In which Papa Cat seizes the day. Again.

Any long-time readers might remember this post from five years ago, when my dad, having blown out the candles on his 80th birthday cake, said 'Right: now I'm striking out for 85.'

Today's the day.

I spoke to him on the phone earlier: he was looking forward to a fancy lunch out with his daughters, followed my garbled account of my not-yet-written conference paper and asked a couple of pertinent questions, reassured me that I would get everything done, asked me what was coming up for Writers' Week, and gave me a thorough and lively description of Lleyton Hewitt's commentating skills as demonstrated during the Australian Open men's final ('I mean, I can't stand the little bastard, but he did a fantastic job') and a quick rundown on the latest in Adelaide's bikie wars. Still driving; stayed up with me last week till after 1 am watching the tennis, with no ill effects the next day; blood pressure 120/70 and the cardiologist doesn't want to see him for another twelve months.

Here he is, with the dog of the moment, 65 years ago.

The Don's legacy: more complex than you thought

The lovely Greta Bradman, granddaughter of Sir Donald.

Papa Cat's progress

My dad, who turned 84 in February, has finally got himself a hearing aid, with the, erm, aid of Vets' Affairs. His 1944-46 stint trundling round the Pacific and then up and down the Queensland coast on a corvette used at the end of the war as a minesweeper (blown up the year after he was demobbed) has assured that he is being well looked after in his old age and just as well too.

I can still remember the summer I was home in Adelaide for Christmas -- 1982-3, I think it was -- when he put the telly on to watch the Melbourne Test, the first day of which I knew my friend Helen would be attending, and I called out from the next room 'Look out for Helen!' and he called back 'Quarter past ten!'

He still drives; he drove for a living for much of his life and is still one of the best drivers I have ever been in a car with. And I got a text (yes, a text, and what's more he has worked out how to do capital letters) from him this afternoon saying 'Practising with my new ears. The car sounds like a truck.'

Yes, I know. I am very, very lucky.

Papa Cat (centre), Princes Bridge, Melbourne, 1944

Four-fifths of the way there

Longtime readers might remember this post of four years ago, in which Papa Cat turned 80 and said, having blown out his candles, 'Right, now I'm striking out for 85.'

At 8 this morning, knowing him to be an habitual early riser, I decided it wasn't too early to ring him and sing Happy Birthday. He had already had breakfast, read the paper, showered and shaved, done two loads of washing and watered 'what's left of my little garden in the heat', and was now settled down to watch the news on breakfast TV with the cat.

It was sad, he said, about the beans and tomatoes that he'd lost when they fried in the 40 degree heat the day before yesterday before he'd thought to put some shade cloth over them. 'But then I thought about those poor bastards in Queensland, and that put it in perspective.'

He just keeps on living his life

Eighteen years ago, when my parents were mere spring chickens of 65, the most recent in a long line of family moggies padded off to the big litter tray in the sky, and they swore off cats, they said, for good. 'No, no,' my father said when it was suggested they might get another. 'We're too old to start another cat.'

Shortly thereafter my sisters trundled back to my folks' place from the RSPCA with a large and rather scared grey tabby who'd been brought in by a man whose father had died and left his cat, then age 2, to be dealt with. 'Ah,' said my friend D when informed of this new development. 'An adult cat. With habits. And eccentricities.'

Tiger saw my mother through her last six years, and my dad through three bedridden months after he fell off the roof, then widowerhood, then remarriage and finally divorce before he and one of my sisters finally took her off on that last sad trip to the vet a couple of months ago.

I went to visit him today. 'Come and see the Christmas present I bought myself,' he said, and opened the door to his bedroom. A small, lithe kitty, cafe au lait, chocolate and white with bright blue eyes, leapt up off the bed and came to meet us, twining and purring.

Cecil is a rescue cat, who'd been brought in as a stray and had had a hard time before that, brought back to health and condition by the dedicated people at the Animal Welfare League. He's a snowshoe cat. Cecil is seven. My dad will be 84 in February.

