A Funeral for my Mother

Sally Case

On Thursday 16 July 2015, we held a funeral for my mother at Bramcote Crematorium, Nottingham. We were given the 45 minute slot from 10:30, which allowed us just over half an hour to do what we needed. The funeral direction was respectful and dignified. There were flowers. A small congregation assembled. I led the cortege into the chapel, some piano music from Einaudi being played over the public address system.
The coffin containing my mother's remains was placed on the catafalque, along with a tasteful floral tribute. This was the closest I had been to my mother in over thirty years. I gave an oration in place of a eulogy. My brother said a few words. All too soon my brother signalled the closing of the catafalque curtains, and we processed out of the chapel to my choice of In Paradisum from Fauré's Requiem. We greeted and thanked the mourners, and invited them to join us at a local public house, although only two did. It was over. The life of a person was packaged and dispatched in 45 minutes.

What follows here is the oration I delivered, but with the addition of music, photographs and text [in red] of elements that would have made the funeral much richer, albeit a good deal longer. A simple funeral programme, illustrated with the photograph above, gave some of the readings below.

------

[Einaudi piano music: Le Onde]

[Cortege enters chapel]

My name is Peter Hughes. I am one of Sally’s two sons. My brother, Carl, is also with us. I regret that Sally’s two daughters, Lisa and Rachel, are unable to be here in person. [I am grateful] to my two sisters, Lisa and Rachel, and to my brother, Carl, for helping me to construct the following account of the first 45 years of Sally’s life, [and for helping me to piece together something of the ensuing thirty years.]

I should like to begin by thanking you for coming here today. The purpose of our gathering is to pay our last respects to the person most of you will know as Sally Case, to say our good-byes, and to remember her life.

This is a time of transition, certainly for those us who knew Sally, and, depending on your beliefs, for Sally herself. Some of our tasks are to accept the reality of Sally’s death; to acknowledge our feelings about Sally, and the fact that she is no longer with us; to make appropriate adjustments to our lives in the light of her death; and to find ways to incorporate our memories of Sally into our ongoing life. Whilst the intention of this address is to help us all today with the latter of these tasks, trying to make sense of her life, I have little doubt that I shall be engaged on some of the tasks for the rest of my life.

Although the Sally I knew believed in ghosts and disembodied spirits, she was neither a formally- nor a piously-religious person, nor were most of the people in her life, so a religious funeral would seem quite out of place. It is not the place of this short funeral to challenge your spiritual beliefs. If you believe that something of a person survives their death, then Sally might have agreed with you. If you believe in past-lives, I doubt that Sally would have disagreed. I think that she might even have flirted with ideas of re-incarnation, but I am not sure. Whatever your beliefs, they mean something to you, so hold onto them. For what it is worth, I am an existentialist by disposition, a Quaker by convincement, and a lifelong atheist.

The structure of this funeral service will be simple. I have prepared an address that I shall read out. After which there will be a short period of silence for quiet reflection, or prayer, if that is your thing. My brother Carl has a few things he wishes to say. After a further brief period of silent reflection, we shall leave the chapel. It is our intention to meet at the Admiral Rodney public house after the service where it might be nice to spend a little while talking with you in a more convivial atmosphere.

Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 1 to 8:

To everything there is a season,
    a time for every purpose under heaven:

2     a time to be born, and a time to die;
    a time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted;
3     a time to kill, and a time to heal;
    a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4     a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
    a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5     a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones;
    a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6     a time to gain, and a time to lose;
    a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7     a time to tear, and a time to sew;
    a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8     a time to love, and a time to hate;
    a time of war, and a time of peace.

Let us begin by spending a few minutes in silence, reflecting on the purposes and meanings we give to our life and to the lives of others around us; and also to our memories of Sally.

[Five minutes of silence]

Sally Cooper: 1939-2015

Sally was born on 8 February 1939, the only child of Harold Hawkes-Cooper and Dora Bilton. Her parents were never married to each other. Her father, Harold, had never formally divorced from a previous marriage from which he had a son and a daughter, although by the time Sally was on the way, Harold’s son, Dennis,  had emigrated to Australia, and his daughter, Amber, had been adopted. It was only later in her life that Sally chose to mention that she had a half-sister whom she had never known. Harold had led quite a colourful life which included a failed attempt at relocating to the USA when he was 21, owning a plant nursery in Sussex, a plant-hunting expedition to Malaysia, a failed attempt to relocate to Argentina, and working as a keeper at London Zoo. He was declared bankrupt at least once. Other Cooper Victorian forebears were stockbrokers and vicars, and one married the daughter of a Maori chief.

Despite her parents not being married to each other, Sally’s surname was recorded as Cooper on her birth certificate. She had no middle name, although I remember Sally occasionally telling people, with some humour, that a dental practice she attended insisted on Sally having a middle initial B. When she married my father, John, she gave her maiden name as Bilton. The Bilton family history was steeped in stolid Methodism with many of Dora’s direct family and ancestors being ministers. Dora had struck out from home in the 1920s and worked as private secretary to Walter Ayles, a Labour MP for Bristol North.

from Pinkle Purr by A.A. Milne

Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A little black nothing of feet and fur;
And by-and-by, when his eyes came through,
He saw his mother, the big Tattoo.
And all that he learned he learned from her.
'I'll ask my mother,' says Pinkle Purr.

Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr,
A ridiculous kitten with silky fur.
And little black Pinkle grew and grew
Till he got as big as the big Tattoo.
And all that he did he did with her.
'Two friends together,' says Pinkle Purr.

War having been declared against Germany little more than six months after her birth, Sally entered the world in turbulent and uncertain times. It could be said that she lived her entire life as though needing the drama and chiaroscuro of those first embattled years. Sally was born in the bustling Sussex seaside town of Hove. The family soon moved away to the safety and loneliness of Anglesey. Sally’s parents worked ‘in service’ to Lord Boston, Dora working in the house, Harold as a gardener, chauffeur and master of the hounds. It may have been here that Sally acquired an early familiarity with garden plants that stayed with her throughout her life. However, it may also have been the experience of her parents working ‘in service’ that engendered a tension within Sally. Both her parents were from respectable middle-class families, and on her father’s side, albeit a long time in the past, there had been fabulous wealth. Just as the humble Tess Durbeyfield was seduced by the noble background of her D’Urberville forebears, Sally was never content to see herself as the daughter of impoverished parents working ‘below stairs’, and derived much satisfaction from associating with wealthy, high status people, yet paradoxically she also found middle-class values, such as deferred gratification and the importance of education, difficult to accept.

After the Second World War the family moved back to London. Tragedy must have loomed increasingly darkly for several years as her father increasingly manifested the symptoms of Parkinsonism. He died when Sally was only 14 years old, a loss she never forgot, and perhaps from which she never fully recovered. However, her middle teenage years were also heady times, for they coincided with the cultural emergence of the teenager. Sally revelled in the popular music of the 1950s, including rock-and-roll, and the songs of Frank Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. She worked as an usherette in a cinema and fell in love with the movies, especially musicals, watching High Society scores of times. I remember that she liked the song Moon River, sung by Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

[Moon River, Audrey Hepburn]

She also associated with a motor-cycle gang in north London, and later told stories about how she would roar off on the back of a bike at great speed into the night. Sometime in 1956, a Jewish friend, David Bernard, introduced Sally to a friend of his girlfriend, Marion. David and Marion later married. The friend-of-a-friend was John Hughes.

[Peggy Sue, Buddy Holly]

John had recently been discharged from National Service in the Royal Marines. He had been stationed in Cyprus where a terrorist group were fighting for independence. To Sally, this sounded excitingly masculine. However, John was not a tearaway: he was steady and thoughtful. Like Sally, he came from a family whose forebears had seen better times. Like Sally, John’s parents were not married to each other. Like Sally, John no longer had a father, although John’s father was still alive, just in another relationship that excluded John. I was the inevitable result of the too-swift romance, and was born the following year, Sally a mere 18 years of age. However, unlike their respective parents, John and Sally decided to marry, in a London registry office.

They found themselves a bedsit (a studio apartment as it would now be called) in Palmer’s Green, north London. To accompany the bawling infant they acquired a small dog. I do not know if Sally had lived with pets until that point, but subsequently she rarely lived without a dog, or sometimes a cat. Indeed, her rescue dog, Anna, survives her now.

John Hughes on his wedding day

At the same time that John Osborne was enjoying Broadway success with Look Back in Anger, a play that places angry young people in dingy flats in post-war Britain, it is hard to imagine that John and Sally were especially contented with the stark realities of their new life. Within a few months, my brother Carl was on the way, and John and Sally moved back into John’s mother’s house in Dollis Hill, Willesden, north west London. This move caused considerable rancour between John and his brother, Mike, precipitating what would become a family rift that healed only on John’s death in 1992.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dollis Hill was a pleasant, prosperous and highly-desirable London suburb. However, like John and Sally’s forebears, it had declined in status, and had become cheap enough for poor Irish immigrant families to make their home, along with people who had sailed into Britain on the Windrush. I remember Sally’s friend, Renate, a German woman living alone in a bedsit just up the road: only 15 years after the end of the Second World War, German people were still commonly viewed with suspicion. Sally would occasionally come out with Yiddish (German Jewish) phrases, and make lokshen pudding, a simple, traditional Yiddish dairy noodle pudding. Sally, Carl and I would also spend time round at the Bernard’s house. In other words, Sally was comfortable mixing with people of various cultures and nationalities. I should also add that a man called Henry, a friend of my father, would come round to the house sometimes, or we would visit him. I now recognise that Henry was gay, an orientation that troubled neither of my parents, years before being gay was decriminalised.

[Fly Me To The Moon, Frank Sinatra]

It can’t have been easy for Sally living in the same house as her mother-in-law. Moreover, John, who attended evening classes to improve his education so that he could get a better job, proved to be too steady for Sally, too reliable, too unexciting. So in 1962, Sally left us and went to live with another man, and then at the end of the summer decided to return. I still remember the reconciliation meeting because it was the first occasion on which I was permitted to taste the fizzy drink Seven Up, such are the memories of children.

