I Defiantly See Wrinkles as Evidence of Shared Joy.

I never expected to be stood here today. Deep inside, I think I believed Granny would live forever. Of course, it would be unfair to wish immortality on another person, but Granny wasn’t just any other person: she was a force of life, an avatar of kindness, love and compassion. Cultures around the world have concepts of deities of life and as far as I can find, none take the form of an elderly lady, yet what greater celebration of the glory of life is there than the elderly matriarch with the family she loves?

I felt her love wrapped tight around me as she held me close when homesickness had induced a meltdown in me (I was 4 and staying away from home for the first time and Grandad had given me Ribena in the wrong cup and the world ended – and instead of being cross or impatient, she wrapped my in herself until I was ok again). I taste it every time I drink sweet, weak, milky tea – the cure she gave me for the shock of falling in an icy puddle. I watched it flowing from her, filling the room, the house, the whole world as she held my son for the first time, gazed at his little baby face. Her great-grandchild, and far from her first but still given that same awe-filled adoration as if he were her only child, a glowing protection he will carry with him always, even if he doesn’t know it.

She taught me a lot about how to move through a world that can feel unbearably hard at times. I remember her telling me you grow into the face you deserve: if you face the world with a smile, your face will reflect that. It is a hard lesson, but I think of it whenever I find myself struggling through a hard time. I remember that Granny, too, faced difficulties, faced incredibly painful things, and that she did so with love. I remind myself I want to earn my wrinkles, my kind face, and so I set myself to finding the small, shared joys. Whenever I think of her, I think of the smiles drawn deep into her face.

 

I read this at my Granny's funeral. I waited outside with a few other family as the hearse came round. Pink roses were strewn over the wicker coffin - beautiful and just right, yet how could my kind, vibrant Granny be in there? She was carried in, and we followed. 

I don't have words for the ceremony, but hearing how full her life was, and seeing people nod to my words has helped start me healing.

My husband and son didn't come to the ceremony, but instead spent time with my cousins' wives and children. They joined us at the pub after, the kids running around at everyone's feet, laughing and playing. The older generations, we talked and ate and reminisced - and smiled at the children.

The flowers were brought over, with the thought everyone could take some home. Pink roses, to match her favourite plant in her garden. The children used them as wands, casting silly spells on us all. Full of joy and life, like Granny. She'd have loved that.

 

Ru Rainbow

My Granny died on New Year's Eve. I have so much I want to say, but right now the grief is too huge so all I can manage is a photo.

Inspirational People: Ursula K. Le Guin

My triumvirate of favourite authors, I have mentioned before, consists of Sir Terry Pratchett, Patrick Rothfuss, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Of these, Ursula Le Guin rules queen. (Most of the time, anyway. I can be fickle.)

Photo © 2014 Jack Liu

I grew up in a house of books, and it was wonderful. I remember learning to read with my Mum, but I don't remember not being able to read at least a little any more than I can remember not being able to talk at least a little. I am grateful to my parents and my genetics for that - it's taken much longer for my very dyslexic younger sister to read with the pleasure I take for granted.

But despite her dyslexia, when my Dad was preparing his will and asked my younger siblings and I if there were any books we particularly wanted, we each immediately requested the Le Guins. He trawls charity shops for her older books (older books have a particular feel as well as that biblichor smell that makes them more desirable), and gives any he already has to whichever child arrives first and doesn't own that one.

Before anything else by Le Guin, I read the first volume of her short story collection, The Wind's Twelve Quarters. Many of the stories affected me - Darkness Box and The Word of Unbinding stand out particularly because each spoke to my fear of death, but it was Semly's Necklace that cut me the deepest, because as well as my fear of death it sang to the gaping loss of my mother half a life before.

Rocannon's World was the first of her novels I read. It's my memory that I read The Wind's Twelve Quarters because my Dad wanted me to read Semly's Necklace in preparation for Rocannon's World, but having recently re-read the novel I realise Semly's Necklace - or a version of it - makes the first chapter so perhaps I'm wrong. I enjoyed A Wizard of Earthsea, which I read later, but not as much as her science fiction and not as much as my Dad hoped I would, but I want to re-read it now because I think my adult mind will find more in it than my child's mind, seeking adventure, did.

My favourite title of any book ever is The Word for World is Forest (I also love Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, and Le Guin comments on how beautiful his language is in that book), but my favourite of all her books - the one that had the biggest impact on shaping the way I think - is The Left Hand of Darkness. I will try not to say much so as not to give spoilers, but I was a young teen when I read it, and gender was a very fixed and binary thing to me, and I'm thankful to have read this book then so it could have such an impact on me and open my eyes to the world as it is, instead of as society pretends it is.

