Symbolic Forest

It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.

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Keyword noise: death, The Mother, queer, trans, transgender, transition, Pride.

The year turns, and the seasons change, as has happened many times before. Tomorrow evening, if you’re in Europe, is the winter solstice, and the days start turning back towards spring. Right now, as I write this, the sun is well below the horizon and the moon is a thin misty sliver behind dark and rain-filled clouds.

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Keyword noise: winter, solstice, winter solstice, Yuletide, Christmas, transition, The Mother.

It was a bright, crisp, autumn afternoon, the sun still high in the sky. I put my hand in front of my face to shade my eyes from it. Nobody else did, and I wondered if they thought I was saluting.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, burial, The Mother, religion, cemetery, The Children.

It’s been quiet on the blog for the past month, what with one reason and another. Work has taken priority; other writing projects have taken priority; and more than anything, I didn’t realise just how long videoing my crafting exploits, recording a narration and editing the footage into something at least semi-watchable would take. I will put a link to the YouTube channel over on the sidebar at some point.

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Keyword noise: overheard, The Mother, birds.

The Mother has always lied, and always denied that she does. She hates being called out for her mistakes, and will flatly claim she didn’t make them. Moreover, she’s always preferred to lie rather than admit any aspect of the past she’s ashamed of. Sometimes these things come out, years later, and I start to doubt my own memory. I’m not saying she consciously gaslights people; but she will say one thing one day, something entirely contradictory a week later, and you start to wonder where the truth, if anything, actually lies. This has reached the point where she has been—possibly deliberately—not taking her heart medication, and not going to the pharmacy or the doctor when she should to get her prescription sorted. So, now and then, I go to the doctor with her, to see what she tells him and what he tells her. This woman, who has been telling me constantly that she doesn’t feel well, that she’s constantly dizzy, will tell the doctor that everything is fine. He asks her why she hasn’t been taking her medication: she tells him she ran out, even though she has plentiful stocks at home. He asks her why she didn’t come back for a repeat: she says she wants to help save the NHS money.

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Keyword noise: abuse, abusive relationships, The Mother, The Father, smoking.

Back before Christmas I mentioned that I had finally persuaded The Mother to let me start clearing out some of her accumulated junk. Well, there’s a long way to go yet on that of course, but I’m slowly making progress. Slowly working through piles of things that really should never have been kept, sifting through them just in case there is anything important in there, like family photos in the middle of a stack of 40-year-old bank statements to give one real example. And then, there was one thing I came across, that potentially does have genuine historical interest. Well, there were two (one for each of my parents), but this is one.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, poll tax, Community Charge, history.

For years, The Mother has been telling me the house needs cleaning out. “It’ll be too late when I’m gone,” she has said. “You should get started on it now.” And I should get started on it, of course, because for years she has had the false assumption that all of the mess and clutter in the house is mine, or is my fault somehow. This is patently untrue. Things, for example, in my bedroom right now include:

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Keyword noise: The Mother, hoarding.

I mentioned the other day about having a backlog of ideas to write about without forgetting what they are. Some of them have been bubbling around for a few years now, when I’ve read a book or watched something on the telly. For example, a few years ago I was given a copy of the book *Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop* by Bob Stanley. For the past thirty years or so, Stanley has been one third of the band Saint Etienne, who I’ve loved almost as long, and who right from their start in the late 80s have made pop music that cuts across categories, combining fantastically catchy pop hooks with lyrics that are pitched at just the right level between meaningful and slightly inane; but at the same time squeezing in London hip hop, club beats and art school sound collages. Their first album combines pop bangers like “Nothing Can Stop Us” with voice clips of Richard Whiteley and Willie Rushton; the second has excerpts from the 1960s British films Peeping Tom and Billy Liar, and a man ordering chicken soup.^* Their songs “Like A Motorway” and “Hate Your Drug” are arguably the best attempt anyone has ever made to revive the 1960s “death disc” genre,^** but at the same time they care as deeply about London psychogeography as Geoffrey Fletcher, Iain Sinclair or Patrick Keiller. In short, they cover such a broad area in their music, that it is not surprising Stanley wrote a broad, broad book.

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Keyword noise: books, Bob Stanley, Yeah Yeah Yeah, Saint Etienne, ILX, music, journalism, acquaintances, indie, Sarah Records, Belle & Sebastian, The Mother.

A train of thought has been slowly easing into the station over the past few days, after I read a very interesting blog post by historian Caitlin Green about the Ridings of Lindsey and the route between Lincoln and Grimsby—at any rate, the route between Lincoln and Grimsby mapped in 1675 by the Scottish cartographer John Ogilby. Ogilby was the creator of Britannia, Britain’s first road atlas, in the form of 100 cross-country routes drawn as strip-maps at a scale of 1 inch to the mile. Nottingham to Grimsby via Lincoln is map 78.