John was a man of principle and conviction, and lost his job more than once in those early years, so we never had much money. I think that the family was seriously poor. For example, it was not until 1966 that we first had a television, and only at the end of the 1960s that a telephone was installed. On Sundays we would often visit Sally’s mother, Dora, and her partner Maurice, who now lived in Aylesbury where Dora was the daily cleaner at the family home of the Weatherheads, a well-to-do family who owned the famous bookshop in the town. Dora also played the piano for a children’s ballet class. Sally never found it easy to get on with her mother. On a lighter note, John and Sally would occasionally take my brother and me on a picnic to Chorleywood Common, or to Kew Gardens, in Richmond, Surrey. Mostly, however, Sally would simply take us for a walk in nearby Gladstone Park. Occasionally we would visit an art gallery or museum together, and Sally retained a lifelong interest in representational painting, her final house being lavishly adorned with paintings, prints and photographs.

[Habanera, from Bizet's Carmen]

It must have been very difficult for Sally to make ends meet on so little money, for not only was she still young, but during the time that I knew her, budgeting never emerged as one of her strong points. John and Sally had many rows, mostly about the lack of money, and these rows continued throughout their marriage.  In London, Sally did part-time shop work, to which she returned a few years later. By the 1970s she had worked as a cook in a school, which still makes me shudder because her cooking skills were often rudimentary, and as an office cleaner, a school cleaner, a ‘daily’ home cleaner (like her mother), and a private gardener. The only job about which she ever talked with real affection was having worked as an usherette.

Sally and John's house in Dunstable

Sally and John were given a new start in 1964 when John finally landed a half-decent job in Luton, north of London. Accompanied by the surviving pet cat of two, the four of us relocated to [a rented semi-detached house in] nearby Dunstable, Bedfordshire. Sally bought a pedigree Irish setter she named Kerry, and a third child was decided upon. Kerry was delightful, but highly excitable, untrained and as poorly behaved as all the subsequent pet dogs, including border collies, a basset hound, a Pyrenean -cross and a black labrador. Sally soon struck up a friendship with a neighbour, Mary Chapman, and the two remained in periodic contact for the rest of Sally’s life. Sally also took to visiting a friend of her mother, called Tess Vevers. Tess was the wife of Geoffrey Vevers, a significant London socialist, long-time Superintendent at London Zoo, the person who set up Whipsnade Zoo, not far from Dunstable, mentor to Gerald Durrell, and erstwhile colleague of Sally’s father. Tess and Geoffrey lived in a house they built in the zoo, muntjac deer nibbling the flower beds and wallabies on the lawn. Sally had previously taken Carl and me to Regent’s Park Zoo in London, and she took us all to Chester Zoo on many occasions. I think that Sally may have been attracted to the romance of wild beasts collected from foreign parts. Sadly, John’s job did not last, and we were soon on the move again. Just before we left Dunstable, Lisa, Sally’s first daughter, was born.

After a brief but uncomfortable interlude back at John’s mother’s house, the five of us, plus cat and dog, moved to Chester, Cheshire. John had secured a job in a desolate industrial nightmare called Widnes , then Lancashire, now Cheshire. However, for the first time, certainly since her father’s death, perhaps in her entire life, Sally was living in a house in which she was not a tenant. Moreover, although small, it was detached and had gardens at both front and back. Sally considered that, at last, she was moving up in the world. Although not a natural gardener, she took an interest in growing flowers, and had a particular fondness for gladioli and Michaelmas daisies. With considerable labouring support from her family, the two gardens gradually took shape. Sally soon showed a preference for flower arranging over maintaining a large garden, but I was interested to see that, in her final house, she had turned a dingy back yard into a delightful green oasis.

Sally and John's house in Chester

Chester is a provincial town, where things tend to remain the same. Sally was not a provincial person, content with her lot, enjoying quiet relationships. She preferred intense relationships, and racier, cosmopolitan city life. No doubt feeling constrained, at the beginning of the 1970s Sally decided to learn to drive a car. Although petrol was then very much cheaper in real terms than it is now, the cost of buying and running a car was not really an affordable option, but as she had a little income from her part-time jobs Sally felt determined. Sally was not a natural driver, but she persevered. Once she had passed her driving test, Sally was determined to get out and explore North Wales, and she often took her four children and pet dog, but rarely John, to places such as Moel Famau. She also loved visiting formal gardens, such as those belonging to stately homes. Over the years, although forever constrained by poor personal finances, Sally’s taste for adventure included trips to the Netherlands, France, Portugal, and in 2011 on an Atlantic Coast cruise and in 2014 on a Nordic cruise.

