Identity Fraud

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.                                                          

On Sunday Kaddy and I shop for a new frock for the launch of her first collection of poems, Milk Fever.  We reject all the safe choices and Kaddy goes for a lovely crepe knee-length dress in teal – apparently this is the name for the subtle greeny-blue of the cloth.  We choose it because it blends nicely with the colours of the book cover.  Kaddy likes it also because it’s different, and because it suggests the possibility of a new self: ‘I’ve never worn anything like this before,’ she says.  ‘Do you think I should wear my hair up?’

This morning I’m at the hairdresser’s.  ‘How are you?’ Steph asks.  I’m – what?  Looking forward to seeing the chemically restored real me emerging in the mirror.  At my back (I watch her reflection) another customer is trying to explain to her stylist the meaning of ‘solipsistic’.  That’s Cambridge for you – no nonsense about holidays and Christmas shopping in the gossip here.  But I’m feeling out of place.  Since returning from Argentina, I can’t find the Cambridge I loved as a dreamy twenty-something, or the person I was – or thought I was – forty years ago, or even forty days ago when the last trip began.

In fact, nothing is as it seemed.  Those we made our idols prove to have feet of something nastier than clay and the list of names of fallen heroes continues to grow.  The weird thing is, no one is surprised.  It turns out everyone knew all along.  Everybody I speak to has a Jimmy Saville story.  Today, walking back from the shops in a blustery dusk and watching the leafless giants swaying along the edge of Jesus Green, I remember a children’s television programme which taught you how to shade the trunks of trees, and think of all those fresh-faced presenters in that innocent black-and-white world.  How many more are we going to have to re-evaluate, to look at with eyes of experience and say, Well of course, I always knew something wasn’t right.

I suppose we all pretend, or try to fashion an identity that sits right with the setting, time or place.  My first memory of the Portobello Road dates from my student days, when a girl I hardly knew glanced at my oversized black sweater and Indian scarf and said ‘You look like you belong here’.  It wasn’t intended as a compliment, but I remember feeling perversely pleased.   Buenos Aires is famous for its addiction to analysis, which I guess might be about discovering the real you, and also for its reliance on cosmetic surgery.  One regular face on the tango scene there (although no more Argentinian than the rest of us) is notable for its immobility, the skin stretched to a fixed, open-mouthed grin.  It’s easy enough to distance ourselves from such obvious nips and tucks.  Still, those of us in thrall to the tango addiction squeeze our feet into exotic creations with five-inch heels, women who wouldn’t be seen dead in stilettos in the cold light of a Cambridge or Cumbrian afternoon. 

I believed in Jimmy Saville.  For longer than I should, I believed in fairies, and then god, and then the communist party.  Contrary always, or so my mother would say, I continue to defend the much accused, suggest that their good works, whatever shape they took, can still count as good, rather than be dismissed as fraudulent; or even, which finds still less favour, that those capable of a dogged attachment to evil are also capable of good.   As I hold forth, with examples, I watch the face of a friend crumple when my list of perpetrators includes one of her all-time greats.  ‘I had no idea,’ she says.  ‘I think I’ll choose not to believe it.’

At the other end of my contrary continuum, I cling to a silly belief that those closest to me are as I wish them to be: true to their word, unswervingly loyal, immutable in their regard for me.  I don’t know where that word – immutable – came from.  It’s not in my usual lexicon, but it has me scouring the bookshelves for an old paperback copy of Shelley’s poems.  I know it’s there somewhere because I remember reading his ‘Mutability’ at the funeral of a dear friend whom I loved, in my intense and erratic and ultimately faithless way, all my life.  We are ‘as clouds’, Shelley says, or ‘like forgotten lyres’: the only enduring quality we have is that we can’t stay constant.   I had forgotten that the book was a gift from this same friend.  I find his unmistakeable handwriting on the flyleaf: For being there, it says. 

I was sort of there, although I’m still disappointed by the mistakes I made, the small self-deceptions that enabled me to – well, live with myself.  In pretty much the same way, perhaps, as any abuser of the truth will construct a narrative that sanitises motivation, and helps sleep to come at night.  Being an unreliable narrator in my interior world, I’m drawn to the convention in fiction.  I’ve just devoured MJ Hyland’s wonderful Carry me down and This is how and marvelled at the way her central characters begin to learn to tell the truth about themselves, to themselves.  I’m hoping I’m haven’t left it too late.

