Hitchhiking Days

I've suddenly remembered how many hitching journeys I made. The Snake Inn to Glossop with Fleur was the first, in maybe 1957. Walkden to the Lakes and back with Martin the same year. Leeds to Birmingham and back to visit Jeff, alone, 1959. Hamilton to Edinburgh and back with Fleur the same year. In 1960 Paris to Menton via Marseille, alone. Tende to Milan via Turin on the same journey, then Basle to Kehl am Rhein. Did I go alone from Walkden to Hamilton in 1961? I seem to remember a rather dismal bus ride to pick up the A6 at Walkden, alone on that occasion. And finally, Castle Douglas to Stocport with Carmen. I think Rosemarie and I have picked up enough hitchhikers to balance the books, including a rather unhappy young French couple in the western Highlands, and a nervous African-American guy in Missouri - nervous at getting a ride from a White couple, I suppose.

My Life in the Avenue

L’enfance, ce grand territoire d’où chacun est sorti – Saint-Exupéry. There’s a song I play in my head that floods me with happiness. I’m not going to name it and weaken a powerful memory. It must have been on the radio when I was five, doing something satisfying. I can only describe the satisfaction as structural in some way, something falling into place, something being achieved. I don’t think it was my usual activity, cutting out a picture of an aeroplane. It might have been when I surprised myself by drawing a ship in perspective. (I still have that drawing.) But I really can’t remember, and don’t want to, preferring to preserve the mystery. Cutting out pictures of aeroplanes was my favourite activity. The subjects were mainly warplanes – for a reason I will explain – but I considered them works of art not killing machines. I rejoiced in the curve of a wing, whether tapered or squared off, in the different outlines of tail fins (why so different?), in the smooth or bumpy transition between fuselage and cockpit canopy or gun turret, in the difference between grinning radial engines and shark-like in-line ones. Our habits are set early in life, and we can’t escape their consequences. Attaching myself to appearances was a hindrance later. For example, I failed as a trainee pilot. I was inside the machine, having to control it, my view restricted to an instrument panel and foreshortened nose and wing. It was no longer elegant. I also failed as a scientist, seduced by the smells, colours, and names in my home chemistry set, unprepared for the grind of molecular mathematics. What I enjoyed aged five was making tricky design decisions. Cutting out a fighter or bomber, how could I deal with the projecting guns, which were awkward to cut round but whose absence would spoil the look? I did feel I could ignore the mast for the aerial, and any undercarriage I could always assume was retracted, unless of course the subject was a Stuka or Lysander. I also liked the heraldry of aircraft markings. My favourites were those of Mussolini’s air force: three stylised fasces in circles on the wing, a single one on the side, and on the fin a beautiful white cross embellished with the arms of the House of Savoy. My fascination with such devices is embarrassing – I’m no fascist, and one of my favourite songs is ‘Bella Ciao’. In fact my aesthetic pleasure in flags, coats of arms, and military rank insignia in general is tainted by their association with nationalism, feudalism, and war. The pictures I cut out were from aircraft recognition magazines, published by the RAF and marked ‘restricted’. I was given then by our neighbour Auntie Leigh, whose elder son had been killed in action as a pilot. She lived a few doors away in our cul-de-sac in Blackley (pronounced Blake-ly) in North Manchester. For some reason I once had to stay the night with her. She placed on the bedside table a framed photograph of a tall figure in uniform in strong sunlight – perhaps in the Western Desert. She said, ‘He’ll stand guard over you.’ She showed me small model aircraft he no doubt made before enlisting. They were fragile, and to my embarrassment I crushed one when I held it. There were no boys my age in the neighbourhood, so my friendships with adults were special. Auntie Lesley, my favourite, lived in the adjoining semi and was kind and encouraging. I called her Auntie Lesley. Years later when she was very old my mother and I called on her, and she remembered with pleasure how as a four-year-old I would run up the path towards her. My only memory of her house is a gloomy living-room with wax imitation fruit in a bowl. Some years later, after our move to Stockport, I was sent to stay the night with her. She said, ‘Tomorrow is Sunday. We’ll go to church.’ In the morning I heard her and her husband talk in low voices and knew I should get up, but pretended to be asleep. We didn’t get to church. Sorry, Auntie. Another rewarding friendship was with a lad of eighteen called Geoffrey. Nowadays people would be horrified by a five-year-old spending time at his house, yet there was never the least hint of anything inappropriate. I learned a lot from him. He told me interesting things about the war: Hitler used to paint pictures, Göring designed his own uniform, and Japanese houses had screens instead of walls. In an upper room in his house he showed me Billiken, ‘God of things-as-they-ought-to-be’, a gnomelike statuette in pale ceramic, whose shrine must have been so neglected he failed to stop the war. Was it Geoffrey who showed me newspaper photographs of emaciated beings in striped clothing? Or did I see them in one of the newsreels that accompanied, in piquant contrast, one of my favourite slapstick films? A girl in a house opposite was about three. My only memory of her is standing at her front door. I must have had some errand to her parents. There was a glazed porch, unusual in that neighbourhood, which her mother called a ‘lobby’. The girl, whose name I forget, watched rain spatter the glass and said, ‘Poor Mr Rain, he hasn’t any eyes or ears.’ That impressed me. She also mystified me by saying ‘Daddy Kimmus’ was going to visit. Only after being a shepherd in the school nativity play, and waking on Christmas morning to find a toy fort beside my bed (made by Auntie Leigh’s younger son), did I realised who was Daddy Kimmus. The only child in the avenue my age was Margaret. On the Back Field, reached by a ginnel next to Auntie Leigh’s house, we compared bodies. For some reason I was more interested in her back than anything else, and annoyed her by pulling up her dress to look. I think I felt scientific curiosity rather than sensuality. What was really sensual was her bedroom, which I was allowed to visit briefly. So unlike mine, a voluptuous nest of soft pink furnishings, like a bedroom in an American film of the period. A character in one of John Updike’s stories confesses that what he most enjoys about his affairs with women is seeing their bedrooms. The Back Field encounter put to rest an embarrassing episode. In my ignorance I had wondered why women sat down to pee, and decided they had the same equipment as myself, attached behind instead of in front. Being good at drawing I was encouraged by the older girls in the avenue to express this theory as a diagram. My effort was passed among them to great hilarity, and I was encouraged to do further versions to share around. One of those girls, Joan, aged eleven, lived next door but one. Her interest in my anatomical drawings must have aroused my worst instincts. I wrote her a scurrilous missive with such phrases as ‘there are bugs crawling up your bum’ and ‘you drink your own wee-wee.’ I remember her father confronting me in the avenue furiously waving the letter. I said in my defence that I hadn’t meant to send it until Margaret egged me on. She may even have helped me to compose it. At school two girls attracted me. I wanted them to notice me, or even admire me, but they remained indifferent. My fascination was no doubt pre-pubescently sexual, but I also viewed them with the eye of an artist. Barbara’s red hair and full lips, Susan’s long blonde plaits and rosy cheeks, were delightful. Maybe there was the same dichotomy as with the warplanes, death and sex existing in a separate dimension from aesthetics. In the playground there was no segregation of the sexes. (I was surprised to find there was at a school I attended later.) Even aged five girls could be quite bossy. They would tell me off for slouching or calling another boy a ‘sod’. But they also told me interesting things. One showed me the gills under a mushroom, which she called a frogstool, and said, ‘This is where the frog plays the piano.’ Another said, ‘Jesus makes robes for angels with a big sewing machine in the sky. That’s what you hear when it thunders.’ The playground was a large rectangle of tarmac with the odd patch of grass to sit on. On walls at opposite ends were painted the outlines of goalposts, CITY on one, UNITED on the other. It’s a space I revisit in my imagination. The memory of enclosing walls and iron fences gives me a sense of security . . . and community. I was an odd child – I drew designs for flying vehicles based on butterflies, and showed them to bemused teachers – but I never felt estranged from my classmates. My occasional fights were always with equals, and I wasn’t bullied. At playtime the girls amused themselves with skipping ropes or whips and tops, while we boys fought one another, played cops and robbers, or swapped cigarette cards. But there were games we all joined in. Some enterprising child would march round shouting, for instance, ‘All in a game of staggy-in-the-buttonhole,’ stag being a game of tag in which whoever was tagged joined a growing skein of those who were ‘on’. What I remember best is a lad shouting, ‘All in a game of the Daring Dexters.’ I didn’t know who the Dexters were – I now discover they were a circus family in a radio serial – but I was eager to join in. The organiser lined us up and named us: ‘You’re Dan Dexter, you’re Sue Dexter,’ and so on. Sadly, by the time he named us all the bell rang. We also played ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ and ‘May I?’ in which the person who was ‘on’ stood at a distance from the rest. If Mr Wolf said the time was three o’clock the child who asked could take three paces forward. When we were all getting close, Mr Wolf would answer, ‘Dinner time!’ and turn and chase us. The person caught would be the next wolf. ‘May I?’ was similar. The ‘mother’ at the front would answer the request by saying, ‘Take two pins forward’ or maybe back. In our variety of the game the movements were expressed in sewing terms – pins, needles, or types of stitch. The person who got nearest the ‘mother’ won. Soon after starting school I was given a large card with the royal arms in full colour. It was signed by the King, and began, ‘Today, as we celebrate victory, I send this personal message to you and all other boys and girls at school. For you have shared in the hardships and danger of a total war and you have shared no less in the triumph of the Allied Nations.’ I remember little about the war, which ended when I was four. Unlike many others I never experienced hardship or danger, and as for triumph, the word rings hollow today. Barrage balloons punctuated the sky, but I thought nothing of them – they had always been there. I was intrigued by the two little buttons on the front of my father’s khaki side cap, and the rifle he kept in the wardrobe. Dad’s experience was nothing like the TV comedy series. My mother tells me he was often exhausted from exercises and manoeuvres and constantly giving blood, and deafened by Thunderflashes. His knowledge of aircraft didn’t impress me – the Lysander was all he ever mentioned (though he did call midges Stukas). My only other wartime memory is one day in May when my mother burst into my bedroom and announced, ‘Himmler’s dead.’ I said, ‘Don’t you mean Hitler?’ Dear reader, do these seem like pages from a dusty history book? If you too reach the age of eighty-two I hope you find your childhood as alive as mine. T.S.Eliot writes, ‘What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present,’ but it disturbs me that nowadays the past is so easily exhumed. Films, songs, and radio programmes I never thought to see or hear again are there online. On Google Earth I can look down on houses I once lived in, and ‘walk’ along long-forgotten streets. Even the Second World War is still present in a way, as new papers are released for a new generation of historians to sink their teeth into. Having no male friends my age I sought companionship from artifacts – pictures in magazines, songs on the radio, my drawings, domestic objects. This poem appeared in THE SHOp No. 6: Artificial Friends A screw I'm using rolls head first into a crack. There are a hundred more but I can't leave this one lost like someone stuck in a well so struggle to get it back and suddenly remember from being four years old the features of my artificial friends. Dark haunting eyes of a horn two hole button, neat ears of an Art Deco vase, gob-struck mouth of a standing pewter ashtray, fresh face of the boxwood wheel Mother missed for pastry, belly-button and ballet legs of the dancing scissor-tongs. I was perfectly happy to be on my own. Did I love my parents, or did my love of shapes and forms make me cold and unfeeling? My mother was warm and nurturing, and I loved her when she sang to me – ‘On Wings of Song’ was a favourite – but mostly I took her for granted, as I did my father. He often seemed remote, but I cherished a badge he gave me from the British Industries Fair. It represented two interlocking cogwheels and made of plastic – ah, the days when plastic seemed beautiful! Dad could be stern – for example, when I knocked over the aforementioned ashtray then lied that I hadn’t done it – but sometimes read to me from A Book of Scots: ‘Wee Joukie Daidles’ and ‘The Bairnies Cuddle Doon at Nicht’ for instance. He made jokes. Years later, in our first car, we drove through Carlisle en route to Scotland. An advert on bus read: Shop at Binns. Dad said, ‘Cats do that.’ Every night I prayed, ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy,’ and when my little sister arrived, her too. I loved Jesus in the picture on the wall in the school corridor, tall, blond, and smiling, surrounded by skipping children and leaping lambs. But his dad was scary. He sent floods to drown those who misbehaved, or cast people – even children – into outer darkness to gnash their teeth. Also in the school corridor were two paintings I admired: ‘Ruth and Naomi’ and ‘The Golden Apples’. I saw no difference between Bible stories and scenes from Greek mythology. I must have been taught about the Trojan war, because – to my later embarrassment – I wrote that Hector was a coward because he ran away from Achilles. My walk to and from school was an ordeal. I often had to walk gingerly with clenched buttocks, desperate to avoid an accident. The distance was exactly half a mile, but seemed endless. Sometimes I took the road directly from the cul-de-sac to the schoolyard, other times a ginnel which ran parallel, beside a brewery whose dark cloying smell I found unpleasant. In the ginnel I was sometimes confronted by a bigger lad who laughed at me and shoved me around, so I preferred the road, which passed a dairy owned by Susan’s parents. My struggle to contain my bowels was usually on the way home. Sometimes I could distract myself with a phrase from my favourite picture-book, The Cock, The Mouse, and the Little Red Hen, such as ‘A bold bad fox and fourteen little foxes, or a line from a hymn: ‘Sufficient is thine arm alone.’ Or I counted flagstones. These were two feet by one foot six, like the ones in the avenue Margaret and I chalked for hopscotch. I focused on their individual characteristics – a broken corner, an amoeba shape of flattened chewing gum, a white bird dropping – or noted whether joints between were intact, or hollow, or decorated with bright green moss. Sometimes I crouched to look more closely, which seemed to help. Occasionally I had a companion – Margaret, or a boy who lived on a side road near the dairy. If they were with me when I had to crouch, I pretended to see an interesting worm or beetle. Once when I stopped for a beetle inspection Margaret walked on, and when I pleaded with her to wait said, ‘No, serves you right.’ I remembered that on another occasion I had refused to wait while she examined a coltsfoot (the most common flower in those parts). But I had no interest in Nature, maybe because there was so little of it around. I didn’t often fail to contain myself. When I did, shame was mingled with relief. My mother was neither cross nor sympathetic, just cleaned me up as matter-of-factly as if mopping the floor, though with an air of resignation and occasional sighs. She never said I was dirty or careless. My own children had a similar distance to walk to school at that age. I wonder how many five-year-olds do it today. For what must have been the first holiday after the war, my aunt and uncle and three-year-old cousin joined us for a week in Abergele. My only memory of the boarding house is the view across the road. I irritated the adults by repeatedly telling my cousin, ‘That’s Mr Coconut’s house.’ In Mr C’s garden were what my father said were wallflowers, and I irritated the adults further by protesting that they weren’t on a wall. My uncle aroused in me a fascination for boundaries, which I still enjoy. On an unremarkable stretch of promenade, beside a beach strewn with concrete tank barriers, he made me take two steps backwards and said. ‘Now you’re in Llandudno.’ Then two steps forward. ‘Now you’re in Llandulas.’ I thought of that years later when my wife and I bestrode the equator at Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador. Nowadays I like to study illogical enclaves – odd bits of Belgium scattered in Holland, a fragment of the United States marooned in Canada at Lake of the Woods. I think I was an annoying child, pig-headed and self-centred. If something went wrong or proved awkward – if a piece of card was too thick for scissors, or a tube of watercolour was blocked – I was furious. I remembered that just now, spreading a cracker with soft cheese which wasn’t sticky enough. It kept falling off the knife, and broke the cracker when I spread it. As a child in that situation I would have screamed, kicked the kitchen cupboards, and thrown cheese, knife, and crackers on the floor. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn patience and loving-kindness, though feeling goodwill for the cheese wasn’t easy. One example of my cussedness was when Dad was making Christmas presents, bought ones being in short supply after the war. I was idly scraping a piece of wood, and he told me to stop scoring it. I didn’t stop. My mother said, ‘Perhaps he doesn’t know what scoring means,’ which I took as my licence to carry on. Another example was when Geoffrey offered to set up his model railway for my amusement, and showed me diagrams of possible layouts. I chose the most complex. He said, ‘I haven’t enough parts for that one.’ I carried on and on insisting until – to my chagrin – he abandoned the project. The greater an anticipated pleasure, the greater would be my frustration when denied it. I loved short slapstick films. The Three Stooges made me laugh aloud, especially when one got trapped in a bed that folded into a wall. Laurel and Hardy I couldn’t get enough of. One evening when my father and I set out to see one of their films there was an exceptionally long queue. He made us turn back. I was furious with disappointment, moaned and kicked a wall, and got a severe telling off for scuffng my shoes. I don’t remember Dad ever slapping me, but he had a terrifying bellow (maybe learned from a Home Guard sergeant-major). Only years later did I realise it was ‘put on’. Two aspects of life in the cul-de-sac, which might seem like ancient history, are still vivid in my memory. One is the pig bin. Its primary function was to stand in the middle of the avenue and act as stumps for a game of cricket. The ball was soft but made a satisfying clang against the galvanised steel when a batter was bowled out. The secondary function of the bin was to collect food waste to feed pigs, a hangover from the war effort. Food was still strictly rationed. I never saw who emptied the thing, and wasn’t interested enough to find out. At the lower end, where Auntie Leigh’s house stood, the cul-de-sac swelled into a circle. Sometimes the bin happened to be placed at its centre. I had just become the proud owner of a pair of compasses, the kind with a hole for a pencil held in by a screw, and imagined the bin there from time immemorial. A giant pair of compasses, centred on it, would have set out the curve of pavement and garden walls. The other aspect was the horse-drawn milk cart. The milkman appeared to have a foreign accent, which worried me in case he was a spy, but I was told he had damaged his jaw. To my delight he always let me ride the cart from our house to the top of the avenue. I loved the swaying motion, the creak of leather, the friendly smell of the horse (I still love horses). The cart fascinated me, so unlike any other artefact in my domain. Tables and sideboards had straight sides and horizontal tops, and their construction wasn’t obvious, but the cart had sloping sides with curved, tapering members and the joints were clearly visible, with wooden pegs projecting. Its floor sloped upwards and was mounted via two steel steps fixed to brackets, shiny from the milkman’s boots. Our progress was often attended, like devotees hurling themselves at a juggernaut, by housewives with shovels eager for the steaming manure. A finale needs music, so here are my favourites at that time, mostly heard on the radio. There was the one I won’t mention that brings the flood of happiness. There was ‘Lili Marlene’, the first song I ever heard, so sad, so poignant, sung by Allies and Germans alike. There was ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People’ sung by Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, and ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’ sung by The Pied Pipers. The overture to Carmen thrilled me so much I danced around singing, ‘Frank and Elizabeth, Frank and Elizabeth’ which fitted the tune nicely, until I noticed my parents watching and stopped, embarrassed. At school I learned hymns. ‘O God our help in ages past’ felt like a thank you for the recent victory. ‘Summer suns are glowing over land and sea’ was joyful, conveying the idea of more than one sun. I remember the sky as mainly grey. It’s still my default weather, familiar enough for me to work indoors without feeling trapped. Strong sunshine disturbs me unless I can be out in it. Maybe if I was born somewhere like California I could be blasé. Ah well. I’m writing this finale on a bench overlooking Fishguard Harbour. The white stern of the ferry to Ireland has just disappeared behind the headland. The bright sky that brought me here is clouding over. Time to go.

