Welcome to this 1st Edition of "FROM THE WINDOW" a worldwide magazine inviting contributions in the fields of journalism, poetry, travelogues and experiential writing from people in all walks of life and all parts of the globe.

We are a non-commercial internet magazine following a quiet path away from the soundbites and manic zing of mainstream net, promoting understanding of the breadth of common human experience, celebrating a joy in language and run by a pretentious and pompous crip child...

The contents are divided into: firstly, a Guest Column (where we hope to be able to publish contributions from eminent writers and other prominent people), Readers' Writings (arranged in alphabetical order by author's name), The Editor's View, Coming Soon and Poster & Bumph.

This month our Guest Columnist is the poet Ruth Padel and we have articles on, inter alia, fear of boats; a newcomer's response to Zimbabwe; the emotional impact of surgical versus congenital amputation; imagination and the prehistoric cave paintings of Peche Merle; the death of a cat; and a day in the life of a family therapist.

My Guest Columnist next time is the contemporary composer John Tavener, who has recently reached a wider audience with the playing of a piece of his at the funeral service for Princess Diana. Whilst this 1st Edition comprises mostly articles gathered from people known to the Editor in order to kick the ball into play as it were, I am hoping that future editions will be less lamentably ethnocentric and reflect a broader range of lifestyles, backgrounds and experiences. Therefore I am currently seeking contributions for the next edition from sources across the globe and very much hope that surfers reading this now as a result of my letter-writing or as a result of fortuitous roaming will wish to add their own voices to "FROM THE WINDOW".

For blackout curtains. Plus the card I've kept
On mantelpieces, windowsills and bathroom shelves
For years, And now see why.
Of Tutankhamun's alabaster cup
Which promises he'll face the rising sun
Looking happiness smack in the eye.
Hope of for ever. Hope in a cup -
Of a future

When tentative faxes,
Crazily late late nights,
Drunk failures to be together alone
Will never matter. What a con,
This Pharoah,
Trying to bribe history like that,
Trying to go one better than he got.
Whoever made the thing for him was better off.
Who wouldn't be glad

To have made it?
Look at it, translucent
Before windows were invented,
Shadowed with the veiny bloom
Of half-skimmed milk.
If you're not asleep,
Not yet, look closer.
Lotus-petals, fanned In chalky rainbows round the side,
Make you want to cup it, slide your cheek down
Soft along it,
Weigh it, very gently, in your hand.

Dear Hero,

I have been giving the request for an article for your magazine a lot of thought, and have been trying to find sufficient time to put some thoughts down on paper that make any sense at all. However, events seem to be conspiring against it at the moment. I have just returned from a course at Oxford, and am confronted with a deadline for an article for one book, and the whole manuscript for another. (It is a book on the Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, who is the focus of my dark and largely secret past in academic philosophy!)

If you can be patient, I will endeavour to send you something as soon as is possible. I am keen to do so, not least as my apparent inability to write anything coherent on 'pivotal events' in my life is the cause of no little concern for me!

I hope you and those near to you are well, and look forward to seeing you soon.

Richard

When I was about three I had mumps. I lay on the grey couch in the sitting room trying to eat stewed apple lying down. I wasn't hungry and it hurt my throat to swallow but I wanted the normality of a mealtime. The spoon kept getting bigger, spreading out, filling my field of vision and then shrinking. It finally fell to the floor with a huge clatter our of all proportion to its size. I was compelled to reach out, pick it up and feebly beat it on the floor again to see if such an explosion of sound could come from a small spoon falling a few inches onto a carpet. My Mother came in, put me back onto the couch I'd half fallen off and told me I wouldn't be well enough to go to the party the next day. Well enough to be dressed, kneeling on a chair with my chin resting on the window sill, I watched my older sister walk down the path and out of the gate at the bottom of the back garden. I saw her knock on the door of a house in the row opposite ours, I was willing somebody to open it, see me staring at them hopefully and beckon me over. I did my best to look happy and healthy and in party mood. The door opened, Alison disappeared inside, the door shut.

We moved from a semi detached police house near the sea to a detached village police station with a big garden around it and fields beyond the hedges on two sides. Perhaps the garden was not as big as I remember it. I'm sure the house was smaller than it seemed to me then. The passage from the bottom of the stairs to the bathroom at the back of the house seemed endless, especially at night when I was always afraid Father Christmas would follow me. I remember exactly the feeling of fear mixed with a sense of the ridiculousness of the fear that I felt as I scurried along the dark tiles, but I can't remember if it was me or my younger sister who got locked in the bathroom. Did I stand inside the bathroom watching my Father climb in through the small high window over the wash basin to let me out ? Did I stand outside by the coal bunker watching him disappear down past the tooth mug? Or did he help me to climb in to loosen the bolt and let Helen out? I have pictures in my mind of all three versions. Which of them is the "real" memory? Did they all happen at different times? If so, why didn't anyone make the bolt easier to slide open?

In writing about windows I have written about doors as well. The only time I woke up in the middle of sleepwalking I found myself by the front door, rattling the brass door knob, trying to get out. Doors shut you in, windows let you out. Wide awake but bored at night, I once climbed onto my bedroom window sill among the china cat family arranged there and then out onto the outside window sill gripping the sides of the window frame with dampening hands and not daring to move my feet in case they slipped on the slightly dusty sill. No cars came past, no one came upstairs, no one came to the station office door directly beneath me for a pig licence or to report an accident. I couldn't make myself move backwards to safety, I wondered if a fall onto the gravel path or a jump into the raspberry canes would be very dangerous. The thought of surviving but then having to endure the embarrassment of ringing the doorbell in my nightie to get back into the house stopped me trying it. Downstairs a door opened, I jumped back onto and then into my bed.
I wondered what would have happened if I had jumped the other way.

So, the window at work. We are on the first floor of an office block, above a fish and chip shop, in a suburb of Oxford called Summertown. I look across busy Banbury Road to a row of shops that reflect an affluent suburb in the south of England at the end of the twentieth century. An expensive shoe shop; delicatessen; wine shop; shop selling frames and prints; bank; building society; travel agent; dress shop; gift and housewares shop; and a French-style patisserie.

It's an irony, which I am not the first to notice, that Oxfam - a charity whose aim is to relieve poverty, distress, and suffering, which works with and for some of the poorest, most disadvantaged, most exploited people on earth - shares Summertown with shops like these and the people who keep them in business.

Of course, people have to eat, wear clothes and shoes, have plates to eat off....but these shops are not about providing bare necessities, but about expensive and luxurious versions of necessities, and out-and-out luxuries. There's a BMW garage on the corner next to Oxfam House selling cars for £30,000.

It's not all outrageous. There's the chippy, full of schoolkids at lunchtime; supermarkets, newsagents, dry-cleaners, identical to ones along the down-market Cowley Road near where I live. And an Oxfam shop.

So what do I do in this office when I'm not looking out of the window pondering ironies? I'm a copywriter: and that means writing and producing materials about Oxfam and its work to inform and motivate people here in Britain. For instance? Posters and price tickets in the shops telling cutomers how the money they are spending will change people's lives. Postcards for people to pick up in cinemas, to get them to do a sponsored fast. A script for a video to inform craft producers in poor countries about the British market in which their pots and baskets will be sold.

It's a good job. At its best, it stretches me, stimulates me, keeps me up to date with a worthy, sometimes inspiring organisation. At its worst it means getting paid for doing something that comes pretty easily to me. The best and worst of the job is going on overseas trips.

