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September 20, 2003
The red hand of Ulster and the Yeti are on our every corner. Have you noticed. I find it comforting, always looking for comfort; our new walk/don't walk signs are new and bold. I am proud to be a pedestrian; when frisky a cyclist. Dependent on these colored symbols. The boxes which contain the colours which make us stop, encourage us to walk, have grown quieter, they used to tick over, calibrate our blocks, our stops, our goes. However, I like the quiet pixilated red hand and the white yeti, am happy with their presence at our junctions.
September 18, 2003
My mother phones to tell me she is depressed and with flu. Reading Balzac. To cheer herself up? After a stint of manic gardening she is paralysed in a slump of misery. How familiar the pattern.
To the dry cleaners early. (And this is not tax a deductible luxury. How to be an old hostess and look even moderately fresh?) A man is milling around pursued by the tailor in a jacket that is pinned up both sides, a lizard in cheap wool. A pile of his clothes lies at the tailor’s station, jackets and pants to be shrunk to his newly diminished proportions. Not a successful diet. He picks up another batch of altered and cleaned clothes, exits, hails a taxi. He is having his whole wardrobe altered. I recognise sickness in his sparse hair, fragile skin, large feet that speak of a frame that was once more robust. I feel so grateful, briefly, that once again I have to wedge my ass into my pants, that the morning's task is merely part of the day and not an outing that will weld me to my sofa until the following task that should be completed.
July 14, 2003
My father hacks at the hedges of his garden with a gusto not normally associated with a man of his age. There is no topiary and little finesse involved, it is a task he performs biannually and one that he feels steals time from his work of painting pictures of boats. The garden in question is one that lacks the prettiness of herbacious borders or the utility of a vegetable garden, but it is a green bowl that grows large about my parents and thanks to the foresight of some green thumbed ancient sports many colourful explosions, mainly of the shrub variety. There are two palm trees, a handful of somewhat unproductive cherry trees, two beautiful lilac bushes, a japonica, and my mother’s roses which smell and look splendid, perhaps due to the fact that she annually seeks out fertiliser from the dwindling farmer population or horse owners in the area. I have come to realise that the joy my parents derive from this garden is worth the physical work it requires of them. My mother injured a hand last year with the hedges; this year my father toppled from a ladder onto the road that passes their house and was carted away in an ambulance. He split open his head and injured his shoulder. After a night in hospital and extensive x-rays they released him to my mother, his house and his garden.
The odd romance of accidents not fatal or with consequences long endured.
I phone to hear of his progress and they are teenagers freshly met. Concussed and giggling. I remind him that ladders have evolved quite a lot in 60 years. He inherited this ladder from his father. My father has forgotten, until I remind him, that this very ladder was the one that his father met the beginning of his demise on. He retired from the world of car maintenance, climbed ladders to escape his wife, fell off, and subsequently lost his mind and was removed to the loony bin. Death followed soon afterwards.
They are having a summer in Ireland this year, not a season to be presumed upon in those latitudes. When my mother phoned on Sunday at 5.30 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time my father was drinking tea in the garden and doing well.
July 4th, 2003
Can you capitalize on being an idiot? This interests me.
July 2, 2003
I awoke in an extraordinarily good mood. The fatigue and wicked humour that are standard for my morning only lasted a mere half hour. I went to work for a short day and was quite productive in spite of the fact that I felt so physically well that I found it difficult to sit still in my seat. I left at 4.30 and took a nap and awoke looking forward to dinner with a friend. The recent successful campaign for an extra night off, oblivious of the frowns from the marathon restaurant workers, has left me delerious and aware of myself in a way I had forgotten. One member of staff is moving to Australia in an attempt to free himself of all this American work stuff. I find it amusing that Australia is where I was heading when I got lodged here due to lack of air fare seventeen years ago. An enthusiastic Irish chef dwelling in Australia visited us at the restaurant last week and regailed us with how little they had to work. But then he looked wistful and said in his sweet Belfast accent (accents get so lost the longer you are away, now Belfast rage sounds so mellifluous), "ahh, but there's not the energy, the buzz, you know." When involved in another restaurant located diagonally opposite to the one I currently work in, a friend commented as I complained (hah!) about how busy it was, "Well, what is more enjoyable, success or failure?" I took a respectable length of time to consider his question. He is a journalist. I answered that I suppose success is better, knowing that this was the correct answer for him. But you know, I'm not entirely sure. The contours of failure are so familiar to me, the downward curve of disappointment and one's ability to assimilate it into one's every cell and to persevere with that dying phrase are what I'm good at. I feel so much more at home with the business that daily contemplates the rituals of the dole queue. I can hear the clamour of the new agers, but I'm not impressed by their hysteria and I no longer feel I even have to attempt their daft optimism. Failure can be very interesting if conducted on one's own terms.