Sally (right) with a friend on board a cruise ship

Sally on board a cruise ship

Ithaka by Constantine Kavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind -
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

On relocating to Chester, Sally not only had her hands full with two young sons and a baby daughter, but she was also completely removed her from any possibility of support by her mother, mother-in-law or friends, all of whom lived in or not far from London. Not having any siblings, nor experienced many childhood friends, Sally was a long way out of her depth as a mother. As a consequence, I had already manifested some quite troubled behaviour that ought to have rung alarm bells. This dislocation of Sally’s support had several serious consequences for her. Wisely, she started to grow a new support network, first through the Young Wives group of the local Anglican parish church (although her religious faith, such as it was, was very far from conventional), and subsequently through parents’ groups at the schools attended by me and my siblings. This is how she came to meet Margaret Townsend, who became a regular ‘listening ear’, a role taken over and continued by Margaret’s husband, Geoffrey, when Margaret died some years ago; and Joan Flood, with whom Sally also remained in contact. Second, Sally was prescribed tranquilisers that she continued to take for many years. Third, to add to her near-lifelong addiction to nicotine, Sally began drinking spirits more regularly and more heavily. Fourth, in 1968 she attempted to revive a past romantic relationship in north London, a choice that created additional tension with John. Fifth, Sally made several serious attempts to end her life. Clearly, the picture I am painting is of a troubled and unhappy woman. I am unclear why her unhappiness was not medically diagnosed as a condition that required a good deal more attention.

The arrival of my second sister, Rachel, in 1971, was unexpected, and although a joy to us all, placed the family finances under additional strain. John took a second, evening job, in a bar, distancing him further from the family. Sally also expressed considerable discomfort about the top-up fees being paid to educate three of her children in semi-independent schools. Things went from bad to worse when John was made redundant in 1975. Sally’s family life began to fragment.

Sally and John's house in St. Albans

As before, when things were bad, a relocation and new start were proposed, this time back in south east England. John managed to secure a job in Palmer’s Green, and together John and Sally bought a house in St. Albans, Hertfordshire in 1976. However, this was to be their last house together, and by 1979 they were divorced. Sally was already in another relationship when she bought a house in Garston, a suburb of Watford, Hertfordshire the following year. Rod Case was an ambulance driver, not a pen-pusher, and a hard drinker. His fluctuations in mood and temper matched those of Sally. For reasons that I do not understand she respected his aggression and occasional violence. They [relocated to Nottinghamshire in the 1980s, and] married in 1995, and Sally remained with Rod until his death in 2006.

Sally and Rod Case on their wedding day

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tension within Sally was always present: feeling pulled between a need for drama in her relationships against the need for stability. When life became too ‘dramatic’ with Rod, Sally would seek solace with her friend Collin Dennison who was a much quieter person, and of whom, I am informed, Sally was extremely fond for 35 years. Collin sadly died at the start of June this year, an event that may have propelled Sally even further into drowning herself in bottles of vodka, an assault with which her internal organs were unable to cope. [Sally died on the morning of Tuesday 30 June 2015 with Tony and Andy at her hospital bedside.] 

from Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

For me, the elephant in the room is that over a period of years, three of Sally’s children, including me, chose to sever all contact with her. Few people who experienced Sally will be in any doubt that she was a person with whom it was challenging to remain in relationship. Indeed, it was always Sally who challenged the relationship. For sure she could be charming, but there was frequently a sting in the tail. Decades of working as a therapeutic counsellor convinces me that, from the onset of her adult life, Sally ought to have been diagnosed with, and treated for, borderline personality disorder. Had she received the right treatment, I believe that Sally’s life could have been less tortured for her and less of a trial for others. The drama and tragedy of her life did often elicit some of the best in other people, acting out of compassion for her. I am especially grateful that several people, both around Nottingham, particularly Tony Nelson and Andy, but also Beryl, Steve and Carol, plus some further afield, have felt able to support Sally over these many years when I have been unable to do so. Despite living the best part of a thousand miles away, my brother Carl, and his family, maintained an unbroken link with Sally, whereas I could not.

Sally with a friend

Sally was a person I shall remember as having an appetite for drama, whether on the movie screen or in real life. For all that her words were often mired in clay, she was also a romantic, loving musicals and happy endings. Much like any girl of 14, standing on the threshold of life, it is as though Sally felt pulled in two directions. On the one hand she was attracted to drama and adventure, but found the dramatic and adventurous emotionally demanding, and it was hard for her to cope with the consequences; on the other hand she yearned for the safety and security of an idealised family life, but found it equally difficult to cope with the prosaic reality.

Sally with unknown infant

There are several short but meaningful passages in the funeral programme. I should like to close with one of them: Water-lilies by A.A. Milne. It was a personal favourite of Sally Cooper, the girl.

Water-lilies by A.A. Milne

Where the water-lilies go
To and fro,
Rocking in the ripples of the water,
Lazy on a leaf lies the Lake King's daughter,
And the faint winds shake her.
Who will come and take her?
I will! I will!
Keep still! Keep still!
Sleeping on a leaf lies the Lake King's daughter. . . .
Then the wind comes skipping
To the lilies on the water;
And the kind winds wake her.
Now who will take her?
With a laugh she is slipping
Through the lilies on the water.
Wait! Wait!
Too late, too late!
Only the water-lilies go
To and fro,
Dipping, dipping,
To the ripples of the water.

Let us now spend a few minutes in silence, remembering the life of Sally in the context of what we have heard, and reflecting on the meanings we give to her life and how she lived it. If you pray, this could also be a time when you might wish to do so.