Lowell Observatory

Myself and son James at Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, June or July 1966. This image is mentioned in my memoir 'Astronomy as Poetry' which appears in Griffith Review No. 73 published by Griffith Unversity in Brisbane.

More haiku

Woke up feeling grim. 

When Port Talbot came to mind

 I felt better. Why?

 

Wishing there were more

trees, I should be satisfied

with the one I see.

 

The measuring tape

on the box with the green lid

sits exactly right.

 

Doing the washing-up

scraping plates and wondering:

food is sticky. Why? 

 

The garden she made!

Only the fine rain is not

part of her design.

I thought I'd try lipograms, i.e. texts where one letter is omitted. Here's God Save The Queen without the letter 'o': Deity save the kindly Queen we have/ May the refined Queen we have live many years/ Deity save the Queen./ Send her triumphant/ Happy and resplendent/ Under her reign may we spend much time,/ Deity save the Queen. And 'Home on the Range' without the letter 'e': I would gladly stay/among roaming buffalo/and frisking hinds and harts/hardly taking in a discouraging word/noting sky upon sky without day-long cloud.af

Knower's Ark

CHAPTER ONE ‘It’s him!’ Kay moaned. Ahead on the narrow path a figure had appeared. A pudgy youth with red hair in a Number Two cut, holding his arms away from his sides like a gunfighter. ‘Let’s r-run,’ he friend Ming stammered. ‘No use. I’ve tried to escape from him before. He’s fast.’ The girls looked around in desperation. The path ran between the back gardens of houses, with high walls each side. ‘Why did we come this way?’ Kay muttered. Ming cried, ‘Kay! Look!’ She had spotted a wooden gate. A note on it said KEEP OUT but they were kept out anyway because when Kay lifted the latch and pushed at it she found it locked. ‘Over the wall, Ming,’ she said breathlessly. The wall was made of concrete blocks, well above head height even for an adult, with a wooden trellis on top. Kay cupped her hands for Ming to put her feet in, then hoisted her as high as she could. Ming clung to the trellis and scrabbled with her feet to reach the top of the wall, then reached down – still clinging – to help Kay scramble up. Their trainers left scuff marks on the wall. Nervously, because the trellis didn’t feel very secure, they managed to get over and drop down the other side. They were in a garden. Garden? More like a junkyard full of broken furniture, old washing machines and TV sets, with long grass in between. The girls crouched there, panting. From the other side of the wall came the rough voice of a teenage boy. ‘I know you’re in there, Pugh’s Kid. You won’t get away next time.’ Kay shuddered. ‘Thanks for coming with me, Ming. It’s me Billy’s after, not you.’ Ming tried to smile. ‘All for one, one for all. I hope he doesn’t climb over, though. We’d be trapped like rats.’ They listened but there were no sounds of scrabbling from the other side. The voice went on, ‘You’ll be sorry you dissed my Dad.’ ‘I’m not sorry,’ Kay shouted back. ‘Everyone needs to know what he’s like.’ Ming said, ‘I told you there’d be trouble when you posted a review on the garage website. What did it say? You never told me.’ ‘“Kilby Baker is a racist pig. Don’t take your car to his garage or buy a used car from him.”’ And I don’t care, I’m not keeping quiet. Has he gone?’ ‘No, I haven’t gone, dimbo,’ came the voice. ‘Hey, you’re starting at the High School this autumn, aren’t you?’ ‘So?’ ‘So I’ll see you there, won’t I? Every day. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll make you life a living hell.’ Kay was looking at a battered armchair with green fabric. The stuffing was poking out in several places and she felt as if Billy’s words were the joy spilling out of her life, leaving it empty. She heard him laugh. The laughs moved away. ‘He’s gone, Kay,’ Ming said. ‘We should go.’ ‘It could be a trick, Let’s wait.’ ‘Is he clever enough to play tricks?’ Kay pulled a face. ‘He’s horrible but he isn’t stupid.’ Ming glanced around nervously. The so-called garden belonged to a building. The rear wall facing onto the garden was three storeys high in dark blue brickwork, and on each storey a window with steel bars in front. She shivered. On the ground floor was a door with glass panels. No face appeared behind the glass. She hoped no-one would come out. Kay was trying the gate that said KEEP OUT on the other side, but it was bolted and padlocked. Ming said, ‘You never told me what you posted, Kay. I didn’t think you kept secrets from me.’ Kay blushed. ‘I didn’t mean it to be a secret. I told you I gave him one star.’ ‘Didn’t Billy’s Dad complain to your parents?’ ‘No, and they don’t know about it. I think Kilby Baker thinks setting Billy on me is worse.’ Guiltily she studied her friend’s worried face. ‘Ming, I’m sorry I got you into this.’ ‘Then help me out of it.’ Ming looked at the door to the building anxiously. ‘Give me a lift up.’ Once again Kay cupped her hands for Ming’s feet. For some reasons it seemed harder for her to get up on this side. Maybe the garden was lower than the path. Ming clung to the trellis precariously, trying to push with the soles of her trainers, but the wall was slippery with moss and she was getting nowhere. ‘Can you see over?’ Kay asked. ‘Any sign of Billy?’ ‘No,’ ‘Can you pull me up?’ Ming attempted the impossible, clinging with one hand to support her whole weight, reaching down with the other. Too late. The dreaded doorway opened and a tall figure emerged. There was a horrid silence . . . then it growled, ‘Gotcha!’

