Lavender moments

I like those moments that I realise we have made into important and frequent parts of our days - of pure sensory enjoyment, of pause, of play, of opportunity for reflection.  

We find them intensely in our best embraces in the milonga, in conversation and walks with friends, in learning from or sharing with others.  We find them loving things, caring for things, in discovery:

Life is very largely lived in these special seconds or minutes.  They flare, exist briefly and vanish.

Many are things so simple and well known that they are indeed clichés: the pleasure of something beautiful, growing, or the smell of coffee or toast; the scent of sea on the air, being in sunshine or mist, listening to music we love, making something, helping someone. 

Some are completely personal. Our own this week have been finding new snowdrops, climbing a hill with a friend after school, impromptu enactments upon a rock of poems learned for school, making mug cakes! One that must be one of the world's best kept secrets, known only to a few, something that gives an instant glorious thrill: waving at traffic from a pedestrian bridge with children - or rather, when the drivers wave back or beep their horn. Don't knock it til you've tried it! Hugs, hugs holding hands with my children and more hugs; listening, sharing, walk and chat after school, swimming, nothing spectacular. We rarely go out for restaurant meals, we do not have family holidays abroad or go to Center Parcs, we don't have two cars or a lot of expensive gizmos.  The children like their home, they love seeing their friends and the organised activities they do are ones they have chosen, not ones they have been put in to.  

But we do have many local days out in nature or at National Trust or Historic Scotland properties, especially with friends. Speaking of holidays, "But you must take the kids on a trip?" said a puzzled Dutch friend.  "There must be some kind of family holiday?"  Seeing pictures of my kids walking locally with friends the same friend said "I should try to go further for walks...We often decide we should, but never really get around to it somehow.  Usually our household is too much of a dovecote."  But our home, though loved by the kids, feels less to me like a dovecote and sometimes more like a temporary, fairly chaotic basecamp from which reorganise for the next adventure.

Family holidays.  I sighed.  I go away after Christmas alone, to dance, largely because I want to still be a family come January. Besides that I feel pretty lucky we have a car and petrol that I can take the children out for day trips.  What do other people know really about our lives?  When I feel that rising sense to justify things I know it is already hopeless and that it oughtn't to be necessary.  Experience and common sense say how and why you live the way you do and make the choices you do are not topics up for discussion, not, at least, with more deftness than is common.  I thought how well I feel we know our region and the regions around us and to the question "But you must take the kids on a trip?" answered:  "All the time," thinking I had already said more than I cared to.

I realise, flicking through the photos how many of these moments we have, sometimes whole days of them month after month year after year and how lucky we are.   I think, anew how absurd the notion that your investment in your children could be measured in miles travelled, rather than moments and in time.   This (below) was probably Hampshire, but it is irrelevant and never more so than to them.  When you are channelling water and making dams with a new friend your geographical location really doesn't matter. 

I was glad to realise this early after having children.   I made this discovery after packing in so much when they were still babies and toddlers.  I realised the travel I took them on was for me and for Tiggy, the fantastic au pair we had for nine months after my youngest was born: a weekly escape into nature away from the baby clutter; or more accurately, for all of us, but not, in essence just for them.  What they wanted, still largely want, is undivided attention, regardless of where it is.   

I often ask the kids France or Italy? meaning a trip abroad. The little one has picked up beginners Italian from Duolingo.  They are persuaded momentarily by the thought of endless pizza, pasta and ice cream then lose interest.  Home, they say turning back to lego or some arms-around-each-other game.  I know the advantages of travel, including for children but why rush them, force them, why go against my instinct?

I realise as with the holiday abroad? question I am similarly needled when people ask "And what do you do?" "Nothing."  I say more often these days, thinking Nothing I want to talk about, nothing I want to justify.  Good  friends I have noticed understand, even speak up for me when I won't do it myself.  

For the children those moments are sometimes less about pause and reflection, and rather more dive and splash and race or the opportunity to share some burningly important fact that bursts from them in an explosion at the excitement of discovery:  "Did you know Emporer penguins can grow up to 1m tall?" "There is no water on Venus."  "Can trees see you?" "It’s OK to eat sandwiches and pizza with your hands."

