THREE HAPPENINGS AND A FUNERAL

Zvernec Monastery, Vlora, Albania

It's been something of a four weddings and a funeral week, though without the weddings exactly.  We assisted at a funeral though, and sent Ann Patterson Daniels - aka Aged Mother - off to the strains of Nimrod and Abide With Me.  By the agency of some ethereal intervention, Aged Mother parted the clouds and the sun shone all day.  She still seems not so far away,  I feel her presence, watching and waving; just itching to tell the story again of her grandfather, the Mayor of Harrogate.

Still one out, one in, as they say, though the timing was unfortunate.  Aged Mother missed the arrival of Butterbean by just a few days. Had one lived longer, or the other arrived sooner, they might have overlapped and said 'hello' to each other.  To explain, Butterbean is my Younger Daughter's second child, born last week, and both have just escaped from the clutches of the hospital.  Clazza is tired and still in some pain - like having barbed wire in your girdle - but she is mending.  'That's the trouble with childbirth, admitted the daughter of a friend once, 'it doesn't half smart!'

Tiny as ever, Butterbean still has no proper name, though as everyone seems to like Butterbean calling her something else seems now quite redundant.  All sorts of exotic appellations have been canvassed but the last I heard was that the hot money was now behind Isla or Alice.  Isla might reflect her Scottish roots and sit nicely alongside that of her second cousin, Iona.  If they call her Alice we shall just have to pretend that she is English and be on the look out for rabbit holes.  Should you enjoy punting on outsiders, though, you could still place a bet on Xanthe or Amethyst, dark horses indeed, but still under starter's orders.

And then suddenly it was my own birthday, which I am ashamed to say I rather let pass without even so much as taking a chilled bottle of Sancerre out of the fridge to the bottom of the garden and drinking a toast to myself for having lived so long.  Mind you the weather would have rendered the bottom of the garden experience distinctly soggy and it wouldn't have been only the wine that was cold.  My reading matter would have been limp and the wine no longer dry.   Besides, we were expecting a delivery of an order for 83 kilograms of DVD boxes which we still sell from time to time.

So instead in the evening we motored over to Marks and Spencer, dined at the Deli counter on Peking Duck and I bought a new linen jacket to replace an old friend that had started to look even older than me.  Friends though were very kind with cards, calls and messages of support.

If these were the major events of the week then there were some minor upturns too, including a telephone call on Sunday morning to say that I had won first prize in the Cowbridge Book Festival's Creative Writing Competition.  Wow!  The first time ever I had won something and the first practical indication that I may not totally be wasting my time if I try, as our little labels business winds down, to earn a few supplementary coppers from the keyboard.   So far I have entered four story and one novel competitions this year and the score so far is one success, one failure, and three to be determined.  Still, even one out of five can't be too bad, can it?  I am encouraged and cheered.

In closing I must mention an email from my marine biologist friend whose 75th birthday this week it also was.  (Not that I am 75 I hasten to add). The missive came from an internet café somewhere in northern Albania where he has been backpacking by himself in search of medieval monasteries.  Having worked all his life for international organisations he seems never to be content unless he is travelling and regularly takes himself off to distant corners of the world simply to be on the move.  He walks and stays in bed and breakfasts.  I have noticed the same thing in other people:  travel is like a drug, they have to keep moving, and while I greatly admire the spirit I know that I am a very different person and prefer to read about countries without maps rather than experiencing them first hand.Above all I need to feel a connection.

So I prefer to go to places that are familiar and to this end we are off at the end of the month again to the Mill where Jim and Rosie have kindly once again invited us.  I shall have to arrange a birthday celebration there.  The Sancerre is cheaper and there is shade under the walnut trees.

The picture (without which no blog is ever complete) is of an Albanian Monastery.  I cannot guarantee that this is one that my friend has seen and I am rather hoping that you haven't seen it (or any other Albanian Monastery) either.  I certainly hadn't seen any before and now that I have I am not sure that they are markedly different from other such medieval institutions, but of course you (and my friend) may disagree. 