Family: the weight

Never, ever underestimate how much it takes out of a person to endure protracted emotional strain, particularly if this involves self-restraint. Example: spending an entire afternoon with your family of origin, all of whom you love, and all of whom intend to vote for the Coalition even though Tony Abbott appalls at least two of them.

Especially if it's a birthday gathering and there's a lot of pressure to play nice.

I come from a family of implacable ALP-haters who are quite happy to vote Green in the Senate and are all going to. They're all perfectly intelligent, though not what The Australian calls the 'tertiary left', and they all loathe the Shooters and Fishers and the Christian fundies and the climate flat-earthers skeptics and love Barack Obama as much as I do.

For them it's not about left and right as such: it's about teh unions and teh evil commies and teh Great Satan Whitlam and so on. Both sisters work in the health sector and have had their politics formed over decades by listening to male doctors, while my father has never forgiven the commies unions for the wartime strikes.

By the time I got home last night I could hardly walk from the exhaustion of the strain of refraining from shouting and throwing things. Fell into bed at 8.30 with my Ruth Rendell, which was as much as I could manage, lights out by nine and slept till 7.15.

The moral of this story is that the older you get, the more physically knackered you are rendered by stress. I would have been better off going for a long, long walk.

Family matters

Just had a text from my 83-year-old father, the latest in a longish exchange this morning, saying 'Point taken. xx' I had to stifle the impulse to text back saying 'Who are you and what have you done with my father?'

ANZAC Day dot points

* Because I still have my Sydney Morning Herald weekly book reviewing gig, I am still reading a minimum of four novels a week. In several different ways it's the most wonderful education, and I think most people would be astonished to learn how many contemporary novels are, one way or another, about one or both of the two World Wars. In particular, the effects and after-effects of World War 2, like bruises from some gigantic, crushing injury, are still coming up and out and showing in lurid colours on the surface of contemporary consciousness, especially, but not exclusively, in Europe.

But the Great War gets its share of attention from novelists too, and I read another one only recently. That wasn't long after I'd sat down and figured out the details of what my paternal grandfather's battalion, the Tenth, had actually been doing during the war while he was in it, from 1915: too late for ANZAC Cove but in plenty of time for the Western Front.

They were shunted back and forth between two of the worst places, Ypres and the Somme, for around three years. Three years of wading through mud, disintegrating body parts and large well-fed rats. Apart from anything else, I can't help wondering what he was thinking as he watched his only son -- his only child -- set off at seventeen to join the Navy in 1944.

* If I read one more inane blog post, tweet (is there no-one who will save this woman from herself?) or op ed about ANZAC Day and its construction and commemoration written by someone who's never heard of either C.E.W. Bean or Alan Seymour but isn't letting their total ignorance of (1) the single fundamental fact about the creation of the 'ANZAC Legend' or (2) the first real challenge to it in Australian culture (New Zealand may have its literary or historical equivalent) get in the way of a good self-righteous rant, I'm going to break something valuable and then throw up on the shattered fragments. Yes some people glorify war. No others don't. Yes it's used to sell papers and get TV ratings. No that's not actually ANZAC Day's fault, you morons.

And yes, some of us have soldiers, sailors and air(wo)men in the family history and no we don't want to forget about what they endured. I habitually get through the worst times in my own life by thinking about what some of my ancestors had to go through. They are a massive well of strength to draw on.

* I think I've pretty much exhausted my own archival material in former ANZAC Day posts, which can be found here, here and here.

* The biscuits, they rock. My grandfather, famous for his approach to food (and why wouldn't you be, after three years in the trenches), was wont to say to my mother as he reached for whatever was left on any given serving plate or bowl: "I'll just clean this up for you, Kerrie." To this day my sisters and I say this whenever anyone reaches for the last cupcake or the dregs of the champagne, and then fall about shrieking. He would have eaten the whole tray and come back for seconds.

