diary

I'm reading Alan Bennett's Untold Stories, a collection of his writings from the past decade, including bits from his diaries from 1996 onwards. I've had a variant of the illness which is making the rounds in Sydney and yesterday afternoon, reading Bennet in bed, I fell asleep. As I drifted off, a blog post in the form of a Bennettesque diary ran through my mind. Let's see if I can reproduce it...

• I've taken another day off today, even though I'm not particularly sick. This is the first time I've missed a tutorial - and I've missed three. The trouble is, with the start of the new semester two weeks ago, I've been overcome with the sense of sterile ennui which hit me when I first started back at university a year ago. I now see that the first semester of this year was an aberration. I had wonderful, sophisticated lecturers and tutors and every tute had at least three other students over the age of 21 - sometimes even over 40. This semester I am often the only "mature" student in a sea of 19 year olds who, frankly, I find boring. (This doesn't bode well for a future as a high school teacher.) I'm not finding the teachers very stimulating either. Last week one of my under-40 teachers ended a sentence in a lecture with "and stuff like that". In one tutorial, I just about exploded when two young men agreed with each other that rape for a man was essentially much worse than for a woman as it was crushing for the male ego. The following week in the same tutorial, a hard-eyed young man who'd named the Bible as one of his favourite books the previous week made what he thought was a witty pun on the word "dew" as being about Jews. I hate playing the role of un-amused adult figure but seem to have fallen into it.
• Lilli the poodle is staying with us for a week while her owner is up north. It's nice having two dogs in the house again but a relief that one of them isn't very old. Yes, that's the silver lining of Lot's demise, not having the constant background stress of caring for an old creature - not that she was 'bedridden', but we did have to be aware of toileting her regularly (to avoid kidney infections); we did have to keep buying a variety of hopefully tempting meat for her, as her appetite and body dwindled; we did have to clean up her little puddles a few mornings a week; we had to walk slowly with her when out for a walk. The sweet side of living with an old deaf dog was the way she'd stay deeply asleep when we arrived home, only stirring because the other dog was causing a stir - then she'd raise her head and look at us and lick her lips in affection, but often put her head down and go back to sleep straightaway.
• I've been depressed, probably because of the coincidence of these two events - Lot's death and the new, boring semester. It's end-of-an-era meets return-to-the-past; time-passing meets middle-aged-among-young-people. And with me, there's always a splash of my-only-child-is-getting-older-and-will-be-leaving-home-before-I-know-it (and then-I'll-be-really-old) in there too.
• Olle ran in the City to Surf the other day, with a friend, R, and friend's father M. They ran all the way - that's 15 kilometres. They decided to do this only two weeks before the race. M took them on two training sessions, on the second of which they managed to run 7km. On the strength of that, he goaded them to keep running the whole way on Sundey, even though they'd planned to walk up Heartbreak Hill. Coincidentally, Olle won the 800m in the school athletics carnival last week. Looks like endurance is his thing. In Nippers, they start sand-races by lying face down in the sand, facing in the opposite direction to the finish line. When the whistle blows, they have to jump up, turn around and start running. Olle's starts are always very slow - by the time he's got up and turned around, the other children are at least a metre ahead of him. So in the three seasons of Nippers he's done so far, he's come next-to-last in just about every race. So it's a pleasant surprise to see him doing so well at long distance running.
• He's adamant that he doesn't want to do Nippers this year. It was a bit of a push to get him to do it last summer. He'd been put off by the throw-em-in-the-deep-end mentality of their instructor, which worked for most of the boys but not for one with a vividly fearful imagination like Olle. I'm sure we should respect Olle's wishes but we're disappointed, as it's a nice social gathering for us at the beach and I'm sure if only he persevered, he'd find his confidence.
• This morning, walking to the park with the two dogs, I noticed that the corner shop has changed hands. There are flowers and secondhand books for sale out the front and the Lebanese man who's been there for as long as I remember is no longer behind the counter. He and his wife had four children who we'd watched grow up. His youngest went from baby to teenager in the time we've been walking past (and occasionally ducking in to buy something). Now I'll probably never see him again, as I think they live somewhere else entirely.
• Not-running the City to Surf made me feel decrepit. Will I ever get back to running?
• We went to a friend's 69th birthday party on the weekend. Most of the guests were of that age group. I got into conversation with two women who went to the same Catholic girls school as me (but 20 years before me). One of them, who I'd never met before, said to the other that although she'd been rejecting of Catholicism, she knew she'd have to marry someone from a Catholic background - and she had. The other had too, but less consciously, less deliberately. Whenever anyone talks about "marrying" anyone, I feel an outsider. I never aspired to marriage, even in my heterosexual adolescence. Not even in my childhood, when I did aspire to have numerous babies when I grew up, in partnership with a man, but I can't recall having a single fantasy ever about being a bride or getting married. Even though I've been in a relationship with one person for almost two decades, I don't think of myself as married and I don't want to get married.
• And ... although my first major love relationship was with another ex-Catholic, none of my lovers since then has been. Thank goodness. I think of that as part of my lucky escape. The world opened out for me, rather than keeping me inside the confined space I grew up in.
• Later I asked one of these women when she lost her faith. She was studying Voltaire at university and his criticisms of the clerics opened her eyes, she said.  An interestingly-more-intellectual loss-of-faith than mine. I was at a school religious retreat when I was 16. I recall suddenly thinking, 'there is no God'. From that moment on, I knew I didn't believe in a God. And if the basic belief in an almighty deity wasn't there, the edifice built on that, the Catholic religion, was irrelevant. I've never been interested in discussions of proof about God's non-existence as it seems self-evident to me that there isn't one.
• Walking home from school yesterday afternoon, Olle said, "There's drug trafficking in this area". "What makes you say that?" I asked. "I just saw  a pill on the street".
• Although people have been very kind about Lot's death, I'm aware that many of the people who we see most regularly these days, out and about and at the school, have little awareness of how important she's been to us, because she hasn't been out in public much in the past two or three years, except for short meanderings close to home. In her youth, she was well known at the library and at all the local shops, but in recent years, I'd leave her at home for that sort of excursion, as she had arthritis and didn't much like walking on hard surfaces. She still went for a daily walk in the park, but was driven there. (I resisted driving to the park until it was obvious that she couldn't manage the 15 minute walk to get there.) It's a process of decline very similar to old age in people. By the time of death, many of the most vivid memories of them are already years old.
• We had a very awkward (worse than awkward) evening with two friends the other night. They are married - have been for almost 40 years. I've seen the kind of friction between them that can exist in longlasting relationships, though I've thought - hoped - there was affection too. Through a series of misunderstandings and miscommunications, the man of the couple got to the restaurant first (a restaurant you can't book for and which always has a queue) and was given a table and had to wait 20 minutes for the rest of us to arrive. When we arrived, he was in a rage at having to wait and directed that at his wife in a very ugly way. We then had to sit down and pretend to have a good meal while internally reeling from his display of temper. Both co-parent and I felt uneasy and disturbed and are not sure how to proceed. Ideally, I think he should have apologised to us all on the night, which would have opened the way for us to say we were sorry for keeping him waiting. But I don't want to be the one to smooth things over and let him - the man - off the hook, as I think we partly did on the night itself anyway. I wouldn't say they're exactly intimate friends of ours, though we have known them for several years. I'd like to keep the connection but don't want to pretend I wasn't upset by what happened.
• I've discovered that a woman I know well is five inches shorter than me. I was very surprised. I vaguely knew she wasn't as tall as I am, but not by that amount. I don't know if this error is a question of my misperception or the largeness of her personality. (She also has a large head and hair, which I'm sure contribute to making her look taller than she is.)
• Time to return to reading Untold Stories in bed.