WELCOME, BUTTERBEAN

Mother Clazza and Butterbean

My granddaughter arrived in the late afternoon of the 2nd May,  a grey day on which it didn't rain.  Mother and baby are fine.   The birth happened in the Heath hospital, a vast institution on whose site there has been some sort of establishment since Neolithic times.  It may well have been a hospital then.  Once something becomes a hospital the tendency is to continue, for why would you do otherwise? Each generation adds a bit or knocks down a bit until six thousand years later you arrive at what you have now. Anyway it was not to talk about hospitals that I began this piece.

Lacking a formal name - the naming pot is full of potential names but none has yet been extracted - she is called Butterbean since she was the size, well, of a butterbean, when first we learned of her existence.  (The Butterbean is a species of Lima bean apparently, whatever that is, or so I learned when I looked the name up).  When I did this I saw also that the name had been adopted by an American heavyweight boxer, otherwise called Eric Esch.  He wasn't born on 2nd May but on August 3rd and in addition to being a heavyweight boxer he is also a mixed martial artist.  He is probably a nice friendly chap in reality but his photographs show someone that you might not want to cross in a hurry.  If ever there was someone of whom it might be said 'he will grind your bones to make his bread' then Eric Esch looks to be he.

Which seemed to me to be the very antithesis of our Butterbean who is a mere scrap of a thing weighing in at just 5lbs and 10 ounces and very cuddly to boot.  She now begins the long road - actually a surprisingly short road if you are a grandparent - of putting on weight and filling out and learning to sit up and then to crawl and then to toddle and then to talk and then finding out how the world works and that water is wet and fire burns and it hurts when you fall over and the thousand and one other things that have to be learned before you can even set one foot in front of the other on your way to school.

As an aside, you'd think, wouldn't you, that by now we would have evolved some way of simply plugging the brain with 'applications' - maybe delivered by headphones during sleep?  Could you download how to walk, for instance, or to make apple pie, or a history of all the kings and queens of Britain?  After all, birds seem to inherit complex nest building patterns in their DNA.  They don't spend time learning under the mother's wing - the weaver bird just goes out and weaves, termites build vast citadels, bees talk, bats can use sonic radar, all manner of species navigate across the oceans while the human infant is still learning which end of the spoon goes where.

Still maybe she will do all these things too. For the moment Butterbean is just a gorgeous little thing with blue eyes and dark hair and a contented expression when her head is next to your heart.  You can practically feel some mysterious bonding process at work.  And though babies are common enough each baby is special and reminds us that we were all once in this small and vulnerable state with minds empty and vacant, waiting to be filled with all the wonderful world has to offer.

And she is fortunate to be born on 2nd May - the same day, incidentally, as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia and James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner man. The same day as Engelbert Humperdinck, the singer, and David Suchet, the actor; as Manfred von Richtofen - the Red Baron - fighter pilot, and Jerome K Jerome who wrote the funniest book in the English language (Three Men in a Boat).  And should Butterbean ever find herself in Poland then her birthday will fall on the Polish National Flag Day and she will find that everyone is saluting her.  Na zdrowie!

So you see it is quite true what the horoscopes say about people born on the 2nd May being full of artistic and intellectual creativity.  They make extraordinarily good writers of novels, apparently, and good artists, too, if given pencil and paintbrushes.  On the other hand they have little interest in making money; they would far rather do something that they love doing, preferably in one of those professions in which the flow of income can best be characterised as being in a state of flux.

I have discovered my mistake.  I should have been born a week earlier - on the 2nd - instead of, as I was, on 9th May, for which the omens are not nearly so good. Alan Bennett (who was also born on 9th May) is perhaps the exception and he has clearly exhausted all the artistic talent available to Taureans born on this date.  Instead, all the boundless stock of Taurean talent is invested in those arriving on 2nd May and so, dear Butterbean, we shall expect of you (naturally in an entirely unpressurising sort of a way) great things.