Those Crazy Protestors

Originally this was to be a journalistic piece, but it wants to be a fairy story...

Those Crazy Protesters

There was once a crazy woman who lived in a place that didn't matter, and she had three sons, two of whom were crazy just like her. The woman and her two crazy sons were the favourite talking points of the country there abouts, which was a sensible land otherwise populated by entirely sensible people. "There she goes, that crazy woman," they would say, "with her two crazy sons, off to town to see the Mayor again with their shoes on backwards. Oh, that poor man! How he must suffer!"

Now the mayor did indeed consider himself unduly burdened by these crazy people, for he was the third son. All his life he had earnestly devoted himself to the task of disassociating himself from his crazy family and emulating instead his estranged father, whom all agreed must have been a thoroughly sensible man because he had left them. The third son spent his childhood learning to ease himself away from their influence, putting his shoes on the right way round before he reached the school in the mornings and in all things following the lead of his sensible classmates. By the time he reached manhood he was the very picture of common sense, so much so that the townsfolk kindly forgot his crazy beginnings and voted him into the Mayor's Office.

Once there, and with the very best of intentions (for to his credit he never did anything he did not think was for the best) he began to take sensible precautions against ever relapsing into craziness, beginning by making a point of being out whenever his mother visited. He sought the advice of a famous doctor and was assured that craziness is not hereditary but a condition brought on by disreputable nurture, and that he himself was proof. The doctor's diagnosis was that in him the condition was totally defeated, he had examined him with a range of tests both physical and psychometric and had found no sign of backwardsness or even a twist to the side. As further proof the doctor offered the case histories of other children in other towns who had turned up at kindergarten with either their feet or their heads on the wrong way. The doctor himself had led a team of health and education officials who developed an effective early intervention strategy which, through targeting those in need at an early age, had successfully and permanently integrated those victims of bizarre circumstance into the mainstream of life.

The mayor was impressed and immediately instigated a similar program in the town schools, which within months had identified and begun to process a surprising number of children of all ages who showed symptoms of craziness. But many parents were not so impressed and before long the mayor began to receives letters of protestation, some disputing the diagnosis placed upon their child, some claiming that their children had been contaminated by undue exposure in the classroom, and some wishing to inform the mayor of candidates for reform that the system had missed. Someone even called a public meeting on the Rights of the Eminently Sane, a crucial component of the constitution which could indeed be used to question the legality of diverting such a large portion of public funds to the insane. Anxiously the mayor called the doctor, who told him to explain to the townspeople that they were fortunate the scheme had been implemented when it had as clearly they were on the brink of an epidemic, and that only by committing themselves to it's eradication could they secure for future generations a truly reliable and sensible world. This the mayor did and the families of the town, seeing the sense in his words, agreed to cooperate. Most took the sensible option of volunteering to be tested alongside their children, and if the doctor happened to find any trace of a crazy thought or lopsided action they sensibly and dutifully registered on the database of possibly contaminated persons and waited at home for help.

But the mayor soon encountered a problem when large numbers of previously healthy people started registering not just on the database but at the welfare office. It was the only sensible thing to do, they couldn't do a crazy thing like risk passing the condition on to their workmates, nor could they operate machinery or serve the public whilst doubts lingered about the rationality of their minds. The mayor couldn't argue with their logic and wondered how long they could afford to keep them fed, but the doctor told him not to worry as he was close to a treatment suitable for adults and that it would be ready in a few weeks. Meanwhile the local paper had already called for an inquiry into the funding of the schools project and, what with half the workforce being off sick, businesses were struggling and the town's economy was beginning to slide.

Worse was to come when a big TV network mentioned the town in a documentary about a little known group of subversives, the Crazy And Proud Brigade, who were rumoured to be using subtly subliminal tactics to undermine the accepted norms of well moderated and sensible behaviour. Tell-tale signs of their activities, the report announced, were the growing numbers of visibly crazy people who had always appeared, until now, to be perfectly and incontrovertibly sane. Rumours began to circulate that the mayor himself was part of some outlandish plot , a fairly sensible supposition when you consider his family history, which proposition excited further media coverage and a visit from the Chief Governmental Sanity Inspector who gave him six weeks to put a stop to all this craziness or else the town would lose all government funding and be stripped of its status as a Centre of Excellence for Common Sense. Letters poured into the mayor's office, demonstrators picketed the town hall, the manifestos of innumerable protest groups and splinter groups appeared in pamphlets that were thrust into the hands of angry citizens at every school gate and street corner.