Best, because it is a great priviledge to see far-away countries as tourists don't see them, and to meet ordinary people - often doing far-from- ordinary things - with translation and explanation from local Oxfam staff who are often pretty impressive people in their own right.

Worst, because such trips mean getting bored, jet-lagged, ill, homesick, and deeply depressed about the miserable deal so many people in poor countries get. And always having a nagging worry that the stories I bring back aren't good enough, don't do justice to the wonderful people I meet.

Women learning to read and write, and to stand up for themselves, in Bangladesh. Volunteer village health workers making sure that kids get vaccinated against killer diseases in Zambia. Traditional midwives in Uganda getting training that helps them to save mothers and babies. More volunteers in Bolivia helping to do a mass vaccination to nip a yellow fever epidemic in the bud.

And, earlier this year, meeting people who have a lost husbands, lost limbs, lost their houses and land as a result of the war in Cambodia, and somehow keep going, looking after their children, and hoping for something better.

So that's my job. And how did I come to be doing it? By a pretty roundabout route. At secondary school in Hull I wanted to be an architect.... realised I couldn't draw, so decided to be a town planner...started a town planning course at Manchester University...dropped out and transferred to a politics course...graduated, got married, worked in factories for a year...did a post-graduate teaching course...became a civil servant working on VAT...got divorced and started a postgraduate research degree in politics...met Julie...got a job teaching politics in a college in Aberdeen...married Julie...she got a job in Oxford, so I gave up mine to come down here with her...unemployed for nearly a year...got a job with Oxfam, and never looked back.

Quite a saga, eh? And the joke is that all the time I was writing: two plays with my best mate at school, and one of them was produced by us and our mates...verse in my teens and twenties...a comedy/thriller novel which I have never had the confidence to offer to a publisher...and a free, weekly Green newsheet for most of the last year in aberdeen. It was examples of this that got me the job with Oxfam.

What's the moral? Don't come to me for careers advice... or perhaps I am, finally, in a position to give this advice - to follow your heart, as I should have done. But then, would I have finished up looking out of this particular window?

THE ASCENDENT CAT

Voltaire must have been a dog-lover. Otherwise, what made him pose the following question about cats? Why should we interest ourselves in an animal which doesn't have a sign of the zodiac named after it?

He chose to ignore Leo, noblest of cats. He reserved his scorn for the domestic cat, further ignoring the myth and magic of the moggie. "No other animal inspires such reverence and dread," writes Francis Wheen in the introduction to his anthology The Vintage Book of Cats. "Worshipped as a god, persecuted as an agent of the devil, it has preserved its mystery even after centuries of domestication."

And even after years of intimacy. Cosmo has strange, mustard- coloured, almond-shaped eyes. He is Cosmo the clown, an extrovert cat, impudent and inventive, happy to entertain and act the daft laddie. He is noisily affectionate, with a lawn-mower purr. But sometimes his gaze turns inwards, and his peculiar eyes seem to focus on some ancient, remembered grief; and their sadness is so profound and unfathomable that any human caress or words of comfort become condescending and banal.

His mystery will endure. Cosmo is only 4 months old but if he lives for years - if he is luckier than Guy, whose febrile wariness failed to protect him from premature death - he will always hold a part of himself apart. When the mood takes him he will travel to a country for which we have no visa.

For the first time in the recorded history of domestic pets the balance of preference among the British has shifted from dogs to cats. The reasons are practical rather than voguish: more people live alone, more houses are empty all day, more householders have hobbies other than walking the dog. Cats represent low maintenance.

They exercise themselves, keep themselves clean, have the personal resources to cope with solitude and don't foul the footpath. They may, of course, rake over your neighbour's herb garden but their sanitary arrangements are generally discreet. Given regular access to food and water (and even without it) cats are capable of running themselves. The misplaced moggie survives where the stray dog goes under.

In our convenience culture cats are convenience pets. The wheel has turned full circle, as history suggests it was the cat who first decided that human beings would make convenience companions. Dogs, horses and cows were domesticated for obvious reasons, but there is no trace evidence of the domestication of cats. They seem to have decided uinilaterally to live with people, notably the ancient Egyptians, about five thousand years after the hunter-gatheres turned herdsmen and farmers.

In return for food and shelter they made themselves useful by catching rodents. This is the cat's only marketable skill, and it isn't much in demand in today's largely pest-free households. Unlike dogs, who are still put to work in all kinds of helpful ways, cats have come to be valued for themselves alone - for their beauty and grace, for their conditional sociability, for their reflective expression which looks like wisdom and, yes, for their mystery. "What kind of philosophers are we," demanded Henry David Thoreau, "who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?"

I came late in life to cats, or they came to me. Our family pet was a dog, and when I grew up I had neither for years. I became a little alienated from the whole idea of domestic pets and the fuss and cost and mess and misplaced affection they commanded. Animals? Put people first.

But cats have a way of selecting owners. Various opportunists found their way to our door and duped me into believing they craved my company. I flattered myself they sensed an affinity, not knowing the nature of feline diplomacy. "No Roman Catholic of medieval days," wrote Saki, "knew better how to ingratiate himself with his surroundings than a cat with a saucer of cream on its mental horizon."

These temporary quests worked their propaganda. By an elaborate process of networking a ginger kitten was found and transported from a Fife farm, where his siblings had been drowned at birth. The timid survivor grew into Guy: confident, healthy, athletic and handsome, a mighty hunter whose infant history made him exceptionally alert.

I thought him invulnerable. One night last year, two months short of his third birthday, he was struck by a car. I was shaken and humbled by the unexpected force of my grief, which blighted the summer. He was only a cat.

Cats are not people; you would not - you could not - replace a member of your family within three months of their death. Now we have Cosmo the clown and his dainty, snooty sister Chloe, and the hole in the house has been more or less filled. But a first cat is like first love; and sometimes when I come into the garden and there is no striped sunburst sitting on the wall, no Shere Khan waiting in the bushes to ambush my legs, I miss my beautiful golden boy more than I can say.

I was born in April 1961. After 8 hours of labor and a breach birth, instead of the bouncing beautiful PERFECT baby my mother was hoping for, she got me - born with just one full right arm - the other ends just below the elbow - and one full left leg - the other ending well above the knee. I was born with Facial Limb Disruptive Spectrum which is when your pregnant mother gets an infection which raises her body temperature. The foetus goes into shut-down mode and halts the action where it's less vital, usually the limbs - in a bid to keep the heart, nervous system and brain going.

That's how I started, but I sometimes wonder how it might have been if I'd lost these limbs later in life? The majority of my fellow amputees did just that, through accident or illness.

I get around a fair bit, having been a journalist for the last 13 years and I'm also lucky enough to have friends and colleagues who fall into both camps. There are some striking differences between us - but first a warning - we're all different and you may not recognise yourself in what I'm about to say at all - but let's open our minds to the world of amputee generalisation and see what comes out. First, let's talk about how congenital and surgical amputees handle the bucket-loads of questions we get about our limb difference. Oh, if only I had a buck for every time I've been asked: "What happened to your arm?" - and since this question's been asked an awfully long time I've come up with some great answers about sharks, crocodiles, meteorite attacks, and home surgery and so has my friend Kali, who was born with two short arms due to thalidomide. Kali used to say she was an alien and where she came from everyone looked like her - that she was a cannibal - anything she felt like because we see these questions as intrusive. But my internet friend Debbie Moseng, who's a fairly recent double leg amputee tells me: "It never bothered me after the amputations going shopping or anywhere without any legs. People were always nice and I would talk about anything they wanted to know if asked." For Debbie the issue is making people feel more comfortable and perhaps that's because, unlike myself and Kali, she can relate better to the curiosity of the temporarily able-bodied, having been there herself.

