New Term

I am taking it easy this term and teaching very little. My evening class last night was a bit of a trial as I now have Level 1s instead of Level 2s and some of them have never learned grammar before; have no idea that there are the present simple and present continuous and have always muddled along with some approximation of the two. I feel sad that I have to break the news that they have so much to learn. Those who have come from Entry 3 of course, at least know the names of some of the tenses, and know what a noun is; what a verb is and what an adjective is. I wrote definitions of these on the board last night. I had not planned to but I realised that this was needed. Actually, I am not a bad teacher, but have to hurry around the class too much .

I miss my old class!

Last night I couldn't sleep - probably woken by hunger and the acorns falling on the roof - I was very hungry as I didn't eat properly in the evening - but I want to lose weight anyway. So I went to F's room and read a lot more of Virginia Woolf's diary Vol 2 - same old cheap edition; the cover has fallen off but I can use it as a bookmark. I am enjoying all the Bloomsbury gossip. She has started to report conversations for the sheer fun of it; it's lovely to read. She is very funny sometimes. She gets very down in the dumps about certain things - feels such intense rivalry with Katherine Mansfield - they all think J.M. Murry is a terrible man but they think he's bound for glory, which galls them, The Woolfs heard that their view at Rodmell was about to be destroyed by a new house being built right next to their garden, you can almost feel Virginia's angst and anger - that didn't happen, (thank God, because it's so lovely now), and Leonard and V. bought the land themselves and extended their garden, so they finally could relax about that. VW has started to be comfortable around Tom Eliot "Eliot's visit passed off successfully, & yet I am disappointed to find that I am no longer afraid of him." - He is rather proud of some poems he wants the Hogarth to print - called "The Waste Land". Then she is still up against her servants Lottie and Nelly. "Refer back to some other scene of the kind if you wish to know how many hours have been wasted; how many reflections upon the lower classes formulated; & how often L[eonard] has approached me before I order dinner with a pained, solicitous appearance, begging me on no account to say this or that, strongly advising me at all costs to make something else plain."

I went to the dentist this morning and now I have another gold tooth - hope it will be comfortable like the others. I have a most expensive mouth.  It has been a terribly expensive month, and this comes on top of Australia, which cost I don't like to say how much. We had to spend a lot on F - buy stethoscope, memberships, warm coat, food, towels, all sorts of things. Then my dentistry. The dentist, Catherine, says I huff and sigh in the chair and she is quite sarcastic about it, finds it irritating although I don't know I'm doing it; I don't feel like a bad patient.

Went to the happiest shop I know - Waitrose in Hersham. Everybody smiles and is happy and chatty. The staff seem to spend all day gossiping but they do run a good shop. They just can't do enough to help you.

Then went to the garden centre for something to cover the seedlings. I bought a sort of kit - a bit like K'nex for putting bamboo canes together, and a big net. Better go and do it now.

War Crimes - from the Narrow Road to the Deep North

This is a passage about the time after the war, when one of the guards on the Burmese Railway - a Korean - is waiting to be hanged for his treatment of the POWs.

Choi Sang-min noticed how every man at Changi conceived of his destiny differently and invented his past accordingly. Some men had point-blank denied the charges, but they were hanged or were imprisoned for lengthy periods anyway. Some had accepted responsibility but refused to recognise the authority of the Australian trials. They too were hanged or imprisoned for greater or lesser periods. Others denied responsibility, pointing out the impossibility of a lowly guard or soldier refusing to recognise the authority of the Japanese military system, far less refusing to do the Emperor's will. In private they asked a simple question. If they and all their actions were simply expressions of the Emperor's will, why then was the Emperor still free? Why did the American support the Emperor but hang them, who had only ever been the Emperor's tools?

But in their hearts they all knew that the Emperor would never hang and that they would. Just as surely as they had beaten and tortured and killed for the Emperor, the men who didn't accept responsibility were now to hang for the Emperor. They hanged as well and as badly as the men who accepted responsibility or the men who said they never did any of it, for as they jiggled about beneath the trapdoor one after another, their legs jerked all the same....

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

Here is the cover of the paperback I have just been reading.

It's not about the girl, although she is important, but that picture of a made-up woman is just - no.

It is about the man, but he shouldn't be wearing a new uniform and be looking down. He should be bony and wearing tatters and standing upright in spite of that. His hands shouldn't be dangling and useless. He should be looking tense, wary ... it's a terrible cover for a serious book.

Some approximation of this scene would have been more truthful

This map would have helped with the geography

This shows the achievement of the men of all the races who did the engineering and building.

Oh it is such an affecting book. It is about war and peace, life and death, trying to make sense of years of suffering that don't make sense. It is about damaged lives and the puzzle of why they have to be that way.

The extraordinary thing is that no person in the book is an out-and-out monster, although there are times when the Japanese seem to be. There is always a backstory and all the characters are complex and capable of changing. The prisoners come out of Tasmania and other parts of Australia, and they have lived through a world depression - they're not educated men and they are distinctly Australian, with their practicality, mate-ship and their ability to make do. How the doctor fashions catheters from shards of bamboo, for example...how they manage to distill water to fashion a drip ...how they manage to steal things.

This war separated men from women, but in Australia, I think, that's fairly normal. Men there are about the outdoors and farm animals and machinery, whereas women have a traditional role around the family and social life, but of course, at this time that separation was true of all the world. When Flanagan writes of Dorrigo Evans and his heroism, he is writing about something that separates men from women. I don't think that loneliness - a terrible loneliness - is now possible in so acute a form.

