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Issue #116. November 11th - 25th Elsa
Questions and answers
I promise to go wandering (Part 3)
Fading away
Review #1: The Crimea - Tragedy rocks
Review #2: The One Who Flew - Corporate love songs
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Elsa Elsa Caught Dreams. She caught dreams which sparkled in the sun like shimmering butterflies. She caught them between her fingers and held on tight scared that they would fly away. And when she had caught them she’d pin them down into a book so they’d never escape. She’d press them flat and stare at them with wide eyes. But as she stared their beauty seeped away. It ran into the thick yellow blotting paper and the dreams became dull. Filled with disappointment Elsa would start her search all over again. But then she found a dream that she couldn’t catch. Bigger and brighter than any of the others in her book. It broke her heart to watch it fly away. And for a while she stopped chasing dreams. Years passed, and Elsa grew old, and she grew tired. She slumped over on her chair and fell asleep. As she slept she dreamt and as she dreamt she remembered. She remembered the elusive dream that had broken her heart. She remembered how it shimmered and shone. Her heart soared. Elsa caught dreams. She caught dreams which sparkled in the sun like shimmering butterflies. She caught then in her head and heart and watched them flutter. Then she let them fly away.
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Questions and Answers
one Once upon a time I used to have a(nother) blog. In fact it was a collective (Friends of the Heroes) blog but I was the last one to stop posting on it, so for the last fleeting month or so it was almost mine. That was nearly two years ago –December 2003– when I was still very new to Athens. Back then I used to ride on buses a lot, and I was very excited about indiepop. So one evening I found myself on one of those listening a cd-r we had recently got in the post in my discman. I remember leaning against the window glass, looking out at the city lights and feeling shivers down my spine because I was listening to the most beautiful love song. It was a popkid sort of love song, simple and straightforward."But you make my grey sky so wonderfully blue And then suddenly something found itself in my head, from where refused to badge for a long time – which is why I wrote it down: in a vain effort to get rid of it by sharing it with the world. For a while I thought of writing it onto a piece of paper which I would turn into a boat and set free on a river –really– but I couldn't think of any rivers nearby so in the end I just posted it on that blog. No one posted after that and so this little stray paragraph became its swan song. "One day I will refer to this time as the years before I met you - the years I worried about a hundred useless things, all of them meaning the same thing. I worry I'm not worth you." It hang there for a long time like an unanswered question. two Once upon a time I had a penpal too. He was the best penpal you can ever imagine. His emails brought tears to my eyes, made my heart ache and the rest of me bounce around the room. As if this wasn't enough he got me through one of the darkest months in my life by writing to me a lot and generally keeping me in mind. And as if this wasn't enough either, he was the one to talk to me about 'making a mark on the world'; and how not knowing how to do it make it can leave you feeling hopeless and lost – desperate even. For a while –the end of September, the beginning of October last year (2004)– we made lists of things we could become and sent them back and forth with comments and questions attached, and I felt very happy and very sad at the same time. Happy because someone –a half-stranger– was so close to me, closer than anyone had got before, in a way; and sad because despite that this question too stayed unanswered, haunting me –as he very eloquently put it back then– "on some days that start in tired, confused mornings-with-no-purpose and end in the despair of still 'going nowhere'".three and four Fast forward a couple of months later –to the night of the 9th of December- and you'll find me in a London underground station with that same discman in my coat pocket listening to yet another song. "And then suddenly I fell for her It started with a rain of guitars that matched my heartbeat and the noise in the station; because the boy who had sent me that mix-cd meant every word in every song, and a train was approaching. In fact the song disappeared in the rattle of the train for a while and when it came back it said "She means the world to me And so I was introduced to the best popsong ever written in Germany, and (the next day, at a little past 2 pm, in London Waterloo station) to the boy who was meant to answer the first question and give me the clues to answer the second one, too. I'd like to tell you that answering these questions made my life easier but it would be a lie. The past few months of my life –our lives, in fact– have been some of the hardest. I think it is temporary –the storm before the calm– and necessary but all this irrelevant, because what matters is that finding those answers has made my life better. Or maybe perhaps not even that. Perhaps all I'm trying to say is that there are answers, and that you can find them. Dimitra Daisy
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I Promise to go Wandering (Part 3)
