HEROES, HADEDAS AND HOME AGAIN

This is the 40th Losing the Plot blog, which means I'm over the hump of 39 - always my least lucky number. I learned the 13 times table early on, so as never to close a book on an unlucky page, but for some reason 3 times 13 has always seemed particularly ill-starred. Apart from that, I'm not really superstitious, although one magpie is never a good sign, and of course I always touch all four sides of our house before I go on a journey, just to be sure of coming home...

Stavros the Not-So-Terrible

This last one definitely works because once again I'm safely back from the other side of the world, despite losing passport, tickets, boarding passes AND luggage, and slipping in the shower and cracking my head. And no, it wasn't the result of too much celebration. My son and daughter-in-law were away for the night and the two grannies were baby-sitting with exemplary diligence and sobriety. Also, the wine cellar is outside the house and there was such a spectacular electrical storm raging that I was too scared to venture out.

Apart from that, and the odd domestic disaster (an over-adventurous small person crashing through a top drawer and a dash to hospital with an agonised adult - gall bladder, fortunately, not an exploded appendix) it was magic. Beautiful weather, my children and delectable, inexhaustible, small grandchildren - and their equally delightful and inexhaustible Greek family - and food and wine to die for. It's always an emotional reunion but this year was extraordinary because I arrived in Johannesburg at half-time in the England-South Africa final of the rugby World Cup. In Dan and Dimitra's house there were flags, Springbok shirts, a green ribbon on Stavros the Terrible (who isn't really terrible at all, unless he suspects you're up to no good...) and tears and champagne when South Africa won.

The South African flag

It's hard to explain to non-South Africans just what that victory meant. Until now, most South Africans had as much interest in rugby as they have in Patagonian potholes, but by the time I got to O R Tambo, the airport was a sea of Springbok rugby jerseys and the entire nation was glued to a screen. And when the final whistle blew, they exploded with pride and joy.

This is a country so badly in need of anything that can bring its diverse people together and help to heal the fractured past. Of course, sticking it to the English has always had a cheering effect on other nations (sorry Gloom, but it's true) but this was entirely different.The South African rugby team - which was for so long an all-white affair - is now under the inspirational captaincy of Siya Kolisi, and for the first time in its history properly reflects the whole rainbow nation. It might be a little unrealistic to expect the next grandchild (Councillor Kate's baby, due any minute) to  be named after all the Springbok heroes -  and we don't actually know what sex this child is (although I did see 3 magpies this morning) - but I have to say, Siya sounds like a pretty good choice to me.

Flying out from one fractured society to another, I was reading Maggie O'Farrell's 'Instructions for a Heatwave'. She is brilliant on fractured families, and this particular family, the Riordans, are so maddening and entertaining that I almost enjoyed the 11-hr flight. On the return trip I read 'The Whispers of Nemesis' by Anne Zouroudi. She's new to me, so it was my first encounter with her detective, Hermes Diaktoros. Here's what the Guardian said about him: 'Diaktoros is a delight. Half Poirot, half deus ex machina, but far more earth-bound than his first name suggests, the portly detective has an other worldly, Marlowesque incorruptibility as he waddles through the mean olive groves.' Couldn't have put it better myself.

A hadeda conversation

I woke yesterday morning at 5.30 to a frosty moon still high in the sky and Clementina purring in my ear. In Johannesburg it was the hadedas that woke me. They're the noisiest birds in Africa - their raucous shrieks could wake the dead - and for reasons best known to themselves, they start screeching overhead at 4am - but it's a sound that takes me straight back to childhood, and I miss it, along with all my much-loved family. The time went far too quickly, as it always does. I'll be back, of course,  but just to be sure, I touched all 4 walls before I left.

CHANGING CLIMATES

Recycled capitals

Professor Gloom and I were in Palma de Mallorca recently, sipping wine in shady squares and enjoying a bit of respite from the rest of the world. We were in the old quarter, surrounded by ancient stones, winding streets and constant reminders of civilisations that have come and gone. The Arab Baths, close to our hotel, were built by the Moors, who, I'm pleased to say, were early recyclers. They may have knocked down a few Byzantine and Roman buildings, but they re-used the materials to great effect - a good example of things enduring, even if not quite in the way originally envisaged.

The other thing that struck me again and again, was just how courteous most Spaniards are. Our hotel bedroom looked down onto a square where children of all ages arrived every morning for school, and they were cheerful and lively, but well-behaved in a way we don't often see. As Gloom remarked the other day (when we were mown down by a group of teenagers boarding the train) he seemed to spend his youth getting out of the way of old people, and now he spends his old age getting out of the way of the young.