I am currently reading Dancing at the Edge of the World. It makes me smirk and want to cry and above all it makes me think. There have been many highlights, but something I particularly enjoyed was the way she shared a piece she'd written a decade earlier that she no longer fully agreed with. Instead of presenting it in a changed form with no explanation, she has presented it in it's original, with additional italic annotations explaining what she no longer agrees with and why, and how she would re-word aspects if she were to write it now (or at least, the now of when this was published). It is all the more powerful for it: to be able to admit that our opinions can change is a vital step in communication, in community building. 

I have tagged this 'inspirational people' because her fiction has had a huge impact on me; the worlds she has created have affected the way I view this world; her poetry in prose is something I strive towards (although, it is my own style, my own poetry, I am seeking). She is part of why I can't help but write, why story holds me so closely, but she is also part of why I am comfortable calling myself feminist, and why at least trying to be inclusive, intersectional in my feminism matters to me.

Reading Dancing at the Edge of the World, I am realising that her voice is so gentle and so strong, it compels me to seek mine. I could not (should not) write her stories, but she is a pilot star as I seek my own.   

Farewell, Jareth

It's taken me a while to write this, because I'm not ready to accept it. But that's life and death and that's how it goes.

When I was toddler-sized, my favourite books were Spot's Birthday Party by Eric Hill, Meg and Mog by Helen Nicholl and Jan Pieńkowski - and Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak. My elder sister recalls hiding her fear of the story in order to read it to me over and over again as only a toddler can demand, and I think it's her love for me that is why I loved the story so much: I knew if I was ever taken by fairies, she would, without question, be there to bring me home. I have never doubted that.

So move onward a few years, and I'm watching TV. I think I must have been around 8 or 9, because I remember it as being a large, colour TV and we didn't have a colour TV until I was 8. I missed the beginning of the film I was watching, this was long before the days of pressing a button on the remote (what remote?!) to see what you were watching, and we didn't have a TV guide. I was entrhalled, but I had no idea what film it was that had me so spellbound.

Fast forward to my third year of uni. I was home alone and bored, nosing through my housemate's dvd collection. She was a huge Bowie fan, and at this point my only known exposure to him had been the mother of my French exchange student asking "Iz eet pronounced 'Boh-ee' ou 'Bough-ee'?" so I'd been enjoying educating myself on his music. But it was the dvd shelf that stunned me, because there was a film there that looked so familiar. I was sure, but afraid to be sure, to the point my hands were trembling as I put it on. 

There was one scene I remembered most vividly: the Ida character and some goblin reaching a garden by climbing up a ladder and out of a flowerpot to meet a wiseman with a talking hat. Turns out I remembered it wrong: Sarah and Hoggle don't climb out of a flowerpot. But Labyrinth was the film that I had been seeking for somewhere around 15 years.

What I'm saying is, I was late to discovering the depth of the importance and power of David Bowie, but his impact on me was no less for it. I want to write one day about why Labyrinth is an important film ("You have no power over me"), but not today: Bowie is an amazing actor as well as a wonderful musician and the Jareth character is truly sinister, but today I wanted to talk about Bowie.

I find I still don't have the words. 

I was angered when I saw a newspaper headline (I think the Sun) "Shock Bowie Cancer Death". It was not a shock: Lemmy's death was a shock, but Bowie's we knew was coming. Or at least, I saw the announcement 18 months or so ago but no paper followed the story and I managed to convince myself it had been an internet hoax. Just because the papers hadn't realised how much he meant to the world didn't mean his illness wasn't known. I've been similarly annoyed by the people who say, on listening to his latest single, "It's like he knew he was going to die!" Well, yes.

Oh, but I know my anger is the frustrated anger of the bereaved. And as with Sir Terry Pratchett last year, I feel a bit weird that I'm feeling bereaved at the loss of someone I never met. And that makes me feel weird, because somehow I've always known I'd meet David Bowie, a conviction I can't trace the root of (unless it was in that long quest to find the film...) and I'd never lingered on the thought long enough to question it until now, but the convistion is strong enough I'm beginning to wonder if there is an after life.

He was able to fluidly change himself time and time again. He was an openly bisexual person in a world of very few bisexual rolemodels. He was gender fluid in a gender binary time. And that might not seem important to everyone, but representation does matter, and he didn't just represent: he was loved. Is loved. And the huge musiccal legacy he has left us is something I am grateful for.