I search YouTube for a glimpse of The Who performing ‘Who are you?’  Written by Pete Townshend (another fallen idol) and based partly on his alcoholism, the song has long been a favourite.  The video features an impossibly young Roger Daltrey and is intriguing for the evident embarrassment of the band around the business of backing vocals.  I’m particularly struck by Keith Moon who in my mind earns every adjective given to him – crazy, exuberant, destructive, creative, furious, posturing – but who here shows an endearing sense of mischief, infectious laughter.  The album, also ‘Who are you?’, was released in September 1978, three weeks before Moon’s death.

Did you have a fantastic time? Is it nice to be back? Kaddy asks.  Well, I’m not really back, I say, not really here.  Or perhaps I mean not really me.

a question of colour

Our last few days in San Telmo and the city explodes into colour.  On Avenida 9 de Julio rhe jacarandas are suddenly in flower, so the lanes of traffic speed or stall under a cerulean cloud.  The ceibo, the national tree of Argentina, has blossom which flames coral pink in the fierce spring sun.  It's so hot that we risk flip-flops, negotiating the slithery cobbles and cracked tiles and tram rails of Estados Unidos, where the young trees that line the pavements are covered in buttercup-yellow buds.  In the botanical gardens, we spot a humming-bird just feet away, a fizzing pebble of shimmering viridian suspended in mid-air and then instantly gone.  From the bus window we see a girl in shorts and huge electric-turquoise platform sandals.  I miss all those different faces, Joan says after she and Dennis move to a new area.  In Palermo, everyone is so white.

Fearing we are running out of time, we sign up for a tour with Buenos Aires Street Art.  Fast-walking, fast-talking Matt from Oxford takes us on a train to the outlying barrios of Villa Urquiza and Saavedra Park, where we spend three hours battling heat and mosquitoes (Matt rummages in his back-pack and produces a giant bottle of 'Off!' which we pass round like addicts) and marvelling at the work. The paintings are typically technicolour, intricate, elaborate, massive.  Often collaboratively done, they involve artists from various countries, most notably the Bologna artist Blu whose enormous world-within-a-baby (is it a baby?) covers the side of a building and features in his amazing animation (see his website blublu.org).  Closer to home, we watch artists at work on a new intervention round the corner on Tacuari.

The battered silver trains of the Subte have been transformed by the spray cans and rollers of the graffiti artists - some 400 out of some 550 units are painted, Matt tells us.  Although steamy, dirty and sometimes impossibly crowded, the underground system seems to work efficiently, although our friend Juan thinks differently.  At least it's cheap, I say: 2.50 pesos a journey seems like a bargain. Not for us, Juan says.  I have to rethink: five pesos a day, so 30 per week for someone working six days out of seven; about £4.  We push our way through the milling crowds on Callao.  In front of the brash storefronts, a clutch of children with a man I presume to be their dad are curled like kittens in the midday sun.  The city's rubbish collectors are on strike, so piles of stinking garbage spill into the streets.  The authorities spray the heaps with insecticide and declare a yellow alert on account of the heatwave.  If £4 a week is expensive for a successful businessman, what of the jugglers and the thieves?  Bob Dylan sings in my head: there must be some way out of here.

But of course we don't want to leave.  We buy our bottles of Malbec, dark as liquid garnet or slow-flowing blood.  We exchange contact details with new friends.  We have a final breakfast in Las Mazorcas on Peru.  How are you? I ask the lovely proprietor.  Oh fine, she says, just calorada, like everyone else in this heat.  We pay twenty pesos each for an ice cream from a different Dylan, also on Peru and surely the best ice cream in the world.  The raspberry flavour is a livid pink.  The taste, though? It transports me straight back to my great granda's garden, Francesca says.  On the way back to the apartment to collect our cases, I take a last photo of our gomero tree, and one of the empty house next door, painted by the Columbian artist Malegria to protest against homelessness.  Our driver Daniel berates us for our masses of luggage.  What's wrong with travelling light? he says.  Of course we won't all fit into his car.  When we accept his suggestion - that he take me and all the suitcases, and that the others pick up a taxi and meet us at the airport - his fury abates and he apologises for the lack of air conditioning.  As long as you have windows, I say.  Of course, he says, all the windows.  We are onto the motorway before I discover that the seat belt doesn't fasten; the windscreen is spectacularly cracked across its width.  We discuss countries of origin, surnames, tango, the heat.  When we rattle into the heavy goods lane at the first toll point and he abandons the car to help push another vehicle which has crashed into the barrier, I think of other things.  We zoom off again, features of the landscape (There's where they do the selections for the Argentine football team, Daniel says, rolling a cigarette) flashing past like rags and tatters of memory - the light blue of the national flag, the grey cat on Francesca's painted house sign (whatever happened to marmalade?), the shiny silver suit of the demo dancer the previous night at Porteño y Bailarin, that gorgeous first and last dance with Hugo.  It's all over now, Baby Blue, Dylan sings.