Sometimes it's just (?!) ice cream!

Yesterday, reading a recent published set of tango music I could not remember how Fresedo's El Once goes. I was reminded upon search that there are three versions, all of which I have heard in the milongas. Out of idle curiosity I played the introductions to my younger son who was lingering over his tea. He participated willingly and with easy interest apparently considering such an activity entirely normal:

El Once, 1927  

El Once, 1935  

El Once, 1952  

After hearing them a few times without comment from me he swapped the 1927 (tango in its infancy) recording in favour of 1935 (tango coming of age) 
- Why? I said
- It's the most fun, he said  He is right!  But he preferred the 1952 version being "adventurous" and "exciting".  No Fresedo is good for dancing after 1941 for me, but choosing El Once from 1952 is probably just what you would expect, not so much in social dancers but in an exuberant, adventurous seven year year old boy who is rather like a fizz-popping firework or the kind of child who finds the world in general so marvellous he jumps up and down, quite literally for joy every day and in expression of that excitement.

Daniel Klein talks about these moments - which for want of a better name I have called lavender moments - that we savour with the coming of old age:

But wise writers advise over and over the centuries not to leave these realisations until it is too late.  Children, of course, do not - they are too busy living those moments.    Older people often realise how precious they are.  It is those of us inbetween so busy with trade and care, what others expect of us and our own pursuits who perhaps miss them.

A man with whom I danced in Nottingham last year said one of the loveliest compliments I remember from the milongas: You savour every moment, don't you. But if you are given these gifts what else would you do but recognise and enjoy them? 

It is not just the moments I enjoy in themselves.  I like that just the idea of lavender connects me with the story of an old man in Greece, an old man in America I will never meet, my own neighbour, Dutch gardens and my elder son who gave me a lavender bag he had sewn at school. "Only Connect!" said EM Forster.  "Live in fragments no longer."   So many things I find, connect.

Status quo

That's the Belgians said a Dutch friend, when I recounted the tale of the practica in Antwerp.  They don't like the status quo upset. Everything is just so and you are supposed to go along with it.  You didn't so of course that would be a problem for them.

I didn't think the Dutch wouldn't care.   Dutch friends I  stayed with separately said  "Just do as you feel".  Perhaps when they could sense I was feeling torn between doing what, independently I might have chosen and trying to guess what was good for my host; but I think it is also just in their natures.  I cannot say how grateful I was for that freedom.  It meant something like:  I will too.  Then we can both relax.

I asked my parents about their memories of the Belgians they had met.  In the sixties mum had had a sweet, caring and gentlemanly boyfriend from Antwerp.  That aside they recalled an elderly Dutch friend of theirs describing the Belgians she had known as mean-spirited and grasping.  I wondered idly if Antwerp being the centre of the world diamond trade was coincidence.  Diamonds seem so often to be linked to money and sorrow.  Then - surprised - they remembered the only other two of their Belgian acquaintances (not a couple) - both fitted the Dutchwoman's description:  an eye for the main chance, said mum.   Prepared to put money before all else said dad.  It was like that in Tenko too, said mum.  I was reminded of the shameful story of Belgium and the Congo in Adam Hochschild's excellent book:  King Leopold's Ghost.  Things were stacking up against the Belgians.  

The only other guy I could remember said he came from Brussels.  I met him at Tango Train in Amsterdam in December 2016.  He could dance of a fashion but I had chatted to him briefly at a milonga and we didn't hit it off.  The next day I watched him play his own piano tunes during the El Cielo afternoon milonga for his own gratification against the Di Sarli that was playing for everyone else at the time.  Eventually, one of the hosts, Age Akkerman, stopped him.  The next night, the Brussels guy was sitting and chatting with that night's Tango Train DJ:  Toufik Cherifi "El Chupito", listed as also from Brussels.  Incidentally that is a DJ I would not go to hear again.  It can be helpful to see who people associate with.

