.  Especially, a foreign looking dog’s head.  It just means there’s less to go around.  So, I enter the fray with little illusion and a great deal of misgiving.  There are times when one really has to ask just how much rejection can a person take?  Can one overdose on it?  Does it do irreparable damage to one’s self-esteem?  To do what one loves and get paid for it is light upon light.  If writing could earn me money, I’d be in clover but the reality is these stories that are pouring out of me at present are a displacement activity.  You and I know I need to be out earning a living.  How does one reach mid fifties and be so useless at the basics of life?  Practice and perseverance, that’s how.  I have long perfected the art of putting off what needs to be done.  No more, tomorrow I’ll bite the bullet, but tonight I’ll have a big bun and some chocolate.  Challenging day ahead after all!

What is it about comfort's growing appeal?

New shoes at primary school

The teacher taught

But there was really no point

Because I had new shoes

Didn’t hear a word

Just wanted to admire

Those shiny new things

On the end of my feet

Every now and then

I’d raise my foot

And admire them anew

What colour, what shape!

I remember the glow

Of new shoes at school

They made the boredom go away

Thank goodness for growing feet

Then, in secondary school things went wrong

My feet began growing at an alarming rate

I started lying about their size

which seemed to be chasing my age

Instead of gloating at new shoes

I tried to hide them under my desk

Like I hid my spots with concealer

And my breasts with my school bag

When I was pregnant the doctor, unthinking

said thank goodness you’ve big feet

Your pelvic capacity is linked to your shoe size

Medical training should include a compulsory component on tact

For years either bumps or toddlers

Made me not notice my feet

They got me around

And wasn’t that enough

Then last week, I bought new shoes

I’ve been looking at them all day

Ugly nun’s shoes, that eat up the miles

what is it about comfort's growing appeal?

It’s been said that of all the things in your life

Make your shoes and your bed

the best you can buy

Because when not in one

Sure you are bound to be in the other

I suspect it stems from when I was four and lived in a refuge camp

Today I discovered where all the rich hang out in Malta.  There’s a place called Portomaso north of Sliema close to the Hilton, where plush apartments surround horseshoe-like, huge private cruisers moored cosily together.  There are expensive restaurants at each corner and on one of the cruisers a well-dressed couple examined an expensive gold-topped bottle of bubbly.  I find myself wanting to slap this rich man, eating a lobster, on the head hard as I go past.  Don’t know why the rich bring out a desire in me to howl, “come the revolution, you’ll be first against the wall!”

I suspect it stems from when I was four and lived in a refuge camp.  My family had emigrated from Ireland in the 1960s and because of the housing shortage we found ourselves in a refugee camp called Bradfield Park in Sydney.  My best friend was a Romanian who spoke no English.  We conversed at length despite no shared language, children just find a way.  It was a rough neighbourhood, our next-door neighbour, an aborigine, stabbed his wife to death and was dragged off by five large armed and cursing Australian policemen.  Our main problem was not knife fights but bins.  Our bin which was put out on a weekly basis was being stolen.  My father in desperation rigged an elaborate trap for the thief involving bells and ropes.  Of course, being four and extremely talkative I spent the week telling all the neighbours of the exciting trap and needless to say the bin walked again.  As punishment, my Dad took me with him on a walkabout in the camp to find our missing bin.  We covered miles and I began to feel really sorry about the whole business as my father became more quiet and withdrawn the further we went.  Eventually, we returned home binless and a shocked Dad told the rest of the family that we actually lived in the affluent part of the camp!  In terrified tones he described to them all, the real poverty that existed just streets away.  It was scary, we thought we were at the bottom, the very dregs, but in the camp structure we were practically “rich bastards”.

You get used to living behind large ten foot chain fencing, I, as a small child naively thought it kept the bad guys out.  Never twigged it was to keep us refugees in.  I have another memory of playing in the dry soil making mud pies with a cup of water in front of our shack.  My brother, who was six at the time, shouted at me not to move.  Something in his tone frightened me, so I looked around slowly to find a much older boy standing with a boulder held above my head.  He told me if I moved he’d drop it.  My brother, shouted frantic instructions to me, “when I count to three, run!”  He counted one, two and then before he got to three and I could run to safety the boulder was dropped and got me hard on the head.  I was carried home bleeding by my father and was lucky I inherited by far the most useful genetic trait in our family – an exceptionally hard head.

Latter we were allowed to move out of the camp to a better area where you only had to watch your washing dry, no one stole your bins, only your clothes.  This was a real step up.  The whole affair has left me with an abiding hatred of the chicken story “The sky is falling” where Cocky Locky warns everyone of impending disaster.  I would always rub my bump, which I carry to this day, and remind myself that sometimes the blasted sky does indeed fall.

another Australian man wore daring shorts with a “wife beating vest”

There is a fantastic cathedral here in Valletta, Malta.  It’s called St John’s Cathedral and I queued to get in and view the magnificent interior.  While waiting I decided that the entrance fee might be worth paying and entered.  Only to be accosted by a large officious woman at the door who said I needed to cover up!  Bemused, I checked myself, I am not generally known for my daring outfits.  I wore a long skirt down to my ankles and a high necked top.  What could possibly be offensive?  Then, the lady pointed out that part of my shoulders were visible at the edge of my top.  I mean, if you looked up my sleeves you might get a glimpse of my upper arms, but really there was nothing obscene about it.  I could tell the people in the queue around me were bewildered too.  One of them wore a cut away sarong to the waist, but she was okay, another Australian man wore daring shorts with a “wife beating vest” as my eldest son likes to call them.  The lady in front of me had shoulders covered but her neckline descended to her belly button and almost all her breasts were on display.  However, they were all okay, it was I who caused offence for some reason and was duly draped in a huge orange piece of material to make me decent. 

