Rufus

It took me only two weeks in Exeter to make a decision which I had pondered in London for two years. The flat by the river, the kingfisher at dawn, the spontaneity and friendliness of the natives were factors. But the turning point was Belle Isle Park. The ‘Quiet Riverside Park’ was its apt subtitle on a noticeboard not entirely obliterated by graffiti. 

That summer was hot and still. At night, the covers would be discarded one by one until, as sunlight filtered through the thin curtain at 4.30, only a sheet remained. I’d discovered Parkrun and spent early mornings in the company of other runners, distracted from efforts to improve my PB only by the statuesque heron or an egret high stepping through the river’s fringe as delicately as a duchess skirting a puddle. Belle Isle Park was on a short cut from my rented flat to town. A profusion of wildflowers dominated by scarlet poppies turned the open grassland into a flickering Monet. This was the territory of a ginger cat at one end, a tabby at the other. A large boulder, holding a plaque recording the date the park was opened by the local MP, marked the division of the cats’ territories. Never did I see either animal stray past that boundary. 

It was the ginger one which caught my attention. Some days it would run up to me, eager for a stroke. At other times, I would be studiously ignored, its mind focussed on surveying its manor or preoccupied with feline philosophy. 

When my granddaughter visited, I tried to distract her from picking the flowers with the ginger cat, who by then I had christened Bella after the park. But she was more interested in the dogs, which, not allowed in this park, were abundant elsewhere on our walk. Later my son Jake, who had a cat of his own, visited. Proud of my new friendship, I introduced him to Bella. Unprovoked, the cat bit him. 

I continued to salute the cat when I traversed the park. Another walker, on their way to coffee at the Quay or to meet a friend, stopped, reached out a hand and stroked it. 

‘Everyone knows Rufus,’ he said, casually, looking up at me. 

‘Oh, is that his name?’ I didn’t admit I had privately bequeathed him a female handle. 

‘His owner comes here to fetch him every evening. Lives near St Leonard’s church.’ 

He gave Rufus, as I must now call him, a final tickle under the chin. 

The best thing about my new home was the garage. I’d never owned one before and without a car to accommodate, the space was a magnificent bonus. I would open my front door, stroll across the apron between the garage blocks and stand in the maw of the garage relishing the emptiness. 

One day, when I returned to the flat, Rufus was inside, staring at me challengingly from the top of the stairs. He became a frequent visitor after that, but not a regular one. Days when I longed for his company he was nowhere to be seen, not waiting by the door, not in the park. At other times, he would lurk outside the front door, demanding to come in just as I was going out, like Eliot’s Rumtumtugger. 

Rufus’s visits have a routine. As I open the front door, he slips between my legs, races up the stairs and peers down at me from the landing. When I go up, he follows me into the kitchen, waiting for a saucer of milk from which he will take few disdainful slurps. To begin with, he would stay for only a few minutes, signalling the need to return to his duty policing the park with a peremptory miaow. The day he leapt on to the sofa, fell asleep after washing and stayed all afternoon was special. In his company, I feel the need to do nothing – just being with him is enough. 

As dusk falls, gazing out of my window across the river path, I often see Rufus cradled sleepily in the arms of a short, bald man taking him home for dinner.

Flying

Flying

‘In the meantime, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.’

For years, those words were the alarm clock signalling the beginning of my working weeks. Words, intended to calm, which invariably triggered latent fear.

In the teeth of all the information, with which I’m familiar, around the robustness of planes, I am frightened by turbulence. It is as though the lurching, vibrating sensation engenders a visceral reaction which bypasses or neutralises reason, perhaps in the same way as the fakery of religion penetrates otherwise rational minds.

Travel was essential. Some weeks, I spent longer travelling than in the office. No matter, travelling was work, increasingly so after the advent of mobile phones and as laptops were untethered from graunchy dial up and replaced by ubiquitous wi-fi. Work outbound, sleep inbound. That was the edict for transatlantic flights. On short haul, the assumption was you worked both ways, or at least until the abundant free alcohol took effect.