A shady square

Children might no longer be as well-behaved as I would like (and given the behaviour of so many of their elders, who can blame them?) but they were out in their thousands recently, protesting about the damage being done to the world they stand to inherit - and those of us who are leaving them this broken planet should do our best to support them, and help to keep their hopes alive, because in the end, hope is all there is.

Do you remember the cellist of Sarajevo? The lone musician who sat, day after day in the ruins of Sarajevo, playing his cello in a one-man protest against the madness that had engulfed his city? So many other protests come to mind: the unknown man in Tiananmen Square, standing alone in the path of Chinese tanks; Civil and Human Rights marchers in Ireland and America: anti-apartheid and anti-war protesters; the streets of Hong Kong today - I could list dozens, but the thing is that although it so often seems there is no hope that things will ever change - and the danger, of course is that peaceful protests become more violent, because more and more people have less and less to lose - still, the very fact that someone was brave enough to stand up and be counted gave hope to others when it was most needed.

As for those who have started criticising Greta Thunberg, she's 16 years old, for pity's sake, and trying to get the world to wake up and do something about the dangers we now face, even though it's probably too late. Which is better than sitting at home sneering.

LEONARD LASTS LONGER THAN LOVE

I went to QFT to see 'Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love' yesterday, along with a horde of excited pensioners, and Councillor Kate. (Susceptible elderly persons revisiting the scenes of their youth should always be accompanied by a responsible adult.)

Back in the day, I fell in love time and time again to the background music of Leonard Cohen. I can't remember the men, but I remember every word of the songs - so there you have it, friends: Leonard lasts longer than love.

And what songs they are: So Long Marianne, Halleluja, Bird on the Wire... The first one I heard was Suzanne, and I heard it up at the top of a tall, thin, canal-side house in Amsterdam, in the laid-back, smokey atmosphere so redolent of the time. (Note to my children: please don't bother telling me I shouldn't mention things like that because the grandchildren might read them. It was 1970, for crying in a bucket, and even Aunt Emmeline had smoked a joint by then.)

But to get back to Marianne and Leonard. By all accounts she was a lovely, generous woman and I'm glad they put her name first because she spent a lot of her life playing second fiddle to everyone else. It's a sad truth that women have been falling in love with charismatic, tortured geniuses since time began, only realising too late that what they're mostly tortured about is the idea of commitment. And Leonard Cohen was certainly a man who liked to have his cake and eat it. His songs are in a class of their own - and he did send a beautiful message to  her when she lay dying - but if I could turn back the clock and give Marianne Ihlen the happiness she deserved, and save her son from his own damaged destiny, I have to say I'd count Cohen's music well lost. Anyway, it's a fascinating documentary about a hedonistic and self-indulgent time - and one that should send a cold trickle down the spine of anyone who survived.

GOING BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM

I've been more grateful than usual lately for anything that's taken me away from the world of Boris, Trump and impending doom. It's been a dreary patch, what with holidays cancelled, Gloom being hospitalised, and the current novel progressing more slowly than a DUP policy on climate change - never mind the various sequels and short stories lying around unfinished. There are days when I feel like burning the lot. Not Gloom, obviously: his return home, one kidney lighter but remarkably upbeat, was one of the more cheering events of the last weeks.

So thanks to Penelope Lively, yet again. Heat Wave was written in 1996 but for some reason I'd never read it, I can't think why. If I was going to take one woman's books with me to a desert island, they'd probably be hers. (And that would include her wonderfully funny children's book about a poltergeist, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.) Moon Tiger is my all-time favourite, but I love all her work for the sheer beauty of the writing - even when she's talking about the weather. In a Lively novel it doesn't cloud over, instead:
'A grey pall has come tilting up from behind the hill, intensifying the green of fields and trees and hedges. The landscape is vivid. And the first drops of rain begin to fall.'

Wimbledon was another distraction. It's one of the few sporting events I like, although  I'd be happier if there were more Federers and fewer Smasher-Grunts around. Roger (who has a South African mother, by the by) was beaten in the end by Novak Djokovic the Serb, but I like him too, and it was a great match. There have been a few beautiful new players this year - notably the glorious American Coco Gauff - and Simona Halep (Roumanian) who took the women's title from Serena Williams, is a delight, both on court and off.

We also went to see 3 movies in 7 days. (QFT is the perfect venue for a recuperating pensioner nursing a 9 inch curved scar that looks like a shark bite.) Sometimes, Always, Never was a poignant, off-beat, Bill Nighy vehicle that appealed to us both (it was filmed in Lancashire, where Professor Gloom grew up) and Kind Hearts and Coronets is still blackly brilliant after 70 years. Our third film, The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, was a documentary about the garden designs of Dutchman Oudolf. It was like watching a stream of beautiful, restful, abstract paintings interspersed with trenchant Dutch observations. Lovely.