The Black Country and the West Midlands ‘But let me say before it has to go, For all this talk of wandering now, there was a time when, for five years, I hadn’t left the Black Country. There’s a school of thought that says that I never will for all the miles travelled and different worlds glimpsed, as I collected counties for this year’s quest. Each urban centre seen will, by default, be first compared to the towns and cities of my home; I struggled to make myself understood, whilst trying to find a B&B in a far Western Welsh village, as the Black Country tones shone through, even stripped with effort of all dialect; and each distance calculated is that travelled between there and Wolverhampton. Let me give you an example. How long would it take someone to drive from Glastonbury to Ellesmere Port? Well, it would take between 1 and a half to 3 hours from Glastonbury to Wolverhampton, depending on the traffic in Bristol; then an hour and a quarter to Ellesmere Port, presuming the roadworks in Stoke are cleared. So anywhere between 2-4 hours is my guess. The Black Country factors everytime. In visiting every county in England and Wales this year, it is perhaps most surprising that I had to travel to the West Midlands. For most of the year, I wake up in it, eat and travel to work in it; I live my life here, in a place once so blackened by coal and industry, with the skies burned by the omnipresent fires, which now has more trees than Cheltenham. However, I started this quest amongst the Yellowbellies of Lincolnshire, so even this county took more effort than simply waking up in bed to tick off in my book. For the past couple of years, I’ve had a succession of American and Dutch visitors visiting me here. Not over there *waves hand vaguely towards the south* in Brummagen (Birmingham to the foreigners), which is where most people would think of, if they had to think of the West Midlands at all; but here, in the Black Country. I’ve had people cringe when I tell them. ‘They’re coming on holiday to Wolverhampton?! Have you warned them?’ And I smirk back. But mine is a different kind of humour about it. I suspect that I could introduce the most hardened, snobbish heart to the magic of my home city, they just have to be prepared to look with me. I’ve daydreamed sometimes about getting one of those open top buses and conducting tours around Wolverhampton and the Black Country. I’ve been on them in Dublin and I could match that. I’ve been on them in Leicester and I could better that. That’s my humble opinion anyway. Unfortunately, I’m thwarted in my dreaming by the fact that you’d never get a bus up the pedestrianized routes and we’d be stuck in traffic on the ring road too long. (My second money making scheme, should it ever come to that, would be to hold lessons in navigating the Wolverhampton ring road. A recent conversation had a Herefordshire woman asking if there was any rhyme or reason to it. I responded that you have to be Wulfrunian born and bred for at least three generations to get it. The Essex friend overhearing, interuptted, ‘I reckon it’s at least six generations. It’s knowledge half-genetically passed down and half given to them in secret initiations, hidden in a cask underneath the south goal at the Molineux. Don’t let her kid you!’) But back to the tourist bus. What would I tell them? I’d tell them that this area was Celtic until the 7th century and was originally part of Powys, though an outpost of it ruled by Pengwern. Finally the Hwicce – Saxons – over-ran it, but they held fealty to the Mercians, those mighty dynasty eventually swallowed up the whole region. Nontheless, no-one seemed too bothered about such a dangerous place as the Black Country (as we’ll call it for ease), being not easily farmed and then quickly right on the border of the Danish terrorities. Here is where the border eventually formed, on August 6th 910, as a great battle took place between the Saxons and Danes in Tettenhall (now the posh bit of Wolverhampton) and the Saxons finally managed to win. The Saxons remain here still, in a number of ways – our dialect, which is the closest to Old English in the world (a schoolteacher once told us to read Chaucer like it was a local dialect poem in the ‘Black Country Bugle’ and it worked); and placenames pertaining to their religion, Wednesbury – Woden’s Bury and Wednesfield – Woden’s Field, for start. But the Saxon cross in the grounds of St Peter’s Church, right at the peak of the city centre, is Wulfruna’s. She is the lady, whose statue, with the impossibly high breasts, stares out over Civic Square, who founded a monastery there, left a well up Dunstall Road and most of all, gave us the name by which we still call our city – Wulfrun’s High Town, Wolverhampton. But who was she? We don’t know. She was probably a widow, a contemporary of Godiva (who owned and lived in Penn, also an area of Wolverhampton now), who was given most of the area in around 994. Seeing as it wasn’t good for farming and was right up against the Danish border, presumably someone didn’t like her claiming the right of her sex to hold land and property, as opposed, say, to entering a nunnery or getting married again. That was just the start. I’d take my rapt busload of tourists around to the place where Charles II hid up a tree to escape the Roundheads; or where he stayed, up Victoria Street, in Wolverhampton city centre. I could show you where both the great fires ended; or where the streets rioted trying to root out the Papists in their church. I’d show you the church for that matter, made up to look like a stately home, so no-one would notice. The bloke who signed the Act of Independence for the state of Georgia got married in St Peter’s; while at the other end of Dudley Street, the grandfather of James Wilkes Booth was born and grew up, before also going to America and creating the line that was to shoot Abraham Lincoln dead within a couple of generations. I’d show you where Queen Victoria came, on her first public outing after the long years of mourning Albert’s death; or where the anchor of the Titanic was forged. Though I’d have to nip up the road to Dudley for that last one. I could show and tell you a lot. But first you have to come on holiday to the Black Country. Torfaen While we’re on a journey through my homeland, let’s just remember that half of Wolverhampton are descended from at least one Welsh ancestor. Wolverhampton is so full of Welsh, in fact, that there’s a Welsh speaking church in Chapel Ash; and, at the last count, you can learn to speak the language in three different venues within the city centre, though unfortunately during working hours, hence I’m not signed up to any of them. I’m no exception to this general Celtic spread of Wulfrunians, so a car journey down to the Torfaen town of Blaenavon, during a frozen winter morning, was quite literally retracing the steps of my great-grandmother, Ellen Hurle. She arrived in Wolverhampton from Blaenavon to go into service; I did