Not really, I suppose.  By some miracle we survive the next thirty minutes or so and the rest of the journey passes without incident.  On the way I read Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places, about as far from life in Buenos Aires as you can get.  Soon we are back in Carlisle.  It's cold and very wet, and dark by half past four.  Everything works; everything seems pale by comparison.  Friends still in Buenos Aires email with news of a massive power cut which we have missed by a whisker and of the latest anti-government manifestacion in the capital the night before.  I look at the photos of the demo, think about the insecurities of life there, and the passion for change that seems to motivate many of the city's inhabitants.  Is this something we have lost in this country, or something
we have never had?  I remember the hot pink of Club Gricel's neon sign, the blaze of bougainvillea outside a pavement cafe, the kids playing football and taking drugs on the corner by the kiosk, where
the fat lady on the wall reminds us never to settle for simply existing.

say this city

Say this city has ten million souls
Some live in mansions, some live in holes...

W.H Auden: Refugee Blues

Auden's poem, written 70 years ago, explores the hostility felt by refugees from Nazi Germany in the country of 'welcome'.  Many inhabitants of Buenos Aires hail from elsewhere: new arrivals from Bolivia and Peru perch on the fringes of one of the bulging villas, shanty towns; almost everyone you meet has an English cousin or uncle or great-great something.  Yesterday we visited Maggie, a friend from Cumbria now on her fifth six-month stay, in her flat on Avenida Nueve de Julio.  Escaping the English winter, her summers here often seem beset by problems.  Still, she keeps coming back.  She takes us up to the 14th floor of her apartment block to look at the view.  Cars on the complex intersection above San Juan zip along like crazy toys below us.  The jumble of ugly apartment blocks and crumbling splendour spreads before us.  On a clear day, Maggie says, you can see the river, boats appearing to glide over the rooftops, occasionally a big ship from somewhere far away.  She seems to feel at home here, as we do.

The issue of Las Malvinas rumbles on, the protests in the Plaza de Majo a permanent fixture apparently.  Even so, we rarely encounter any hostility towards the 'enemy', and any mention of Inglaterra is likely to elicit an enthusiastic Que linda! The exclamation serves for almost any situation: a fine day, a milonga, a piece of music, that last dance.  Francesca is building a repertoire of lines to charm her partners between dances, a crowded dance floor como una lata de sardinas and the latest, an economical Mmm mmm with the stress on the second mmm.  In Rino's class, Fernando wraps me in his huge embrace, rubs my arms and shoulders,  and punctuates every small success with Muy bien, niña. Muy bien!  Struggling for dances in the milonga, I see Rino striding the length of the floor towards me.  Francesca, I think, or maybe Nancy.  But no, he's coming for me.  We dance to a lovely Donato set, including m favourite Sinsabor, the troubles of love.  At the finish Rino says something I don't quite catch then translates laboriously: I - love - you.  I love you too! I say.  It's true.

You wouldn't expect to find love on the Subte, I suppose, though we meet some interesting people. Last Sunday a young man with an interesting haircut and an armful of tattoos stops us on the pavement and asks for directions.  We clutch our bags warily in front of us, all those warnings echoing in our minds.  Alejandro turns out to be a web designer-cum-surfer who travels the Americas in search of available work and the best waves.  Come to Cornwall, Francesca suggests.  It would be cold, he says.  Although he lived here for six months a while back, he has forgotten all he knew about the underground system so he tags along with us.  Suddenly we are experts.  He invites us to visit him at his home in Bogotá.  His lifestyle makes it hard for him to have a girlfriend.  Pero viajo con dios, he says: I travel with god. 

Travellers on the Subte can buy just about anything: tissues, pens and pencils, a screwdriver.  The other day I encountered a man selling head torches.  One morning a young girl - twelve, thirteen maybe - gets into our carriage.  She has one arm round a baby.  The baby, stiffly upright, gazes at the passengers.  The girl moves down the aisle, stopping in front of each traveller and holding out her right hand as if for a handshake.  If you offer your own hand, you receive that street greeting of a palm-to-palm slap followed by a gentle knuckle punch. Most do.  Then she leaves a matchbox-sized pink card on your knee.  Amor is printed in a heart on one side; on the other, a few lines where you can write a message.  I return the card with a few coins.  Her smile is faint.  The baby looks away.  I wonder where she lives.