I feel sometimes that it must help when the person you love who's died is famous. When people close to me have died, there's been this seismic shift in the world to which most of the world seems oblivious. Not so for Bowie. Not so for Alan Rickman (whose generosity in supporting young talent from poor backgrounds and his commitment to equality needs to be more widely known). Not so for the rather striking number of famous deaths since Christmas.

Does it help to know the world mourns with you?

I didn't know what Bowie meant to me until now. It doesn't seem true that I'll never meet him. 

Farewell, Goblin King.

Inspirational People - Lorna Arnold

Today would have been Lorna Arnold's 100th birthday. I'm very sad she isn't here to celebrate it, but I'm still grateful to have known her and it feels right today to talk about my Great-Aunt Lorna. My elder sister recently told me that she knew Lorna wasn't allowed to talk about her work, so always assumed she was a spy! She was a nuclear historian, working alongside Margaret Gowing.

You can find out about her life on her website, wikipedia or in her memoire, so that's not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about how her life has inspired me: the fact that it wasn't until she was in her mid-40's that she found the career she's famous for. When I was feeling like my life was wasting before, racing away from me, I took strength from remembering that, and that was a huge part of how I had the courage to apply for the job I'm now in. She gave me that strength.

I also want to talk about the last time I saw her, the summer before she died. She lived up in Oxford, and there was an exhibition at the Ashmolean my Dad, step-mum and I wanted to see so it was a good justification to pop in. She wasn't quite ready when we got there, very frail by then, her carer was helping her as we waited. It was weird for me: there was something familiar about the house as we arrived, and as we waited I looked out at the garden and it was exactly as I knew it would be. And Dad remembered that I had been here before when I was very tiny. Strange the things we remember: it was the sunshine in the garden.

When Lorna came down, I was silhouetted against the French windows, which meant despite her now limited vision, she could still see me and commented how tall I was - I was amazed, similarly, by short she seemed. She's one of these people who filled any room she was in, so it seems strange that she was so little. We ate cake and drank tea and talked about the world and the way it's shaped. She commanded a room when she spoke, and she spoke so articulately and intelligently. And you know what, she made me feel invincible in her calm, made me feel like I could achieve anything, and I needed that at that moment. My depression started to lift for the first time after that visit.

Goodbye, Sir Terry

I've been sitting here staring at a blank screen trying to work out how to say... what to say about Sir Terry Pratchett.

The first of his books I read was Guards Guard, when I was 12. My middle school had a tiny library, and one shelf was only for year 8 pupils. I'd had my eye on the book since I started 3 years before - Josh Kirby's art was fantastic and there were dragons! And I loved it, although it wasn't what I was expecting.

I loved the Johnny trilogy, and Carpet People, and Good Omens is the book I read again and again, but Discworld is where I lose myself. I remember the great pleasure of trips to the bookshop with my Dad, using hard-earned pocket money to pick up the series; slowly, slowly. The Last Continent was the first that was my favourite, but these days it's Reaper Man followed by anything with the Witches.

When I went to uni, I couldn't take my vast library so a lot of it was boxed up and left with my Dad for safe-keeping. Came home and moved with Husbit officially. A few years ago we finally had the space to collect most of the boxes (I think there's one left, maybe two), so we went through and ensured we had a full Discworld collection between us and my step-mum was delighted to find herself in possession of a nearly full set - with my Dad's collection, there were still several duplicates.

Magrat is a character I've been meaning to write about for a while: she is not my favourite character but she is the most important to me.

I hated her, to begin with: she was so wet and uselessly well-meaning and dreamy and one day I realised I hated her because she reminded me of me, right down to the bird's nest hair and peas on an ironing board. And as I realised that, she became a stronger person and that hurt, because she was moving away from someone I related to and becoming someone I thought I could never be - and then finally I started to get there. And I've been trying to find the way to express that best so that I could write and tell Terry Pratchett and I'm sorrowful I didn't write to him in time.

When I heard the diagnosis, I was heartbroken and hoping for a miracle and it was selfish because I didn't want the books to end - the Science and the Folklore as much as the fiction - but I think it's a selfishness shared by many. I wanted him to be well for his friends and his family and himself, but in an abstract way: tangibly, I wanted him to be well for the Disc. And that ... that can never happen now and I'm sad. And I'm sad for his family and his friends and for the stories.

But I'm so grateful for the ones we've already had.