[Five minutes of silence]

My brother Carl wishes to say a few words ...

...

The funeral closed with In Paradisum, from Fauré's Requiem.

Good English

It has become a commonplace to hear use of the phrases "I/he/she was sat ..." when what is meant is "I/he/she was sitting ...", and "I/he/she was stood ..." when what is meant is "I/he/she was standing ..." Until recently I had believed this confused construction to be restricted to the North East of England where the various regional dialects reshape standard English in ways that sound as though the speaker is poorly educated. However, repeated use by broadcasters on BBC Radio 4 demonstrates that its use is (now at least) widespread. I assume the construction to be an elision between respectively "I sat ..." and "I was sitting ...", and "I stood ..." and "I was standing ..." Both forms point to the past, the first using the past simple tense, the second using the past continuous tense. To be sat, is not to be sitting, but to be placed in a sitting position. Similarly, to be stood, is not to be standing, but to be placed in a standing position.

On seeing her child throwing stones at the ducks, the boy's mother promptly picked him up and returned him to his pushchair. In other words, the boy was sat in his pushchair by his mother.

The house-keeper claimed that she picked up the china dog, gave it a dust, and then stood it back on the mantle-piece. She suggested that someone else must have entered the room and moved the china dog from the mantle-piece to the table. However, according to the butler, as he entered the drawing room he saw the house-keeper stand the china dog on the table: "I am in no doubt that it was stood on the table by the house-keeper, and not by anyone else."

Does it really matter? Does it matter that the popular construction is not simply grammatically erroneous, but also guides the listener towards a semantic jumble and confusion? Most of the time, such sloppiness is of little consequence. Many people allow intonation to work hard to achieve the clarity that they failed to achieve with their grammar, and maybe even their choice of vocabulary. Many people use clichés and popular idioms to allow speech to run along familiar tramlines. Other parts of the sentence usually guide the listener back to the semantically correct meaning. And anyway, if the listener is unsure of the meaning, surely they can simply ask, can they not? Or the sloppy speaker can offer unsolicited corrections and amendments. "When I say parsnips, I mean Bishopsgate."

Consider the difference between the following two statements: "Whilst he continued to bellow at the top of his voice, I was unable to speak." "While he continued to bellow at the top of his voice, I was unable to speak." These two sentences do not mean the same thing. The first sentence contrasts that I was unable to speak with the fact that the other person was able to bellow. The second sentence infers that I was prevented from speaking because the other person was bellowing.I guess that some people have little interest in communicating at this level of detail. For them, a basic level of meaning may be sufficient: precision and accuracy would accord the communication with greater worth than it merited. On the other hand, there are people for whom precision and accuracy in communication are worth much.

It is impressive that the English language can be variously squeezed and stretched in these ways. The same language can be used to call for help in an emergency, and can wrestle with the most tortuous of philosophical conundrums. I am happy that the language can adapt according to need. I am okay with it changing according to fashion. However (and it is 'however', because acceptance of the development, or mutation, of a language over time is usually held in opposition to the conservative desire to preserve the language as it is), I also hold a candle for the preservation of a standard of communication that in its formality, including an acceptance that there is correct and incorrect usage, not only permits the making of fine distinctions, but also encourages semantic discrimination and aesthetic sensitivity.

Martin Herbert, who died on Wednesday 10 December 2014

Martin Herbert was my friend. He died in the early hours of yesterday morning. He died suddenly and unexpectedly. His death is a great shock to everyone who knew him.

Martin was my closest male friend from our University days: we studied at the University of Durham in the mid- to late-1970s. Like me, he was a thoughtful person, which is one of the reasons why we got on so well. We shared a taste in folk music. I talked at length with Martin when I first met the woman who would become my wife, and he attended our Quaker wedding many years later. It was Martin who aroused my interest in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

However, unlike me, Martin was a talented amateur artist, and a gifted musician, both abilities that were to prove extremely significant in his life. I was familiar with his artworks while we were still students. Before he left Durham, Martin gave me one of his early, airbrushed acrylic works, the style of which was reminiscent of the work of Roger Dean, whose album covers were popular at the time. The painting has rarely been off a wall in whichever house I have lived in ever since.

Immediately after university, Martin was uncertain of his direction, and worked for a while as a 'theme park' station master at Beamish Museum in County Durham, in full uniform, replete with pocket watch. When I was turned down by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Martin applied and his application was successful. In my beat up Austin 1300, I drove Martin and his luggage to Cambridge, where the BAS is based, only to discover that we had left a suitcase in Durham, so we had to drive all the way back again the same evening. He worked as a meteorologist in the Antarctic for a couple of years.