The city has a variety of undersides.  One afternoon we play at tourists and follow the guided tour of El Zanjon, a building which charts the course of San Telmo's history.  Built almost 200 years ago as a single dwelling for one of the city's wealthy families, it later became a conventillo, housing over a hundred people in 23 bedrooms.  It fell into disrepair and in the 1960s was condemned by the government.  Twenty years later it was bought by the current owner, who wanted to turn it into a restaurant.  The initial excavations uncovered first a huge cistern below ground, and then the remains of an earlier home with a lookout tower.  The old tunnels where the stream-cum-sewer had been bricked over after the yellow fever epidemic were dredged, removing tonnes of debris.  The owner abandoned the restaurant idea and began a thirty-year restoration project, turning the building and the tunnels beneath into a museum.  The tour is fascinating, taking us from wealth to poverty and back: El Zanjon is now available for hire for corporate events.  We ask how much.  Think plenty, our guide says.

A few blocks from here, holes in the ground of a different kind.   Francesca and I rediscover, eventually, the  site of the old Club Atletico, under the flyover where Paseo Colon meets Cochabamba.  In 2002 archaeologists discovered intact the basement torture centre where 1800 prisoners were 'disappeared' during the Dirty War of the 1970s.  When we found the site in 2010, we watched as people with trowels walked down the short flight of brick steps and disappeared below ground.  Parts of the excavation, now complete, had been landscaped and paved, and a memorial created; parts were still to be begun.  Two years on, we think there has been some progress, though the whole thing has an abandoned air. A cycle lane now runs along the perimeter fence.  The memorial park with its seats is firmly behind bars.  And the mention of the site has disappeared from the guidebooks.  I imagine the area being bulldozed to form the next carpark.  Francesca disagrees.  They couldn't get away with it, she says.  There would be a public outcry.  I'm not so sure.   Whilst investigations continue and the trials of the perpetrators reach their conclusion, I have the sense that this memory has been packaged and preserved elsewhere, in the elaborate monument on the other side of the city perhaps, leaving reminders like this one buried like the polluted waters below El Zanjon.

Back in our mansion, we look at the holes in the glass at the top of the building, the damp on the walls.  We hear talk of the rules of the building and government regulations which make restoration or resale difficult.  There is much chatter about politics, corruption, the economy, the difficulty of buying dollars.  Not everyone is of the same opinion.  On the day after the latest mass demonstration which stitches up the traffic for hours, we listen to an Argentinian friend dismiss with scorn the pot-banging middle classes whose anti-government feelings are rooted in a desire to avoid taxation.  The friend (who was in prison for three years during the 1970s military rule) reminds us of what the present government has done on behalf of those most in need.  Still, there is no housing benefit.  The latest 'land grab' sees around 6,000 squatters staking out a piece of land in the Parque Indoamericano, with protests from local residents torching tents and chanting racist slogans.  Nothing is straightforward in this Through the Looking Glass world.    We have only a few days left before we return to what we regard as normal.  This morning the sun is tempered by a cooling breeze.  'I LOVE this city,' our friend says, 'in all its uglinesses.'

Double Vision

"Most of the places I have gone to dance 
lead a double life"

Carlos Calvo 

Julie Taylor: Paper Tangos

From last year's apartment (Carlos Calvo 846: 1st floor) you could look out past the geraniums to a muddle of old and new.  This year we are in the same building on the second floor.  It feels a long way up.  We cling on to the narrow balcony railing and crane our necks for the same view but the angle is different, so we learn to see both at once: the street view from 2011 is overlaid with our new roofscape of concrete and tile, bits of rooftop garden and the odd line of washing.

San Telmo invites this kind of double vision. Past and present jostle for attention.  On Sunday we walked the few blocks to Puerto Madero, what might pass for the Canary Wharf of Buenos Aires.  The recently regenerated port area gleams with plate glass and polished steel.  We stop for coffee and watch the cyclists and joggers pass in the sunshine.  A young woman on roller blades glides to a halt at the lights.  The waterfront's history survives, though, in the red brick of the refurbished dock offices, the huge cranes, and the eyesore blocks of flats, dating back to the sixties perhaps, half derelict, awaiting demolition presumably .   Heading back, we stop to photograph a piece of graffiti that has appeared since our last visit.  Rather than the hastily-sprayed slogan (though there is plenty of that, voices of the otherwise voiceless, I guess) this is state-of-the-art art, huge, elaborate, often shocking or funny - like the eyes of the enormous cat on the side of a building on Peru which, since it was painted round wall-lamps, light up at night.  Street art is everywhere: along the length of a train on the Subte, across a house wall, once the home of one of San Telmo's burgeoning rich, now crumbling.  It pulls us up short, making us see the past through the filter of the present.