The mayor began to panic. He called the doctor who told him he was not an expert in socio-economics, but wouldn't it be sensible to finish the job now that he had started it? The doctor's own research now suggested that there was no cure for craziness stronger than the right motivation, perhaps what was called for was the combination of a financial carrot and a legislative stick? The mayor was slightly disturbed by the odd tone of the doctor's but nevertheless he took his advice, having no-one to ask for a second opinion (never having made, he realised now, any political firiends to speak of). So, mindful of the six week deadline, he bypassed the normal rules and procedures to pass a law requiring all crazy people to attend for registration at the Town Hall at 10 a.m. prompt, where they were to be allocated their places on an intensive self-help course in return for a package of incentives including a certificate of employability and a range of tax breaks and accumulative benefits to look forward to in their retirement.

The next morning the town was gridlocked as what seemed to be the entire population marched noisily and enthusiastically from several rallying points towards the Town Hall, some led by college students waving the banners of the Crazy And Proud Brigade, some by striking workers demanding Equal Rights With The Insane, and some by a coalition of nurses and schoolteachers carrying home-made placards urging a National Campaign for Health and Sanity in the Workplace. As diverse as their passions and causes were they converged in the town square with one intention : to protest the injustices visited upon them by the mayor and to reassert the will of the people in what was, after all, their town. In short, if anyone was mad it was the mayor.

The mayor stepped out onto the sensibly low-set balcony to a cacophony of blaring horns and heckling shouts and a great hammering of placards and try as he might to make himself heard he could not carry his voice above the din. At 9.55 he asked the Chief of Police to fire above the heads of the crowd to gain their attention. At 9.56 the Police Chief ordered his men to do so. At 9.57 there was a memorable moment of silence in the square that people would talk of, with awe, for years to come - it was a moment so immaculately clear in it's implications that no-one present would have cared a hoot, if asked, about how crazy or sane they were, a moment when they all understood their part in something big. At 9.58 a scene of utter anarchy erupted in the square as the crowd surged in all directions, the police pushing back and everyone pushing into one another, then a rallying cry and a rush by the crowd towards the balcony (sensibly low). The mayor was dragged off and beaten to a pulp before the Police Chief ordered his men to aim to disable and the crowd began a series of running battles with the police that only ended when the Governmental Guards arrived with humvees and a platoon of SAS specially trained in urban warfare and counterinsurgency tactics.

When he came to he was surprised to see his mother's backward facing shoes little more than a foot from his face. He looked up at her crazy old mischievous eyes and wept like an infant. His brothers helped him to his feet, carefully turning his shoes around for him, and together they left the town.

The mayor asked his mother if she forgave him for disowning her. She replied that you can't help the way you walk. He asked if she had ever considered Insanity Therapy. She laughed hysterically at his crazy talk. "One more question, Mother, was I crazy to want a cure?" "You know that doctor?" his mother asked by way of reply, "I called to see you about him. It was the only sensible thing I ever did. You weren't in. He's your father. Batty as a fruit cake he is, always has been."

They didn't stop laughing until their bellies ached, then they cried the rest of the way home.

A Short Story

Every day since the new year broke long and cold he had watched the weather, that Arctic January of her first stay there, lacing his boots with eager satisfaction whenever the great storm clouds lifted. She had not minded. Early on she had given in to the easy spell of ritual, willingly conspiring with Nans to fill the huddled rooms with the scent of warm bread in the mornings, beeswax and lavender in the afternoons and, as the night wrapped itself about the tiny farmhouse, the hot salty tang of a bacon joint or the primitive, musty pungence of simmering mutton stew.

In the evenings, always just after the nine o’clock news, Twm would make his final check on the dogs in the shed and Nans would take the short-handled shovel and with it carry half a fire of glowing coals the colour of August to warm the parlour hearth for her. Then Rhys would emerge from his improvised darkroom under the stairs, Nans would kiss each of them goodnight, and together they would lay out the day’s work on the guest bed Twm had borrowed from Mrs Ellis down in the village. She had protested at their having gone to so much trouble but Nans had said “Tut, girl, we couldn’t be letting you sleep on that old settee, you’d wake all creased up like a concertina!” And Twm had said “Duw, you’re lucky it’s got a proper mattress, better than that old straw thing we’ve got!” And Nans had slapped his arm for talking such nonsense, and Twm had grinned and winked, and Rhys had descended from his attic bedroom with an ancient eiderdown bedspread in his arms the exact shade of his eyes. “I’ve aired it,” he said defensively, when his mother tried to wave him back up the stairs, and it became the backdrop to a month of late hours whilst his parents slept.