At some stage Martin took a well-paid job with a major software company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), relocating to High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. During this time, he developed his talents to play every musical instrument (other than a ukulele) one can find in a folk club, and then also started to run the folk club. Martin and at least one of his folk groups (Wynters Armoury?) played at folk festivals such as that at Cambridge. My wife, daughter and I met him in Whitby when he was playing at the folk festival there. He bought a bothy on the North York Moors, but sold it again when he realised how rarely he was able to travel back north. I am unsure how many years he worked for SCO, but at some stage he decided that he'd had enough of all that, had saved enough money, and took himself off round the world for a year, often travelling off the beaten track, collecting ethnic musical instruments, and being taught to play them. On his return, inspired by some indigenous American music and instruments he had encountered (and bought), he played, synthesised, recorded and produced an album of wonderful haunting music that I have listened to a million times: Spirit of the Wood. My cassette tape of the music is nearly worn out, but it can still be found in mp3 format on his website (www.martinherbert.com).

Whilst I am hazy about dates, some while later Martin packed his fiddle and went south to Andalucia (he was familiar with Laurie Lee's book As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning) to live in the house of a friend. There he started to develop much further his abilities in fine art. I think that he was in Spain for a couple of years. From a Pre-Raphaelite interest in naiads and dryads as an amateur artist at university, Martin developed a much more robust new-age kind of spiritual artistic interest and style, combining traditional artistic skills with digital. He launched a website called Spirit Visions, and was able successfully to sell some of his work. Returning to Britain, he moved into a ramshackle house in mid-Wales, and I guess that he was in proximity to like-minded people. He married a Finnish artist, Vivi-Mari Carpelan, who seemed to give him a renewed zest for life. Galleries accepted his work for sale, and he was a serious entrant for national artistic competitions. For a while his weblog incorporated weekly a new artwork. A year or two ago, Martin decided that he would be able to make more headway in the competitive artistic world if he were to have an MA in Fine Art. This autumn he enrolled at Aberystwyth University. His energy and enthusiasm for the degree appeared boundless, and it would seem that his presence was welcomed by staff and students alike.

I consider it possible that Martin may have mellowed in middle-age compared with our student days, when he was a refreshingly uncouth young man from Peterlee, County Durham, although I believe that he was born in Derbyshire. I will never forget an evening in some pub or other, telling how, on a previous occasion, having drunk quite a lot of alcohol, he had vomited and then observed: "I don't remember eating that!" Martin always lived life a little faster and more richly than me. Artist, musician, more-recently a loving husband, a good friend to many, many people, and my most long-standing friend. You will be missed. I shall miss you.

Dungeness

14:24 - 16:24 Saturday 13 September 2014

The sea is uncommonly restless. In fact, the sea is distinctly agitated. A stiff wind is stirring up great lumps of water like distant tumuli, and gashes of white are to be seen everywhere. The water is an inscrutable milky turquoise. Gusts of wind fret its surface, while deep waves incessantly scythe into the shore, hurling themselves onto the shingle. There is a perpetual sibilance of breaking and crashing waves, changing only in the ever-shifting sources of sound, and in the relative intensity of bass notes. Wet pebbles glisten in dappled sunlight. Cloud shadows play ducks and drakes over the waves, sometimes streaking across the water like dark ghosts. Out on the horizon the misty forms of supertankers move as imperceptibly as the hour hand of a clock. A buoy, warning of shoals, rocks drunkenly several hundred metres off the beach. Further out a small trawler appears lifeless. Three cormorants, silhouetted against the sky, fly past in formation. Gulls hang on the wind.

People arrive. They arrive excited. However, they are soon bored. They don't know what to do with the place. The abundance of shingle suggests distraction so they pick up and throw pebbles out to sea, or up in the air for others to aim at like skeet. Men with high-tech fishing tackle pit their 420 million years of evolutionary advantage over and against invisible fish, which prove to be too canny, or else simply not there. More people arrive, with yelling children and barking dogs. In time they move on. Whatever they came looking for, it is not here. That is almost a definition of Dungeness: absence, emptiness, there really is nothing here. I notice that the place even has no smell, merely a sense of freshness. Vacancy is the antithesis of what most people want. The correct way to come here is silently, on one's own, with neither expectations nor desires. Only then can one begin to hear the whisper of its elemental message: wind, sea, shingle.

The sun is turning inexorably westward. The inbound tide brings waves lapping ever higher up the beach, presaging the inundation of the shingle shelf on which I am sitting. The as-yet dry pebbles are mostly a warm biscuit in the saturated light of late afternoon, but there are also many chaste shades of grey. The trawler is now inching back to an unseen berth, bucking in the heavy swell like an unbroken stallion. Most of the fisherman have packed up and left - gone home to watch television reports of football matches. A seal surfaces, watching the backs of people as they disappear along the boardwalk. Soon the beach will be as deserted as it should be. Indeed the wilderness that is Dungeness is Britain's only officially-designated desert.

Care of my health data [tbc]

This posting was intended to be part of a longer essay. What is currently presented here was written in sections over several days. The piece was then left, abandoned really, as a draft for eighteen months, awaiting my return and completion. I returned to it on 12 June 2015, but completion still has a wait.