You'll notice if you go to amputee groups or disability conferences that the majority of office-bearers tend to be surgical amps. They tend to be louder and have the guts to stand up to the bureaucrats and fight and while they may not always win their cause, it doesn't seem to crush them. My friend Sue Nolan was born with one leg shorter than the other and hated going to her prosthetists': "I was treated as though I was less, and I learnt to expect less, not just from my prosthetist, but from society in general". My internet friend Victoria agrees: "I remember standing there in front of grimy old men, half naked while they slapped hot plaster of paris on me, then having (once the leg was made) to parade up and down a public hallway (again, half naked, so they could see the action of the leg) so they could watch me walk". Victoria was born with her left leg missing above the knee. When I reluctantly go to my prosthetists' the surgical amputees are the ones not used to waiting centuries for service and they tend to know the jargon for their bits and pieces of limb technology. They're more used to demanding to be treated as full, real people.

Getting limb loss in perspective is another area of difference. Victoria says: "I think surgical amps are better off.... To be honest, I think of people losing their legs below the knee as having hardly any problem at all. I know this is unfair and wrong, but I still do feel it - to me they have a mere "flesh wound," to quote Monty Python". I think it can be difficult for us congenitals to identify with the attachment to certain body parts - as Victoria seems to be saying - who needed that foot anyway? And I walk around amazed at how many two armed people completely WASTE at least one hand - now if only I had that hand! The things I could do.....

When it comes to how we lost the limbs that's where we congenitals feel great empathy for the agony and illness our surgical brothers and sisters go through - at least the womb is a quiet and long-forgotten place! But when I put this to my internet friend Dianne Gresham she said: "To me congenital amputees have it harder. I mean - the childhood thing and knowing how mean some kids can be towards others who are different". I was surprised by this - Dianne has endured: an arterial by-pass, complications due to gangrene, removal of toes, then half her foot, then the leg below the knee and her kidney as well. She had falls which led to infections, debridements and heaps of time in hospital - and she thinks I had it rough!

But Victoria agrees with Dianne: "I think congenital amputees face a very different situation than other kids, a more definite feeling of 'difference', and outsiderness, I think". I went to both "special" and regular schools and I noticed kids will pick on anyone who's different - culturally, economically, intellectually. Overcoming requires a real smart-mouth because kids will avoid picking on anyone who can insult them better and faster and nastier. So will adults.

Do you know that scene in "Blade Runner" where the Rutger Hauer's Roy is facing his last moments on Earth and he says to Harrison Ford's Decker, "I've seen things...."? A lot of us congenital beauties have witnessed irreplaceable moments - I saw Vietnam vets with their legs gone in full uniform in wheelchairs waiting for their limbs when I was 9 years old, and was an ardent supporter of Australia's withdrawal from the battle-fields in 1972; I have seen little kids take their first steps on their first legs; I have held the hands of people with terrible and glorious stories to tell because they've known I might understand something of an intensity of life; I have embraced all kinds of limbs for beating up bullies and saving guinea pigs from danger and a million different things - with no damage to me!

My friend Tony, who lost his leg in a motorbike accident says: "At least I knew once in my body and mind what it was like to walk with my own two legs, to hold with my own two arms".

Can't beat that, really, though in dreams you can run and fly, swim like a fish and sting like a bee.

Background: The following poem was written while waiting to get into the bathroom in a hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1987, following a three­month Operation Raleigh expedition to the island of Seram. John Bushby was hogging the shower somewhat. The hotel contained the first proper washing facilities any of us had seen in months, all expedition ablutions having been conducted by diving into the river. Thus I had plenty of time to compose the following short verse.

The national airline, Garuda Indonesia, had succeeded in losing the baggage of half the expedition members on the very day we were due to attend a farewell party at a very prestigious sports club, attended by several dignitaries such as Indonesian Government Ministers and the British Ambassador. The other half of the expedition had taken a flight with Mandala, a local airline then still flying Vickers Viscount propeller­driven aircraft. Their luggage got through. Ambon Pattimura is the name of the airport serving the island group that includes Seram; Ujung Pandang is where we changed 'planes half way. It had a reputation for losing baggage in transit.

The poem was first read to the assembled guests at the party - including the company president of Garuda Indonesia!

The poem: Ode to a lost rucksack

--------------------------

A ton of baggage we did load
At Ambon Pattimura.
But did it come? Oh did it hell!
Half way and then no further.
Into a Black Hole it did fall
At Ujung Pandang airport.
So here we are, all dressed in rags,
Our decent clothing in our bags.

John Bushby now has lost his thrice,
On each and every flight.
Oh will there ever come the day
When Garuda gets it right?
Some by Mandala they did fly
With ancient wings a-flapping.
It may be slow, it may be old,
But let the whole wide world be told:
They deliver all your baggage!

© 1987 Chris Eley

"Ready?" shouts Max the instructor. I scream my final goodbye to sanity and normality: "Yes!". Then "Ready ... Go!". And we are out, two and a half miles up in the pale blue sky, face down, in a wild rush of wind, with East Anglia laid out below us. Max taps my elbows and I bring my arms from across my chest (the "exit position") up to either side of my head. I know Max is firmly attached to my back but I feel this is just me. I can't see, hear or feel him. He told me to breathe, to shout and yell if I felt like it. I feel like it. Falling is an uncontrolled, undignified descent to pain. So free-falling is not falling. Perhaps it's flying. I am cushioned by the air. We move our left hands and turn in a gentle curve to the left. Suddenly Mike, the "jump master", last out, is sailing in towards us. We exchange grins and thumbs up signs ... and then he is in closer and we join hands, a totally unexpected joy on top of joy. My screams are of delight. The terror I expected to feel is simply not there: there is no room for it in the rush of newness and me-ness and intensity. We fly down for nearly two miles. After sixty seconds that are strangely long and impossibly short the big, pink, rectangular canopy opens and we are jerked upright.

Now all is quiet, peaceful yet full of sensation. Max is with me again. He says quietly, "You can take your goggles off now. Here, hold onto the control straps, have a go." There are long, glorious minutes of camraderie and visual delight. Max points out the sights. "You know you said you can't do fairground rides", he says. "Well you can't come all this way and not have some fun". It's impossible to say no. We pull hard on the left strap and hold it down, and we spin until we and the canopy are on the same level, whirling in the air, revelling in the control and the freedom.

I do as I'm told when we land - just pick my feet up. We are gently down again. I can't believe this was me. There is much grinning and back- slapping. I am so grateful, to Joy who encouraged me, to Max whose calm skills made it happen, to Paul who went through this wonderful madness with me.

A couple of weeks ago I met a lady confined to immobility in a chair by multiple sclerosis. With her determination and my "toolkit" of hardware and software we found ways for her to manage a computer so that she can express herself and communicate with friends and family. With her eyes shining with the undimmed life in her head she told me that she had recently jumped tandem, as I was going to. "You'll love it," she said. "When we're in the air we're all the same - free!" You were right, Sherry.

