Nunhead Cemetery

Four o' clock. The iron gates close at five and this is not the kind of place you want to spend the night in. My sister and I hurry up the gravel path, then stop suddenly to speak about our mother, taking it in turns to empty our hearts, spill our grief, hear the brown leaves crackle underfoot.

We walk up to the ruined church, without a priest or congregation, without stained glass or sermon. No hymn book. No bride. Only our two sad faces peering up into the light, past the crumbling pale stone, no longer seeking the holiness of perfection, instead loving the ruins of beauty, perfect in themselves.

And so we wander this way, wander that way, speaking in staccato through leafy alley ways, past grey tombs and mighty obelisks, under huge trees heavy with ivy, graves hidden in the bracken, overturned headstones, fallen angels with broken wings sliding, sliding into mud.

We stumble down a narrow dark tunnel of green, and there, in the squelch of mud, we speak our truth of grief and fear and losing, say things rarely spoken of life, except at times like these. Names and dates, old and young, men and women, loved and unloved, all pass through our unlit eyes.

To my right, an ancient tree is being lifted into the air by a cracked headstone which has subsided and moulded itself into its thick roots. My sister turns, spots a marble casket, its lid open some inches, sliding off. The blackness inside stares back at us like an unflinching eye.

We stagger out into daylight and a damp grassy glade filled with the graves of wives and mothers, plastic flowers in psychedelic colours in plastic pots dotting the horizon. And there, around the fresh churned soil of a newly dug grave, jump seven magpies, and a red fox, darting, moving.

I feel like we are intruders in this scene. The grass is all lit up, the trees are bowing. A strange current of silence is in the air. The grass is blowing. For this is their world, their language, of brightness and burial, tender woodland and no return.

The fox looks up and stares at us carefully, turns tail and leaves. The magpies scatter and disappear, and we are left alone once again in the singing daylight with only the trees, the dead and the ravens, and some distant echo.

We leave the gates of the cemetery. Back on the high street, I feel as though I am emerging from a murmured spell, a remarkable tune running through my head.

Next to the Angel Peace Statue at the point where Brighton turns into Hove, there was a huge crane towering over the seafront, looming tall next to Embassy Court. I wondered what it was for, with a metal grill box hanging from it, and I could just about make out the outline of two men. Suddenly a figure of a man jumped from the box and was dangling before my eyes attached by a white rope around his ankle.

I stood and watched as he was lowered back down and another man took his place in the metal grill box, and was lifted back high in the air.

Today the sea front is so alive with such sights, I feel almost airborne. Huge swathes of starlings line every inch of the West Pier, and seagulls float above me, immobile in the wind. Black silhouettes of men in wetsuits bob up and down in the waves around the West Pier, and occasionally, one struggles to his feet on a board momentarily before being swept under the foam and waves once again. In the distance, seven kites curve in the air, dragging more men and perhaps women above and across the surface of the choppy sea.

Even the clouds seem buoyant and adrift, turned orange by the fading sunlight, which casts a sheen over the sea like copper, which mixes with the turquoise of the five o clock sky and makes the rain on the pavement shine.

It feels good to take steps in such a swirl of brightness, like a lifting bird who does not mind if her feathers are ruffled or if it looks like there might be a storm over Shoreham harbour tonight.

Light, light, light. I pass the lawns I have passed so many times, the toes of my shoes turning darker with the wet from underfoot. I have a wind in my soul, clearing through cobwebs and the blackest dust, loosening the stiffened grey cogs of my machinery so that I can move again. I am surfing this moment, my hair, aflap with gulls and a single aeroplane trail. Air is billowing my dress and senses, the wind is sailing me home.

Hi, Here's Me Today

Tell Me I'm Not getting Old

I've just had the bus ride from hell. Teenagers with ghetto blasters under their blazers spewing out what sounded like a mutant hybrid of drum n' bass and the theme tune from TellyTubbies.