the return trip to go down the pit. The Big Pit to be precise. I had first heard about this in a University lecture discussing history and tourism about a decade ago, but had never been. Mind you, Blaenavon is a minefield of distraction for me. It’s seeking to rival Hay-on-Wye for secondhand bookshops for a start, so there’s the gauntlet of them to run; then there’s the fact that every other time I’ve been down there, it’s to wander around the graveyard with a camera and a notebook, looking for ancestors. I’m glad that, on this occasion at least, I disdained both of these pursuits to visit the Big Pit. After the Miners’ Strike, which hit my own Black Country so hard too, the pits of the valleys started closing one by one. At Blaenavon though, some of the miners got themselves a grant, along with their redundancy pay, and bought the mine back. Not to work it in the usual way, but to create a tourist attraction of it. Folk like me and Kate get to put on our hard-hats and Davy lamps, then descend in the same shaft-lift that our guides had once used to enter the shafts for coal, accompanied by a miner-turned-tourist-guide with a ready banter in jokes and a vast knowledge of the pits and their history. Our party was mostly made up of very little people. No, not a pixie convention, but the 7th birthday of a little lad from the Valleys, arrived with a dozen friends and a tiny brother… oh and Mum. Our guide asked us and the other couple of adults if we minded his pitching his tour at their level and, of course, we didn’t. In fact, it made it better. It was like being on a school trip! One of the funniest moments probably doesn’t translate. It was when all of the lights had been switched off for a moment, so that we could experience what it was like to be in the pitch dark of the mine, then our Davy Lamps were all switched on, each of the adults helping the gaggle of children. The tour guide asked another question of them, which none of them knew. ‘Who should we ask?’ He lilted in that beautiful Valleys accent. ‘Her?’ Indicating Kate. I was watching her as she was suddenly illuminated in a spotlight. I turned to see what was causing it. It was the bright bulbs of a dozen waist-high Davy Lamps turned to look at her, nodding up and down as the children agreed with his choice. I guess you had to be there. You should be there. The Big Pit is well worth a visit, from the mine itself to the locker-rooms and showers, with audio sound over hidden speakers allowing you to close your eyes and think that you were there then. Before Thatcher. There’s an exhibition of miners from antiquity to the modern day, the clothes they wore and the equipment they used. The medical rooms, with scary looking equipment, and then the café, with stunning views over the Blorenge and Coity. Before you meander down into the town itself and lose yourself in its bookshops. But if you wander through the graveyard and spot a stone with the surname ‘Hurle’ on it, please e-mail me the details, as it’s definitely one of mine.
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Fading Away Andrea sat watching her face disvole into the raindrops running across the window. Her eyes seemed paler than ever, her skin almost transparent. She felt as though she was disapearing into nothingness. "Soon I won't even exist" she thought. Andrea felt reality slip away from with every passing day. Every movement she made seemed to contain the memory of a thousand other movements and every place she visited seemed contain the shadow of a thousand other footsteps. When she reached to turn the handle on the door she could almost see the faint outline of her hand from the day before. And from the day before, and the day before... She felt like a bad photocopy of herself from two years ago - crackled and blurred around the edges. She bit on her penicil and tried to concentrate on the sudoko puzzle in front of her. The numbers danced on the page. Clean, bright, meaningless numbers. She stared hard at the page then began filling in the page with random numbers. It didn't make any sense. She shut her eyes. Trying to decide whether it would be better to let sleep steal her away for the 30 minutes that remained of the journey or fight the temptation and arrrive a little less dazed. It wouldn't make a great deal of difference. She was going to be tired today whatever happened. Her head was already swimming, her body was aching and limbs heavy. She felt constantly felt as though she was walking against the wind, or swimming through a cold soup. The train approached Wolverhampton station and her stomach turned over. One more stop and then she would be in Birmingham and the day would begin for real - the office gossip, the petty niggles, and the stress. Andrea had been making the one hour journey for over two years. Each morning she caught the same train into work, and usually the same train home again. On a good day she would get a seat by the window facing forwards, the train would leave and arrive on time and would be relatively warm. Even on good days each her journey was clouded with tiredness, and with frustration and the sense that her life was slipping away somewhere approaching Wolverhampton. She envied the commuters who lived 20 minutes further along the line.She envied people travelling for fun even more. They stood on the platform at 7.00am bright eyed and excited whilst she stood there shivering, with permenent bags surrounding her eyes. The train made an ungracious stop and she opened her eyes with a start. It took her a few minutes to focus properly. It took her a few minutes to understand what she was seeing. The shadow of her fragile colourless face superimposed upon an old women stood on the platform. The women had dark brown eyes full of life and her face although crumpled and worn was rich in smile lines. Light seemed to hit her with a bounce and ricochet around the platform. Andrea had never seen anything more real in her life. She felt ashamed as she let her eyes focus on her own reflection once more. 50 years younger and with less life than a 40 watt lightbulb. And suddenly she realised she didn't have to be this way. And she got up left the train.
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