So paralysis by fear of flying was as impractical as demanding your own office on the grounds that open plan triggered agoraphobia. I took a flying desensitisation course being offered free by the local newspaper in return for the right to plaster the rag with images of cowering passengers vomiting on the tarmac or being reluctantly hauled into the maw of a plane. 

The morning session was devoted to lectures from a flying instructor standing next to a crisply attired airline captain. 

‘How do planes actually fly,’ we asked? 

‘Because the air passing over the curved upper surface of the wing has to travel faster than the air traversing the flat, lower surface, thus creating a vacuum and producing lift.’ 

A simple, neat and convincing answer. Unfortunately, it’s wrong, or at least a gross over-simplification. (In the award-winning radio comedy, Cabin Pressure, there is an embarrassed silence when this theory is challenged innocently by the observation that planes can fly upside down.) 

After lunch, we were herded into the plane, a beefy Boeing 757. At the top of the steps, one victim, a mousy woman who had sat with a glazed expression at the back of the class, refused and tuned tail, unabashed by the ignominy matched only, to my mind, by making one’s way back down the ladder from the platform of a bungee jump and the main reason it’s not on my bucket list. Another got as far as her seat before fleeing through the still open door. The rest of us clipped in dutifully, well-spaced around the mainly empty plane, and listened to the reassuring commentary (‘hear that click, it’s the undercarriage retracting’) from the crisp captain flying us from Birmingham to Glasgow. 

It was early spring, and the air was as calm as the atmospheric equivalent of a millpond. My son had been born the previous week and it was without the blessing of his mother (whose only challenge on her ten-mile drive to work was the occasional traffic jam) that I was indulging in this trip. There was no turbulence, so that while others endured the entire trip remoulding their arm rests with whitened knuckles or eyes squeezed shut in an ecstasy of terror, I sat demurely at peace as we made our way across northern England, circled Glasgow airport and returned with a feather light landing to the Midlands.

The only value I derived from the event, other than avoiding several nappy changes, was the instructor’s encouragement to request a visit to the cockpit on future flights if we felt that would calm our nerves. On many occasions since then – we are talking 1990’s, oh, halcyon, innocent days! – I would signal to a passing flight attendant, reach up to them conspiratorially and make my request, deploying the open sesame phrase, nervous flier. Always, it was granted. The theory was that seeing confident, self-assured people crisply in charge of the plane would dissipate the anxiety. In my case, it was the boyish fascination with the switches, knobs, screens and lights, such as lads of the early twentieth century might have experienced on the footplate of a locomotive, which provided such a distraction that fear lost its grip.     

Late in my flying career, I was approached by a confidential flight attendant during a trip to Stockholm. 

‘Mr Thompson?’ he inquired. 

I froze. Why was I the passenger he had picked to inform that we had run out of fuel/a wing had dropped off/the pilot had had a heart attack and I had been selected to land the plane?

‘Mr Thompson, I have just had a message from the Executive Club. At the end of this flight, you will have flown half a million miles with British Airways.’ 

He looked as chuffed as if he had personally booked and paid for all my tickets. 

‘We would like to offer you a glass of champagne to mark the occasion.’ 

I nodded my acceptance. In traditional BA style, it was lukewarm.

Since ending my working life, I have had no need to fly and have smugly occupied the moral high ground, deprecating aviation for its contribution to global heating. A stance which has been annoyingly devalued by the forced grounding of everyone else by coronavirus. I see pictures of aircraft, tessellated nose to tail, in the Mojave desert, nicknamed the boneyard, and rejoice.