If I had my way, with people like this, as well as those with extraordinarily loud ringtones that play the latest Gabba track, or worse, some Rn'B catawalling from some talentless trollop, I would round them all up, stick them on an island, strap all their arms to their sides, and ring them all up at the same time so they'd all be deafened by the simultaneous shrieking of their combined ringtones, which they of course would never ever be able to answer. I would then employ someone to walk amidst them hurling screwed up bits of paper past their ears at various intervals.

I might write to my M.P. with my radical new idea. A fine use of taxpayers money I think.

Eileen Scott

The other week, I got into a fairly intense discussion with my hairdresser about euthanasia and the NHS ( he's quite an intense hairdresser). He's French, and he told me how, when his grandfather was seriously ill recently, he went to visit him in a French hospital, where the standards made British hospitals look frighteningly archaic. The standard of hygiene over there is exceptionally high, as is the nursing care. Apparently there is no such thing as M.R.S.A over there, the hospital superbug that is ravaging our British hospitals.

This story that I read in The Mail, though of course designed to throw a hefty punch at the Labour government, is not unusual. It seems like it could be a somewhat sensational horror story, perhaps a terrible one-off, a tragic mistake.

However, when my mother was in Chester Countess Hospital, at least five women in her ward of eight had contracted M.R.S.A, at least one of whom I know to have died. And they left my Mum in that same infected ward for two days, saying there was nowhere else to put her, and then, in the end, telling us that in fact it was, perversely, the safest place for her to be, because everywhere else they could have moved her to was in fact even more risky, with an even higher count of the superbug.

This story of Eileen Scott does not shock me, the elderly woman in question contracting and finally killed by two strains of a superbug from a non-life threatening complaint for which she was admitted into hospital. Further, she was left in her own excrement for days, regularly not fed because the nurses were too busy, and was only admitted to hospital the second time because of a shoulder fracture which she suffered when two nurses tried to move her.

I remember the shocking treatment my Mum got in the Chester Countess Hospital, how run off their feet the nurses were, how little thought and care was put into my mother's healthcare and comfort. It was diabolical. If we hadn't been going in every day, and then my sister continuing to go in every day after my other sister and I had left, to attend to Mum' basic needs, I shudder to think of the state she would have been left in. It was one of the worst aspects of Mum being so poorly, knowing how badly she was being looked after, how dangerous thew hospital was in terms of M.R.S.A., other superbugs and general misconduct (Mum's pneumonia was probably caused through a nurse accidently knocking out her drip).

And yet, both patients and their families at such a time are rarely in the position or state to be strongly challenging the hospital management, and even if they did, wouldn't be likely to get far through the red tape.

So the Government are launching a campaign of 'Dignity In care' for elderly patients in hospitals and in care homes. If the Government want to implement 'dignity in care', I think perhaps not forcing sick elderly patients to sell their own homes in order to fund time in care homes might be a start.

My mother was lucky, she was deemed part of a process of 'continuing care' from the hospital, and her Nursing Home was funded. But it was only by the skin of our teeth that we got that, and I know how horrendous it would have been to see my mother's home, our home, forced to be sold, and my sister made homeless because of it, all to keep my Mum in a state which the Government and law deems 'living'. Thousands of other elderly patients are forced every day into such a situation.

There is very little respect or understanding of the elderly in our culture today, as I think there is little understanding of the deeper issues around what it means and what it takes to give dignity and choice to the 'living'. Perhaps as well as throwing a bit of money at the NHS and care home funding, the Government would do well to invest in more deep medical, and yes, I'd say spiritual or psychological investigation into what it means to be alive as opposed to just medically 'living', how it feels to be suffering from disease or illness, or to be facing death, how it feels actually being elderly. From what I have seen, the elderly, especially the sick or disabled, are largely patronised or forgotten, pushed away out of sight, often their choices and dignity taken away from them.

Ours is a superficial understanding of what it means to age, and what it means to get sick, what it means to live and what it means to die. As usual it is not just money that continuing health care for old people needs, but education, awareness, and yes, humanity. We will all be there one day, if we make it. Let's hope this new campaign shows some of that, but I won't hold my breath.