Papa Cat's War, Part 2: 1944

Guest blogger: Papa Cat

'Mallee to Matelot'

Maybe it was learning of the exploits of Raleigh, Drake and Nelson at school in the 1930s (when history was still taught) [Never mind the editorialising, concentrate on the reminiscence -- Ed], or perhaps it was a fortunate sea trip to the UK in 1935 that influenced me to join the Navy during WW2. More likely, the fact that one could apply to join at age 17 was the deciding factor.

In any event, on 4 July 1944, I found myself with 20 or so other pimply-faced youths [He was not -- Ed] being sworn in to the service in the old drill hall of shore establishment HMAS Torrens, Birkenhead, South Australia.

That afternoon we entrained for Crib Point, home of Flinders Naval Depot, also known as HMAS Cerberus, south-east of Frankston on the Mornington Peninsula, about 90 minutes (in those days) by train from Melbourne.

The rail trip and the first few days after our arrival remain somewhat blurred, but were a mixture of swapping names, home towns or suburbs, being organised into classes, getting our shots, being allocated dormitories and finding the mess hall and bathrooms, but mainly getting to know our immediate boss -- usually a Leading Seaman in charge of each dormitory. We were issued with winter and summer uniforms, a blanket, a seabag, and of course a hammock. All our gear had to be stowed correctly in our lockers, and surprise inspections were frequent, especially for the first few weeks.

I think breakfast was the most interesting meal of the day. If you have ever seen three dozen eggs frying in a square flat pan and a couple more such pans further along the line at various stages of cooking, it's a sight you can recall instantly for the rest of your life. At this stage I must say that for the two years and 35 days I spent in the Navy, I was never hungry and the cooks were absolutely first class, especially the ones on HMAS Warrnambool 1944-46. Congratulations and thanks a lot.

From July 4 until November 14, we marched, drilled, learned to do what we were told when we were told [*Snort* -- Ed], and learned always to recgnise an officer, both on the base and, especially, off the base, when on leave. Paid a kingly two shillings and sixpence a day, we had gun drill, fire drill, stripping and assembling Lewis machine guns, large gunnery practice, boat drill, signal flags etc etc. From July 4 we had been called men -- and by November 14, we felt like men.

Every other weekend we had leave in Melbourne. Pictures [He means movies -- Ed], dances, transport, even the races -- we had free admission to all. My mates and I were lucky enough to see the mighty Bernborough win a couple of races at Caulfield. Winter in Melbourne was not fantastic, but being young and fit we were not worried at all.

The mighty Bernborough.

The two main organisations that raised money for the entertainment and welfare of servicement were the Red Cross and the Comforts Fund. Their members saw to it that servicemen were never hungry or lonely while on leave. Dances were on every night, usually with supper. These were held in suburban halls, as well as in the cities. We were even approached in the street, to be made aware of local halls and clubs who would see that we were made welcome.

We were invited to stay in private homes on our weekends off, but most of us preferred to stay in one of the numerous hostels in the cities. On looking back, the hospitality accorded us was incredible, and at the time we didn't realise the generosity of the people we met in all the cities we visited. Most of these people had family members to be concerned about, so I guess they felt good about caring for us.

At this point I feel compelled to interrupt briefly and remind the reader that these are seventeen-year-old boys we're talking about. Here is Papa Cat, centre, with two mates on Princes Bridge in Melbourne, a matter of days after joining up.

November 14 came around very quickly. A week or so beforehand, our class of 20 were asked if we had any preference as to the class of ship we would like to go to. 'Jacko' and myself were called aside, and because we had Leaving Certificates, we were prevailed upon to do a six-week radar operator's course in Sydney. Radar was fairly new in the Navy, and I suppose they presumed that we would be able to absorb the mysteries in a short time. We soon found out that our instructors were learning as they went along. We were told that we would be posted to a Corvette on completing the course.