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Keyword noise: history, local history, Grimsby, Waltham, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, John Ogilby, The Mother, family history.

Yesterday’s post about applying human assumptions to the rest of the universe set my mind off running down another tangent, about our tendency firstly to oversimplify the world, and secondly to insist on the validity of our oversimplified mental map of the world in the face of all the evidence that it is wrong.

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Keyword noise: heterochromia, eyes, assumptions, The Mother, teaching, evidence.

I’ve written a few things so far about my father’s death, just over a year ago now. Some were recollections written recently; the post about his death itself was written down not long after it happened. I’m glad I wrote it when I did, because, in trying to write this post, on how it felt to “host” a funeral, to be one of the more prominent mourners at it, there is an awful lot that I realise now I don’t remember.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, The Children, The Mother, The Father, undertakers, religion, belief, church.

The other week, I said how you can’t just bury a dead body without there being an awful lot of paperwork involved, at least not in any sort of above-board way. Moreover, one thing I didn’t even get to was that: when you do bury a body, you can’t just pop the gravestone up at the head of the grave there and then. The rules vary from place to place, but to avoid causing some sort of tragic subsidence-induced gravestone-toppling accident, you have to leave the grave to settle for a number of months with some sort of temporary grave marker in the ground instead. Then, some while later—and potentially when you’ve saved up the money, because gravestones are expensive—you can pull up the temporary cross or whatever and replace it with the final thing.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, death, relationships, burial, cemetery, graveyards, grave, headstone, divorce, family, funerals, stonemasons.

Almost a year ago, give or take a week or two, my dad died. I wrote, a few days later, about the experience, or at least part of it. Starting from being woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from the hospital, and ending with myself and The Mother walking out of the hospital, wondering what would happen next. I scribbled it down a few days later, after I had had a couple of days to process it, but whilst it was still relatively fresh in my head. The intention, naturally was to write more about the experience of being newly-bereaved, the dullness of the bureaucracy, of everyone else’s reactions to you, the hushed voices and awkward moments. Of course, none of that ever got written. Nothing even about his funeral. Much of it has now faded. I was thinking, though, now that I’ve relaunched this blog once more, maybe I should go back, go back over those few weeks last October, and try to remember exactly what it did feel like.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, comedy, humour, The Mother, coffins, undertakers, Ovo.

So, it’s never a good sign when a hospital phones you at 2am, is it.

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Keyword noise: death, cancer, hospitals, The Father, The Mother.

The phone rang on Saturday morning, and The Mother was on the end. “I’ve got some bad news,” she said.

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Keyword noise: The Cat, death, miaow, pets, The Mother.

Despite my age, The Mother still makes sure to send me an advent calendar every year. I’m not quite sure why she feels the need. She buys me one, sends it, we remember to open the doors for a few days, then leave it and suddenly remember, around the 20th, that we now have a few weeks worth of chocolate to eat. So far this year we’ve opened it every day, but I’m not really sure how long that’s going to last.

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Keyword noise: Advent, calendar, chocolate, Christmas, Yuletide, The Mother.

This post has nothing, really, to do with the above title; I was listening to a Hefner album this morning, heard the above lyric, and liked it. Maybe soon I’ll write something which applies to that title, post it under a different title, and so on.

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Keyword noise: Dimitris Lambrou, gay rights, Hefner, lesbian, Lesbos, The Mother, sapphic.

It looks like I’m a pest.

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Keyword noise: hearing, mice, noise, nuisance, pest, repellent, sound, ultrasonic, The Mother.

The Mother is always fond of saying: “you know, with your brain and your skills, you could have done so much better for a career! You could have done anything you wanted!”

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Keyword noise: career, crime, internet, millionaire, The Mother.

Next week is going to be hell. I’m dreading it. Our kitchen – which passed its 25th birthday last winter – is being ripped out, torn up, and being replaced by something nice, new and shiny. The only problem: it’s going to take all week. The house is already in uproar, and I have no idea how we’re going to eat. Lots of dinners out next week, I think.

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Keyword noise: buildings, change, home, kitchen, photography, renovation, The Mother.

My parents are not Norwegian. They’re English, have hardly ever left England, don’t speak any languages other than English. Until last week, my mother hadn’t had a foreign holiday for 35 years, and my dad had never had one at all.

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Keyword noise: English, Norway, Norwegian, Paris, stereotyping, The Mother.

You often hear people saying something along these lines:

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Keyword noise: belief, god, miracle, prayer, religion, The Mother.

