Tag Archives: fiction

Virus

The shapes on the textbook pages look alien, technological – as if they’re custom-designed docking stations intended to board my human cells. Spiky and staccato. The smell of freshly printed knowledge sheens from the paper, engendering a fog of half-formed understanding.

I can’t feel each individual cell fighting back – instead, a generalised malaise. My head aches in a non-specific way, and the throat begins to feel raw and dry. After a few days, my body spasms painfully with gargling, chesty coughs. The clear phlegm is essentially tasteless as unpleasantly spat out into the toilet bowl.

Now is the time to retreat into mounded duvets and escapist fantasy tales – to accept depression and feelings of hopelessness and overwhelm. Perhaps I can sweat it out in a few days of total rest.

I spend a whole day watching the contorted, popularised fantasies of Once Upon a Time.

Natural History Museum at Tring

I

There’s glass between us, and sometimes I must squint past the reflections to see you. But I feel a softly increasing sense of wonder, sadness, bewilderment as I encounter each of seemingly thousands of British birds. Resident. Seasonal migrant. Vagrant. I imagine your calls and the rustlings, flutterings, hissings of your movement. A vast community that co-exists with mine, doubtless exceeds mine, and which somehow I’m daily almost oblivious of. What societies and histories and great sadnesses are part of each of your worlds?

Here’s the Great Northern, oddly chosen star of the eponymous novel. Perhaps Ransome met with you here.

I move on to the photography exhibition and the scent of blood and snow, the red fox with hunted arctic fox dangling from its jaws.

II

Imagining the squelch of mud and the rattling wheels of the zebra-drawn carriage. The odours of peculiar and exotic poos from around the world, concentrated in an English park. The odd spectacle of an elegantly dressed gentleman attempting to ride a giant tortoise.

In the dingy cafe, the what’s-that-called, the chocolate “biscuit” that’s full of cherries and candied peel and raisins, chews sweetly. I have to rip off morsels with my teeth, almost twisting my neck to achieve it – perhaps like an animal gnawing at its prey. The smell of coffee signals a welcome boost to a hungover morning.

Indoors is full of mundane shuffles of museum-goers visiting each exhibit, and fragmentary conversations as adult excessively interprets for child.

I look through the glass into a bewildering, awe-inspiring multitude of British birds, and a quiet disquiet, a gentle sadness, a long sigh, begin to be felt. How is it possible to have lived on these islands so long, without any real meeting, knowledge, appreciation?

Clock

The Peebles church bells sound every quarter hour:

ding dong ding dong (x4)

Then, on Sunday mornings, pealing and hymns and cascading notes to exhort the faithful out of bed and to church.

Depending on weather and wind, could sometimes hear it from home. Otherwise, faintly coming into awareness as we cycled the leaf-slippery, unbalanced lanes into town to join grandparents in worship followed by Sunday lunch and Sherlock Holmes.

The “golden” carriage clock on their mantlepiece, looking oddly constrained and refined compared to the rustic hand/home-crafted artefacts of home. But then, I’m not sure they were entirely comfortable in that small, modern space, either.

The taste of oven-roasted red and yellow peppers, crunchy roast chicken, and blackberry fool, intense in colour and flavour, swirled with not-quite-curdling double cream.

The smells from the kitchen where Elizabeth worked while William read to us from aged volume of Conan Doyle.

Sometimes, the dessert was burning hot “treacle” tart, and William would tell his “Stone cold again, sir – you really must do something about that cook!” story – or just the catch-phrase, with an endearing air of amusement.

The song “I hear the ticking of the clock” by Heart – that affected me so much in my teens – what was it… “How do I get you alone?” – Nick said he couldn’t quite see why I didn’t just talk to her…

Pot of tea

It dribbles at the spout, and that so offends me! Surely a carefully sharp edge could cut the flow crisply.

Steam drifts up from the cup, fine china not sucking away the heat prematurely, amber, golden, delicate tea looking beautiful, with one or two leaves swelling succulently in the bottom of the cup.

The china clinks and chinks with a satisfyingly stereotypically elegant set of associations. Miss Elizabeth Bennett.

The taste of butter and tannin. In the Himalaya, there truly is butter in the tea, but here it’s more of a long, almost chewable feeling on the tongue, yet with not a yak in sight.

The smell of tea leaves in a tin. The special teas I used to love, like Rose Pekoe – prising off the lid with the handle of a teaspoon, shaking the big black leaves against the ornate tin, and breathing in treacly dark, smokey smells.

The sense of repose and relaxation that a well set up tea scenario can offer – images of relaxed seating out on lavender-scented terraces, or cosy around wood stove on a crisp winter afternoon, fingerless knits clasped around an honest, steaming mug.

Sinking deeply into an armchair by the fire, legs folded under me.