Dear Hero

I am flattered that you should think of me as a possible contributor to your magazine, but I am afraid I have to disappoint you. You have lighted on the kind of topic I am no good at. What I publish are researched articles in journals, with lots of footnotes, much less interesting than the kind of thing you have in mind. I wouldn't be able to do justice to FROM THE WINDOW, and your reputation as an editor and publisher would suffer. I do hope your other invited contributors are a more imaginative lot, and that they provide you with a fizzing first issue. You have my best wishes for its success.

Kind regards

Angus

We are in a remote rural area of north west Tanzania. In the village of Kashishi the health dispensary has been all but decimated by a falling tree. We are working with the villagers to help construct a new dispensary. In the meantime the old dispensary continues to see patients and hold mother and child clinics. One morning I decide to take a break from the task in hand, mending hammers, to take a look at the mother and child health programme in the old building. One day a week is set aside for this: babies are weighed and vaccinated, and their mothers are educated in basic hygiene. This is why it is so important to have a new dispensary, somewhere to continue to ensure the health of Kashishi and its surrounding villages. It's okay, the doctor says, of course the mums won't mind. Do you want to take a photo, he asks, ostentatiously filling a syringe and plunging it into the squealing baby's arm before turning to smile at me. He hasn't, in fact, asked the mothers whether they mind a strange Masungu Mama* staring at them. Nevertheless, I remain. The mothers are all wearing brightly coloured kangas, their babies scooped up onto their backs in a kind of kanga-backpack. This seems to suit both mother and child equally well: baby is happy to be next to mum and so doesn't grizzle, and mum has her hands free to get on with things - far more sensible than complicated, expensive, carrycots, prams and pushchairs. The place is a mass of bodies, all crammed onto this crumbling verandah in the hot African sunshine. It is strangely calm, women gaze impassively as their offspring are dangled over weighing machines and are jabbed with needles. The babies don't seem to cry much either. The doctor and nurses bustle about, processing babies. The mothers wait patiently and I watch. And as I watch I begin to feel strangely forlorn. I can't work out why. I should be happy, after all, this is why I am here; I'm helping to build a new dispensary so that Kashishi children can continue to be vaccinate against disease and their mothers educated in basic health. And here I am, a woman amongst women, I ought to feel a big surge of sisterhood, or something. But I don't. I feel out of place, alien.

I am a single,white female, twenty four years old. I have no children. I'm wearing shorts and boots and am covered in dust from the building site. How strange I must look to these women. What must they think of me? They must be wondering what on earth I am doing here, why I'm not at home cooking and cleaning and looking after my children. Standing in my workmen's clothes with my dirty hair and childless hips, I begin to wonder the same thing. How can I even begin to understand these women and their lives, so far removed from mine. What makes me think that my education and independence makes me somehow superior, lucky and privileged? It seems so arrogant of me to think I can help. What am I playing at?

* masungu mama = white woman (in Swahili)

THE LAUNCH PAD

I was born with a disability that was supposed to limit my life expectancy. (Detailed in accompanying bio). As a result of the constricted, narrow- minded attitudes of the medics & educators, I was given no chance to discover or develop my true potential. Until 14 years after I left school, when, after 12 years in a menial dead end supermaket job I was sacked for being too slow at the job to satisfy the under manager. This proved to be the catalyst for positive change in my life because after 18 months of searching fruitlessly for a job, I was accepted onto a training course in community care skills (which was really a local minister ducking out of his pastoral responsibilities.) My duties comprised of visiting local elderly house-bound people and, more importantly, a work experience placement in a "special" school as a classroom aide. My duties were mostly working one to one with the pupils in a senior class. This placement showed me that my previous life experience WAS of value to society contrary to the prognoses of the B****** so called experts when I was a child. Since then I've turned into a stroppy, trouble making crip

CAVE PAINTING, DRAWING AND IMAGINING
AND ART IN THE PRIMARY SCHOOL

Last August I visited the Peche Merle caves of the Valee du Cele near Cabrarets in Southern France. The caves contain paintings that are between 20,000 and 15,000 years old.

The visit fulfilled a personal ambition. The visit also gave me an opportunity to re-consider my attitude to drawing and image-making. This touched particularly upon my involvements with the teaching of art in the Primary School.

The leaflet picked up in a nearby information centre quoted The Abbe Breuil - a speliologist and interested amateur as describing the caves as "a Sistine Chapel of the Causses plateau, and one of the most beautiful monuments of the pictorial art of the Paleaolithic age." The metaphor has stuck with me and it has, in the pattern of associations and connections it opens up, much to offer. It suggests many aspects of the caves themselves, aspects that expand from the easy associations (scale and painted surface) that can be made between the Sistine Chapel and the Peche Merle Caves. The metaphor suggests associations that lead through culture and tangible eveidence to the numinous, the mysteries of the very beginnings of human thought and human imagination.

The caves, we were informed, could only be visited by 700 people a day, we might, or might not be lucky and, of course, they would be closed till 2.00pm for lunch.

Would we in visiting this holy place be amongst the chosen? Luckily, we were. we awaited the tour and visited the site museum. The museum prepared us. In a semi-troglodite building we saw lesser relics and traces, carved bones and clay pot shards, skulls and beads and facsimiles of the images themselves. all interesting but within the semiotics of the architecture, and the format of the tourist experience and my personal expectations - only a taste of what was to come.

Excitement mounted - perfectly ordinary families bore comparison with ancient ancestors. Large photographs of the images left, coldly, untold more than they told. (Photographs, it seems, can never be mysterious only represent mystery). An atmosphere of impatience and expectation merged within the body of pilgrims. Even video-technology only deepened desire for and expectation of more ancient visual technology.

From the false darkness of the museum - like so many museums it seemed built to emphasise the cave and the tomb as holders of secrets - we moved on. This time there was somewhere else to go - wqe progressed to our real objective. The descent continued and became the entry into the Holy Place. The other world of the Cave Paintings and the shared human past approached as we approached. The past that the fritte kiosk, the postcard shop even the museum itself rested precariously upon, became real as the present receded.

Rock of ages, hollowed by the river of time, with the writing of the ancients on its tablets of Stone!

I recalled that I had read somewhere about those killed in the rush to view the Sistine Chapel at its opening.

Nobody was killed as we descended. The steps beneath the sign commemorating the discovery of the cave by two boys in the 1920's (all caves, it seems, are discovered by small boys and explored by old men - usually priests) led on. There were twenty or so of us descending in groups leaving at twenty minute intervals - a prosaic account of the chosen 700.

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say there was much expectation in our group. To one at least morally, if not in practice, disenchanted with much current visual imagery such excitement was itself exciting. The drama was physical as well as psychological, the air cooled, the darkness grew and opened pupils, the steps were just narrow enough.

We scanned the carefully illuminated darkness. The Hall of the Broken Column surrounded us. In a sense, and the sense was sight, the international party became one. We shared an aim if not a spoken language. We all looked. We all, I strongly wish to believe, felt the otherness of this place. And we all imagined.

The cave, the world underground is a metaphor for the world above. This is so and becomes so for more than one reason. Firstly, the very strangeness of caves both provokes and demands that we discover in them "likeness". The likeness that we discover is the real and potent. In Peche Merle as in so many caves it has a concrete, tangible, reality.