Given that today, in the news, there’s rather a lot about the slowly-growing and now likely forthcoming schism in the Anglican church, I thought I’d ask the average churchgoer in the street about it. Well, the average churchgoer who is also my mother, at any rate. She’s a fairly average “active” Anglican, though. She’s white, lower-middle-class, female, edging towards elderly, lives in a commuter village, and goes to church every week. She’s a Sunday School teacher, has organised the parish’s Christian Aid collections, sings in an ecumenical Christian parish singing group,^* and generally is far more active and puts more effort into religion than most churchgoers, never mind the huge percentage of Anglicans who tick the relevant box on the census but never cross the threshold of a church for anything other than weddings and funerals.

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Keyword noise: Anglicanism, Christianity, church, conservatism, gay rights, homophobia, parish church, Peter Akinola, religion, Rowan Williams, schism, The Mother.

This week, I have managed to:

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Keyword noise: accomplishments, The Cat, feline, relationships, The Mother.

Ever since I moved back in with The Parents, The Mother has been insistant that I have a Proper Breakfast. Unfortunately for me, her idea of a Proper Breakfast was always a bowl of corn flakes. I’ve never been a fan of breakfast cereal,^* and tried to explain to her that there’s not that much justification for eating it. It was originally invented by an enema-obsessed nutritionist who was very concerned about bowel movements, and believed that masturbation was evil. His brother added salt and sugar to make it more palatable. If you think it doesn’t taste very good now, bear in mind that the current Managing Director of Kelloggs Europe has admitted that “if you take the salt out you might be better off eating the cardboard carton for taste”.

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Keyword noise: bacon, bacon rolls, breakfast, cereal, cheese, Corn Flakes, ham, John Harvey Kellogg, The Mother, toast.

Back in July, my mother lost The Cat, accidentally releasing him on the way to the vet’s. She spent hours putting up posters in that part of town, searching round the neighbourhood, answering calls from people who thought they had seen him, but to nothing. After a month or so, the calls dried up, and we assumed he wasn’t coming back.

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Keyword noise: The Cat, feline, miaow, missing, pets, photography, The Mother.

Talking about pets: the cat has vanished. Not near home, either.

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Keyword noise: The Cat, cooking, disappeared, lost, missing, pets, The Mother.

The Mother has always been very much a fan of vocal music, choral singing, and that sort of thing. More recently, she’s started singing herself, and now belongs to lots of church singing groups, local choral societies, and so on. She’s never done much solo work, but she often goes off to events and sings in choirs at various places. She’s going to one tomorrow, in fact. There’s one thing about tomorrow’s choral singing event, though, which amuses me greatly.

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Keyword noise: choir, concert, singing, The Mother.

My mother is rushing around tonight in a bit of a panic. Being a regular churchgoer, and church organiser, Christmas is obviously a busy time of year for her. Tonight, though, the mother and all the other church organisers are all rushing round in a panic, searching all the cupboards at the church, searching each other’s houses and attics, searching and searching and saying to each other: “well, where did you last see them?”

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Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, church, nativity, nativity scene, The Mother.

I need help.

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Keyword noise: Christmas, gift ideas, gifts, presents, The Mother.

This is the time of year when the black moods usually hit. I’ve heard of SAD, and maybe it’s that. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that the things I’m scared of, when I think back, all seem to have happened at this time of year too. When it gets back round to November again, the dark fears all start to come back.

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Keyword noise: depression, SAD, seasons, winter, The Mother.

My mother is still beavering away at the family tree, on various genealogy websites. She still hasn’t really got the hang of the internet yet, though…

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Keyword noise: genealogy, The Mother.

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

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Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.

The other week I was struck with a sudden spurt of enthusiasm for handicraft-type stuff, and I decided I should make myself a bag. I need a new handbag—the strap on the last one got worn through by a slightly-rusted metal loop—and making one would be fun and an ideal way to have something a bit different. It surely can’t be that hard to knock up a basic shopping-bag style thing, out of some decent thickness canvas or hessian or something, which i can sling over my shoulder. To decorate it, I decided I would get The Mother to hunt out some of my old swimming badges (the oval-pointy shaped ones) and sew them on, a vertical line on either side.

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Keyword noise: crafting, The Mother.

My mother has a fairly nice stereo. It’s nothing special—not one of those hi-fi enthusiast setups with everything separate, but it has all the ordinary functions and features and is worth a few hundred quid. She won it, a year or two ago. She was thinking about buying a new one to replace their mid-70s record player, when all of a sudden she won one that was worth a fair bit more than she was thinking of spending.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, luck.

June has come in, and everything is full of drizzle, still. Typical. I forgot to say “White rabbits!” until mid-morning, too.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, clothing, Scholl, shoes, crafting.

I was sat around not doing much last night, when I suddenly thought: “Oh no! It’s the parents’ silver wedding anniversary tomorrow!” I have never been able to remember when their wedding anniversary is. Never, ever. Even the times I’ve remembered to buy a card, I’ve forgotten to write it or post it or something. But I thought I really should remember this year, because it’s the silver anniversary and everything.

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Keyword noise: The Mother.