THAT is one of the great first lines. I can’t get away from Stoppard it seems: we celebrated Mum’s birthday by going to see Arcadia. (I should also have remembered that the version of The Cherry Orchard which Dad and I saw at the Old Vic last summer was actually by Stoppard too). Et in Arcadia ego. Really, could anyone with any interest in theatre or literature or people or the universe NOT like this play? When I’m writing something, one of the ways in which I try to shut up the inner critics is by telling myself that the piece I’m working on doesn’t have to be about everything. The thing about Stoppard at his best, like Shakespeare, is that you feel the play IS about everything, at least while you’re watching it. Or if not everything, then everything that matters. What is the difference between everything and everything that matters, come to that? I think I have measured it out in trips to the Ormeau Recycling Centre.
Yesterday we marked two anniversaries: my mother’s birth and her father’s death. In fact neither occurred on that exact date but you know how these things go. Sunday is a good day both for church and for having people round for drinks in the garden. My granny has lived alone for twenty-five years now. I just remember my grandpa as a benevolent, quiet presence. When I was born he called me India for a while because he thought Lydia an unspeakably pretentious name.
5 months in, I have thought about the anniversary of Dad’s death and how Christmas will never be the same now. Not that it will necessarily be gloomy, but I anticipate that the death of Dad will lend a certain gravitas that the birth of Jesus never quite did for me. Yesterday, Mum brought in a dirty white tub that had been sitting outside her kitchen door since December. It was the Christmas pudding we didn’t eat on that last day with Dad. A nice idea, but a large pudding for two women and a diabetic was never really going to happen. She insists that it will be fine next year or any year in fact as Christmas puddings supposedly keep forever even if they have been drenched in dirty Dublin rain a hundred times. I can hardly wait.
Rituals. My mother’s family assemble in the same place every year to remember my grandpa. I think I will need to go into Christmas armed with rituals: Carols from Kings, Gigondas, and maybe by next December I will be ready to watch Shakespeare in Love again. Which neatly brings us back to Stoppard and must therefore be my cue to exit.
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I had no idea that papa called you India in your infancy! Given that I was just emerging from infancy myself, this is no surprise, but it is interesting that it has not become an extended family narrative. For what it’s worth, I associate papa with HB vanilla ice cream, the dropping well and salt: he would always bring a slab of ice cream on his way home from the pub on a sunday lunch time and be admonished by the family for pouring too much salt on granny’s delicious sunday lunches. My last memory was of papa waving goodbye to us (dad, marc and me) on the curb outside Creevagh in his camel overcoat. I’m not sure if this is a confabulation, but if it is, i am happy for it to be.
Isn’t memory funny? Now that you say that about the ice cream, I remember it — the unpeeling of the cardboard sides from the white block.
And he was fonding of saying at the moment of unpeeling, ‘I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!’.
Yes yes yes!
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