Yesterday we walked the length of Carlos Calvo and Estados Unidos, the sections between the multi-lane Avenida Nueve de Julio and Paseo Colon, which Francesca tells me used to be a river, with streams from San Telmo flowing into it.  We pick our way along the cobbles, slithery with persistent drizzle, and imagine the swampy land that hatched the first big yellow fever epidemic in the 1870s, claiming 10,000 lives and driving out the wealthy settlers, leaving the area to be reclaimed by the poor.  Their splendid homes became tenement buildings.   Now, poverty and wealth coexist here in a way that is never comfortable for the visitor.  On the way into the bank's  cash machines late at night, we step over a boy sleeping on the steps.  San Telmo seems poised on the middle of that seesaw between regeneration and decline.

Two encounters bring this home to us.  Pip books us into a wine tasting (http://www.vinotango.com.ar) as guests of his friend Juan, the proprietor and Juan's mum.  There are nine or ten of us, seated round a table in this beautiful shop.   In front of us, trays of cheese, a silver-coloured tub that I imagine is for the bits we don't want to swallow (in fact, we swallow everything that is put in front of us, Juan and mum included) and two gorgeous plain glass fat-bottomed decanters, into which Juan empties the most expensive reds.  We sample five wines, one white, increasing in price and body.  'We don't know that much about wines,' our hosts say modestly.  These varieties of grape are unusual for Argentina and we are to discover them together.  In between bottles, Juan sings tango.  Apparently, he studied music in New York. The penultimate wine, a Bonarda called El Enemigo, wows us all.

Around the corner although a world away, we stroll down Chile and find the fileatador at work. He looks at us without comment over his spectacles as we stumble in castellano through a request for a traditionally decorated sign for Francesca's house, then laboriously finds four chairs which he arranges at the trestle tables opposite his seat.  The tables are covered with tin cans of paint, brushes, bits of paper, blunt pencils. Almost two hours later (see Pip's blog fatguyinfabioshoes.blogspot.com for a blow-by-blow account of a similar meeting) we emerge dazed into the now dark street, having struggled in several languages through every topic from the derivation of the word hedgehog and the difference between frogs and toads to the potential benefits of nuclear power.  No website here: he hands us a carbon copy of the handwritten order.  
   
It's hard to tell whether San Telmo is on the up, the smart new bodegas and bars a sign that the patron saint of sailors will raise her to new heights, or whether it is sinking back into the swamp.  Visitors can only see the past, not the political and economic pressures which the capital and its barrios face now; so says the owner of El Zanjon, one of the oldest buildings in the area.  The blind leading the blind, Francesca says as we pass two men with white sticks navigating their way along a busy pavement.  Who knows?  Certainly this is an area that will not roll over and die quietly.  On Peru, we come upon a woman, middle-aged, respectable, lipsticking her opinion of the authorities responsible for the violent repression of academics in the 'Night of the Long Canes' (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos) onto a commemorative poster - 'hijos de puta' was her view.  In the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers and Grandmothers still march every Thursday afternoon to commemorate those lost during the country's 'dirty war'.  As a woman with a megaphone speaks each name, the rest chorus 'Presente'; the disappeared reappear.


I'm sure there are treatments for seeing double but I think I prefer it this way.  Today we visited the Giacometti exhibition at the beautiful PROA gallery in La Boca. The artist began every day, the curator tells us, with the intention to see 'con ojos propios', with his own eyes, rather than let his perception be dulled with preconceptions.  Whilst San Telmo doesn't encourage belief in miracles* it does teach you to look up (there are wonders on every block) but to do so with care where you tread.

*(although our cleaner, Milagros, arrived yesterday)

Journey with maps

Buenos Aires October 2012: Journey with maps

We have come equipped: the guide book, the yellow-bordered tango map from the first trip, plans for various further journeys which we will never make... Pip and Maggi are heading for Tierra del Fuego in a week or so.  Meanwhile Francesca and I struggle to make it beyond the borders of San Telmo.

Part of this is the inertia that seems to absorb us each time we arrive in the city.  Is it something that emanates from the brickwork or the cobbles beneath our feet? Or something that is generated by the country’s lumbering bureaucracy? Pip has come up with the term NFBA to account for the impossibility of ever, it seems, completing a simple task.  It took John and Nancy two days (not including hours of preparation studying the formidable Guia T) to buy a SUBE card.