Comments

[Jacinta]

I read Alan Bennett's "Four Stories" in a friend's beach house during the June holidays. She has a great collection and I averaged one book a day. I lay flat out on the bed relaxing while my husband and the children made winter beach excursions.
Such a lofty exercise to write in a Bennettesque vein. You both have a mesmeric style. So easy to read, yet disciplined and spare. An enjoyable read. Thanks.
I knew I didn't believe in God when the Josephite nuns were telling us about angels. This was about the time I had been disabused of Santa and the Easter Bunny. It seemed a bit rich to try and pull the angel conspiracy on me too. Their reaction to my statement of disbelief so shocked me that I questioned their sanity. I still have a suspicion all believers in religion are mad.
P.S. Another writer who's style is seductive (yet pared back) is W. G. Sebald. English was a second language for him. Most of his work has been translated from German. He worked as an English academic in East Anglia. I have read everything he has written. He wrote a description of the fire bombing of Dresden that is poetic.

[Laura]

Your memory of losing your faith reminded me of Mary McCarthy's story about her experience of this event in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood - have you read this book? I'm sure you'd like it.

[suso]

Jacinta, funnily enough, I've just read a Bennett diary entry in which he complains about Sebald, doesn't "get" him. But on your recommendation, I'll look him up.
I haven't read that book, Laura - I read her 'The Group' years ago. I must put it on my list.

[Helen]

Oh, go Olle go!
Go Olle go!
Gooooooooooo Olle!
(If you don't have that Nicabate ad in Sydney, you won't know what the hell I'm on about)
You must be so proud of him!
Bless.

[Kirsten]

I have been out of touch and hadn't read about Lot's death. So sorry to hear it.