When I told my parents about the Antwerp practica incident they cringed. Dad thought I had been wholly unreasonable, offensive even.  They both sided with the guy.  They thought it perfectly normal for a man to think a woman at a dance will dance as a woman.  Fair enough, I said, except when she has explicitly said otherwise. 
-What were you wearing? said mum
- A skirt! I said.   It was a new place and I hoped there'd be some guys I wanted to dance with. I do wear skirts and heels when I think there's a chance of that. I dance in the other role and wear slacks when I know there are aren't enough guy dancers I want to dance with who also want to dance with me. 
- Mmm. she said unconvinced.

But my parents don't dance tango.  In the fifties and sixties if a man in Britain asked a woman to dance, I hear over and over from people around at the time, that she tended to accept.  I explained that the milongas are different.  You don't presume things about dancing with people.  So when a guy ignores the conventions of the milonga and doesn't invite by look and the girl explicitly refuses him, for the guy to insist  - as happened at El Sur - beggars belief.   I felt on a sticky wicket because I was claiming convention to  my case while also swapping roles which is not conventional - though it is becoming common in Europe. Still, just because you alter one convention doesn't mean that you should get rid of others.

- They probably think you're gay said mum.  
- So what? I said.
She giggled, knowing I was needled.  Dad harrumphed.

- It isn't appropriate anyway, he said.
- What isn't?
- You going to these milongas in Europe in your situation.
- What 'situation'?
- Married with two children.
We left that there.

In the summer of 2014 I took my children camping in the south of England.  The three of us met a lovely family with two little girls similar in age to my boys then.  They all played together.

  

I forget where the father was from but the mother was Argentinian.  Her grandmother had been born in the early twentieth century around the start of the Golden Era of tango music  (1935-1955).  She had not been allowed to have anything to do with tango.  The phenomenon emerged among immigrants, single men and in insalubrious parts of the city.  She wasn't allowed to go to the milongas nor to have nor play any tango records.  She wasn't even allowed to play tango on the piano.  Everything to do with tango music or dance was inappropriate for that family.  The girl got married and still had nothing to do with tango.  Decades later after her husband had died and she was an old lady she started to play tango on the piano.  Apparently it gave her great pleasure.

The tale reminded me of a Dutch grandmother, a widow, whom we met when our respective families were on holiday in Spain some thirty years ago.  As it was later told to me she had been married to a controlling husband.  In her eighties, after her husband had died and she was allowed to pursue her own interests she took up travel and painting.  She visited us in England.  I can remember her painting outside our house.  The feeling about her was peaceful, clear and focused.  Here is one of her paintings and another above:

I have much more freedom than both of these women had in their lives, but it is also 2017.

I heard a sad friend sing today.  She had a good voice.  I suggested she join a choir.  She didn't feel she could because she already goes out one night a week and she thought her husband wouldn't like it.

When I think about people controlling the lives of others or saying what is appropriate for others to do, or people just feeling controlled and that they can't do things because of what they feel their partners and families might say or do it reminds me of those two elderly women in Argentina and the Netherlands and the freedom they achieved but only when independent in old age.

I  respect those brave souls who encourage, without pressure, their partners and family in choice, freedom, exploration and growth, even when it is unconventional and especially when such unconventionality is unfamiliar with them.  I admire those who seek and hear the possibly contrary opinions of others about hard things.  The more we are connected to the people with whom we engage the more these things imply risk but such openness seems to be healthy.

Local things

Embroidery of a local landmark by my grandmother, Chrissie Allison

In the first few minutes at Schiphol it was hard to think I was in another country. Everything looked the same. It was nothing like arriving in Kano airport in the 70s where the heat, the night air and the different smells hit you like a wave. 

Was there any security there? I asked dad thinking perhaps we had just been met by a military official and walked to a car. 

Oh yes, he said. And it was slow. Then he said: A lot of the mothers - many of them army wives - used to go back to the UK at half term to see the children at boarding school. They would get a bus together from Kaduna. Once, when they got to the airport they were asked if they wanted to buy a boarding card for 200 Naira (about £150 in the 1970s). They had already paid for their tickets. After that the military arranged for a lieutenant colonel to accompany future airport runs. 

They made a straightforward local fix to a local problem.