It’s also easy to get lost here.  Even though the city’s streets are organised on a grid, it’s hard to remember whether Chile or Defensa run parallel or at right angles to where you happen to be. Or you can find yourself walking in the opposite direction to the one you intend, so that suddenly you’re deep into an unknown neighbourhood, reluctant to get out the crumpled map and search for the right section, to identify you firmly in the eyes of passers-by as a tourist and therefore easy prey.

Parts of the city are off limits, so we are told.  They don’t actually appear at all on the tourist maps: look for Villa 21 near Barracas, for example, and you will find a blank space where Calle Luna should be.  And La Boca, its rich cultural history repackaged for the tourist trade, is part of a barrio of real material deprivation.  Stray off the central streets, you are warned, and you are in danger.  In any case the maps themselves seem out to confuse.  One guidebook has street maps orientated towards north, whilst its subte section is swivelled through 100 degrees or so.  Or perhaps it’s the other way round. In most north is pointing out somewhere towards the bottom left of the page.  The dangers, though, evaporate, or are overshadowed at least by – we struggle to pinpoint what it is – something about the way everyone here seems aware of others, us, what we might need.  ‘You can cross now,’ the old woman said as we chattered at the junction, oblivious of the green man. Or a different kind of need: ‘Hola Princesa,’ a man murmured as we passed yesterday.  I’d like to think it was directed at me.

Bus routes form an intricate jigsaw.  The rattling colectivos, coloured from a child’s palette according to line, rattle and smoke along, nudging pedestrians at crossings, squealing to a halt at the corner of a street.  There might be a pole with a sign, or a sticker on a wall, or simply a tell-tale straggle of would-be travellers to mark the stop.  The Guia itself (10 pesos, or 30 for the deluxe edition, spiral-bound) demands serious study, matching maps and number grids and route details in an elaborate through-the-looking-glass bingo. Mornington Crescent? Francesca says.

So we venture occasionally beyond the confines of our small world to a milonga on the other side of town or, as yesterday, braving Cumbrian rain, to Sarmiento and then Arenales for the compulsory shoe shopping pilgrimage.  Mostly, though, we are diverted by the everyday wonders of San Telmo: wine-tasting, sign- ordering, sun after rain and a cleaner called Milagros.

Knot

KNOT

‘He was shaky when he stepped on to the quay with his ropes.  He crouched under a streetlamp, doing and undoing a bowline knot that wouldn’t come out right.  Finally he had to recite, “Over and under and over and round and over and under and through,” a raw cadet again.’

                                                                                                               Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land  

                                                                                                               (1985)

I remember learning knots at Brownies, or Guides perhaps – though why on earth..?  Now I only recall three: the simplest granny, the essential reef knot, and the round turn and two half hitches, the last in name only.  I can make the initial loop, then I’m stuck.  I do like them, though: something about their finicky precision, their predictability, their clarity – unlike most things in life, there is a clear right and wrong.  Get it wrong, and it simply doesn’t work.  Like cat’s cradle, a single mistake leaves you with a tangle on your hands, or sends you back to the start.

Apart from the contorted little knobbles that school embroidery taught me, knots also signal mastery: a male word for what I regard, shamefully perhaps, as a male competence.  They are a part of that world of big ships and technical knowhow, engines and coordinates and hard science, which seems to me resoundingly masculine.  Yes, I know, I know: Ellen Macarthur and Amy Johnson and all my own years of dedicated feminism.  I fought for equal pay, prefer (usually) to open my own doors, will defend the right of women to box professionally.  But strong calves leaping onto the quayside to make fast my (my!) boat seem part and parcel of varnished mahogany boards and splicing the mainbrace, essentially male pursuits.

I am not entirely in awe of such skills.  There is a bar in La Trinité, on Brittany’s south coast, with a glass case of knots on the wall.  It’s a delight to while away a wet hour or two over a glass of beer while contemplating the difference between an Anchor Hitch and a Fisherman’s Bend.  But isn’t there something slightly unhinged about these uniform rows, carefully labelled like butterflies pinned out by their wings?  As quirks go, though, it is of a piece with the same small town’s award system for the annual sailing regatta: the winner in each category receives his (all the champions we saw were men) body weight in oysters and champagne, determined by his standing on one end of a plank until the crates and boxes piled on the other end of the rickety seesaw send him wobbling into the air.  Only a man could have designed such a quaint discriminator.   The opportunity for subverting the system, though, bears the stamp of the women who added the weekly shop and bunches of flowers to their men’s kilos.

