helves. And then, one glorious day, a tiny version of a capsicum appeared. The tomato plant began to sprout cheerful blossoms, which promptly browned and fell off within the space of a day. During the second month, actual tomatoes began to appear.
It was the winter of 2002 when my mother, aunt and I got kicked out of a seance for pissing off the medium.
My aunt Annie is my mother’s eldest sister; a magnified version of my mother with wild hair, grand hand gestures and a hearty laugh where lesser mortals merely smile. Over the years they have developed a relationship delicately built by sharing interests and experiences, and frequently destroyed by their desire to out-do each other in all said interests and experiences.
Specifically, they share a keen interest in all things occult and over the years have played a game of spiritual Top Trumps. At first, both parties were satisfied discussing people’s lives based on their horoscopes and deeming ‘Well! He’s a typical Aquarius’ a sufficient explanation to someone’s wrongdoings. The game was soon raised by the introduction of aura-photographs* and tarot readings, but things escalated when my aunt dismissed my mother’s chakra reader as ‘too superficial’. My mother took personal offense and stated that Annie simply refused to truly investigate the realities of her own personality, and they promptly stopped speaking for months. In that time Annie retaliated by befriending a personal spiritual guide called Sebastian who, as far as I understood it, served both as a spiritual conduit and gay best friend. They would lunch together to discuss, at length, my aunt’s various past lives as if they were reviewing the latest Catherine Cookson adaptations.
“Well, you were a misunderstood, oppressed maid after all, what could you have done? You’ve brought that fear of rejection along with you into this life, sweetheart.”
“You know this aggression is just your French Revolutionary speaking.”
One day, my mother had spent a good hour on the phone to Annie before she hung up and sighed: “That Sebastian told her she is a reincarnated Native American Chief”. Things had gone too far. Unless Native American Chiefs harboured a number of souls, even my mother was sceptical about the amount of reincarnations they seemed to produce. She invited Annie over for coffee to bury the hatchet** and discuss some family problems that had recently come up.
The visit went well, coffee was had and gossip was exchanged, but no solution was found for the problems Annie had come to discuss. The traditional 3-round game of Identify, Analyse and Blame The Usual Suspects just frustrated them both until eventually, Annie voiced their last hope:
“We have to talk to mother.”
My grandmother had been dead for 37 years at this point, so clearly this was going to require some occult interference. Annie knew of a medium who was to hold a seance near our house soon, and plans were made to attend said seance to identify where our family had officially gone wrong once and for all.
Without waiting to be asked I invited myself along and that night, we walked to the mid-18th century town house where a middle-aged woman in a mohair cardigan ushered us in. We were directed to a small room with no windows where a veritable cross-section of modern society had gathered: next to a woman in expensive-looking glasses and khaki leisure pants sat a man in biker boots and oversized bomber jacket, blocking the view for a skinny, worried looking woman whose brown turtleneck jumper hung around her like a Sharpei’s skin. The plastic fold-out chairs all pointed to the front of the room, where a makeshift podium had been built and covered with white sheets. Everyone went quiet as a side door opened and the medium entered.
She was of a certain age in that she was older, but not so old that she had given into the traditional pensioner uniform of sensible shoes, tan knee-highs and polyester garments in inexplicabe pastel hues; instead she looked fairly sensible, with a sporty leather jacket over a black dress and kicky ankle boots, and absolutely no ectoplasm anywhere. As she performed the usual show of stating the obvious and reaffirming people about things they already knew I worried that the whole thing would turn out to be a disappointment, but then she turned to my aunt, who had sat with her hand up for the past 10 minutes.
Without revealing what it was we wanted to know about, my aunt asked the medium to contact mother. The medium went silent before declaring that mother was quite far gone, barely there at all, but that she was looking into the light and happy. My mother linked in.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She isn’t in contact with this world any more.”
“What do you mean? She has to, we’ve come all this way.”
“Sometimes, spirits become too detached from this world for me to interpret their messages.”
My mother turned to Annie who, gesturing wildly, raised her voice at the medium and said:
“Why are we even surprised? It’s not the first time she’s avoided our problems. You’re the medium, you tell her we need her help. We’re her children and she’s still not taking a blind bit of notice. Looking into the light my arse.”
Things had been tense before as people had relived their most painful memories, but now that tension had been lifted as everyone, to a person, turned to the medium to see what she would do next. To her credit she rallied beautifully, going out on a complete limb to save the situation. Not that it helped.
“Your father would like to help you.”
“Our father! Spent his entire life avoiding us and now he wants to help? Over my dead body. You can tell him we don’t want to speak to him and to get mother.”
The medium straightened her jacket and said she would see what she could do while, behind her, the woman in the mohair cardigan who had greeted us at the door came in carrying a tray with pots of tea. By the end of the teabreak Annie, my mother and I were standing outside the building.
My role in the whole affair was pretty much non existent, but I had never been so happy to be anywhere else as I was being there. The moment where the stuffy room full of anxious people with questions they would never find a satisfactory answer to was suddenly awash with the clarity of that down to earth response was utterly beautiful, absurd and hilarious. It began to rain slowly as we walked towards a nearby cafe where we would spend the rest of the evening, gossiping, drinking, and laughing.