My first feeling at Schiphol made me wonder: Is this the “New Europe” - we are all one? All our differences fading, blurring, merging? I would be much happier with that clear and definitive scenario than the current EU that seems to drift under the banner “ever closer union”. 

I’d like us to be one - no borders, barriers, fewer and fewer reason for disagreement and fights over power and land. How easy things might be if countries in Europe had streamlined economies, health, education, judicial and transport systems. I don’t worry too much that we are all too different for that and that our different ideas of say justice would make things impossible. I don't believe that is true.

A Dutch friend, Wil, said recently: Europe works: I was in Romania 15 years ago and saw children driving their animals in carts with nothing but potatoes and tomatoes to eat. I was there five years ago and what difference. 

- The fact is it's less about your idealised state and more about who pays for who, said dad. 

- Look at Poland, I said quoting my friend - already a powerhouse - and twenty years ago, who would have thought?

- But the Greeks he said, dangerously, hamming up a devil's advocate to which he didn't expect a reply. Will they ever pay? 

I thought of a Greek I'd danced with. We had been talking about men learning to dance tango socially rather than in class.  Men won't dance as women in my country he said. Not in the milongas anyway. He described how well dressed the men were attending the milonga, how well they danced, how he, a new though for me very good dancer quailed at the thought of going to milongas in his own country. The way he described it the air seemed to hum in a very non-British way with ideas to do with machismo, honour, pride and respect. It reminded me of the sense I'd had from the practimilonguero videos or in the lyrics of tango songs of descriptions of Buenos Aires in the Golden Age.

Given that, I suspected being the poor man of Europe was tough enough for the Greeks and that the sense of shame, never mind the debt must be crippling. Besides, taking the long view, consider what their culture has already given the west. When they are back on their feet, one day they will probably help someone else.  They already are.  Despiting their own straits they are rescuing sea-borne refugees.

The countries in the EU may be economically unbalanced but probably not for long. I like that we are sharing what there is in Europe. I like that in some ways economically things seem to be going that way with the democratisation of the marketplace through initiatives like eBay, Airbnb, Uber and Liftshare.  We in the EU are not so incompatible so sharing is easier.

If the EU had countries like Kuwait, one of the most democratic countries in the Middle East things might still be harder. In a milonga just before Christmas I spoke to a woman from there who referred several times to tribes. Marriage for example was until recently and perhaps still, determined along tribal lines. She was one of the most liberal Kuwaitis I expect to meet yet she seemed to have foot in the modern Western world where women work and drive and go out and a reluctant foot in a world of stricture and control that many women in the West could not tolerate. The concept of tribal alliance in her mind was still very near. We are not like Syria, Lebanon, and these countries she said meaning I think those places that used to be referred to as the Levant.  They were always more progressive. When in the west do we ever think of tribes? The Picts, Etruscans, Scythians? In western Europe that ended at least a thousand years ago. More often we mean two thousand years ago and more. It might not be so easy to "be one" with a culture like that.

Europe together is strong and stands for many good and liberal values but I don't know in fact if that one European state I say I prefer to the current European Union is in fact the way to go and the way the EU probably does want to go. Homogeneity can and does stifle creativity, diversity and can erase the distinctive traditions and ways of life that form local identities. If you doubt this consider how much regional variation in accent has disappeared in the last hundred years or even just since radio and television. 

Dad was sceptical about this. Yet, I said you told me when you came back from Borken (Germany) in 1950 that for those next five years in York you went from speaking German to falling in with the ‘tha’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’, of the other local kids.  

"Tha thinks thasen clever just cos tha fither's a copper."  When as children my brother and I begged dad to 'speak Yorkshire' this was the phrase I remember.  He always smiled.

I did, he said. And I thought it was a throwback even then. I couldn’t quite believe it when I first heard it. I think you're making the same mistake. I'm sure they still say it. But I lived in York for over four years in the early nineties and didn't hear it then.