There are glimpses in the book of women - for example, comfort women - who also suffer at the hands of the Japanese, but the book is about men and their capacity to inflict suffering and to suffer - and survive.

Birmingham again

We took F to university yesterday - although a newbie, she was not given a place in Hall but had to go to a house agency. But I think she will be OK in her house with a French postgrad, a Japanese postgrad and a 2nd year International Relations student - she is old for her age and will enjoy being with older people sometimes.

It was a real trip down memory lane - those Victorian streets in Birmingham go on and on - and all the houses have an add-on kitchen at the back, and a certain shade of dirty cream paint.... I even went past the house where I used to live in Selly Oak. F's is better than most with 2 decent bathrooms and 4 double bedrooms, new carpets throughout - but the furniture is cheap and old, there is a leak in the kitchen onto the kitchen floor, garden is full of weeds and the whole house is a bit smelly but the smell is disguised with those awful plug-in air-fresheners.

Similar houses in the Pershore Road

At one point, after sitting in the living room, I was so confused with a house I remembered in Dawlish Road that I opened the cupboard in an attempt to go upstairs.

There are far more students now and lots of property companies managing student houses - whereas before it was nearly always a one-to-one arrangement with a landlord.

This morning I skiffed past this well-known landmark:

Yes, Hampton Court - don't be fooled by the chimneys - they're a Victorian addition to make the place look more exciting.

Seed pods from Queensland

The long ones are from the Poinciana or Flame tree. 

I was particularly struck by these seed pods because they are made of wood - or a very solid substance, very strange because these are only the pods and they don't need to be strong or enduring, do they?

I thought at first that the long ones are from a tamarind tree but on Googling these I discovered tamarind pods are shorter and have fruits, not seeds. The very large seed pods come from the Poinciana tree and it is native of Madagascar but grown  in the southern United States (especially Florida) and Bermuda.

Poinciana. F. Caesalpiniaceae. Originally from Madagascar, these decorative trees (up to 12m) typically have a buttressed trunk and a broad, spreading canopy. Their large, compound green leaves can have up to 2,400 fine leaflets with minute hairs. The tree is deciduous before flowering from November to January (in Australia). The quality of the bloom improves with age and after a long, hot dry spell. The long, spectacular racemes of flowers are bright red and blotched with yellow. After flowering the tree becomes loaded with numerous large (up to half a metre flat pods that hang from the foliage. (101 plants of the wet tropics: Martin Cohen and Julia Cooper)

Poinciana tree

The shorter seed pods, however, are from a native Australian tree. The tree is called Black Bean, or Moreton Bay Chestnut. (It's not a chestnut. The Australians call their trees things like Northern Silky Oak and they are nothing to do with the oak trees we have in Europe. Likewise ash.)
Castanospermum australe. These large, straight-trunked trees (up to 35m) grow in rainforest and adjacent habitats and have grey to brown smooth trunks and glossy, dark green compound leaves that provide a dense canopy. ...The large, woody seed pods are long and rounded, each containing three to five large, rounded chestnut like seeds. (Cohen and Cooper)

Mature black bean tree

Reading for the book club

I have been enjoying my sojourn with Virginia Woolf. I liked "To the Lighthouse" although I got on better with the first part than the second. Then I tried "Jacob's Room" which I could see was not as successful as the other, greater novels, because it was earlier and she was feeling her way with her impressionistic technique, which meant that some of the time it was hard to understand what on earth was going on. Jacob was there as a blocky smudge, as his impressions of others and their impressions of him.

Then I went to the book club book: "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" by Richard Flanagan, and its ideas of what matters enough to record, and what is the truth, are so entirely different that it knocks one's head sideways. But here there's a boldness and confidence about what matters that's dizzying and the writer has no truck with gentleness. It's as though the bright colours and reality of hard Australian trees and extreme climate has trained him to write in a hard, bright way.

Yet there are surprising similarities about what matters, Flanagan writes about death and VW was no stranger to death; before she was eighteen her mother, sister, brother and father had died; it seemed that they were always at deathbeds, and grief and bereftness comes into the three books I have read - that intrusive, unnecessary bloody death in "Mrs Dalloway" for example.. VW felt the importance of returning to reading the classics, like Flanagan's protagonist.  Flanagan is struggling with the truth just as much as Virginia Woolf, he is also asking what is true, for example, about heroism.

Sometimes in my life, what is given as truth and what I understand as truth are very different, and I think, I must record that, I must write this discrepancy down -  and I don't support the idea that there is no truth. I look sideways and I say nothing, but I know what is true. But I may be seen as a different character whose version of the truth is distorted.

It's a mast year again, and all the oak trees are productive together - acorns fall on my roof from time to time and I like to hear that clunk and roll. 

Plants of the Wet Tropics, North Queensland - creepers and climbers

You will not find a creepier creeper

Horribly prickly palm creeper: wait-a-while

Climbing pandanus

This is called a strangler vine. Eventually it will kill the tree.

Monstera was the first plant I was ever given! Here is a really happy one.

Plants of the Wet Tropics - more from North Queensland: Paperbark, palms, curtain fig tree

This is a giant red paperbark, botanical gardens Cairns. The point of the boardwalk, we discovered, is to stop the leeches which do lurk everywhere in a rainforest.

Paperbark

Strange lack of roots. Eaten away?