The columns have an architectural monumentality, the forms of the cave, the column, stalactite and stalagmite are both strange and evocative. The likeness here is also more. Secondly, the finding and celebrating of the known in the depths of the unknown and primordially feared - appeals to more than the scientist, and guager. It is re-assuring and soothing to see the known in this place. The experience needs explaining and we explain experience by making experience similar. We say the strange is like the known. The formal vocabulary of the known, the face, the old woman, the palace, the phallus - (this much is familiar to any visitor to Wookey Hole, Chislehurst Caves or Mother Shiptons Cave) is all here - things known but things also verging upon the feared. Names for the unknown. Names for our fears.

Such likeness is perhaps also more. The likenessing of seeing into the dark. The likenessing that makes a cave a metaphor for the known world is the human imagination at work. The cave becomes, perhaps, more than anything else, a place of and for the imagination. We see faces in fires and in the clouds, clouds in the curtains and curtains in the clouds. we see that way because we are human. Because we look for likeness. Because we imagine. And because we imagine the caves are like our imaginations and more incredibly, I suggest, our imaginations have become like the caves in which they grew.

Such a reading, can link us to the explosive act of imagination that is left as so many traces in the caves of the Valee du Cele. The experiments in culture and imagination and language have been conducted in scratches, stains and charcoal lines. The cave has been called and it is, a laboratory of thought. The hypotheses and the results are still here though the experimental equipment and the experimenters are dust.

The drawings mark the point at which something special happened to the human race. This cave at Peche Merle is more than a Wookey Hole. The analogies and the rituals of Peche Merle speak of this as well as of the Franc and the dollar. The Fritte Kiosk stands on a wooded hillside for a reson.

The drawings are the birth of human visual representation. They are the birth of imagery, the birth of that visual language and communication and thought that became insoluble in time. |The visual language was born that is our inheritance. The Japanese, the German, the Swede, we did not perhaps all understand the guide when he spoke. But we saw the language of the cavemen and read the images of the caves without translation or translator. We did so perhaps not even realising that we did so - thus passing the crucial test of fluency. The Mammoth was there for us so was the horse. The Mammoth moved with ponderous gravitas the horses danced. In this we touched our ancestors as surely as if we placed our hands upon a relic.

To peer into the dark in this place one imagines, but also one sees the imaginings of 20,000 years ago. One can also share the birth of these imaginings. The horse was in the cave before the man, the likeness lay in wait for the human imagination. The caves of Peche Merle seem to me to be an affirmation of the centrality of the connecting, associating, imagining human minds power. The power of the imagination to discover likeness to transfer cognition from one domain to another is the alchemy of the caves.

The smooth rock surface on which the magnificent horses of Peche Merle are pointed has a horse-shaped edge into which and from which the horse is painted. The horse was there before the human, before the horse even. It was there until the human imagination transformed it. It was there for us, for thousands of years. It was not unique. The world has always been so. The world consists of such likenesses. But one such in the Peche Merle caves became special. Its likeness was formed and changed until it danced with its own life. Such discovery of likeness dances in the famous enlightenment of Newton in the scandalous first images of Impressionism and in the writings of Joyce. It dances too in the earliest drawings of children as marks become charged with meaning and significance.

The guide pointed it out to us. "There is the rock with the shape of the horses head," the ripple of recognition told us that we knew. We hardly needed it pointing out - after all we pre-programmed and the programme has been running for thousands of years.

We know a huge amount about these drawings. We know about them because our thought is contiguous with them, a part of them. They are a part of a visit to the Supermarket and to the Cinema. The drawings of Peche Merle are part of our intelligence. We do not need to ask why the cave dweller placed his hand upon the cave wall to leave a mark. We do not need to ask because it is what we do. That is certainly what young children do. We only ask perhaps if we have ceased to recognise the importance and vitality and centrality of drawing. We ask perhaps if we have seen too many theme-park representations of cavemen.

As we peered into the darkness to make sense of the shadows, cracks, stains and drawn lines, the sense that had been made, the cave pictures themselves stared back at us. The Mammoths deer, bear and perhaps the "Imaginary Creatures" of the hidden parts of the cave (what sublime extension of the metaphor of cave as human imagination!) witnessed our act of communication and communion. The images interrogated our intelligence. They also triggered imagination.

Everywhere likeness in the cracks and patinas, shadows and crevices and in the drawings themselves. Likenesses enhanced, extended images burgeoning into independence. Language itself. Imagination itself.

The part of the cave called by the guide "The Ceiling of the Hieroglyphics" pushes hard at this reading of the images. The ceiling like the Sistine is a triumphant celebration of the human imagination. It is not however the celebration desired by so much contemporary imagery; imagery that is fixed and closed fettered by single meanings and a quest for the limitations of photographic, holographic and virtual realisms. The Ceiling of the Hieroglyphics is celebration and desire, drenched not in limitation but in imagination. Here it is not realism or reality as a virtue, or even the virtualness of the reality that is celebrated but the power of the likeness, the power of the metaphor, that has broken out and become imagination.

The ceiling teems with images and meanings collapsing into each other sharing forms counteracting, struggling for supremacy. Dozens of animal images overlap and interact floating off the surface of the ceiling. Here it seems is no case of the old drawings simply being overwritten by the new. The images co-exist and jostle for attention. The effect is cinema of the imagination. The motor is not mechanical but organic. The images do not move at 6 frames per second, but at a wholly more human rate. The images animate as you imagine and discover likeness. A leg turns into a head. The static moves. The magic is real.

Here in the Ceiling of the Hieroglyphics is the essence of the drawings, the experiments in imagination and likeness of Peche Merle. The likeness here is not a restricted likeness, but a likeness of enormous potential, a playful likeness. The duck and the rabbit of theoretical visual ambiguity pale in this carnival of visual recognitions.

It all seems fitting. A drawing technology founded upon the power of the imagination to transform the mysteries of the real celebrates that potential in a dazzling display. It is not the unmistakeability and rigidity of the image that is celebrated but the mutability and openness of meaning. We are present quite literally at the imaginations coming into being. Such are the roots of drawing and such is its potential.

In the caves of Peche Merle the language of the cavemen and women is written and it is a language which can speak to and through us. The drawings of the caves are human thought given form. It makes little sense to ask if the authors were artists or scientists. The lessons of the Peche Merles drawings are relevant today. And particularly relevant to the education system within which I work.

Drawing is so easily marginalised and ignored as thought and language. meaning is so enthusiastically recognised so as to be quickly fixed. the imagination is quarantined in peripheral aspects of the curriculum and of human activity. The electronic technologies are so easily overvalued the ancient technologies so easily ignored. The arts and the sciences are definitions of difference.

These are not the ways nor the lessons of the thinkers and teachers of Peche Merle.

I think it goes back to my early childhood. I was never a brave child. I was never called a "tomboy". I never experienced the rough and tumble of living with brothers and sisters. I was an only child, with older than usual parents. At home the emphasis was on being polite, working hard at school and acquiring acceptable social skills. I was surrounded with love and care, but overprotected.

"Don't go in the sea above your knees, you might drown".

"Don't go horse riding, you might fall off".

"You can't have roller skates, you might break your leg".

Consequently, I didn't learn to swim until I was 13 years old and even now, I'm still terrified of putting my face in the water.

