Anxiety dreams

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  1. Anxiety dreams

    May 16, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    24 hours away from once again taking to the road and driving to Bulgaria – first stop Dusseldorf, then Stuttgart then all points east, as heat and cicadas and distances increase.

    In the soon to be deserted house, the dust is settling after they hacked away the plaster from walls still damp from the long undetected silent leak. That was yesterday. The heavy dinosaur drying machines have been taken away. No longer will their indefatigable roar behind closed doors fray nerves and accelerate the electricity meter.

    Upstairs the spare bedroom has filled with bags and crates – all to be squeezed into our car once darkness falls – in the hope that our flit will be unobtrusive.

    And so the anxiety dreams begin.

    It is the interval and I leave Annie in the theatre bar. I have three minutes to stow my bicycle somewhere safe and get back in time for the second act. Picking up the bike from the pavement outside the theatre I wobble across two lanes of traffic and ride up the wrong side of a busy shopping street. The theatre is further and further away. Then I see an estate agents with other bikes parked outside. I spot that they are not locked. This must be a good place to leave my bike. Should I ask permission? Probably, but I have no time. The audience will be filing back to their seats by now and Annie will be wondering where the hell I am. I start back up the pavement. It leads to some stairs. I climb them and my route leads me through an open door. No-one in the flat appears to notice as I pass through living room and kitchen. It must be an established right of way. I go through the back door and climb some more stairs. Suddenly I am in an enormous classroom. There are at least a hundred kids sitting behind desks and I am taking form period. I hover over a tape machine that doesn’t work. I start walking round talking to individuals but when I look up, I find that all the kids are gone. It’s time for me to find my next class. But I have to pick up coat, scarf, books, tape recorder – I drop a towel and stoop to clutch at it with my two spare fingers. Then still struggling with all this stuff in my arms, I am in the busy school corridor looking for my class. I find them sitting crammed onto two tables in the crowded refectory. Surely I don’t have to teach them here. My head of Department is sitting with them with her deputy. Is this an observation? But fat Wendy turns to me. What are you doing here, sir? You haven’t got us now. You’ve got the other lot. Of course! I nod to my head of department, not daring to ask her where I’m supposed to be. Out in the corridor again, I look into classrooms. Lessons have started. Where is my class? The corridor turns into a shopping mall then street. Shops turn to houses and I realise I need to turn back. I’m now in a car with Annie, still looking for this class. What sort of impression am I giving the school? A teacher who doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be teaching; a teacher who cannot locate his class – that teacher must be woefully underprepared.

    I wake and struggle downstairs. I switch on the radio. Something about tourists being turned back from Lundy Island by rough seas. I switch on the TV – yet another Labour MP caught out over his expenses. I switch on the computer. It’s set itself to the wrong date and time again and I get a red message from Norton that my subscription has ended and I am defenceless against virus attacks. Ay Caramba!

    I try to ring Dad in Verona, but he has gone out with his key. Vlad – who rhymes with Dad – is in Kurdish Iraq – racing back to the Turkish border before his visa expires – so he can pick up another visa for Iran.

    I must lighten up.

  2. Thoughts on 1st May

    May 8, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    First of May – I wonder how many of my generation find their fingers instinctively curling into fists? – only to blush at the memories of naïve youth – 1968 the year of European revolution and dreams of a better world as across the channel students and workers manned barricades from Paris to Prague, we English marched in protest at the Vietnam war, chanting We are all foreign scum and many young men wanted to look like Che Guevara while women espoused the Joni Mitchell/Joan Baez look.


    The peoples’ flag is deepest red!

    Dee-dum dee dum dee dumdeedum

    This is pretty much what we sang when our university sit-in had to end in 1970. An alliance of left wing and liberal groupings had followed the lead of their colleagues at the University of Coventry, who had “discovered” that secret dossiers about them were being passed between an unholy alliance of Professors, Government and Employers.


    It was an article of faith that files on all of us must exist, so we seized the administration building in the midst of a dramatic snowstorm, erected barricades of tables and chairs and the students’ Union set up a 24 hour a day session in the Lecture theatre where we could pass resolutions condemning every reactionary government from Greece to Argentina, and send messages of solidarity to the brave fighters in Cuba and Vietnam. Of course we found no files, the University authorities denied their existence, but we continued to believe with a religious fervour worthy of St Dominic.


    But late winter turned to balmy spring and our protests ended in dum-dee-dum. No student was going to continue to occupy a soulless administration block with the Easter holidays coming on. So in spite of our promise to the radical Edgar Broughton band who had come all the way from Coventry to perform a free concert in our honour and a letter to the Vice Chancellor stating that we would never desert the barricades until he produced secret files on all of us, we marched out the Thursday before the holidays and rashly decided to sing the Red Flag, assuming that our comrades knew the words.


    No-one knew anything beyond the rousing first line.

  3. This much I don’t know

    April 21, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    The Sea of Faith
    Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
    Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
    But now I only hear
    Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
    Retreating, to the breath
    Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
    And naked shingles of the world.

    (Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach)

    I have become obsessed with certainty and its acolytes.

    President Ahmadenijad denounces Israel as a racist state and representatives of the civilized world walk out and express outrage. Ken Livingstone says the same thing at a recording of Any Questions and middle England responds with applause. Meanwhile liberal Jews who raise doubts about Israel’s actions are denounced as anti-Semitic self-haters.