But Google and Apple, who know me better than I do myself, mine deep into my history to excavate secrets and release demons. Periodically, interspersed between videos demonstrating how to repair bicycle punctures and showcasing the latest innovations in electric cars, I am offered footage of the pilot’s eye view of a 747 departing JFK, or a carefully coiffed senior first officer tackling a cross-wind landing in Dublin. I hesitate only for a moment. I pour a glass of wine and lower the lights. Now I’m sitting at the pilot’s shoulder watching the runway unfold. A robotic voice announces V1: the point of no return. Finally, I am able to sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.

Dads

 Dads

 

Today is my father’s birthday. Now just five years shy of the age at which he died, I ponder our relationship. Introspection is a disease of retirement.

 

Viewed through the wide angle of distance, how rosy was the post-war settlement! “You never had it so good“, was Macmillan’s celebratory exhortation with its undertone of admonishment. Zoom in. An economy in overdrive, jobs for everyone, the dawn of the jet age with its promises of exploration and freedom. Look, there are the new towns, the new houses, the new cars. Tighten the focus again. Now we are looking into those ticky-tacky homes. Mums in floral pinafores proud of their new top loader, dads polishing the Morris in the garage, 2.4 children scenting the approach of the 1960s. How successfully economic prosperity papered over the cracks! Who could be unhappy with a roof over their head, a full belly and the safety net of the welfare state? Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t been invented and therapy was an indulgence for middle-class Americans. Giving your children a better life than you had was not an aspiration, it was an inevitability. What could possibly go wrong?

 

My grandfather, my father‘s father, was a Communist. At some point in the 1930s, he left his adopted home in the UK and returned to the Soviet Union, taking his wife and youngest son with him. His teenage middle son, my father, was left in the care of his older brother, just five years his senior. It was a prolonged separation. Not until nearly a decade later did my grandfather return to London with my father’s younger brother but missing my grandmother who had died of starvation in a collective farm.

 

Abandonment by his parents in pursuit of an ideology must alone have been tough. But during my grandfather’s absence, the Second World War happened. My father lived through the London Blitz and, as a firewatcher, would have observed scenes as harrowing as any on the front line. Nevertheless, with determination of a calibre I could never match, he put himself through school, college and university emerging from the tunnel of the 1940s into the prosperous post-war daylight where my future mother was waiting to meet him. All his moorings must have been loosened by the events of his first thirty years. How else could he have fallen in love with and married a non-Jew? A fatal mistake, as his divorced wife acknowledged half a century later, and one which eventually resulted in the severing of all ties with my extended family on both sides.

 

How facile it is to lay the fault for our shortcomings at our parents’ door. Even when it is justified, that is only, as Philip Larkin tells us, because ‘man hands on misery to man’. And that is the dividing line between accountability and blame.

 

As I complete the last mile of the Countess Wear walk, the canal placid in early morning sunshine, I try to summon sympathy for a man who achieved the adoration of his students and colleagues while bearing the burden of his past, but at a heavy price to his family.

Lockdown

Lockdown

It happens every year at Christmas. Shops lower their shutters, the streets go quiet, everyone is closeted indoors with their family. And this hiatus is repeated a few days later over New Year. So the first day or two of the Covid-19 lockdown didn’t feel strange, or more accurately, the only strange thing was that it didn’t feel strange. By the third or fourth day, the strangeness, or lack of it, had worn off and was replaced by a weary acceptance, at least for those of us suffering no immediate adverse impacts on either health or finance. The sharper the shock, the longer the implications take to sink in; dissenting voices are already murmuring of sleep walking into a police state.

Most weeks, my calendar is studded with events which provide some traction to my sense of purpose. But enforced use of the delete button has created empty space as forbidding as the fresh white page of a Monday morning. My grip on the value of living, ever tenuous since I stopped productive (and reproductive) activities, is less secure. The carefully curated catalogue of pastimes – voluntary, leisure, social - assembled to fill the chasm left by work has been dismembered with nice precision, cancellation email by cancellation email. Death by a thousand cuts. Only assiduous attention to my regime of running and walking by the river provides some diversion.