My first experience of being on a boat only confirmed my mother's worst fears. Our next door neighbours had bought a small cabin cruiser, moored off shore at Seasalter and we were invited, on a Sunday afternoon in september, to join them on the boat for a picnic. My mother and I were loaded into a small rowing boat on the beach and rowed out by Steve, the owner, to the cabin cruiser to join Betty, his wife, and small daughter, Stephanie. In the process of helping us aboard the cabin cruiser, Steve lost one of the oars and it floated away on the current. He attempted to start the cabin cruiser engine to chase the oar, but it failed to start. He tried rowing after the oar, but the rowing boat went round in circles. Convinced that another boat would come our way and help us out, we settled down to eat our picnic. I thought it was a great adventure to be marooned in the middle of the sea, but my mother was looking extremely anxious. As dusk approached, it started to rain, the wind got up, the tide turned and the boat was buffeted by waves. We squeezed ourselves into the semi-shelter of the cabin and then I was sick everywhere. It was no longer an adventure, I was tired, cross and frightened. I thought I would be there for ever. I vowed if I got off alive, I'd never go on a boat again.

I was eight years old at the time and it was another 10 years before I went on a boat again. This time I was in Cornwall, staying with a college friend. Her boyfriend decided we would hire a boat for the day and take it on the River Fal, from Falmouth to St Mawes. Not wishing to show my fear or be a "kill-joy", I went along with the arrangements. I was reassured when I saw the boat had an outboard motor and the river looked very calm. What I hadn't realised was that large ships come and go from Falmouth harbour and we had to cross the shipping lanes and enter the open sea to travel across to St Mawes. The wake from large ships pounded the side of our little boat and tossed us about. I was terrified and then I was sick everywhere. I pleaded to be put off on to a small uninhabited rocky outcrop in the middle of the Fal, and stay there for the rest of the day, while they went on without me. They refused and the trip was aborted.

You can imagine my relief when they opened the Channel Tunnel. I can now take a day trip to france, eat a beautiful French meal and not deposit it in the English Channel on the way home.

So while the rest of the family sail the "Seven Seas", you'll find me on terra firma engaged in a far more sensible activity --- hitting a small white ball with a long stick, several hundred yards across a field and trying to get it into a small hole in the ground!!

CM continued to teach Part time while her daughter and son were very young. Much of this work focused on children with special educational needs, so when CM returned to a full time job she managed a support service for children with SEN in mainstream school. CM is currently running a County project for Kent providing advice and support for parents of children with SEN.

CM lives in a village on the North Downs with her husband, son and three cats. Most of her v. limited free time is spent on the golf course.

(0) I DON'T SPEAK PROPER,
HE, SHE, THEY, IT
DON'T SPEAK PROPER
"THIS BIG"
SITE SIGNALS,
THUMB & FOREFINGER AN INCH AND A HALF APART
.THE GAP WHEN YOU SQUINT IS INEVITABLE,
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THIS AND THAT STAR.
AS THE HEAT COMES SEEPING
AND THE DAY LOSES ITS BITE
THERE ARE STAR STUDDED CLOUDS DRIFTING
IN THE DAWNING OF THE NIGHT.
OUTSIDE THE FENCE
THERE ARE POOLS OF,
MUCK
IN SHARP EDGED,
HOOF HOLES.

(1) BREATH OF FEATHERS,
THROUGH A DREAM LIT SLEEP

FROM WHERE THEY CRAWL
A PILLAR OF POLLEN AND AIR

COULD IT BE CLOSE TO THE GROUND
WHERE THE WARM CAN HIDE

TAR WEIGHTED WATERS
FOLLOW A ROOTS HELTER SKELTER

SWALLOW KINGS RICHES LIE
WHERE CLAY CAKED DRESSES ARE

A GLIMMER OF A SMILE
LODGED IRRETRIEVABLY

CAN THE FEATHERED RULER
CLAIM TO COMMAND ALL OF THESE

HE SENSES IN HIS RIBS
TIMELESS WANDERINGS

NOT TO EVADE
BUT TO FILE AND STACK

ONLY THEN CAN THE ASCENDANT FLAME
BE DISLOCATED, AND WITHERED CLOTHES
BE LAIN TO REST.

(2) FORGED OF THE PATHS
A ROMANCE OF VELVET UNDERGROWTH
SWALLOWED WHOLE BY THE INSECTS
THERE INFESTED.
STAMP UP THIS UNDER POPULACE

(3) SLABS ON A BOILING CRATER MAKE,
SNAKES AND LADIES
DANCE A CHEQUERED PLATFORM
IN WHOSE CATACOMBES
COURTIERS LIVE ON.

(4) LIFES TRANLATION VIES IN YOU,
IS RECORDED IN YOU.

(5) SINCE WALKING ON WATER IS LONG FORGOTTEN
AND IT'S NOT EVEN DRUNK ANY MORE
AND EVERYONES EYES FLICKER IN THE
ELECTRIC GLOOM.

My old friend Chris Eley told me of your project and I just wanted to pop in and wish you good luck.

I have had very few life experiences that could be described as pivotal points, but I tell you one thing that I really like doing and it never ceases to entertain me.

It is watching garden birds from my window. I put out all kinds of scraps and tables and feeders and watch the constant soap operas that go on beween the bossy starlings and the loud ostenatious magpies, the tiny cheerful long tailed tits and the indignant blackbirds.

Sometimes we get rarities like siskins and green woodpeckers, but we never get visited by the huge flock of escaped parakeets that fly past at 8.20pm every night as regular as clockwork.

Now I'm not a serious bird spotter and any bird hides that I have been in look out onto what appears to be absolutely nothing as all the ducks and other birds seem to have pushed off to the car park of the cafe next door. You won't catch me in green wellies and tripods. I am lazy enough to like the wildlife to come to me.

Our garden is also regularly visited by foxes and squirrels, lizards and fieldmice and the pond has a magnificent collection of frogs and dragonflies.

Give me boring old garden birds any time, I don't even mind the pigeons!

All this free entertainment and I live in built up London!.

Christina Pope.
0:-)

I was once at college with Chris Eley in Sheffield where he was doing a housing course and I was doing a biology course and I started an Amateur Radio Society (in the days when a woman on the air stood out like a sore thumb), and he turned up to the first meeting.

Since then I have had three careers from Biochemistry (our team got a Nobel Prize for Medicine on the Prostaglandins), to teaching literacy and numeracy to adults (a bit of my software was shortlisted for the Rowntree prize at the House of Lords) as a senior lecturer in a college, to my current lowly (but much more fun) job of keeping several computer networks flying in a school that is a Technology College.

I think we are only just starting to see how the Internet can REALLY be used and your project sounds like a good example.

Will that do?

A Day in the Life of a Psychologist/Therapist/ Writer/Mother/Wife/Friend et al.:

Up at 7:10. Last night came home late because we got tickets to King Lear -- we'd given up all hope of ever seeing it, and it took American friends to get us there, as they were persistent enough (and had enough time at their disposal to try to obtain the tickets) to insist that we join them should they be successful at gaining the very few reserved tickets available on the day ( the tickets are like nuggets of gold; the friends had to cue from 7:15 am to get the standing room ones (we did get to sit after the interval) which they did). It was worth losing sleep over it, as I did, even though the first few moments, leaden with heavy sleep still on me, upon waking I wondered...

I have an 8:30 patient. I was trained as a psychotherapist in the early enough days that the medical model still persisted, and I cannot get out of the habit of calling the people I work with "patients" even though I find that completely inaccurate. Usually I call them "people I work with" or "people in therapy with me" but sometimes those locutions are much too circuitous, and "patient" slips in. Bear with me, since I will be using that term, and think of it then as a lousey shorthand.

Last night I spilled salad dressing all over a much favoured dress, and I tried to get the oil stains out last night on our (late) return. Unsuccessful, so another attempt before breakfast. I realize that others' washing also needs to be done, so a family load goes in, as well. Then coffee, a bagel (old New York habits die hard), juice, and a round of tidying up before my patient arrives and I start work.

