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Life in Flight: The world from my back yard

Life in Flight: The world from my back yard
Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

If flying is being freed of anything that binds you to the earth and to everything that holds you there, to soar, to swim, to float, to spin, and lockdown means our species is magically removed, who can blame the birds for coming in from the sea.

 

This is a companion piece to this column published a week ago.

1.

I’ve always yearned to fly, in dreams and in reality. In the big planes, sure, long before I ever did fly, when I used to gaze up in wonder and envy at plane loads of people going off to somewhere exotic, places far away, unknown and consequently mystical. But I have a lifelong love affair with birds on the wing too. Imagine the sense of freedom they must feel, soaring and dipping, keeling and banking by their absolute command of their every muscle. The tiniest dip of the edge of a wing and she’s banking to the left, flapping to rise, or keeping her wings motionless to glide. Or, in the case of this video made five years ago and which was shared with me this week, to be an eagle set free at the pinnacle of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and remain in a tensely controlled holding pattern until you see your master on the ground below, upon sight of whom you suddenly fold in your wings like a human does his arms and swoop down at breathtaking speed, alighting on his arm:

In dreams I fly, or so it seems; a source of fascination to the extent that I wrote a song about it in 2004. I can’t share the music, so maybe best to think of it as a poem:

On Morpheus Way

A while away
a second, stray
a minute, say;
an hour, a day
A plain

A clearing there,
a lane, a chair
a mountain lair
a table shared;
A mirror

In dreams awake
a hand I take
in other worlds a life to make
in dreams to stray
on Morpheus Way
and play

In clouds I fly
in dreams I try
to breach the sky
to claim the high
to rise

To soar, to swim
to float, to spin
at freedom’s whim
in Hera’s stream
to glimmer

In dreams awake
a hand I take
in other worlds a life to make
in dreams to stray
on Morpheus Way
and play

(The notion of “in dreams awake” is borrowed from Johnny Clegg’s The Crossing.)

2.

In a big garden that wraps around the oldest house in town, a little woman with a big heart is doing laps. It looks like Sandra Antrobus can’t travel overseas this year; she can’t even get to her hotel down the road. Any rate, she’s had to close it, for reasons that we all have come to understand. Her enforced solitude – her wonderful husband Michael no longer sits in his once customary chair in the TV lounge, and I always feel a bit skaam when she insists I sit there – sits unnaturally with her. In her normal life, she is always on her feet, flitting from house to house, seeing to maintenance, allocating rooms and houses for guests. Instead, she tells me in a WhatsApp call, she now takes a walk all the way around the perimeter of her property, but with each lap she does she changes the route. This one takes her down  the Rue Whatevaire in Paris, now she’s in a street in Rome near their hotel overlooking the Trevi Fountain. She imagines throwing a coin into it while Pat Boone sings. And off she goes, slipping in and out of worlds she knows with her Michael no longer there; worlds they knew together.

Sandra, dear Sandra, is hereby acknowledged as inspiration for this theme.

3.

Rounding a corner in the back yard I find myself in Sultanahmet. It’s been a stressful day and night getting there for reasons to do with online fraud and my naivety, but we’re here at last and Istanbul’s old town, in February 2013, is humming with tourists. It seems so wrong to me now. How will I keep clear of everybody, how will I stay alive, will I ever get home, and thank God it’s a dream.

In Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s real Sultanahmet of 2020, even this week the people are still demanding a lockdown even if measures such as wearing masks have become stricter. I’ve gotta get out of this place but not before I find a street trader whose pistachio-strewn baklava goes down sweetly as I pass the entrance to the Turkish baths where old men bathe, and enter the Grand Bazaar to be accosted by a bearded young man who’s decided I’m American and rich enough to buy one of his Persian carpets. But my eye is caught by the spectacle three shops down, a magpie’s delight of lanterns in reds and teals and shiny yellows. I buy a pair of teal ones, one for a table top and one to hang, and there they are now as I sweep past the dining room window and past the rusting wheelbarrow with its tangle of plants and past my unswept braai to find myself in London, strolling into Regent Street from Piccadilly Circus. Regent Street is garlanded with necklaces of blue Christmas lights, which means it’s December 1993 and I’m ravenous. But chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, not just in Nat King Cole’s languid vocal delivery but right there, on a brazier behind which stands a man in a coat, woolly scarf and beret scooping several of them into a carton for a pound. They’re strange, something known to me only in movies and songs. They’re more crumbly than crunchy on the outside and the mush within reminds me of sweet potato. I should have left their mystique back there in the song.

As I reach Oxford Circus there’s someone walking past my front gate, an event so normal just three weeks ago yet now oddly suspicious. What could he be up to? Where’s his mask? Why is he here? I need to be further away from here, much further, and the sight of an empty beer bottle with a metal flower stuck in it takes me to Yorkshire in 1987, and we’re stumbling out of the Mucky Malt, gulping in the cold night air and giggling in relief at having extricated ourselves. The beef and ale pie had been magnificent, as were the variety of Yorkshire ales that had been poured down my throat with it, but boy did I now understand why my aunt Marian had said to cousin Molly earlier, “What! Yer not tekkin’ ’im to t’Mucky Malt, shore-leh? Oh dear!” It turned out to be open mic night at the Malt Shovel on that night of the week, and the sight and sound of the barrel of a publican and her bawdy humour and Yorkshire-Ethel-Merman voice was not going to leave my head in a hurry. There are dockside sailors’ bars far more genteel.

But you do wonder. More than 30 years have gone by and Molly is in a care home now and Marian is long gone. You chide yourself that you’ve scarcely been in touch in the years since Chichester, and how must Susan and Geoff and Ben and David be coping with their lockdown, and when this is all over, you must find a way to get back and see Molly again. Even if she’d wonder who you were.

At the back gate I do a U-turn and my little Toyota in the back yard is suddenly parked along the Boulevard de la Croisette in Cannes, and I spy an ice cream restaurant, literally a palace of glace, as the French call the frozen delight. It’s open-air, it’s summer on the Côte d’Azur, I’m young and life is so good, even without the parfait glass of lemon, hazelnut and pistachio ice creams I’m devouring. The reverie is interrupted by the robin that nests high up in the yucca tree in the far corner of the back yard, and my mind pictures the boulevard as it must be now, and wonders: have the birds moved in from the sea, like they have at Langebaan, are they flocking and flapping all over the beaches, even the boulevard itself, and perched on the ledges of the Carlton and Martinez hotels where movie stars swan and sashay in normal times.

It’s all far too close, too dark, and if the yucca is platform nine and three quarters, and if I rise up high like an eagle and swoop down towards it, this must be Montmartre during La Belle Époque, and there, that man at a table in the street outside La Guinguette, with the beret and cravat, could it be… and his table companion, surely not… and a street scene comes to life in your head while your mind brings you back to the print of Van Gogh’s irises on the wall in the passage on the day before the Easter weekend, and you pull your arms together like a bird pulling its wings together for the descent into your back yard in Cradock in April 2020, alighting on your arm. Lockdown, week two, done. Let’s see where next week takes us. DM/TGIFood

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