The photographs he took grew into three rows the length of the bed then along the gleaming sideboard, propped up by Nans’s ornaments - her porcelain dancing girls in their hyacinth cha cha frocks, her art deco vases - and a fading black and white picture of Twm in a beret from his days, Rhys had explained, in the International Brigade. “There’s more,” he had said wryly, “to my family, than meets the eye.”

Rhys’s pictures, arranged chronologically, revealed less and less : Wednesday’s coarse scratches of heather were speckled with the first light fall of snow that a hard frost crystallised overnight so that on Thursday through Rhys’s close focused lens each hummock’s huddled stems stood encircled in crackling quartz . But it was toward the heights that Rhys trained his eye most often, and once he said to her that heaven was where the snow merged with the sky.

“This last one today, the sun’s almost set, you must have run like a madman to get down before your dinner went cold.”

“I can fly. Didn’t Mam tell you? It’s the blood of the Little People…come with me tomorrow, you’ll see.” He had stripped to the waist whilst she had tidied his pictures away.

“But the whole point of tomorrow” she had said with mock exasperation as he untied her hair “is to be here.”

“You and your hippy psychology” he had laughed, “you're so naturally high I get dizzy just looking at you.”

“What,” she had responded, “just what, exactly, do you know about me and my psychology?”

…………………………………………………………………..

Elis had been determined not to let the spell of the place dissuade him from his purpose. All the way from London, as he drove, he had rehearsed in his mind the words he would use – “Mam, I understand, ok? But there’s no running water ” There’s a well she would say “…the roof leaks ” Mrs Ellis’s boys, they’ll mend it “…and you’re not well ” – And he had practised in the rear view mirror the look of undeniable rationale with which he would reach her. His confidence had not wavered at the quirky little border town with it’s time-locked, languidly English village green where he had stopped for petrol, nor had it been squeezed by the narrowing of the roads or the looming encroachment of the trees as he twisted and turned his way through the Welsh foothills. He had resolutely texted his girlfriend when he had pulled into the lay-by at Dolwyddelan for a pee: def back fri, chill, will talk her round np.

When the road left the pass for the ground-hugging expanse of the moors he was as single-minded as when he had left the city. As the single lane plunged from the rim of the plateau and the peaks sprang up on all sides he had no sense of uncertainty, not at any rate of the validity of his mission, although he suspected his girlfriend was not deceived by his “np” – talking his mother out of anything was always going to be a problem, he knew that. Even when he parked beside the tiny village hall and surprised himself by feeling more like a local than a tourist, and when Mrs Morris who ran the Post Office greeted him with “Elis Tomos, haven’t you grown!” just exactly as she had on each of his childhood visits (and it seemed so inevitably right that she had) even then he held firm and did not think it incongruous that he felt the need to congratulate himself.

His grandparents had lived for some years in a compact little bungalow, one of four that had been purpose-built for the elderly next to the old people’s home. Elis had badgered Nans every day of his stay one summer to take him with her on her daily trip to the shop, so that he could watch the diggers and bulldozers at work on the foundations. The last time he had visited – he would have been about 12, he remembered, because it was the year he had gone to live with his mother’s parents – they had still been up at the farm. He had not meant to call on them until the next day but for reasons he could not fathom, had allowed the car to drive past the turn off he should have taken and had driven on into the village.

“She’s a bit gone in her head now” said Twm, the tea cup clattering on it’s saucer as he offered it to Elis. “You know, old Mrs Morris, not about her things… Duw, my English has gone boy!”

“He speaks Italian in his sleep, you know” Nans winked, first at her husband, then at Elis. “How was the journey?”

“Terrific, barely a hitch. Nain, Taid, I’m sorry it’s been so long…”

“Now don’t talk nonsense” Nans interrupted. “You young people, lives to lead, at least you’ve been writing.”

“Duw yes!” Twm waggled his finger at him. “The vicar’s son, now he’s never writing! But we’ve kept all yours.”