-----

I feel comfortable about my GP knowing that my body does not react well to aspirin, but that it tolerates penicillin quite well. Having recently moved house and neighbourhood, I am just starting to settle in with a new GP, who I hope will get to know both me and my body, and in whom I hope to develop some trust. I feel less comfortable that exactly the same medical information is available to any locum doctor and nurse practitioner who might happen to fill in at the medical practice, but recognise that, should I require medical treatment, as I did recently when my shin mysteriously developed cellulitis, I do wish to be prescribed medication both appropriate to, and sensitive to, the needs of my body. However, I should feel a good deal less relaxed about that wider category of medical personnel having access to my personal medical details if, say I had for many years, been prescribed a cocktail of amitriptyline, clozapine and diclofenac; or had recently been treated for an STD; or was taking a daily dose of AZT.

I recall, many years ago, answering the front door to find a primly-dressed woman expecting to come into the house. She knew precisely who I am, who my wife is, and all about our then-young daughter. The woman identified herself cursorily and inadequately, and she had about her an air of presumption that attempted simply to invalidate any hesitation I might have about her. From her manner, I should not have been surprised had she been a police officer. In fact, she was a medical practitioner of some kind, and she demanded to see my daughter. Fortunately for me, my wife and daughter were out at the time, so there was little point in doing anything other than resist the woman's attempted intrusion. Apart from her overall attitude, what made me feel so uneasy was partly that she, a stranger to me, clearly already knew a lot about me and my family, but particularly that she displayed absolutely no understanding that that asymmetrical intimate knowledge about a stranger was likely to be experienced as deeply unsettling and unwelcome.

It is not even that I am especially paranoid. Indeed, recently having relocated to a small village in Kent, UK, I often experience residents from the village approaching me with phrases such as "You're the person who moved into Lynn's house, aren't you?" and "I believe that you are a member of the village ukulele group." These are intended as friendly, welcoming and including greetings, and as invitations to get to know them amicably as people, potentially as friends, with the expectation of reciprocity and warmth. This is a far cry from a coldly clinical medical official who presents in a manner akin to gathering corroborating and incriminating evidence.

In my role as head of a university counselling service for eight years, one of the most difficult and intractable problems I experienced was trying to persuade some of the medical staff in the university to respect counselling confidentiality. So profound was the lack of understanding of those medical staff, and so entrenched was their daily unwillingness to countenance any form of confidentiality that deviated from their own, that it was a contributory factor, albeit one of many, in my desire to move on from the university.

This is not to suggest that all medical personnel in the UK, whether within or outside the National Health Service, treat the care of private information with disdain. However, it is my experience that a proportion of medical staff hold an idea very different from my own about what constitutes 'private'. Indeed, in the context of my physical health needs, few if any parts of my body appear to be considered within my 'private' domain, a point I tolerate but far from like. I guess that, for some medical personnel, it is easy to extend this 'invasion' of my intimate space to include my personal data.

I was horrified to learn on BBC Radio 4 last week (Friday 14 February 2014) that the NHS intends to scoop up all my personal medical records, input them into an enormous database, make that data available to the public sector, including the police, and subsequently to sell that data to commercial organisations. It appears that the government decided to permit this. The data will not be subject to the Data Protection Act. It is called care.data and the data was to be harvested, processed and made available this spring.

There are so many levels on which I object to this project that I feel overwhelmed at the prospect of attempting to enumerate even the most significant aspects. However, it is worth acknowledging that the ostensible purpose of care.data, that is, the principal rationale advanced for its proposition, sounds worthy enough, albeit naive: to utilise an extremely large body of patient data, including illnesses, their treatments, and the effectiveness of those treatments, in order better to develop health policies, health provision, health treatments and their management. For example, it is claimed that, had this data been available in the 1950s, it would have been possible to develop much sooner health education programmes around the practice of smoking tobacco. As a broad principle, I quite strongly approve of the epidemiological approach to understanding the health of a population, and wish that the UK government more readily took notice of it. I believe that the greatest health advances in the UK over the past 150 years have not been open-heart surgery and organ transplants; high-tech diagnostic equipment such as that used in functional magnetic resonance imaging; and expensively-developed medications such as abiraterone, but in the public health provision of clean water and vaccines against the most common infectious diseases, and public health education about germs and infection, about vitamins and nutrition, and about contraception and practices around childbirth. All these latter developments have come about, not as a result of images from scanning electron microscopes, but by looking at what happens to populations. I believe that there is yet much to be learned from epidemiological health research. Indeed, for many years I was happy to volunteer, along with 520,000 other people from ten European countries, in a World Health Organisation study called the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC). So why do I object so strongly to care.data?

First, and most obviously, I have not volunteered my involvement in care.data. Unless I choose to opt out, my personal, and to me intimate, medical records will be automatically uploaded into a national database. Second, in contrast to the EPIC study which was absolutely clear in its focus, the purpose of care.data is to make available a large body of data for a wide variety of studies, only the first of which may have been defined, and many or most of which will emerge only once the database has been constructed. For all anyone knows today, in decades to come the data could be used for the purposes of eugenics. Third, it is claimed that the data will be anonymised. However, as the health data of each person is, and is intended to be, specific to that person, a strong understanding of that term is a contradiction. If what is meant is simply that names and addresses will be stripped out, then anonymity can be compromised with ease. We live in times when computer companies earn immense profits by data mining and by constructing digital 'images' of people from the search engine trails they leave like silvery snail trails left overnight on the garden path.

