Everybody's lyin' and skivin' and dyin'

Around Shepherd Market, down Curzon Street and several other places on my way home, some attractive new varieties of outdoor heater. Rather than the orange glow reminiscent of an early January morning in a station waiting room, a gas flame leaping yellow. The first I thought was an installation with that silk-like material that represents fire, but encountered closer it was real and beautiful and warm.

There is a part of England for which there is no positional reference point, being neither North, nor Midlands, nor East. A flat land awaiting rightful return to its proper status of seabed. A few days ago it was the epicentre of a small earth tremor: locally numerous acts of habitual incest were disrupted, and habitations damaged to the cost of literally dozens of pounds.

I'm due to fly from Heathrow's T5 just a week after its opening. Of course it will all fall apart in a farce of faulty software and things getting stuck or breaking off, so that by the time I arrive the accumulated passengers will form a vast refugee camp surrounding the terminal building, huddled around burning stacks of mis-sorted luggage in the freezing Spring rain. The first cases of typhoid and cholera should just be breaking out.

.

'On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn't have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys - all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don't find them in Penrith.'
From Alan Bennett's 2007 diary, published in the London Review of Books, 3 January 2008.

'Alan Bennett may be right about the dearth of rent boys in Penrith, but he's wrong about libraries: there's a good one right by the church.'
Reader's letter printed in the London Review of Books, 24 January 2008

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), dandy and editor of 'Elle' magazine, suffers a stroke and is almost entirely paralysed as a result, his doctor using the English term: 'locked-in syndrome' to describe the condition. We first, and often thereafter, see the world from the patient's perspective, blurred and confusing. One of his eyelids is sewn shut and we see that too. It's a long time before we properly see his twisted face.

Jean-Do's only available means of expression is by blinking his left eye. But we also hear his internal monologue, with a dry wit that's a relief to the viewer. Occasionally his over-avuncular doctor appears to diagnose his condition, but for the most part he is in the hands of women: Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) who teaches him to communicate, Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) his physiotherapist, Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) his former partner and mother of his children, and Claude (Anne Consigny) to whom he dictates his account of the experience.

Using a list of letters and eye blinks, Henriette teaches Jean-Do to 'speak', it isn't an easy task and to begin with he isn't an easy pupil. Even when both parties are adept, it's a slow process, more tortuous than composing a text message if that's possible.

Throughout there's a real sense of his incapacity: the television in his room left on overnight emitting the monotone high-pitched tone that accompanies the test card and prevents sleep, the fly on his nose that causes him to move his head for the first time. In his helplessness, Jean-Do is at the mercy of women, and occasionally there's a hint of his fear - yet they are generally very good to him, including Céline, who may have some cause to be vengeful. The worst he experiences at their hands is a visit to church conducted by the devout Marie - Jean-Do recalls a visit to Lourdes with a girlfriend who installed a performance-thwarting illuminated Madonna in their hotel room.

As well as his paralysis there is the awkwardness others feel, but they quickly adjust: his children recognise him as their father, his friend Laurent (Isaach De Bankolé) reads to him from The Count of Monte Cristo. People find ways to connect.

The scenes of conversation with characters who are elsewhere, via telephone and an interpreter, are the most painful. Jean-Do found it difficult enough to communicate with his elderly father (Max von Sydow) before, but now it's near impossible, frustrating them both. The scene in which Céline has to translate for a call from Jean-Do's mistress, is agonising.

It's a film about communication, and about what people can do to people and what people can do for people.

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (Le Scaphandre et le papillon) Dir: Julien Schnabel (2007)
http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=119032.html


Marie and Henriette


Claude


Céline


Jean-Dominique Bauby (in flashback)

Bratislava

Crossing the border, the countryside didn't change. Terrifying bleak forest, mistletoe clumps in the trees like nests of some big malignant bird, grey vegetation, frozen ditches. The landscape was the same, but the use of it altered: shacks and knackered livestock compounds. I'm not much for the sticks, it's in the username, but this was something worse. It was all broken down, and horribly thriving. On the outskirts of the city there was a Tesco.

Walking down the approach from the Hlavná station reminded me of arriving in a northern town on a Saturday lunchtime in the dead hour before the football special and the police escort. Remains of benches with the wooden slats missing, cow shed shelters, wheezing buses almost as old as me. Like Barnsley not long after the miners' strike.

Obchodná was like a street my subconscious had invented in a dream, nothing especially surreal about it, but the mix was all off. I can't explain how. Walking down it I got slight tingles, the buzzy-dizzy feeling that deja vu causes, but I'd never been there before.

.

What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"
"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best?" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, "What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying 'What about a little something?' and Me saying,' Well, I shouldn't mind a little something, should you, Piglet,' and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing."
"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say 'Oh, nothing,' and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh.
"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh again.
"It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh.

[...]

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was Still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm--when-- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."

A.A. Milne, 'The House at Pooh Corner' (1928)