Fishing undermines further my already dubious notions of gender.  Fishing flies have the intricacy and attention to minute detail that we might associate with embroidery, essentially in the popular view a female pursuit, although the needlewoman I know best is a man.  The Flyfisher’s Companion (John Buckland 1990) provides an absorbing distraction, drawing on a history that dates back to the third century AD.  The fisherman (Buckland assumes readers and practitioners alike are male) might also have been a peripatetic fly-tier complete with a travelling kit of materials and miniature tools that look as if they belong in a jeweller’s studio or a dental surgery.  Whilst artificial flies these days are likely to be made of synthetics, traditionally the fly-tier might have used fur, feathers, silk, wool and hair to imitate the real food of the fish.  Whether the finished fly is an attractor (to stimulate the fish to attack) or a deceiver (to represent a natural food form), the results are typically fine and delicate, a miracle of shimmering iridescence. 

Non-fishers will be more familiar with notions of attraction and deceit in relation to people rather than trout or salmon, and the knot has often been associated with both positive and negative in human endeavour.  Tying the knot calls to mind the marriage ceremony and probably rests in the tradition of binding together the wrists of the couple, although I rather like the suggestion that the knots represent the web of knotted string that predated the metal bed base.  The knot here symbolises commitment, a promise that the relationship is for ever.  It implies security: like the knot in a climbing harness, it keeps us safe.  But when the partnership sours, the ties that bind can become the ropes that keep us captive, an inextricable mesh of unhappiness:

               JACK    You are a pain in the neck

                              To stop you giving me a pain in the neck

                              I protect my neck by tightening my neck muscles,

                              which gives me the pain in the neck

                                             you are.

               JILL      My head aches through trying to stop you

                              giving me a headache.

                                                                                                                        R.D.Laing Knots (1970)

The natural world echoes the dichotomy.  Japanese knotweed is, according to the World Conservation Union, among the 100 worst invasive species, its spreading roots and vigorous growth crowding out other species of plant and damaging foundations, roads and buildings.  At the other extreme, the knot garden is a model of control, its neat pattern and formal arrangement containing an aromatic assortment of herbs.  If you are a birder, the word itself may well have the connotation of spectacular.  The biggest autumn high tides at Snettisham on the north-east coast of Norfolk create the phenomenon where tens of thousands of the wader that bear the name take to the skies en masse when they are crowded off the mud-flats by the incoming tide.  I experienced this with friends recently.  We got up at 4. 30am to a sky full of stars and trudged and stumbled along the side of the lagoon in a straggle of other lunatics with binoculars and telescopes.  The man behind me had driven the nine hours from Cornwall the day before, just for this event.  Like me, this was his first time.  We stood, watching the shrinking mudbank emerge in the half-light as not mud at all but a moving mass of heads, legs, beaks all scurrying in the same direction, with increasing urgency.  Now and again a flurry of dunlin whooshed across our field of vision.  And then it was happening: swirl after swirl of knot took to the air in front of us and wheeled over our heads into the lagoon. 

 

In some respects this was a modest event: a mere 30,000 probably rather than the 60,000 or 80,000 of the records, and the sun hadn’t yet made it over the horizon so we missed the jewelled effect of the best photos.  Still it was something extraordinary, lit by eos rhododaktylos, the rosy fingers of dawn, to the tune of the background bedlam of the birds cries like the half-heard chaos of a distant party.  And of course the clicking of all those cameras.

  

what's the difference

What's the difference

‘What’s the difference between a pound of feathers and a pound of lead?’ used to be the trick question for too-clever children.  ‘Find the difference between...’ still confounds maths starters.  They’re tiresome questions, in my book.  I don’t think I much like measuring, and I’m certainly no Gradgrind.  I find my resistance to fact gets more obdurate as I grow older. 

Yesterday, on the beach near Blakeney Point, we explored the first sculptures in the ‘Aisle and Air’ exhibition, North Norfolk’s summer project which celebrates the work of 40 artists with local connections.  I was entranced by the camera obscura hidden inside what looked so convincingly like a Victorian beach hut that at first I walked straight past (why, though, since Cley has never been that kind of beach, at least not in my experience?).  When you step inside and pull the door closed behind you, sunlit shore and that blue cloud-scudded sky appear by magic, upside down, on a kind of shelf in front of you.  If you linger, the picture becomes clearer.  Was the sun brighter, or were we used to the dark?  That was enough science for me, though.  Outside again, grappling with the mechanics of pinholes and refracted beams (or should that be reflected?) was as tough as grasping the speeds and distances involved with Voyager 2’s departure from our solar system.  I’m not proud of my ignorance, but often my head feels too full of other things to take in the hard stuff.