The normal dance executed when opposing pedestrians wish to give way to each other is replaced by a scrupulous veering to the edge of the path, with communication limited to a shy smile or a grunt of thanks. Even strolling along a perfectly straight path, one is obliged to adopt a zigzag trajectory to give an adequately wide berth to overtaking runners or cyclists and oncoming pedestrians. The friendliness of strangers, which so attracted me to Exeter, has been replaced by the tense wariness practised by passengers in London tubes, where any acknowledgment of others is perceived at best as a social solecism and at worst as an incipient threat.

Marauding families colonise the byways previously the preserve of walkers and birdwatchers. Surly fathers and harried mothers trail two point four children. The disconsolate teenagers, fermenting their sense of injustice, are sulkily submissive. Parents are visited by memories of pushing buggies around draughty playgrounds, counting the minutes until the sun goes over the yardarm. 

Friends meeting by chance during their ration of daily outdoor exercise face each other across yards of no man’s land as inviolable as if it were mined. The distance necessitates raised voices so their amplified conversations are audible to all passers-by and, with the addition of hand gestures for emphasis or elucidation, give the appearance of a play. Watching this street theatre from a bench where I was resting for a drink, I was reminded of a performance of Under Milk Wood featuring Cy Grant in which the characters bawled their lines to one another from the front doors of their homes placed around the edge of the stage. I was taken by my mother who invited the daughter of her best friend with whom she was trying to match me, a bloodless creature who was no more interested in me than I was in her. The outing was not a success. To this day, I find the conceit of Under Milk Wood repellent.

Last night there was no wind. After the tumult of recent storms, the silence was especially intense. Unlike the muting of ambient sounds by snow which is calming, this silence had an eerie quality. Sounds were not being muffled, they simply weren’t there. As I stood on the bridge at the quay surrounded by darkened windows, I could hear clearly the paddling of a single swan thirty feet beneath me. One of the riverside restaurants had left lights on in its empty riverside terrace, to create an illusion of cheery normality. Passing through their reflections, the swan shattered them.

© David Thompson 2020

Virus

Virus

The future of the world is normally only of concern to desiccated academics. The well-trailed environmental apocalypse to be visited on our grandchildren, if not our children, was occluded by the imperatives of consumption and aspiration, the engine of the economy. Now, in the absence of most immediate distractions, the shape of the future and floundering for a purpose to the present, is the legitimate preoccupation of us all.

Regime changing adventures, hubristically initiated for domestic political advantage and built on brittle ideological foundations, notoriously lack exit strategies. While this campaign still in its infancy, predictions about its resolution multiply. None is too gloomy, or too optimistic or too far-fetched to gain traction in some quarter.

This historical inflection point is marked by firsts. Exeter Cathedral is closed for the first time in three centuries; the pubs are closed for the first time in – well, who knows how long; ditto schools, shops, National Trust houses. Of the government’s edicts, the most curious relates to curtailing exercise. People have been told to limit themselves to getting off the couch just once a day and abjure places most conducive to outdoor pursuits, such as national parks and suburban playgrounds. In a nation not noted for its devotion to physical activity, with the obesity statistics to prove it, such a prohibition seems de trop.

As the satirists were trumped by politicians’ iniquities over Brexit last year, so is the left wing now discombobulated by the radical on-the-hoof policies of the most electorally secure and doctrinaire Tory government since Margaret Thatcher. Nationalising the railways, refusing to bail out airlines, meeting employees’ wage bills; it has not merely parked its tanks on Labour’s front lawn, it has rewilded the entire estate. Hell, at this rate, by installing thousands of new beds in privately owned conference centre and exhibition halls, including the Excel Centre (notorious for staging international arms fairs), Boris might even fulfil his election promise of creating forty new hospitals.

© David Thompson 2020

Rivers

Rivers

Few are the cities not sited adjacent to rivers. The benefits of proximity are many: drinking water, transport, power, access to trade, not to mention fish if you’re lucky.