Anatomy of Happiness

I shouldn’t write this. I should investigate states beyond happiness: meditative bliss and enlightenment. I should emphasize the fact that happy moments are transient, that within peak experiences lie seeds of suffering. Veiled Melancholy, as Keats has it. But meditation is a slog, I’m not enlightened, and what I want to investigate (with much nostalgia) are times when I felt truly happy. My seven examples are mainly where happiness lasted more than a day. I’m avoiding examples where I was happy just through relief—a loved-one home after unexplained lateness, finances less dire than I thought, a broken machine fixed, a furious row resolved into hugs and kisses. Pleasure in those occasions is fleeting. If I try to milk more happiness from the relief—‘She’s home, thank God’—it eludes me. The source of stress removed, life resumes its humdrum course. I don’t share these memories to flaunt occasional good fortune. I do it to examine their nature and origin in a search for insight. People who gush about a wonderful time they’ve had, and post photos of it on Facebook, are irritating. I hope readers will suppress irritation: I assure them I’ve filled a long life with plenty of failures and unworthy actions, and the present is far from blissful. I’m intrigued how the occasions I describe are imbued with their surroundings, and sometimes with a particular piece of music. Were the setting or the song essential ingredients? Or simply dragged in, the way the pattern in a carpet, the flowers on a fuchsia bush, can be tied to painful memories? In those, the pattern or the flowers didn’t augment the feeling, merely framed it. Like an archaeologist uncovering the levels of Troy, I present examples in reverse chronology. Example 1. Seven years ago. I’m sitting at an old wooden table near the back door of our farmhouse in Wales. All around are the fields of the smallholding. For fifteen years we’ve struggled to establish a garden and deal with livestock. Now I’m shelling borlotti beans from our polytunnel. My wife, busy nearby, approves my labour. The sawtooth outcrops on the horizon are six miles away. The sun is warm on my back and I’m satisfied by the growing pile of beans in one glass bowl and empty pods in another. The beans are buff with reddish brown streaks and blotches, each unique like an abstract painting. There’s no external music—only a buzzard crying to its young, crows chattering, and the breeze sighing in the treetops. But there’s always music in my head. What it was in the bean example I don’t remember. The main qualities of the occasion are its simplicity, its rarity, and its sense of being—not exactly in a bubble, because the birds and horizon are very present—but some kind of sacred space, like a clearing in a dark wood or a sunlit skerry surrounded by murky depths. There’s a blend of pleasant sensations—the sun’s warmth, wifely approval, the beauty (at different scales) of the horizon and the patterns on the beans. A painting, by Vuillard say, might frame myself and the table seen from an upstairs window, leaving out slugs, weeds, rotting fence-posts, and produce never ripened or harvested too late. Being ‘in the flow’ of the task allows me to forget those failures. There’s a sense of purpose—the beans are sustenance. Simply sketching the beans I might feel trivial, unproductive, deterred by the carping inner voice that has been with me since childhood, maybe from my parents. For now the voice is silent, my joy unsullied. The feeling of happiness lasts all day. Even now, sad at leaving those rolling fields, accepting old age and diminished strength for life in town, I revisit it with as much pleasure as regret. Example 2. Forty years earlier. Contrast and relief come into this example, but because the feeling lasts for days (and is easily revisited) I present it as authentic. The contrast is in the scenery. We’ve been waiting at a border post to drive our VW beetle into Mexico. Americans around us are fuming at the bureaucratic delay, and we fear we should have brought more car documents. But suddenly we’re free to go on. From the blank dusty streets of Laredo (only later do I think of that song) we enter the flower-strewn boulevards of Nuevo Laredo, full of life. People are strolling, chatting, looking around, unlike the citizens of the town we’ve left. It’s a different world only two days’ journey from our home in Kansas. The sense of adventure and fulfillment lasts five days, until we turn north through the Sonora desert, where boredom sets in. But not even boredom diminishes the sense of achievement, and this is where the music comes. After hearing a tune at a roadside stall on the descent from the Sierra Madre, I add these banal words: ‘In the state of Sinaloa, in the town of Mazatlán.’ Banal, but so cheerful. I wrote ‘a sense of achievement’ almost without thinking. Is achievement essential for happiness? In Example 1 the achievement was minimal—shelling beans is child’s play, there were no obstacles. Which is what made the task so pleasant. So does one win either way: enjoy what’s easy, or enjoy overcoming what isn’t? I hesitated to present this example, because nowadays it doesn’t count as an achievement. I know people who are much more widely travelled, in more exotic locations. But part of my joy at reaching Mexico was assuaging my youthful gripe, ‘I haven’t travelled enough!’ And as André Gide remarks (in Si Le Grain Ne Meurt) about his first trip to Algeria, ‘Many others had been: what was new and different was our going.’ Example 3. Two years and a half before, in London. My wife has gone into labour with our first child. I have no worries about the birth. I find it hard to believe how little anxiety I suffered in those far-off days. Today, social gatherings, bank accounts, simple car journeys, set me on edge. But at least (I believe) I’m no longer blind to consequences as I was in those far-off days of moral myopia and unskillful actions. I’ve left my wife in Whittington Hospital, told to come back next day. I’m filled with euphoria. I have a clear image of walking (‘on air’—a cliché coming true) across the bridge on Hornsey Lane over Archway Road far below. Even in those pre-ultrasound days I know the child will be a son. There’s no music associated with that memory. The feeling lasts well beyond the birth. It fades when my wife and son come home and we realize our responsibilities, but I still easily revisit it. And strangely enough, the setting is significant in other ways. The other day, checking the London A to Z street guide, I had a revelation. Before I married I had a bedsit in Hampstead with a view of Highgate. The green patina on a distant copper dome was a striking landmark. That dome in Waterlow Park happens to be right behind Whittington Hospital. I feel like an explorer who realizes Mount X and Mount Y, named from different viewpoints, are the same. Whittington Hospital, by the way, is named for Dick Whittington, a young apprentice in the Middle Ages. Unhappy with his master he decided to leave London. But heading north he heard church bells sing, ‘Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.’ He turned, and did become Lord Mayor. A few months after my son is born, driving up Archway Road heading north for a job in Leeds on my Honda 50 (some journey!) I pass under that same bridge and wonder like Dick whether I’ll return. (I don’t.) Example 4. A year before. This example has specific music and—incongruously for a love story—a specific location outside a dentist’s. I set off along England’s Lane in the north London suburb of Hampstead after my appointment. My filling doesn’t hurt. The weather is warm and sunny. The music in my head is ‘You Know What I Mean’ by the Vernons Girls, which when I think of it now brings euphoria flooding back. Suddenly, unexpectedly, after many disappointments and false trails, life is smiling on me again: I’m in love, and loved in return (and we dance the twist together). There is an element of contrast, with my previous lonely existence, but more important is the word ‘unexpectedly’. The weather plays its part, and so does the cheerful weirdness of the song. It’s probably a cliché that love makes one more sensitive to music. Other songs associated with our courtship take me back strongly when I think of them. That sensitivity faded, buried under habit and practical worries. But like those rivers in limestone country that dive underground only to re-emerge, the feeling of that day is with me as strong as ever. Example 5. Six months before. I’ve just moved to London from my home town in the North of England, and between visits from friends looking for parties to gatecrash, I’m lonely. At first I shared a flat but that didn’t work out, so now I live alone. I go on a few dates, but those don’t work out either. I absorb myself in my job on a technical magazine, often staying to work into mid-evening. New Year’s Eve is especially grim. I want to head for the crowds around the fountains in Trafalgar Square, but the Tube isn’t running. In January I decide to join an amateur drama group. I’m invited to audition for The Winter’s Tale. The leading actor has dropped out and to my amazement I’m given the part. The setting for the most intense moment is a dingle on Hampstead Heath. I’m sitting on a stone. The weather isn’t too cold. It’s the weekend and my good fortune has just sunk in. The play text is in my hand, with penciled cuts and annotations by the director. I’m reading Act IV where dire events in Sicily give way to the lightheartedness of Bohemia. Once again, a song brings back the glorious feeling: I’m no longer alone, I have exhilarating company in a delightful play. The song is ‘Get Thee Hence For I Must Go’, sung by the thieving pedlar Autolycus to the credulous shepherdesses. At first I think ‘ill’ in ‘If to either thou dost ill’ is a verb. When I realize it’s a noun I laugh. That laugh is like a motif for the feeling, which persists for weeks until anxiety takes over. The director drops out, and in a rash Olivier-type move I offer to direct as well as play Leontes. But all goes well. And in the audience, unknown to me, is the girl who will become my wife. Example 6. I’m ten years old, at the dinner table in my parents’ house. The white tablecloth has been removed after Sunday lunch, leaving a brown felt underlay, a familiar base for homework and inter-meal