Snowdon

I'm just back from a week in North Wales to see my Mum and sister, and to explore my native country.

I began the journey at my Mum's house, staying with my sister. We visited Mum in the special nursing home the next day, the first time I had seen her there since she got transferred there from hospital last week. I thought I'd be ok with it, thought somehow that her being settled somewhere would make it easier to comprehend her situation, but it didn't. I spent the first afternoon with a dazed head that wouldn't quite attach back to my body, as I walked in and out of her bedroom, nauseous and lost.

The second visit the following day was worse somehow, my Mum has a chest infection again, which is never easy to see her in such physical distress. In the end I had to walk outside in the cold Autumn air with my sister, and rail at the whole situation. It all just felt sick, cruel that Mum is being put through all this struggle in the name of living, when it seems to me that her time has come. I have had it said to me that maybe her time hasn't quite come, maybe she is hanging on for something that we cannot comprehend. Maybe. But without two drips feeding and medicating her, she would not be here right now - it is only thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, and a philosophy that says we must have life, no matter the cost, that she hangs on.

It brings a lot up for me, seeing my Mum like this, in terms of issues such as euthanasia and a human being's free will. It seems we cannot even determine our own death anymore, we can't die with dignity or self-determination, instead we must ebb our days out in state funded nursing homes. I know it is a complex subject, but somewhere it just seems wrong, wrong to subject a person to this. I guess it is perhaps only when it happens to someone you love that you realise what an important and painful subject euthanasia is.

I guess death itself is such a complex thing. Determining at what point someone is still deemed alive or capable of life or having any quality of life is a difficult thing to assess. People don't want to be responsible for making that choice of potentially ending lives that could have maybe been lived longer or even saved. But the price is that people are forced to live on, and it seems in this culture, no one realises that that is often worse thing than dying, for the person, for their family.

As I was sitting outside the nursing home with my sister, I became aware just how kind and strong my sister was. She understood all my anger, my fear, my fear, my panic, my loss. But every day that I was unable to come and see Mum because I live so far away in Brighton, she was there, day after day, going to see her, wiping her mouth and brushing her hair, holding her hand and playing her the radio. In the face of all this seemingly impossible and boundless suffering, she told me in her own way, that there were still little acts of love she could give to our Mum, there was still dignity and humanity she could bring to the situation, and that is what she would do, to the end.

After talking with my sister outside on the front bench, I felt renewed courage, and wasn't afraid or angry anymore. No time for that, these moments are too precious. I returned to my mother's room, somewhere more at peace. It is no surprise that we resist the truth, the awful truth of sickness and dying, because it just hurts so much. The pain of having to let go, in a situation over which, ultimately, I have no control, is hard. But when I can stop resisting, stop struggling, somewhere there are moments of peace, things are just as they are, and I am back again, loving, no longer afraid.

Wednesday night, Bob arrives, on a late train, that was late. We all go to meet him at the station. Thursday is the day he and I take the train to Snowdonia to climb the biggest mountain in Wales.

Thursday

12.30pm, at Shotton Station waiting for the train to Llandudno. We have just arrived from the tiny train station at my village, Hawarden.

My mother was raised in Shotton, my grandparents lived here all their lives, as well as my Great uncles and aunties and other relatives. This tiny steelworks town, grey and rainy, is infused with memories.

I used to love coming here as a child. Only a few miles from my Hawarden home, I would come to stay with Grandma at weekends. We would walk up the high street, she and I, and I would stare at my reflection in the shiny Tesco's wall, when I was younger, holding her hand, and when I was older, trailing behind her playing with my hair, pretending I was cool. We would go to the pick n' mix section at Woolworths and I would always get strawberry creams and a small packet of After Eights for 20p. Sometimes she would pop a toffee from the pick n mix into her mouth, giving me a naughty knowing smile as we walked up and down the aisle.