The other 18 in the class were lined up. Surnames A-B went to Shore Base Darwin, and the rest to HMAS Australia. That's how the Navy handled preferences.

Papa Cat's War, Part 1: 1939-1943

It's over two years since my dad wrote down, at my request, his wartime memories so I could blog them. Ahem:


Guest blogger: Papa Cat

When World War II erupted in Europe in September 1939 I was twelve years old and in my second year away from home, going to a regional school about 25k from the farm where I lived with my parents (home for weekends and holidays, of course).

My father, a WWI Digger, who had survived the horrendous battles of the Somme [and Ypres -- Ed], was always huddled over the battery radio at news times. We only had one twelve-volt battery, which he had to take out of the old 1919 Dodge when he came home in the evening. Knowing the areas of Belgium and France from his overseas service, his opinions of events were many, varied and vocal.

At school we learnt the geography of Holland, Belgium and France and traced the advance of the German Army. How fortunate we were to have a Headmaster who believed we should learn history as it was happening. In our spare time after school, and at weekends, we collected papers and bottles and scrounged old rubbish dumps for items made of aluminium (much needed for aeroplane manufacturing). We knocked on doors and collected money for the Red Cross and the Comforts Fund. We older boys were encouraged to attend Church dances, not only to learn, but to partner the girls whose boyfriends and husbands were overseas [O RLY? -- Ed], mostly in the Middle East in the Army's famous 48th Division.

Rationing was introduced early in the war years: petrol, food and clothing. Petrol was hard for country people because of the distances to travel, and of course there was no public transport. A few deals were done between farmers and townsfolk. It was no trouble to swap some farm-killed meat, home-made butter and a few eggs for a petrol ration ticket or two. Of course one did not move anywhere in a car without phoning neighbours and friends to see if they wanted a lift or needed some shopping done.

A horse and cart, or 'sulky', were prized possessions and were a slow but sure means of getting around. Our 'sulky' had rubber tyres and I recall on one occasion, when the tube just couldn't take any more patches, my father -- displaying a stubbornness that probably contributed to his survival in WWI -- attempted to stuff the tyre with straw. I don't remember being around to see whether this was successful or not. Probably not -- I certainly would have heard about it if he had revolutionised our transport situation!

Clothing coupons were quite useless as far as buying a lady's outfit or a man's suit were concerned; one just had to save them up over time to get most things. So hand-me-downs and patching and mending were the go. Wool was needed for service uniforms, so it was difficult to get enough to knit socks or jumpers. As far as clothing was concerned, the solution was simple:

Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without.




In 1942 I went to board in Adelaide to do the Leaving Certificate (as it was called then) at Adelaide High School. The city was abuzz, with Service uniforms everywhere. School was good. Plenty of sport. Much study. And how good it was to play cricket on a turfed oval! I just couldn't get used to not dodging stones and cowpats from the cattle that grazed on our oval in the country.

When not studying, I was riding around at night on my trusty Malvern Star, being a dispatch rider for the local A.R.P. (Air Raid Precautions) Unit. This mainly consisted of knocking on doors to remind people that their windows were not blacked out properly. Not many cars to contend with -- no petrol! Those that were on the road had to have their headlights 'blacked out', just showing a horizontal slit of light about two inches deep the width of the glass.

On 7 December 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and from that day it was 'game on' as far as Australia was concerned. No wonder A.R.P was on everyone's lips. And so we teenagers pedalled around our allotted area with our yellow armbands on, doing what we were told. [Fat chance -- Ed] The girls did their bit as well, busying themselves with first aid classes.

Because of the rapid Japanese advance towards Singapore, it was a question of where they were going to stop. It became apparent that the possibility of air raids on the Australian mainland was quite real. Everyone had an air-raid shelter in their back yard. My father, no doubt recalling the WWI trenches, dug a shelter near the house on the farm -- 20 feet long [no wonder the poor old sod had sciatica -- Ed] and narrow, with a zigzag design. People generally were not nervous, just determined to be as prepared as they could be.