* Needless to say I, as an impressionable teenager, happily joined in and was more than a bit miffed that my aura turned out to be yellow and red, the exact colours of our living room at the time. It’s a depressing reality check when even your aura refuses to truly distance itself from parental influences, despite all the efforts you have taken by wearing too much eyeliner.
** As it were.
A week or so ago, I flew over to the Netherlands to spend a few celebratory days with my family. It was my mother’s birthday and my sister has recently engaged herself to be married to a 6 ft 5 tall PE teacher with a penchant for DJ-ing, which he does at weekends under the pseudonym DJ Willy. This only adds to his likeability and the enviable ease with which he moves around social circles, picking up friends for life, great experiences and maintaining his generally lovely attitude seemingly without effort.
The wedding is to be next year, and my mother, sister and I discuss the whole event while we wait for my father and DJ Willy to join us at a restaurant that has worked very hard to be quaint and homely (quirky wallpaper, comfy chairs, a plant) while at the same time being posh enough to have a waiter whose sole responsibility it is to keep your wine glass full. This is a first for me, frequenter of pubs, and I empty two glasses before we’re ready for our starter just for the novelty of it. It is usually about halfway through the second glass that I forget the limitations of my reserved personality* and tonight is no different.
‘So how many people are you going to invite?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘You need to know how many so you know whether there will be enough space in the church. Who’s going to seat people when they get there?’
‘Surely they can just come in and seat themselves?’
‘God, no. What if feuding parts of the family end up sitting near each other? You haven’t introduced your in-laws to the majority of our family yet, what if it kicks off between his father and our aunt who thinks she’s a reincarnated native American? Or if people who are only friends of friends just take a seat at the front?’
At this point my mother chimes in stating that, if anyone has the audacity to steal the space she has already reserved for herself and her hat with her nose pressed up against the altar, she will avenge herself and happily do time for it. As she sips her wine with vigour, the starter is served accompanied by a lengthy explanation on the origin, age and cooking process of each ingredient, like a dating show for vegetables. I get the distinct impression the waiter is rushing through it after hearing about my mother’s gung ho attitude to a prison sentence. I empty my glass and, while the increasingly attractive wine waiter fills it up, I begin to get cocky.
‘You’ll need music. Do you want a string quartet or the church organ? What song? And the colour scheme. What flowers do you want and is dad going to give you away? That’s not very feminist, but do you want your wedding to be about you or making a statement for the sisterhood?’
I admit now that it wasn’t very funny, but throughout the starter and most of the main course I feel that I, the person who is free to go back abroad as soon as the seeds of terror had been planted in my sister’s mind, am winning. Yet by my fifth glass of wine I have somehow agreed to do the flowers and sing as my sister walks down the aisle.
As my mother announces that this was all she ever wanted, my father looks up from his plate to express his disappointment with the arrangement. He has apparently been practising a range of adapted lovesongs to sing at both our weddings since enough of our childhood had lapsed to confidently ascertain that neither of us were asexual. He performs a quick line or two to illustrate this, when he is stopped by the waiter serving our last course. As we are introduced to our trio of desserts and I eye contestant no. 3 hungrily, my father cuts the waiter short and says ‘anyway, what are you going to sing? You don’t even sing in front of us unless there’s a door in between.’
This is a point. The thought of potentially ruining my sister’s walk down the aisle is a sobering one, and as we have run out of courses the waiter has stopped filling my glass, serving us coffee instead. Considering she is my only sibling, and the rather better turned-out one at that, I fear becoming the bride’s special sister, you know, the one no one ever sees, who also wanted to contribute something, bless her. I decide I have two options. One, get over myself, practice like hell and hope for the best. Or two, and this is probably the most likely one, I begin drinking at 9 AM on the day of the wedding, deliver a performance that will make me feel like Etta James but sound like a recently dumped 40-year old after happy hour at the karaoke bar. Until then, all I can do is hope for one, practice for two, and however it turns out, finish with a joyful ‘happy wedding day, sis’.
*on a sidenote, my mother once proclaimed in tears that I was so reserved it made her uncomfortable, and she did not know how to talk to me. Being reserved, I didn’t know either and made her a cup of coffee instead. I don’t know if it solved the issue, but she hasn’t brought it up since. Coffee does wonders, I always say.
We must all die at some point, and what we’re supposed to do in the meantime is, at best, very vaguely outlined in terms of things we’re definitely not allowed to get involved in.
Frustratingly, you grow up being told what to do until you’re old enough to drive a car. After that you’re suddenly expected to carry on doing things without directions and sitting around doing nothing is generally frowned upon.
So far, I have managed to get an education, move countries and qualify as a teacher, all of which seemed the most logical things to do based on the rough materials that make up my life: I am of moderate intelligence, with a knack for languages, specifically the one spoken in the country I chose to move to, and my father is a teacher. He seems to be happy in his choice and so far, so am I. The tricky bit has come now that I am 25, on my own and completely at a loss trying to determine what makes my life my own.