I think those regional variations in language at least are already, have already died out. I can remember as a child under ten begging to hear old Harry - a man in probably his nineties - who had come in to the village, perhaps from the countryside of north eastern Scotland from the way he spoke. I was taken by my grandmother to his house on the High street where I sat on the rug in front of his hearth with a lot of others in the room. He chatted and joked to those assembled and I was astonished to understand hardly a word though I had been familiar since birth with the local accent and expressions you’d be more likely to hear locally than on the television. Like what?, said my son. Oh, like ‘dinnae fash’. I said. ‘I’m fair scunnert’. ‘Messages’ for ‘shopping’. Things like that.

In Buenos Aires I chatted several times with Alejandro. He was a mix of Italian and Argentine and spoke in a constant mixture of castellano, Italian and English. He had lived all over the world including in several European countries in one of which lived his child. He liked Spain best but he wasn’t impressed by the way he saw Europe going. When they give me ham now in Italy, they give it with plastic gloves. Ma, va! he said with disgust. It’s hard to object to good hygiene but I understood what he meant. 

Overhearing a few words of Dutch reminded me I was certainly in a different place. Esperanto was never really a goer. You can change the transport people use or the laws passed by those they elect but when people have choice they may choose based on efficiency but they often choose idiosyncratically. They choose things that have meaning for them and those things are often rooted in old ways, things related to childhood, thing associated with love, security, family, friends and identity. These are things on a small scale. 

If the countries in Europe became a single state would that diversity, those local languages, traditions remain? Would they strengthen? Or would they go the opposite way? I think about the Basques, the Catalans, the Corsicans, all forced to be part of something they say is not to do with them. Yugoslavia broke up. Kosovo is still disputed. Then there’s Brexit. In these cases people seem to be saying we want to be who we are and are objecting: who we are is not in essence part of something else. There is no point in apportioning blame in these things.  The way forward must be - at least for good neighbourliness - through dialogue and understanding why people feel the way they do.  Neighbours, like ex-spouses, like bordering countries always do have to negotiate over things so it's as well to do so on good terms. Besides it's interesting as well as useful knowing why people hold the beliefs and opinions they do.

Who wants a local identity of Amazon, KFC, Starbucks and empty high streets?  It always struck me that a Swiss libertarian friend seemed to hate the thought that in many ways he is bounded geographically even while he travels a lot.  He believed rather that his identity was to do with his beliefs and his affinity with those who share them.  No surprise then that his home for many years has been London. But he like everyone is shaped by childhood experiences and simply where you live in life.  So a lot of our identity is in fact helplessly to do with the traditional food we may have eaten, the walks we take, the music we hear, the customs we adhere to and the local projects we are involved in.  This is what we call culture.

Local identity is about what is unique, the local organisations, the one-off shops not the chain stores.  One such is the family-run Braithwaites (est 1868) in Dundee - that have become local institutions. 

Braithwaite's in fact has only ever been in two locations. It used to be in the the Pillars (also known as the Town House), another Dundee institution built in the eighteenth century and knocked down in the 1930s to make way for...a square. It is remembered now in a few models, if you know where to look:

Identity is tied to the much-loved places we visit with friends and family and has roots in local history, stories, legends. I think some of us feel a corporate, bureaucratic Eurostate threatens those small, local, things that were made more by people and traditions than by governments and corporations. People don’t believe it should need some Euro stamp of authenticity to protect them. 

No local community means people don’t care about each other, don’t look out for vulnerable neighbours, local charities don’t have volunteers. Replicated this means without these small, essential supports a National Health System can’t really cope with those same people yo-yoing in and out of hospital. 

Could our local, national and international systems be in better harmony? Governmental decisions shouldn’t just be about accommodating local things. Shouldn’t it be all about local things? Shouldn’t the movements of the macro systems be determined by what works locally because that is what most affects people? Shouldn’t strong village community or neighbourhood councils have as much if not more focus and power than town councils? At the very least they should not be ignored and patronised and have things done to their communities without a by-your-leave.

Can you in fact to choose to keep some special, local things and make new things under a new one state system or is it more that the things we consider precious appear and disappear as a result of circumstance? If that is true isn't keeping those things and allowing the creation of new ones more a question of creating and fostering the kind of small, local environment in which such things thrive?