    Every day in the US, Rush Limbaugh castigates liberals and tries to educate anyone listening into his alternative truth that climate change is an anti-capitalist invention and that Obama is a thug spearheading an attempt to undermine the sacred principles of the founding fathers and bring about a socialist state in God’s chosen country. He is as convinced of the truth as President Ahmadenijad.


    Recently accused of being a bleeding heart liberal in one of those polarising arguments in which a rush of blood drove me into an indefensible position, I confess to certain crusty gut instincts, formed in my youth. But I grow to regret these instincts, fear my passionate outbursts and wish I could be witty and detached.


    “Only Connect” is E.M. Forster’s command at the outset of his pre-first world war novel Howards End. “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.” is the super confident opening of a writer who is in total command of his fiction.


    In the 1920s the writer John Buchan is less sure. One character blames the First World War for a loosening of the bolts of reason and the rupture of the barrier wall separating the conscious with all its necessary scruples from the flooding irrational subconscious. English gentlemen in the security of their private clubs express disquiet:


    "Lord!" he cried, "how I loathe our new manners in foreign policy.
    The old English way was to regard all foreigners as slightly
    childish and rather idiotic and ourselves as the only grown-ups in
    a kindergarten world.  That meant that we had a cool detached view
    and did even-handed unsympathetic justice.  But now we have got
    into the nursery ourselves and are bear-fighting on the floor.  We
    take violent sides, and make pets, and of course if you are -phil
    something or other you have got to be -phobe something else.  It is
    all wrong.  We are becoming Balkanised."


    Scepticism seems the correct approach but it leads us straight from the shingle of Dover Beach to Margate Sands where the super intelligent TS Eliot could “connect nothing with nothing.”


    Reserve passion for the individual outrage. You cannot walk on the other side. But make no attempt to generalise from the particular lest you find yourself enrolled in one of Arnold’s ignorant armies. These no longer “clash by night” but from London to Bangkok and from Afghanistan to Gaza there is a 24 hour struggle between those who are sure they are right.


    And in my fiction I remain powerless before the strange actions of my characters. In my fiction I know even less than I think I know about the real world.


    And we are here as on a darkling plain
    Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
    Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  4. Thailand memories

    March 28, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    Now as the cold rain slaps my face, it’s time to record those crucial moments before they fade into the wet grey of England’s Spring.

    Daniel’s barn now stands proud and scaffoldless in its field – the workers have departed – and it only awaits Tony’s paint brush. Away to the right the cotton bushes, grown from seed this year have delivered a rich harvest.

    I close my eyes and sink into the green of Siripan’s garden – seen from so many decks and floors of buildings. I hear the rasping of frogs and the apologetic hiccup from the resident gecko. The orchids writhe and blossom in mid air.

    The temple of elephant carvers – whole backyard devoted to totem poles of elephantine shapes.

    The shops on the Tarpei road – so many dusky interiors of dark shelves and rich glowing fabrics

    Ness’s party and the joyful abandon of Tony’s singing a duet with Siripan over Love Potion Number 9 getting the timing exactly right.

    On a morning bike ride Siripan encounters a snake writhing near vertical in its attempt to escape an oncoming lorry. It dances into the path of her bicycle. She lifts her feet just in time to avoid its lashing coils.
    Caught in the headlights on the narrow back road the body of the neighbour’s drunken nephew lies motionless across our path. Tony goes to rouse the neighbour and together they pull the boy’s unresisting body homeward. With a suicide this year the family feels cursed by evil spirits.


    Up early in the morning to meet with a group of bird watchers led by a heart surgeon. We are all ages. Our leader can spot a speck in the distance and train his telescope in seconds. His enthusiasm galvanises us all. Here a kingfisher; there a falcon breakfasting on its prey; we just miss a sunbird.

    Our trip to Udom and Siripan’s mother as giggly and tactile as ever, teaching me the scansion of classic Thai poetry and Dun so good humoured and On so optimistic and beautiful.

    Tony’s decisive driving, so concentrated, sensing the opening gaps, aware of drifters and blind drivers avoiding the flocks of heedless motorcyclists that blow about the road like mad starlings.

    Siripan’s sumptuous meals, her photographs from Myanmar – her passionate advocacy of that country and its need for foreign visitors to sustain the ordinary people.

    Siripan’s and Tony’s fierce commitment to Thailand, its arts, culture and natural beauty

    For more information visit

    http://www.siripankidd.com/

    Written with love and gratitude

  5. Jarring Notes

    March 19, 2009 by Christopher Buxton

    The cylindrical stone jars point in every direction from hilltop and plain. They have sat buried the dry ground for over two thousand years. They look like guns or base organ pipes. But their mouths are muted. They sit scarcely stirred by the earth crunching bombs that fell around them from 1964 to 1973.

    Across the Plain of Jars there are still thousands of unexploded devices that will take a life, a leg or an arm – all dropped by the Americans in a war that was never declared or acknowledged.

    The villagers use bomb casings for fences and house support. But the children pick up the little bomb-lettes spread by cluster bombs. The boys have been told that when they explode there are valuable ball bearings for their catapults. Often it is too late before they understand the terrible price for their ammunition.

    Across the Plain of Jars there are efforts to clear the area of mines, bombs and bomb-lettes. The whole job is reckoned to take four generations.

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