This morning I do four-and-a-half hours of therapy, with fifteen minute breaks between each . Some mornings it's less, sometimes more. In between, during the breaks I catch up with details, and phone calls. Luckily this morning neither of my two ansaphones is flashing, adding to the messages I have to return left from last evening. I return one of these, as the three others have asked me to phone in the afternoon (something I will do when I take a break from writing this). It's from another psychologist asking me to take on a couple who sound as if they are having a good deal of difficulty. Their referrer is also their friend and extremely involved with them; this puts added pressure on me as there is the silent message "Fix them for me" behind the referral. This is not unusual -- that is, to have a couple or individual referred by a referrer who has an inordinate investment in the outcome.

This morning I have worked with a woman who is frightened of being in relationships; her parents have had an abusive one, and her older siblings have left a trail of broken ones behind them. I then went on to work with a couple whose son has been schizophrenic for ten years; each deals with him very differently, and he has come to divide them so that they have come for "couples' therapy." Moreover, partly because they do not agree about him, they have a very difficult time registering when he is in need of hsopitalization -- they have left it too late again, this time, and he has wrecked their kitchen while they were out last evening. These are quite typical of some of the issues I tend to work with with people I see for therapy.

Lunch eaten on the hop, with the boys, who are on holiday, playing computer games, making their own sandwiches, and answering the door and phone to friends, around me; and between answering phone calls and trying to return messages. Have to phone a friend who is making a referral to me, but who also talks to me about current publishing problems I am undergoing. This stirs me up, but I put it away, as I must move onto the next thing, given the time pressure of my "free period" betweeen patients. Wash out of dryer, new load in. Must remember to transfer this last load to the drier. I still have to phone Good Housekeeping back over a request for an interview about "men who leave marriages after twenty or more years," and to phone my agent in New York who has left a message to phone her. It is now about mid-morning in New York, and I will take a break from this to phone her.

Three more phone calls dealt with (or, rather, put off till tomorrow, as one wasn't there, and now it's up to her to phone me, one has to ring me back, and the third is the Good Housekeeping interview now scheduled for tomorrow). Only two more phone calls to return left. Hope I can get them in during this now less than hour between the next set of patients.

Two more hours of patients ( I finish at 6:45pm today), then prepare dinner (probably pasta, yet again, as I have a sauce already defrosted for that (can't remember when I took it out, hope it's still okay, fingers crossed! Whoops-- just checked and it's been thrown away, will have to make sauce ftrom scratch now), then, have decided, won't go out to my book group, though, for once I have read the book straight through, have liked it, and have even thought quite a bit about it, and even though I'd love to see the friends who will be there, because otherwise I won't get everything I need to get done before we leave for France for three weeks, which we are doing in three days' time. My husband will go without me. But I still have to prepare dinner for all of us, since this meeting of the book group, unlike the others, is not for dinner. So tonight, after dinner, and after nagging the boys to do the dishes (they have a rota, but I am always on-duty as the chief-of-staff who has to see that their jobs do, in fact, get done), I will do my billing, pay bills, write to my brother who's been waiting for me to send him something for a week now, and still have more phone calls to make, backed up from messages not returned a few days ago. I'd love to watch This Life with Adam, something we do together every so often, although he gets understandably a bit impatient ---though, saint-like, he tries not to show it-- with me asking him how everyone relates to each other (since I don't watch it consistently) when he's trying to follow the action. I'll probably get into bed around 11:00, and read (currently a few different things: The First Stone, by Helen Garner, about a sex discrimination case in Australia, a novel by a friend, and another novel which a friend gave me to give to my agent, and the one I really, really want to read which is the new Phillip Roth book). I usually fall asleep much too soon after starting to read, but I also usually wake up in the middle of the night, and frequently then carry on reading again until I fall asleep again --one reason why I tend to wake up so leadenly when the alarm goes off, again, at 7:10 am, not long after I've just put the book down and fallen into a finally heavy sleep. Such broken sleep patterns are one of the joys of middle age, hot on the heels of the broken sleep of the early childrearing years. My hope is that by old age sleep will be easy and/or a not very necessary short-lived part of each day.

**LATE EXTRA**

Being over here

The view from my verandah be black as night, which is fortunately appropriate to the time of day and comes as something of a relief from the dazzling glare of life that intrudes so uncompromisingly, that twists my head and pulls my ears and wrenches my eyes wide to accept the facts of the every day. As we discussed on the phone, life is different here. Everyday changes perception and breaks down my beliefs until I can say "sure", a peculiar phrase which if said right sounds like a scathingly disaffected "yeh, well I don't care, its your f***ing life you can do and believe what the hell you like" but which really means is "sure man, and by the way, take it easy." Because it doesn't matter...it is so hard to pin, every day I write and I think and I watch because I am not a tourist nor a resident, not an artist nor a scientific observer, but I'm watching. In my life I've thought that I was kinda broadminded and educated, I thought I knew more or less how things were and how they ought to be - (not in a fascist way y'know, just like, that I had my eyes open) - but now I realise I only ever looked and never aaaarrghhhh, never descended into cliches of such mind-numbing banality and crude irrelevance eh? How is it that I can say that I am in shock, that this is a different universe to the ivory gallows that I hung myself in despair from so often. Life here is wonderful, slow, carefree and easy...but it is dark and corrupt, hypocritical and economically f***ed. There is an absolute epidemic of AIDS here, poverty and distress, ancient cars that dont gofaster than 10mph, but hey, sure, I know that. I love the style, the weather, the people (who are friendly beyond any call of duty); I hate the politicians, the exploiters and the savage commercial importation of "style" in the western sense - Now I can see why the Chinese have got their back up so about cultural imperialism. Most of all I love the music and the colours of the Msasa trees which seem to turn from green to red like traffic lights, and whose pods come crashing to the ground like misfired rockets onto a lazy yellowed lawn in front of the house, the winding dusty drive that weaves between them, the ducks and geese and chickens, cats and dogs, the cars that dont go and the huts with their leaking thatch and the air, just 'cause. Millionaires and ambassadors live on either side of us, it's a long story, and a beautiful house. You know when you never want to leave somewhere, not because its easy or beautiful but because it's rrright eh? Anyway, thats the view here, maybe I'll go down the drive next writings ya? What else to say, well too much of no importance, as with most lives. Just smile with me and keep your eye on the weather report. We'll discuss travel agents more next time. It was wonderful to talk to you, I think you might have many friends here you've never met, it was wonderful to hear your voice (yours too P.) it means that for 5-10mins you are just down the road, and then gone again. I need to feel that distance, it keeps me awake.

I don't feel like I've said enough but I hope that it reads so that you can understand , sure eh? Oh yeh, potted bio's right? I can't believe you chased me round the globe in order to give me a deadline I can't make...typical Honessty.

.......um. God Ho, have you ever tried writing an auto-bio, no, actually, scratch that I can see a cynical 'poor little disabled girl' spiel flowing torrentialy from your mute -did you get that in?- lips, ooh yes and ever so pretty, a beeautiful child, so talented too. {Not to be taken to heart by the way, just in a ' I Know You...' kinda way} Right so, another monster task for my beloved... here goes;

Oh, and remember I knew you first...

Yours in absolute confidence of your iminent methane fuelled, cometesque ascent to fame and fortune throughout the galaxy unto eternity. Tom xxxx

P{s} - When do I get paid?