Names are different.  Roses have lovely names and for me this is part of their sweetness.  ‘Paul’s Himalayan musk’ is the first in my new garden and I can’t wait for the heady scents and blown petals of its first flowering.  Madame Alfred Carrière is next on my list, white tinted with a blush of pink; or Blairy Number 2, a deeper pink I first met on its scramble through old trees in my favourite nursery in Horningsea.  Who are these people whose names are now firmly attached to beauty?  I could find out, but I don’t care to.  Or perhaps it’s that I feel I don’t have time.  This weekend the hedgerows were full of wild roses – dog roses, Andy called them – and campion and some kind of dandelion and honeysuckle and one or two yellow flags, and agrimony: ‘a letter away from acrimony,’ I said.  No comment.  There were orchids, too: a couple of bee orchids, unmistakable once you’ve found the perfectly formed miniature bee inside the cup, and lots of marsh orchids.  ‘And what are the stumpy dark red ones?’ I asked.  ‘Marsh orchids.’  ‘So what are the tall purple ones then?’  ‘Marsh orchids.  They’re the same.’

There’s no logic.  Earlier, in the garden, we examined the contents of the moth trap.  I took a picture of the elephant hawk moth for the curiosity value of its pinks and greens and sent it to a friend.  The small elephant hawk moth was the same, only smaller.  ‘No,’ Andy said.  ‘It’s a different species.’  You really get value for money in moth names, though: from straightforwardly descriptive – ‘buff ermine’, ‘snout’ – to the more lyrical ‘dark arches’ and ‘footman’, ‘heart and dart’ and my favourite, ‘setaceous Hebrew character’.  Andy’s into micros now but I can’t find it in my heart to be interested in these tiny pale things, the lbjs of the moth world.  I sit and watch while he patiently identifies and lists and counts, and wonder about the joker who added ‘uncertain’ to the lepidoptery corpus.

I suppose being a collector makes you a soft touch for subsets.  Moths are a secondary interest at least for my birder brother, but probably I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself later in the day joining the hunt for a dragonfly, the poetically-named red-veined darter.  Slightly different from a birding expedition, this involved quite a bit of creeping in silence along a track, and standing around staring at grass.  It seemed impossible but by the end of half an hour or so we’d seen a few, including one almost swallowed by a bull, and one I’d spotted myself right in front of me on the path.  They’re long, and very red; but ultimately it takes more than a glimpse of something so small to keep my attention.  This morning I was remembering those beefier insects – cockroaches? crickets? – that join the dancers at the Saturday night open-air milonga in Córdoba, Argentina.  The locals didn’t seem too bothered by them, but having something the size of a small mouse perched on your arm or landing with a clunk on your shoulder was a challenge for Fred and me.  Anyway, this ruby beauty was a first for Andy, and logging firsts seems to be a significant part of this kind of collecting.  

I count myself fortunate to be a fellow traveller, though I imagine I make a tiresome companion for an expert.  I go for the obvious: avocets in their glamorous blue stilettos, and the disarming spoonbill, balanced grumpily on one cartoon leg, shifting now and again for a bit of clumsy preening with that ridiculous beak.  Anything that can be seen with the naked eye is a bonus.  The bittern disappointed by its absence.  Top bird treat for me this weekend was watching a swallow feed a nestful of babies, all wriggling eagerness and hugely open mouths, outside Drove Orchards in Thornham.

On the way home, a last stop to look for a squacco heron (shouldn’t that be squacko?)  What’s the difference between the squacco heron and an ordinary one?  ‘Smaller’ is sufficient to dissipate my already flagging interest.  I ponder instead the way we are both, I think, in our separate ways, engaged in the fight to preserve what is precious. On a writers’ retreat at Le Verger recently, host David Lambert was amused by my persistent questions about the names of trees, a symptom of what he sees as a European obsession with classification.  If you asked the question in Trinidad, the answer would be ‘Is a tree!  Has beautiful red flowers...’    Whilst I look for labels, probe and juggle words, Andy sorts & catalogues what he sees.  Similar and different in the way that siblings often are, we are both caught up in the search for meaning, to find some order in a disordered world, to make sense of our experience.

Footnote: 'Aisle and Air' is curated by Isabel Vasseur and runs until 5 August.  The beach hut (I can’t remember its title) is the work of Paul Ebben and Peter Swann.