An English-style Home Guard was formed mostly in country towns. They had a variety of weapons, mostly owned by farmers, plus old WWI rifles loaned by the Army. They had plans of their locals districts; two-man teams were allotted large trees that could be felled quickly to block main roads; precious petrol made Molotov cocktails. They may not have won, but they would have caused a lot of havoc trying.


Don't miss the next exciting episode, 'Mallee to Matelot', in which Papa Cat joins the Navy.

More shocking revelations about Tony Abbott and fatherhood!

As though the tragicomic episode a few years back about the Boy Who Everyone Thought Was but Turned Out Not To Be Tony Abbott's Son (so very sad for him; never mind the three beautiful daughters, we all know 'every bloke wants a son') were not enough, The Punch has broken a truly startling new story about Abbott and fatherhood this morning.

Not that they seem to have noticed. They've buried the lead six feet under:

'For a man who always cautioned against hubris in office – if ultimately succumbing to it by holding onto the prime ministership for so long – John Howard is having a bit of trouble containing his excitement at the speed at which his progeny has turned Liberal fortunes around.

“I don’t think Tony has put a foot wrong,” he tells The Punch. “He’s given real heart and hope to the Liberal Party.”'

Memo to David Penberthy and/or The Punch's sub(s): I think you-all mean 'protegé'.

Putting away the ornaments

As we approach the end of the first week of January I've been thinking about how often the last week of January has, for me, brought with it some life-changing, life-enhancing or life-summarising event, for better or worse, and have been bracing myself for what, if anything, this January might bring.

By far the most traumatic of these was the sudden collapse of my mother in 1999 from the brain haemorrhage of whose effects she was to die a few days later. Every year, Christmas is bracketed by two little bittersweet moments, mother-wise: once when I unpack the decorations to put on the Christmas tree and again when I pack them up to put them away. A number of them are decorations I originally brought from interstate and overseas when I came home for Christmas and gave to her to put on the family tree, as one by one the old ornaments were broken or got too old and shabby to use.

If you are lucky enough still to have a mother, try to appreciate her as much as you can, even if she is not ideal as mothers go, because you just don't know. Mine proved to be more fragile than her own handwriting on the tissue paper that has now outlived her by eleven years and counting.

How to tell if it's December

Quiet Friday night lull in the local big bright Coles and so when the voice starts up I notice it at once. Long supermarket experience and my peripheral hearing conspire to mis-identify it at first as a small-child problem: there's a wailing, insistent, pre-hysterical note and it is going on and on and on.

No, perhaps it's an older-child problem. The rhythms are those of fully formed sentences. Whoever it is is not any kind of a happy bunny.

No, I now think it's some kind of teenage girl or very young woman fighting with her boyfriend. Whatever else it is, it certainly sounds like a fight. My shopping list says SOAP. I head for the soap aisle. The voice gets louder and is sounding more and more upset. I notice for the first time that although there are occasional pauses in the monologue, I have, from the beginning, heard only the one voice. It's now speaking sufficiently loudly that I can make out what it's saying from two aisles away.

'It's not fair! I said if we go there then we won't get to see the others at all and he said well we can go round there after lunch and I said but we're going to Jen's for tea, what, do you want to spend practically the whole day driving around and he said well it's not my fault, they just put pressure on and said it like it was a done deal and I can't ring them up now and say we're not coming after all!'

At this point I round the end of the soap aisle and there she is, long black cotton dress with spaghetti straps over plump flawlessly-skinned shoulders, black hair up and starting to come down, I'd say mid-twenties, scarlet in the face, staring ferociously at a shelf full of skin care products and yelling into her mobile. As she comes into my line of sight, her voice cracks in the middle of the word 'mum' and she begins to sob without restraint.