The Australian giggled, as he said, “Sorry love, you looked like Mary Poppins to me even without the shroud.”  I sigh, such things seem to happen to me.  It was at this point dressed in a huge orange tent surrounded by half naked people, I realised I had forgotten my glasses.  Having paid my fee I was trapped in a stunning church with poor eyesight that only let me see what was less than a metre in front of me.    Not to be outdone I peered hopefully at each nave, every picture and all the ornaments.  In fact I am pretty sure, every tourist that day in Valletta has a picture of me in a vast orange tent in all their pictures of the cathedral.  They are all probably at home now in far off places showing relatives and friends their holiday snaps and saying, “yes, I have no idea what this idiot was doing, dressed in an orange tent who managed to get into all the shots.”  Well, the explanation is that in order to see I had to stand in front of everyone really close to the exhibits.  While peering at the aforesaid object people were clicking away in the background. 

The floor is covered in gravestones of the famous knights who died and their names are engraved along with the dates.  The more famous have paid for huge statues of themselves posing with angels and such like.  In fact the more I read and examined the place the less I felt like admiring things.  Is that how it is, you pay for your immortality, your place in Holy places?  To get remembered, you need only get something ornate and gold trimmed and stick it up somewhere?  That doesn’t seem right.  Mind you King Charles V who actually gave the knights Malta, as their centre was not quite right either.  Charles suffered from an enlarged lower jaw, a deformity that became considerably worse in later Habsburg generations, giving rise to the term Habsburg jaw. This deformity was caused by the family's long history of inbreeding, which was commonly practiced in royal families of that era to maintain dynastic control of territory. His bloodline would become so genetically flawed that they could not survive, those red necks from the film “Deliverance”, were obviously not the only ones to marry their kith and kin.  I even think can hear a banjo playing as I wander round the church and its opulent décor.  But, it was perhaps holding his own funeral that makes Charles stand out in my mind.  Yes, you heard me right.  Here is an account of that very occasion.

“The chapel was hung with black, and the blaze of hundreds of wax-lights was scarcely sufficient to dispel the darkness. The brethren in their conventual dress, and all the Emperor’s household clad in deep mourning, gathered round a huge catafalque, shrouded also in black, which had been raised in the centre of the chapel. The service for the burial of the dead was then performed; and, amidst the dismal wail of the monks, the prayers ascended for the departed spirit, that it might be received into the mansions of the blessed. The sorrowful attendants were melted to tears, as the image of their master’s death was presented to their minds—or they were touched, it may be, with compassion by this pitiable display of weakness. Charles, muffled in a dark mantle, and bearing a lighted candle in his hand, mingled with his household, the spectator of his own obsequies; and the doleful ceremony was concluded by his placing the taper in the hands of the priest, in sign of his surrendering up his soul to the Almighty.” Yes, the rich and the royal are often, "gone in the head", as my nephew James would rightly say!  On that thought, I gave back my orange tent and left the cathedral pondering the dangers of riches, fame and glory.

She was omnivorous and ate everything but people

There is a monument in Valletta in one of the beautiful parts I found recently.  In fact, there are many lovely monuments around this historic city.  For example overlooking the main harbour there is a huge prone figure lying flat on his back as if on a bed beside a huge bell.  The Siege Bell War Memorial commemorates the victory of the Allied forces during the Second Siege of Malta from 1940-1943 and remembers the many who paid with their lives in defense of the island. 

The proud tiny island was almost constantly bombarded during this period.   At a time when the war could have gone either way and entire countries in Europe were over run in days/weeks this tiny island and its defenders, planted deep in the Mediterranean, on the critical shipping routes of this region, stood firm for three years in their walled city and would not submit. In 1942 Malta was awarded the George Cross. In bestowing the award King George VI said '...to honour her brave people, I award the George Cross to the Island Fortress of Malta to bear witness to a heroism and devotion that will long be famous in history'.

It perhaps helped that the Maltese had a heritage of withstanding such attacks dating back to the great siege of 1565 when just 600 knights, a few thousand mercenaries and a few thousand Maltese irregulars – in all between 6,000 and 9,000 managed to hold the city against 40,000 fighting men of the Ottoman empire.  

However, it is not the courage of the Maltese but their kindness that I wish to celebrate here.  Nearby there is a monument to a foreigner to this island.  

It is dedicated to Clement Martin Edwards who died on the 17^th March 1818 and reads

“Few could vie with him in usefulness of talent

And fewer still possessed a heart more benevolent

Or deposition more social. 

He died in the prime of life

But lived long enough to know

how fully he had secured

the respect and esteem of all good men.”

 What a lovely way to be remembered.  I have a horrid feeling mine will read something akin to

"She was omnivorous and ate everything but people

With a temper foul to bear and look that would curdle butter

Her purpose in life appeared to be consuming as much chocolate as possible

but take heart dear passerby, as you read this gravestone

because however bad you are, you are better by far than her!"

Here is a panoramic view of the harbour of Valleta, if you fancy a quick look.

http://www.vrmalta.com/malta-virtual-tour/Valletta-Grand-Harbour-from-the-Great-Siege-Bell.html