If she didn't have a pan of scouse waiting for us in the pressure cooker when we got in, or braising steak with thick gravy, we would get fish and chips from the chippy at the end of Shotton high street, with Angel Delight for pudding if I was lucky. Apart from my Grandma's jam turnovers, Angel Delight had to be my favourite ever pudding, especially when it was served in her cut glass bowls and kept in the fridge overnight. I could clean my bowl in seconds, and would lick the last streaks of pink mousse off the spoon like it was precious gold dust.

When Fridays at school were still half days, my Mum would drive me and a friend to Shotton, to the 'icey'. There I would watch packets of crisps drop from metal pincers in the crisp machine, slurp my Slush Puppie that turned my lips blue, eat Monster Munch and whirl around the ice rink to the sound of echoing music. I cherished those Friday afternoons, the smell of ice and children and the way it felt when I had finally laced my ice skates up, and was padding across the black rubber flooring to the entrance of the freezing rink.

It's raining. It's been raining on and off for days now. It has gone straight from Summer to the heart of a British Winter in four days, it feels. We are on the train to Blaenau Ffestiniog now, from there, we will catch the steam train and chug our way deeper into the heart of North Wales. A young girl on the train is teasing her mother in Welsh. I don't know what she is saying.

Everything is so cheap here in Wales, so unpretentious. It makes me realise what a blag so much of Brighton is. Yesterday, in Mold, I bought a pair of boots for £3.50, and shoes for a pound! Bone china cups for two pounds each.

My sister and I ate lunch in the kind of café I used to come to a lot when I was a teenager, with my first boyfriend. The entire place was heaving with fat old ladies with chronic health problems sitting on orange plastic chairs, smoking fags at the tables. We got a proper cup of tea, and a 'milky coffee', (instant coffee and hot milk kept warm in a huge pot on top of a stove.) It tasted fantastic. The owners were collecting money for one of their washer uppers, who has recently found out they have cancer. A fat lady in a wheelchair commiserated:

"I was in hospital recently, and they cut the wrong vein. Terrible it was. They don't care, you know, you're just a number to them. But then, as I was lying there, I had to think, when I was younger I was a matron in hospital, and I'd go and see all those men who had lost their arms and legs who were in the Paraplegic Ward, all there, back from the army, and I'd think 'there's always someone worse off than you.' Yes, there's always someone worse off than you. Anyway, I'd better be going, I'm on a hunt for Shredded Wheat, reduced sugar.."

With that, her son span her out of the café in her wheelchair, a somnambulistic look across his face. Somehow I feel like there is a woman like this in every cafe or bar across the Western world, telling such a tale, with a cigarette in her hand, and glasses, dyed hair and a son with an impenetrable sadness in his soul.

Wales, I always feel so much more at home here, and always such an alien.

The land is rising up. From the coast train past Rhyl and Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay, now we are deep into country where the hills are starting to rise, fir trees pointing upwards from their peaks. The grass is verdant, almost luminous in the rain. Slate walls, slate paving, slate rooves under the cloudy slate coloured sky. The Welsh landscape. Moving, primal. It's time to get my raincoat out.

So we did a trial run of the mountain in the rain on Friday, with the intention of just ambling up the Watkin Path to take in waterfalls and woodland and general picturesque beauty. In fact we ended up climbing two thirds of the way up Snowdon, so hard it was to turn back from the ominous magic of those blackening peaks that we gradually edged up towards.

Saturday, we were out of the house by half past eight, on the bus for nine, and at the foot of Snowdon before ten. A quick coffee and a fried egg butty for me and we were on our way.

My legs aren't used to this. This becomes clear after about five minutes. This is going to be no easy climb. But the mountainside increasingly drops away beneath us, and we climb, slowly, steadily, towards the distant cloudy peak. Fellow climbers surround us at every pass, for it is Saturday, and a clear fresh morning.