'But muuuummmmm! I knowww! I want us to come to your place! But Darren says he wants to see his family too and it's stupid, there's only two of them, there's only Lauren and John, it's stupid, it's not fair! They think they own Christmas!'

Arithmetic, or is it algebra, in chronological order

1 horrible old neck injury (high-speed highway rollover, 1986: C4 and C5) x too much housework and gardening (yesterday) x general stress (ongoing) = shoulder, neck and scalp muscles in spasm = extreme nausea + plenty of hyoscine hydrobromide + too much codeine + 1 moving, upsetting funeral of a 60-year-old woman you've known since you were born + several hours with your father & sisters + far too many brandies (today) + 2 x really crucial deadlines that matter a lot to a lot of other people (imminent) = X, where X is how you'll feel at 8 am when the alarm goes off.

On the other hand, it's 20 years today (3.30 am, November 26th 1989) since I had my last cigarette: cold turkey from 40-50 a day. CP, if you're reading this, thanks from the heart.

The cake is in the oven

As threatened, I have made Deborah Strange Land's family's traditional Christmas cake, and it is in the oven.

Deborah has beautiful photos of hers here so I didn't take bother to take any pictures of mine (particularly since my brown-paper wrapping on the cake tin looks like the work of a drunken three-year-old) except right at the beginning when the raisins, currants, sultanas, dates and glacé cherries were marinating in the brandy in the big red pottery bowl that S and P gave me one Christmas (I think) after I had admired theirs.




It's an essential part of the recipe at this in-the-oven point that you contact your female nearest and dearest to say that your Christmas cake is in the oven and you are thinking of them. And so, dear girly blogfriends, I am. (And any of the blokes what are interested, too; this may not be a permissible variant, but I'm fairly sure that at least half the men who read this blog are better cooks than I am, apart from anything else.)

Yesterday there was a good omen when I grabbed up a pair of very cheap loose light white cotton trousers from India via K-Mart, not even bothering to try them on, on a whim on my way to the checkout (the single hardest-to-find item in the whole Christmas cake shopping list? Brown wrapping paper), only to discover, when I arrived home, two things:

(1) We in Adders are set for the worst November heatwave on record, starting at 35 degrees on Sunday and up to 37 on Monday, which will last all week and possibly go on longer than that, and the white trousers (which fit perfectly and don't even need to be taken up) are the perfect garment for lying round the house whingeing and moaning in; and

(2) an acceptable alternative to almond paste/marzipan, which is the traditional undercoat for Christmas cake decoration but which makes many people gag, is a thing called Rolled Fondant that I found in Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible, the instructions for which include a directive to wear all-white clothes while you're making it, because a single stray thread can discolour the fondant.

So, double serendipity. Sweet.

There is one thing very wrong with this recipe, though. Either Grandma Strange Land or Deborah herself has inexplicably left the kitteh hair out of the list of ingredients.

That has been remedied.

Brothers, sisters and anthologies : oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

Spooked

Longtime readers of this blog might remember my astonishment on discovering, in the course of an enthusiastic rummage through the online NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages records, a pair of five-greats grandparents who were both First Fleeters -- one convict, one Marine -- and who married on Norfolk Island in 1790, had a bunch of sprogs, were given some land and lived to a ripe old age. I'd always thought that my dad's family were the serious pioneers and I was a bit sad that my mum didn't live long enough to discover that her family, via her own father, was several generations more Australian even than my dad's.

Googling around to find out as much about them as I could, I came upon the Jane Langley Descendants Association -- apparently there are something like twelve thousand such descendants -- and immediately joined, and have been getting their newsletter plus information provided by other genealogy enthusiasts ever since. Today I fished a full envelope of this stuff out of the mailbox. Usually when there are photos in it, they are baby photos of tenth-generation members, taken less than a year ago, but today I was leafing through the various family trees and came upon a Depression-era photo of four women: my second? third? cousin Eileen, my great-aunt Florence, my great-grandmother Ellen aka Granny McGuinness, and my great-great-grandmother Caroline.