Unfortunately, this seems like the kind of existential crisis I am not prepared to address, both because I’m weary of the suggestion of an existential crisis and, frankly, I have a better plan. No one wants sit around wondering what life’s all about (or possibly some people do, but no one wants to listen to them, and rightly so). Instead, I’m trying out some obvious lifestyle choices and hobbies to see what sticks in order to establish some personal certainties I can find comfort in. So far, the list consists of the following:
1) Improve knitting skills to include the production of useful household items, rather than just scarves, which have hitherto only served as presents which received a lukewarm reception at best.
2) Successfully grow my own vegetables aside from the seasonal single cherry tomato which is then kept in the fridge for days so people can come round to admire it. Must be more casual about my gardening skills.
3) Maintain this blog to an acceptable standard (i.e. also interesting to people other than me).
4) Visit more places, both venues and countries. This obviously because it’ll be fun and exciting, but in all honesty it’s mainly because I want photos of myself stood in front of landmarks, looking stylish and casual. In years to come, I want my children and grandchildren to think I was a stylish, casual cosmopolitan. I suspect the majority of people on holiday have this underlying motive, otherwise why bother having your photo taken in front of the pyramids of Giza or that quaint little market stall in Casablanca? Must pay specific attention to improving style and casual stance, possibly get used to wearing hats.
5) Get a fur collar to match both my winter coats. For no other reason than that I like the idea of it.
These goals just scream ‘wholesome, open-minded person’ to me, the kind that famous grandchildren write a loving biography about that gets rave reviews in the Guardian, and that’s exactly what I’m going for (this is also where the photos would come in handy). This blog will, therefore, mainly focus on my endeavours to achieve said goals, and undoubtedly my frustrations in the face of adversity. I’m looking forward to it already.
So, I’ve never really blogged, or posted anything longer than a Facebook message online. Partially because I have always assumed that my attention span wouldn’t stretch that far, but mainly because of my inherent concern that whatever I write will be judged as boring; I could live with interesting people finding my blog boring. That’s because they’re genuinely interesting while I’m exactly as interesting as someone writing a blog, anonymously, on what I expect will mainly be vegetables and cake. However, I now also run the risk of being judged as boring by people who think that the dream they had last night is a conversation piece. For years, I couldn’t face that prospect.
It’s only been since the past two years or so that I have become increasingly gung ho about what other people think*. But as soon as you can start to see your way clear to overcoming uncertainty or insecurity, you should always run ahead and ram your way through whatever is holding you back. Hence, this blog.
ANYWAY. Let’s talk vegetables. I live in a tiny flat with no garden, but I have a windowsill that catches the sun nearly all day. Considering it has all the features of a conservatory (sun, glass, and a roof) it counts as a conservatory. I was born and raised in a city, and the only thing I ever planted up until now was an acorn, which I expected would grow into an acorn-tree overnight. It didn’t, and I never received a formal apology for this disappointment. But I didn’t let that stop me.
The first things I bought was two tiny capsicum plants and one cherry tomato plant, as well as a bag of compost which promised to grow my plants up to twice the normal size**. I checked the next morning, and it hadn’t. Again, no formal apology, but I didn’t write to the compost company to let them know (I know! It’s silly. What if they’d taken the complaint seriously and send me free compost for life? I’d be set. I could incorporate compost in more aspects of my life just to manage the sheer volume I’d have lying around. I’m sure my living room would be immensely improved by having compost wall decorations, and I’d never again have to worry about what to bring to a dinner party).
Moving on. Weeks passed, and despite my incessant staring the plants point blank refused to grow into something I recognised from the supermarket shelves. And then, one glorious day, a tiny version of a capsicum appeared. The tomato plant began to sprout cheerful blossoms, which promptly browned and fell off within the space of a day. During the second month, actual tomatoes began to appear.
My feelings at this time were of biblical proportions, in that I imagined that this is exactly what God would have felt like when he saw the results of his first day creating Earth. I can understand his feelings of sheer joy, and subsequent overenthusiasm in creating the rest of the world at such speed that the slap-dash results of his approach are obvious to anyone who feels inclined to visit, say, the Ardennes. I digress, but all I’m saying is that if God had slept on it for a night or two, the Ardennes wouldn’t be such a shithole.
Working on the basis that we should all learn from one another’s mistakes, especially if they’ve been made by God (who himself even recognised that drowning the whole planet wasn’t a good idea, and promised never to do it again), I decided to leave my plants as they were. I made this decision two weeks ago, and not much has changed apart from the stems bending over under the sheer weight of what must be abnormally big capsicums and tomatoes. If things continue as they are, in two months’ time I will have enough capsicums and tomatoes for one salad, and it will be the most delicious salad I’ll have ever had.
Next time, cake.
*This may have something to do with the fact that you tend to meet more people as you get older.
**Which just goes to show how vulnerable to marketing people like me are. I have no idea how big a tomato plant should grow, so how would I know if it had grown twice the normal size?