We climb for a couple of hours, aiming for the point where the path splits into the one to Snowdon and the one up to Crib Gogh, with its dangerously narrow snaking ridge. As we turn the corner of the path, the mountainside gives way to reveal huge green lakes, sunlight streaming over the waters. And we are standing on a giant halo, a crystal strewn mammoth of a rock. In front and behind us our fellow climbers, in all shape and forms, the same as me, pant their way forward, increasingly red faced, exhausted.

As we get higher and higher, I realise why I am doing this. From gentle, inspiring rolling green beauty, the mountain changes to a denser, darker presence which strikes me speechless and unnerved. Immense and watchful, Snowdon is power, and we are merely crawling across its vast body like tiny insect babies. At the same time, its power fills me up, imbibes me with a determination and desire to reach its top.

The further and further up that we go I realise, tears down my face, that this place can hold all the strongest stuff of life, love, loss and suffering, it feels like it can hold the whole of existence itself. And as I walk and I watch the grey and black and brown of Snowdon approaching, I can feel my mother, she is here too, she is in the mountain, she is the mountain, and this climb I am doing is life itself, is death, is ending and beginning, endurance, hope, struggle, surrender. With every step my body comes alive, despite the strain and soreness, despite the strong desire to rest. My legs haven't felt this way since I was a child, probably since I used to go walking in Wepre Woods with Mum. For miles on end we would go, through trees and over brooks, up steep banks and over styals, through mud and ponds and endless fields. And here I am, halfway up a mountain, and I am eleven years old again.

After three and a half, maybe four hours, we finally reach the top ridge and make the final walk to the summit. We are above the clouds now, and it quickly becomes freezing. We pile on extra layers hurriedly, wish we had a flask of tea or something stronger. Below us, an endless stream of climbers makes their own journey up to this place, but I can no longer see them. I can see nothing from the top, only cloud, but it doesn't matter, I'm here, I made it, and somehow, everything makes sense.

Darkness When The First Light Was Born

Homage to the world. Homage to the raging fires that eat it alive. Homage to tomorrow. Homage to the day when none of us will wake up. Homage to ships and planes. Homage to speeding clouds. Homage to the stripe on the zebra's back. Homage to all fallen prey. Homage to the predatory. Homage to light. Homage to the baby's skull. Homage to machinery. Homage to apparatus. Homage to buildings and to streetlights. Homage to my sisters. Homage to bad friends. Homage to mistakes. Homage to silent birds. Homage to snow.

Homage to stereos. Homage to the yellow stain on my mother's nightdress. Homage to kissing. Homage to fingers. Homage to harrowed eyes. Homage to brilliance. Homage to stupidity. Homage to sex. Homage to abstinence. Homage to a blue sky. Homage to apples, unripened fruit. Homage to leprosy of the soul. Homage to worshippers. Homage to the uncontrollably vain. Homage to TV. Homage to the hermitage on a hill. Homage to the ringtones of teenage children. Homage to their fathers.

Homage to the dying. Homage to every tear wept at their bedside. Homage to my mother. Homage to my father and his ebbing mind. Homage to animals and to beasties. Homage to the night. Homage to the frail, the ugly. Homage to superstars. Homage to the brave. Homage to power stations. Homage to sadists. Homage to euthanasia. Homage to the suicidal. Homage to insects. Homage to bats, eaten alive by beetles. Homage to caverns. Homage to church steeples.

Homage to the beatific. Homage to the horrific. Homage to the damaged and needy. Homage to air. Homage to sunlight. Homage to wrinkles. Homage to breath. Homage to limbs. Homage to eyesight. Homage to decay. Homage to the Atlantic Ocean. Homage to gravestones. Homage to small Northern towns. Homage to nonsense. Homage to the written word. Homage to mystics. Homage to tenderness. Homage to the cry of the wind. Homage to bad smells. Homage to the face in the mirror. Homage to you. Homage to me. Homage to waving goodbye. Homage to the end.

Daniel Johnston on 'The Cutting Edge'

fuck, bless.