activities. My father, a member of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers (motto: Decus et Tutamen) probably supplied the felt. I’m building a house with my Bayco set, a clunky system of rods and brick-patterned tiles, some red, some white. Red one-piece roofs, green doors and window frames, bay windows, white pillars, arches, even a pointed roof for a gazebo. How to arrange all these is my absorbing and satisfying task as designer. Often, my pleasure in the moment is muted by the thought that someone else is having a better time. That isn’t happening. I’m sorry for anyone who isn’t me. A hymn heard earlier that afternoon at Sunday School runs through my head: ‘A Man There Lived in Galilee’. The jolly tune ‘Tyrol’ has a catchy rhythm and pleasing intervals. (Perhaps a musicologist could explain why some intervals create happiness—for example the one between the sixth and seventh notes of Pachelbel’s chaconne, and several in ‘Clarão de Lua’ by Nazaré Pereira.) Normally I go grudgingly to Sunday School, annoyed at having to change into my best clothes, but that day’s session has been unusually pleasant—more to do with seeing friends than feeling religious. The elements of this occasion are satisfaction in solving a design problem, the absence of any sense it isn’t worthwhile (my parents, sleepy after Sunday roast, are leaving me to it), and definitely the music of the hymn, which when I remember it brings back the feeling strongly. The joy lasts several hours, until the table is set for the evening meal. Example 7. A song from when I was six arouses a strong memory of contentment. ‘Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think’ by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians must have accompanied some activity I was absorbed in. Writing, drawing, cutting out pictures of military aircraft? I was lonely in that house, before we moved to the one in Example 6, but was happy on my own when some project took all my attention. At that age I didn’t question whether what I was doing was Worthwhile or Career Advancing. Still trailing clouds of confidence, perhaps? Another song from that era evokes the cul-de-sac we lived in. I had no friends my own age but I knew most of the neighbours, especially the lovely lady next door I called Auntie Lesley. One, a young man of eighteen, showed me his train set (and no, there was no funny business) and a strange figurine called ‘Billiken: God of Things As They Ought To Be’. A woman whose pilot son was killed in the war showed me his scale models of fighter planes. A girl five years older than me sometimes tolerated my company. A girl much younger confused me by saying ‘Daddy Kimmus’ was going to bring presents. What brings them all back so clearly is ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People’ sung by Bing Crosby. Ah, that picket fence and rambling rose! I planned to add more examples, but rejected them because of clinging. How often I’ve anxiously looked forward to something, impatient with anything that might get in the way, only to find when it arrives that the life has been drained from it. I’m reminded of lines in Strindberg’s Dream Play (translation by Elizabeth Sprigge): INDRA’S DAUGHTER. What was wrong with the fishnet? BILLSTICKER. Wrong? Well, there wasn’t anything wrong exactly. But it wasn’t what I’d had in mind, and so I didn’t enjoy it quite as much . . . It’s as if I strain to print the scene and emotion onto my brain, to add to my stock of experiences. ‘Life might be humdrum, but at least that happened!’ And to assuage the fear that such pleasure might never be repeated. Blake said it all, of course. The threads that run through these rare examples are effortlessness, lack of egotism, lack of striving, playfulness, and letting things take their course even when being creative. Immersing myself in the process, allowing simple mechanisms—the seams of the bean pods, the holes in the Bayco bases, the friction of pen on paper—to dictate it. Usually, engaged in some activity, I have such a clear idea of what I want to achieve that any obstacle makes me stressed and anxious. Also, I’m often greedy to get on with several tasks or projects at once, and can’t decide which to prioritize. It’s especially hard when I’m keen to do an indoor task, but the sun is shining, calling me, calling me. Ah well. I’m learning to see greed as unskillful, just like clinging. The most intense times of happiness have been unexpected—sometimes inexplicable. That seems to be what gives them their quality. Moments of contentment in my present life are still tainted by the fear that they won’t last (of course they won’t!) and recently, bedeviled by investigation: ‘If I’m looking beyond happiness I shouldn’t enjoy this moment.’ But I’m reassured by the Zen saying: ‘If it’s a good day, we shouldn’t be uneasy about being happy. We shouldn’t be attached to non-attachment.’ Will this analysis weakens the sensation roused by a place or piece of music? I don’t think so. Whatever happens I’m grateful, and mean to avoid that Nessun maggior dolore angst. More than anything, I wish all beings could share those feelings, or at the very least be free from pain and suffering.