I don’t fare well in this heat, being about as pale as you can get for a man whose genealogy is easily traced back to deepest Andalucía. But you know, given how much the gloomy winter weather – and let’s not forget, we didn’t have much of a spring – affects me, I’m not going to moan about this heatwave. Here in the UK, we’ve had a warning that Monday and Tuesday are going to be particularly uncomfortable, and the last couple of summers, I’ve faced these mini heatwaves with my face, neck and arms plastered with Poundland sun cream and a baseball cap. Until now, I’ve never been a summer hat guy. But needs must.
At this point, I’d like to stress, the cap is unbranded. If I’m going to wear a hat or any item of clothing with some vulgar oversized logo on it that pushes the price of the item up considerably, then I’m going to be paid for that. But middle-aged male ‘models’ with a long and troubled history of P45s, work disciplinaries and several incidents of being physically escorted out of buildings by security are not much in demand.
I’ve spent some of the day, ineffectively trying to organise my new stand-up set which I’m hoping to unveil next Friday when I’m doing my third gig in Clapham. It’s looking a tall order at the minute. The material is there but the editing process before I can pare it down is always lengthy as I’ve a tendency to overwrite. I just like to see everything on the page and then we move onto the highlighter stage. I love the ‘highlighter’ stage. I need to speed it all up but it’s a scatty mind these days.
Before I move on, let me just reveal that leg-crossing wise, I’ve currently got my right leg over my left knee. This is good. When I’m stressed, my left leg, the dominant leg, leads on the leg crossing and the pressure on the right knee is greater than the reverse. If that makes no sense or is construed as irrelevant to this post, please disregard.
I spent yesterday afternoon trying to organise the back room in the flat. This used to be my study before it got wrecked by a leaking roof, documented weekly on the last 200 or so episodes of the now mercifully retired podcast. With the roof now finally sorted, I figure for however much longer I’m marooned here in this flat, I may as well try and organise it into something resembling a room of some sort. At the moments it’s just full of hundreds of books, old paperwork and untold boxes. Moving things about, getting rid of some junk, mentally, that felt good. Feeling like there is now a point to walking towards the back of the flat, that also feels like progress.
This afternoon, after a lazy morning, I took myself off to the cemetery to clean up my mum’s grave. I don’t go there much. It’s pure laziness and a bit of not getting much out of the visit, but the former mainly I suppose. I’m not proud of that. My mum would’ve been one of those Mediterranean old school women who would’ve devoted her life to going to my grave every other day if it had been me rather than her in the ground and I still sometimes feel guilty that my visits have tailed off over the years, particularly as I live so close to the cemetery these days. I recall a horrific ‘boys’ holiday to Rhodes in September 1994. I’m not the kind of guy who’s suited to those trips or someone that’s an easy fit for a stag night (of which I’ve avoided more than I’ve been involved with). The holiday was an absolute disaster. The apartment, in the middle of nowhere, got flooded. The three of us (all introverts) were wading through several inches of water from room to room in part of the apartment, and there was one morning where the island was on its highest security alert in two decades after some diplomatic incident between Greece and Turkey. But what I remember most from that grim fortnight, and it really was grim (I vividly remember trying to mentally adjust to the fact I was still nine days away from seeing my mum again at one point), was this poor woman who’d appear outside the apartment every morning to pray at a shrine across the road set up in memory of her son who’d been knocked over on one of those crazily dangerous roads you often get in European countries. My heart went out to her every time I saw her. She was crushed. One morning after she left, I walked across the road to take a look at the shrine, knowing my mum too would’ve been there every morning, punishing herself, had that been me with my life curtailed early.
My aunt was always the one who oversaw the maintenance of my mum’s grave. For two decades, she was the one there every week, laying fresh flowers, removing the old ones, washing and wiping down the stone. Massively commendable on her part and just another debt I owe her. Sometimes I joined her. Again, not enough, but I did and afterwards we’d go for a coffee at a café opposite the cemetery where we’d order ourselves these impressive hot chocolates and my aunt would get a Portuguese custard tart, always leaving the casing. I never understood this. The casing, for me, rivals the actual custard as the main attraction of the pastel de nata. She’s always been someone who eats little and when she shows up at my café, those cameos increasingly rare these days now she’s in her final years, she’ll often leave huge chunks of her sandwich or pastry untouched and I’m so embarrassed that the café will think this a reflection of the quality of their fare that I end up having to eat some of what she’s left behind, so that this ‘possible disregard’ for their food doesn’t come across as so blatant.
She called me this lunchtime after all her milk had gone off in this heat, wanting to know what ‘Long Life’ milk is called. It’ll be pointless buying fresh milk over the coming weeks while London burns. Ten minutes later, after telling my aunt numerous times it’s ‘Long Life’ milk, she still has no idea how to pronounce it. “Just buy a carton of milk,” I told her in the end. “You can’t go wrong with that.” It won’t be her going to the shops anyway. It’ll be another errand for my uncle. She organises his diary and usually sends him wherever he needs to go, usually against his wishes.
Unusually for a southern European, my uncle has never been one for café culture and with both now housebound and seeing out their days bickering with each other over absolutely anything, my aunt now uses my uncle’s refusal to take her out for a coffee just across the road as another line of attack.
My uncle is a good judge of character and situations, and a wise man once you scratch beneath the quiet exterior, but I do think he’s wrong on this. Sometimes life isn’t necessarily about doing what you like doing, but what might be good for the person close to you. It wouldn’t hurt him if he’d just step out of the flat with my aunt once in a while and go for a coffee. Their local café, a Brazilian place on Clapham Road, is only two minutes’ walk, ten now given their respective physical state now, and bizarrely no longer stocks pastries, and I think it’d help them to venture out of the flat for a social activity. These days, their once busy social calendar has been decimated. Every trip out is either out of necessity, to the shops (they refuse to allow the family to online shop for them) or the hospital. I don’t think that’s good for their mindset.
With them isolated now, if my uncle took my aunt out even for just an hour, it could help lift their moods, though admittedly, given their fractious Costanza-like relationship, I’m not sure what they would talk about. It might be that I’d need to play gooseberry, lead on the conversations, gradually taking a back seat until finally I play no part in their exchanges. It’d be like the time, after 4 painful months of teaching me how to ride a bike, where my dad, often running behind me, topless in tiny running shorts, finally let go of my saddle and yelled ecstatically from behind “Danny! Look, you’re doing it on your own.” That April evening in 1981, I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad happier with me. For my part, I was desperate to nail the cycling just so I no longer had to suffer the shameful site of being escorted out on my Grifter by a half-naked man, with a mullet, in tiny running shorts.
The ground by where my mum lies is these days sloping to the left, and baked hard by the sun, massive fissures have opened up in the sun-scorched turf. It’s not always easy to know if you’re literally walking over someone’s grave now, the older graves that is, and I’m very conscious of this. As I sidestepped where I felt a coffin might be buried, marvelling at how the trees shut out the street sounds, I found myself thinking of those long-gone people and the lives they might’ve led. I thought of them drinking, smoking, where they worked, the fornicating, who they fornicated with, I admit, that crossed my mind too as I walked over all that buried history, and when was the last time their barely visible graves were visited.
I’d best get back to writing the new set now. That should’ve been the priority this afternoon.
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