I'd never seen photos of any of them before. Florence, even in a bad reproduction of an old photo, is unmistakably my Grandad's sister: same tall stature, long face, swarthy complexion and thick, curly, wild, dark hair. (My mum inherited this hair, except in her own mother's flaming red.) The transcript of Jane Langley's trial for theft at the Old Bailey in September 1785 says



(The transcript suggests that Jane wuz framed by this drunken "gentleman" trying to explain how he'd lost his money, but I would say that, wouldn't I.)

The girth of Granny McGuinness explains a lot.

Oh well.

Who dares meddle with me?

Driving home this afternoon I saw in front of me a modest-sized white 4x4 with the classiest back-windscreen motto I've ever seen: Nemo me impune lacessit. It rang a faint and distant bell but I couldn't place it, and I've never studied Latin, so I sat there in the traffic trying to nut it out. Nemo means nobody, of course, and me is obvious, and it's a fair old bet that impune has something to do with punishment or the lack of punishment, but lacessit had me stumped. What could it all mean? 'Can't blame me for trying'? 'No jury would ever convict me'?

Five minutes later I pull into the driveway, leap out of the car, run into the house and google it before I forget it. Hooray for Wikipedia:

Nemo me impune lacessit is the Latin motto of the Order of the Thistle and of three Scottish regiments of the British Army. The motto also appears, in conjunction with the collar of the Order of the Thistle, in later versions of the Royal coat of arms of the Kingdom of Scotland and subsequently in the version of the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom used in Scotland. It is often translated as No one attacks me with impunity, or rendered in Scots as Wha daur meddle wi' me? ("Cha togar m'feargh gun dioladh" in Scottish Gaelic.)

Duh. Given that I'd just spent the afternoon with my father, you'd think Wha daur meddle wi' me would have been the very first thing I'd thought of.

It occurs to me later that it's really just the high-class version of that image you often see on the back of the car in front of you: Yosemite Sam twirling his six-guns and snarling 'Back off.' I love Loony Tunes, but I think I like the Latin even better.

Southern Gothic

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally amazing Barry McGuire singing 'Eve of Destruction' at James Bradley's City of Tongues, with James' comment that 'the great ones never date', produced a kind of chemical reaction that sent me hightailing it to Google to find this:





This was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on my brand-new guitar (which I still have, stained with the blood of my fingers) and sing. I've got a particularly vivid memory of a houseboat holiday when I was sixteen, singing this song as part of the after-dinner family self-entertainment in an exaggerated Southern accent while my parents and sisters threw in a lot of Yee-ha and Lord have mercy in a kind of call-and-response approach, but my dad, half-cut and feeling no pain, and if I was sixteen he must still only have been, what, 42, got a bit more creative and started throwing in responses that acted as a kind of subtext to what is already an extremely veiled and secretive song, its drama residing in its silences. So our version, sung forty years ago in the middle of nowhere on a boat tied up to a willow on the bank a river that now belongs to history and myth, was full of things like this:

That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
(Ah hates them preacher men)
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh and by the way
(Here we go, this ain't good)
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
(Ah tole you never go up there)
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchee Bridge
(You in biiiig trouble)

Gah

Papa Cat got carted off to hospital yesterday after some sort of heart attackish thingy. Not very big, but there is some damage. Have spent the last 36 hours walking past and under signs saying Emergency and Resuscitation and Critical Care, writing book reviews in hospital corridor chairs using the Notes application on my iPhone, and sending texts to my sisters saying things like 'Have you got his Gold Card?' and 'I'm in the cafeteria, where are you??!'

Tonight he is, as they say, resting comfortably: under observation in a quiet ward, no surgery or anything. But a doctor saying "I've looked at his ECG's and I didn't like what I saw" is a doctor whose face not even a mother could love.