The Orchard

The Orchard (as of 12 January 2014)

There are currently ten trees (apple [dessert and culinary], pear, plum and cherry) planted in the orchard, with sixteen more (apple [dessert and culinary], pear, plum, mirabelle and cherry [dessert and culinary]) on order. I have yet to order cider apple trees.

I have, to date, dug forty planting holes, each a cube of 40 cm. I have extracted approximately 166.4 kg (40 cm x 40 cm x 40 cm x 2.6 g/cm3 of soil, from which I shall sieve out between 10 kg and 20 kg of stones (mostly flints). I intend to re-use the stones as hard-core with which to make a firm path running the length of the orchard.

Each of the trees is socked and booted with a plastic tree guard and a cardboard mulch collar to protect their bark and roots from predation by rabbits.

Trees in the orchard

House and Garden

1	Y1	Y1	Y1	Y1
2	Y1	Y1	Y1	Y1
3	Y1	Y1	Y1	Y1
4	Y1 (M9 or M26 rootstock only)	Y1 (M9 or M26 rootstock only)	Y1 (M9 or M26 rootstock only)	Y1 (M9 or M26 rootstock only)
5	Victoria plum	Bleu de Belgique plum	Conference pear	Y1
6	Unidentified dessert apple	Sunburst dessert cherry	Conference pear	Y1
7	Nofolk Biffin culinary apple	Red Falstaff dessert apple	Christmas Pippin dessert apple	Y1
8	Golden Noble culinary apple	Y1	Y1	Y1
9	Y1	Y1	Y1	Y1
10	Y1	Y1	Y1	Y1
11	Y2 (yet to be dug)	Y2 (yet to be dug)	Y2 (yet to be dug)	Y2 (yet to be dug)
12	..	..	..	..
13	..	..	..	..

Projected number and variety of trees (by category)

Category	Projected number	Number of trees	Number of varieties
Apple, cider	15
Apple, culinary	15	2 (+1)	2 (+1)
Apple, desert	15	3 (+2)	3 (+2)
Apricot	4
Cherry, culinary	4	(1)	(1)
Cherry, dessert	6	1 (+4)	1 (+3)
Damson plum	4	(1)	(1)
Fig	3
Greengage plum	4
Mirabelle plum	4	(1)	(1)
Mulberry	1
Peach	2
Pear	14	2 (+4)	1 (+3)
Persimmon	1
Plum	5	2 (+1)	2 (+0)
Quince	2	(1)	(1)
Walnut	1
Total	100	10 (+16)	9 (+13)

Trees bought (black), ordered (red), to consider (blank)

Apples
Apple, cider	Bulmers Norman
	Dabinett
	Nottingham Colonel
	Tillington Ladies Finger
	Yarlington Mill
Apple, culinary	Bramley	1
	Golden Noble	1
	Norfolk Biffin	1
Apple, dessert	Christmas Pippin	1
	Cox’s Orange Pippin
	Egremont Russet	1
	Gala	1
	Red Falstaff	1
	Unidentified	1
Pears
	Beurre Hardy	1
	Concorde
	Conference	2 (+1)
	Doyenne de Comice	1
	Williams	1
Quince
	Cydonia oblonga Vranja	1
Apricot
	Tomcot
Cherry
	Lapins Cherokee	1
	Morello	1
	Regina	1
	Stella	1
	Sunburst	1 (+1)
Damson plum
	Blue Violet
	Early Rivers
	Farleigh Damson  / Crittenden's Prolific (Kent)
	Frogmore (Berkshire)
	King of the Damsons / Bradley's King (Nottinghamshire)
	Merriweather / Merryweather	1
	Shropshire Prune / Prune Damson / Long Damson /  Damascene / Westmoreland Damson / Cheshire Damson
Greengage plum
	Boddarts Reneclode (Germany)
	Bryanston (UK)
	Cambridge Gage (UK)
	Canerik (Turkey)
	Denniston's Superb (USA)
	Golden Transparent (UK)
	Graf Althanns Reneklode (Germany)
	Green Vanilla (Mount Pelion, Greece)
	Große Grüne Reneklode (Germany)
	Laxton's Gage (UK)
	Laxton's Supreme (UK)
	Meroldts Reneclode (Germany)
	Old Green Gage
	Rainha Cláudia (Portugal)
	Regina Claudia (Italy)
	Reine Claude de Bavay (Belgium)
	Reine Claude d'Oullins (France)
	Reine Claude Verte (France)
	Transparent Gage (France)
	Uhinks Reneklode (Germany)
	Washington (USA)
Mirabelle plum
	Golden Sphere
	Gypsy
	Mirabelle de Nancy	1
	Ruby (Cherry Plum)
Plum
	Bleu de Belgique	1
	Victoria	1 (+1)
Other Fruit
Elder (hedging)
Fig
	Brown Turkey
	Violette de Bordeaux
Persimmon
	Diospyros virginiana
Almond
Hazel
	Kentish Cob
Walnut