*** Christ Church College where my website is located for this edition will not accept the f-word. Sorry Tom, it's out of my control. HJN.

But the view going south blurred into tears and darkened into reflection. The pall of clouds so beautifully beige underhung by a low winter's sun that had galloped miles of Northumberland alongside us the previous day and brought forth lyrical song and droning laments on bassoon and tuba in my imagination, spun wildly now into hiccoughs of string and choral requiem that would not quieten down, would not still themselves into resolution. My mind saw nothing from the window at all, my eyes stared and saw blankness, my mind grew from wilderness grief into bewildered turmoil: crowds of hurting memories stuffed me full.

Crowds of hurting memories stuffed me full till I could find till I could find find could find, stuffed me full till I could find find find my dancers, my imaginery dancers my imaginary dancers who in their apricot outfits graced my emotions with languid stylised angst. Ne'er did I see such slow movement accompany such fire - minimal motion and maximum effort - to be so still requires effort, the unseen "effortless" labouring culminating in apparently naught.

I was upset by being helpless upset by wanting to run around helping with the luggage running hither and thither for errands sandwiches cups of tea, wanting to be the kid in blue dungarees and pink and white striped teeshirt that inhabited my outward form and I ran for the shelter of my mind as the crowded hurts buffeted me.

Physical disability hurts. It hurts to be watching while others tend to one, it hurts to be unable to show that one cares and predicts need in others one loves and longs to cuddle. It hurts not to be able to unshackle the unceasing burden of petty manifold responsibilities from too busy Mother. All this hurts in a groaning in the wind creaky old tree sort of way like a strong wind buffetting me now and again and all I can do is wait for it to pass me by.

Then there are the shards of sudden acute cutting pain as nerves seem beyond rawness and one feels belched into beyond anything normal. This is the pain of Frustration as I at least experience it, and it relates more to hands than voice - I'll explain about being mute in a mo. My hands are the object of my hatred and scorn because they fretfully and reflexboundly fiddle and in so doing agitate my aspirations. I long to sculpt. I long to chip marble into poetic form hue imagination into a sturdy outer reality that bellows of the music fed to me by the wind. I long to forge hot iron to twisted forms that lurk huge and somatically within plastered brain eggs of my mind. I long to weave yarns into rugs that enthrall and warm with their homespun tones and I long to reap from travel the elements of my yarns.

I long to move from daytime sculpting to an evening at the piano and to jiggle out with ease and dexterity anything from blues and Beethoven to my passionate own sonatas. My useless hands frustrate my desires. I try to paint and compose music and write words and deny the pain access to my heart but the nearest hope of assuaging hurt in kindly gauze is ballet ballet and that is almost as remote as sculpting. The hurt relents with turning thoughts to dance and the prospect even of the mirage-on-the- horizon variety of turning my thwarted imagination into mesmerising movement form and music combined seems positively therapeutic to the screaming agonised child....

I cried long and bitter tears the day I realised I was disabled but since my disability mutes my voice noone knew the significance of the day to me. All hope of talking walking being like my brother drained as if his words had cut off my air. This hurt is of a veil made of inpenetrable glass coming into view and muffling me so that I am seen but not heard, waving as I drowned in my own immaterial tears. My brother pulled me out of bed when I was scarce 2 with his usual daily routine words "come on poor wee Hewo". I thought therapists were teaching me to talk and walk. I thought if I did what I was told it would come to be. I knew that others learnt more spontaneously but I thought I was stupid and needed lessons. It hadn't occurred to me that there was anything but a temporary hitch until that morning when my bro did exactly as he always did but I wanted to ask Mother if I would ever talk and I couldn't of course and I started to cry, and not being noticed as I cried my invisible tears made me sob gulping sobs that even then could not be seen by my loving family, who carried on with breakfast and sandpit play and responded not one iota to my emotional state.

If there was a day that turned my life towards art it was rooted here, and was recognised by me when I later found blaring hurt in paintings that linked me back into humanity: I adored seeing huge canvasses on the walls of a gallery in Edinburgh when I was still 2, and responded so avidly that I was allowed to linger long beyond my brother and father who returned to the sunlit pavements while I danced my spirit around a Monet haystack of subtle bruised dawn daubed with panache and an identifiable obsession. The hurt of being mute is a dull ache that I live with continually like I live with numbness in my bum from sitting overlong in one position, and the reason of course that it's a dull backcloth aching and not the screaming foreground is because my dearest Mother devoted years of patient time to building a release mechanism that buoys my mirth into glee and permits via fast spelling unimaginable freedom celebrated daily.

Another hurt is fear that hurts me with a cloyingly paralysing and cold panic with palpitating anxiety and gripping of the chest with tight tentacles of hideous strength. This is the fear of my dependence on trained others, this is the unrelenting hurt that handicaps my optimistic self and bloats it into a mishapen wreck I scarce recognise as new me and of which I cannot here begin to tell....

And there is the hurt that is like a trumpet sounding in my head, a sunny day melodious alarm interrupting my glorious dreams with a stabbing desire to run - particularly to run kicking up scrunchy dry autumn gold leaves as the sun slants through the bared boughs and I in my imagination throw out from my very own throat song, lustily loud and brazen song, operatic and deep and mingled only with the birdsong in the woods, meant only for me and the pleasure of the day and the joy of being alone in such a place on such a day.... and there is the sad solitary hurt of never actually being able to be alone....and the nagging hurt of boredom.... and the other two twin enormous hurts of loneliness and rejection, each a heavy fuggy Jupiter that charges into me and yanks me into the folds of a dismal gaseous pall that shrouds the gleeful bouncing bairn, that distracts with worrisome longing like an addictive craving for acceptance by a gang of pals of my own ilk ....

Hurts crowd into me till there is ne'er a jot of me uncovered by their disregard for self uncovered by their bruised whipping of my emotions into unharmony, unbeauty, unpeacable repose, unworkable terror, ungiving, unproductive, irresponsible whinnying that relies on love for extrication. Time wasting hurt handicapping me further.

Chill out chill out chill out chill out chill out chill out chill out chill out chill out the train rumbles along at me chill out chill out chill out chill out and the gloom gathers about me and we run full pelt into a long tunnel where I see myself in the window and the smiles of my granny and the man in the opposite seat smiling at my external cuteness not knowing I am crying but rescuing me from my solitary sojourn into the dark shadows of my inner world, laying to rest my ghoulies and ghosties bringing cheer to me as we hurtle back into sunshine and my internal music floods me again with transcendent trumpeting and most mellow gently billowing skyborne song which now as I write these words sounds quite corny - but in musical notation is acceptably avant garde.

I live in England, in the same town as I was born in but I love my mother's native land of Scotland even more. I also find Venice hard to eradicate from my mind, it swims like a tantalising mirage on my horizon informing my tastes and swelling my longing need to be truly me. I yearn to visit with people beyond Europe but have not a lot of dosh available for such sojourns.

I need quiet. I hear music in my head a great deal of the time in a way I have come to accept is unusual. I was a composition student on a part- time Intermediate place at the Royal Academy of Music in London, participating alongside the undergraduate and graduate students when I was 9 years old, but they abruptly terminated my place and thrust me into a terrible depression.

I am currently looking forward to holding an exhibition of my installation art in Canterbury next July and to seeing this magazine flight forward with some life of its own.

I rarely am brave enough to admit my age. For me this is my "coming out".