“Twm's kept everything” said Nans as she opened a drawer of the old dresser and began sorting an assortment of papers and photographs.

“Nain,” Elis protested, “you don't have to show me my own letters !” But he knew that the squeak that surprised him in his own voice was the first farewell of his confidence, melting.

Nans had stopped searching. She had pulled out an old brown envelope, taped together where the corners had holes, and Elis knew they were not his letters inside it.

He felt at once tiny and hugely ungainly, poignantly aware of the fifteen years that had passed since he last saw his grandmother's now paper-skinned fingers and the responsibility that seemed to confer on his youth. He wanted to sink into the home-scented safety of the high-walled seat that had been his by the fireside when he was a child. He knew what the package contained – the last correspondance of the prodigal son with a promise to return and his picture at a Himalayan base camp, blissfully expectant, his gaze focused over and beyond the eye of the camera . “Your father” Nans said, and Elis barely controlled the tremor in his hands, “would have wanted you to have these.”

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She smiled back at herself in the window as she pulled the last of the breakfast dishes out of the washing up bowl - he had been right, she knew now, she always began at the summit, as if the miracle of being there wiped out the need for an explanation, and the ribbon-thin paths the sheep etched in the heather always wove their way home. Leaving the dishes to dry face-down on the draining board she rinsed her hands, puckering her nose at the sight of her water-wrinkled fingers. She turned to look for a towel but stopped in mid spin, remembering that she had washed and pegged the towels to dry hours ago as the birds woke that morning, sleep having fluttered away as the waiting day trilled in anticipation. Wiping her palms on her jeans so as to grip the rattling bakelite door-handle, reminding herself yet again to rummage through the still unpacked boxes to find the little jar of nails and screws, she stepped out into the rambling spring sunshine.

There he was, her son, perpetually startling her with his resemblance to the boy who had leaned against that same lichen-bleached wall in the photo on Nans and Twm’s bookcase. He had turned his head at the sound of the door scraping the quarry tiles, his face tilted so that his brows ran parallel to the slow slant of the ridge behind him, hair unruly as the dark twisted limbs of the hawthorn that was just beginning to bloom behind the south corner. “Not really a garden” he said now, unrelentingly familiar, “more of a designated sheep-free zone”.

“Not for long, unless we do something with that gate”.

He glanced at where the rusted metalwork clung to the prehistoric-looking iron pegs straining to break free of the stone-age gateposts, slabs of native rock stolen from their cromlech walls probably, they had once speculated, by eighteenth century chapel-goers.

“I’ll get a hammer,” he said, but when she had finished unpegging and folding and had lifted the basket from the mountain-grass lawn, he had turned again to stare towards the high zigzag of the horizon. For the first time she noticed the bluebells growing close by the wall at his feet, making her catch her breath.

“Where they there yesterday?”

“Duh…Yes.”

He turned to her.

“I didn’t see them”.

“You can’t have been looking very hard.”

“Don’t tread on them.”

“On what?”

“The bluebells!”

“Oh.” His eyes again, the rarest of iris hues, the colour of summer snow in the deep shade, and the generous glint of his smile, laughing. “For a moment there,” he jerked his head back to indicate the scene behind him, “I thought you meant the mountains.

Paris : A Cautionary Tale

The true story of our arrival in Paris...

The Two Brothers

They were so similar that they must have been twins, though we did not inquire after the fact, and they sat side by side in the unglamorous reception area of the small hotel lobby as we entered, distinguishable only by the faded black dinner jacket one of them wore over a thin white shirt whilst the other preferred a rusty-coloured jacquard sweater. Their dark and identically unkempt hair fudged the lines of their soft-bodied faces so that, with their sallow complexions, they looked as though they needed defining with some exercise and a dose of sharp country air. They were clearly taken aback by our arrival and their confusion was compounded when we produced, in still confident expectation, our two booking slips for our three separate rooms. With barely a word to us they began to converse at a pace too rapid for my long-neglected Comprehensive School French to fathom so, as they rolled into a fervour of exaggerated discourse, I leaned over the edge of the high counter in the hope of gleaning some clue as to the cause of their consternation from the printed paperwork they waved at eachother, occasionally throwing me round-eyed beleaguered looks to which I responded with what I hoped they would interpret as an enquiring but resolute smile.