‘Is this the river?’ friends would ask as we rode the Docklands Light Railway to my flat on the Isle of Dogs.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘these are the docks, or what’s left of them.’

‘Is this the river?’ they persist as we traverse a narrow stretch of water.

‘No, it’s the canal linking the docks to the river.’

The River Thames, when we reach it, is unmistakable. The confidence of its broad sweep dwarfs the manmade docks and canals. From the air, on the approach to London City Airport, the opposing promontories of the Isle of Dogs and the North Greenwich peninsular fit into the S-shaped bends of the river as neatly as teeth on meshing cogs.

Visitors to Exeter are equally bewildered when I take them for walks along the River Exe. What it lacks in majesty compared to London’s great river, it compensates with profusion. In places, there are four parallel waterways: the Exe itself, leats dug to power mills, the Exeter Ship Canal and, the most recent addition, the wide flood relief channel. Further downstream, they all succumb to the pull of the river. Having served its purpose, the leats slyly rejoin under the cover of brambles or discharge audaciously from concrete culverts; the flood relief channel empties into an accommodating bend; the canal is absorbed into the river at the estuary where the confluence can be viewed from the grounds of the Turf Hotel.

Unlike the Thames at Greenwich, the Exe is not tidal here, but the water levels in all four bodies fluctuate with the seasons. In the summer, the river’s roar over the weir subsides to a whisper. The flood relief channel, a river in its own right after a storm, is reduced to a meandering stream and bog-loving foliage erupts on its gently rising banks. Starved of supply, the trickling leat diminishes to stagnant pools separated by isthmuses and strewn with fallen branches. As the pools evaporate, a muddy skin pimpled with stones forms in the bed. Only the canal, its flow carefully regulated by locks and sluices, stays constant and reliably navigable to rowers practising for the annual regatta.

© David Thompson 2020

Trew's Weir

Trew's Weir

The first thing is to get the name right. John Trew was the Welsh engineer engaged to build the first short, shallow section of the Exeter Ship Canal, so the weir on the River Exe which bears his name merits an apostrophe. But these days pedants are held in as much contempt as experts.

The smooth muscle of water wrapped around the bone of the weir is scrambled into an eggy foam as it cascades into the channel beyond. Two days after a downpour, when rainfall harvested in Exmoor has traversed all of Devon, the river rises, disturbed sediment turns the water an opaque brown and the weir becomes invisible under a furious cloud of spray. It takes only a few weeks of dry weather for the weir to be transformed into a mere rocky outcrop abandoned of purpose. Moss is exposed on the desiccating surface and small boys tightrope the weir’s lip, arms flailing for balance. Downstream, scrappy islets emerge like memories of lost civilisations and are commandeered by nesting swans oblivious to the peril of flash floods. These seasonal fluctuations in flow would make a hydropower installation at Trew’s Weir, even were it permitted, a risky enterprise.  

A narrow footpath enclosed by railings on both sides passes the weir. On the nearside, they serve to prevent people falling into the lagoon. Chains looped through metal hooks just above the water level would be the only means of escape. The railing on the far side prevents trespassing on to a triangular promontory no larger than a Basingstoke back garden, which abuts the eastern end of the weir. A sign asserts that it is reserved for private fishing, although I have never seen anyone using it to catch their dinner. A local man believes he bought it from the Council when he acquired several unconnected riverside parcels with a set of allotments, but he confessed that he has never trawled the historical trail to establish ownership and no one is of a mind to challenge the matter. (Astonishingly, more than 10% of land in England and Wales is still not registered because there hasn’t been a transaction on that property since registration became compulsory in the 1980s.) The putative owner has given a nearby resident permission to maintain the land. Periodically, dressed in heavy duty wellies, vivid orange overalls and a welding visor, he unlocks the gate and strims the tussocky undergrowth. He has improved my view, so I should not deprecate his efforts.

© David Thompson 2020