Having stood back patiently for two or three minutes my parents and RJ began to make anxious enquiries of their own, asking me in short urgent Welsh what was being said, to which I could respond with no more reassurance than a shrugged “I think there's been a mix-up with the rooms...” Naturally the concern on my parents faces took a step towards panic and a growing awareness of the fraught situation prompted self-disturbing questions from the children so it was fortuitous, and a relief to them, that a very competent-looking and pleasant young woman - who spoke excellent English with a beautifully intelligible accent - arrived at that moment and proceeded to listen with great interest to what they had to say about our plight.

Meanwhile, no doubt provoked by the arrival of their compatriot with her capable air, the brothers' exchange spiraled into obvious argument. RJ and I looked at eachother with adrenalin-buoyed control, mutually understanding that she with her P.R. experience and I as the only member of our party with even a modicum of French had to somehow elicit a satisfactory outcome for us all.

Quite suddenly our agitated hosts seemed to reach an impasse and rather short-temperedly one of them handed me two sets of keys – one for my parents, one for myself and the children. They had no record, they explained without apology, of RJ's booking, and hence for her there was no room, although they were prepared to go o the great trouble of giving myself, the children and RJ a four-bed room, and weren't we grateful for that?

“Not good enough at all” RJ remonstrated, pointing out the line on her booking slip that said in bold print single room booked and payment confirmed, at which point the jacketed brother threw his hands in the air as if to say “Save me from these clients with their impossible demands, Mon Dieu!” RJ however rose splendidly to the occasion, fixing the pair of them with her best P.R. look that told them, in calm but unequivocal language-barrier busting terms, that she was going to see this thing through all the way to what she considered to be a satisfactory end.

Which is what she did achieve, but it is a long story involving unpleasant rooms and much comedic wandering of the corridors by RJ and myself and the jacquard-sweatered implausibly unapologetic brother. Eventually we were all settled in clean and comfortable enough rooms, RJ with a double all to herself. The brothers did exert a lot of energy trying to meet their obligations to us and although we never did establish exactly who was to blame it seems most likely to be the booking agency. The rest of our stay was pleasant enough, marred only by the noisy location, but then we had chosen to stay in the center of Paris so we can't grumble at that. The brothers relaxed a little and said Bonjour and smiled occasionally, and we remembered the old adage : You gotta laugh or you'll cry, so we chose the funny side to remember it by . The booking agency will be getting a letter, not about the hotel but about their “emergency contact number” which wasn't an emergency contact number or, indeed, of any help at all except that mentioning it to the brothers brought them to the brink of despair and the ultimate resolution of the affair.

As for the woman with the splendid articulation, she showed great concern but offered no practical assistance that I am aware of – other than relieving some of the strain with her engaging conversation, for which we say Merci.

Proverbial Inheritance

Proverbial Inheritance

(On Mother Love)

So for the crow the chick is

white, for white she sees like

the fair light of stars, never

the dark of matter, as if evil

alone were unconstitutional

and all else flesh to the bone.

And so she looks to home

with relative sight, and leads

her sons to corpses,

white light to white light.

(On Perseverance)

Sure you'll crack the egg

if you hit it hard enough ,

make something of yourself

from something dead, but

what is seen by the purblind

is clearly ill defined by

the smashing of boundaries.

(On Bridges)

Indeed there is a call for bridges

between the leadership of men and

the blind mothers, like to the call for

a bridge to the soul and the alternative

to mathematical equations of space-time

physics, in the building of such bridges,

is the matter that's implicit in the

singular affections of crows.

Alice In Poemland

Whilst I get some new writings together, here are some oldies..

('Twas museslip, and the wavely flomes

did bloglydangle in the swage;

All squeemsy were the splatterpomes

and the bombbards shortsage)

Alice in Poemland

Twinkle, twinkle, little poem,

How I wonder where you're going -

You left me and now it's night,

Where's my little winking light?

How I lost you there's no knowing,

How I miss you, little poem.

Alice on Poets

Speak badly of your local poet,

Berate him when he pleases

(He's probably a nancy boy

That's likely why he teases)

But if it is a lady poet

Then put her in your thesis,

You'll find she is presented best

In sassy little pieces

Alice Threw the Looking Glass

When Alice threw the looking glass

The Reverend had to duck,

He said "You broke my paradox!

That's seven years bad luck!"

But Alice found his opium stash,

She didn't give a ....