A wild (looking) Oudolf garden

One thing Oudolf said - about non-indigenous plants: 'Why not use them, if they behave?' - struck a chord with me. I'm not indigenous: I was born a South African and spent more than half my life in South Africa and Zimbabwe, but my roots are now firmly in Northern Irish soil. I write about all these places, and although I can't claim to be a Northern Irish writer (which is an interesting condition in itself) this is now my home. Luckily for me, no-one has yet told me to go back where I came from, (no doubt because I'm white) but if the hideous Trump has started using the expression, perhaps someone should remind him that his own forebears came from Germany and his wife is Slovene-born.

The whole question of identity is a minefield: so many people these days are displaced - born on one continent, raised on another; blown from country to country on the winds of war, work, necessity, choice - but in the end your nationality, ethnicity, age, sex or creed shouldn't matter. You either contribute what you can to society, or you don't, and we are all members of the human race - apart from Roger Federer, obviously, who is a God.

And the only country we will all wash up in in the end (if we're lucky) is the Country of the Old, although for the time being I'm pretending not to be here.

A GLIMMER OF HOPE

Holywood, Costa del Down

We should have spent Easter in South Africa, with the children and grandchildren in a luxury game park (I'm talking tented accommodation with sunken baths and air conditioning here) followed by Orthodox Easter with family, friends and glorious Greek food, and after that a spectacular train trip down to Cape Town - instead of which, illness struck and our plans were scuppered. Still, as someone pointed out, at least we no longer had to worry about being eaten by lions. And there were other compensations (friends, family, chocolate) and best of all we were here to cheer on Alliance in general and Councillor Kate in particular as they won an unprecedented 53 Council seats in the local elections. Also, now that global warming is kicking in, instead of April showers and spring gales we had days of sunshine.

But April was a cruel month: journalist Lyra McKee shot dead; Mozambique, still reeling, hit by a second cyclone; Notre Dame charred and broken; floods in Zimbabwe and South Africa; Easter celebrants in Sri Lanka blown to bits; the latest dire warnings about the future of our planet...and here's something to put you off your dinner: if human children were given the same growth hormones used on chickens, they'd weigh 26 stone by the time they were 3 years old. If that doesn't stop you buying non organic/free-range, nothing will.

The Writer's Friend

The other statistic that caught my eye recently was from the most recent Royal Literary Society report, which states that the average writer's yearly income has fallen from £18,000 in 2005 to £10,500 in 2018. (I have personal proof of this: my last quarterly royalties statement from one of my two publishers was 54p. If I depended on my writing to pay the bills, I'd be living in a cardboard box down by the Lagan, never mind planning holidays in South Africa.) I'm amazed so many keep going. It's a terrible job really - solitary, largely unpaid, fraught with rejection, and even when you do manage to get something published, the chances are high these days that someone will take offence at what you've written. The things you may or may not write about these days, depending on your class, gender, race, etc, are bizarre. Come on guys, Wind in the Willows wasn't written by a mole or a rat, but it's still worth reading!

Anyway, I've conducted a survey into what other writers do when the going gets tough and despair sets in. Some people scrub their kitchen floors or tidy cupboards; many of us go walking (which is cheap and healthy) and Kelly McCaughrain gardens - and makes plum gin for her friends. (I think more of you should do this.) I do jigsaws and play Scrabble. And it pains me to report that even here you're not safe from the censorious. I play online with my sister in Cape Town, and we are fiendishly competitive. So when she made a world-beating, 7-letter, triple-word score, I responded - in the private comment space, with 'Holy f...!' This was instantly translated into 'Hm, I don't think we'll send that word...' Censored on Scrabble, would you believe it? Well, all I can say is 'Holy ....'

Of course, the best way to cheer yourself up is to read a good book, and Jan Carson's new novel 'The Fire Starters' is extremely funny and very good. She has a wicked unflinching eye and writes wonderfully to boot - an apt phrase, now that I think of it, for someone who describes the people of East Belfast as being 'particularly fond of football because it is a game of two sides and involves kicking'. And I don't think I liked this book so much just because I've been here so long that I no longer feel like a blow-in -  even if you knew or cared nothing for this city and its past, I don't see how you could fail to be moved and beguiled by the writing.

I'm also indebted to the friend who sent me an article from last month's London Review of Books: Diana Stone's 'Nightmares in Harare'. Beautiful, heartbreaking, writing, and a timely reminder that there is always someone, somewhere, whose troubles are infinitely worse than yours. But we all have to keep going somehow, to remember that things do change, and believe that they will change again, even here. And last weekend they did, and brought us all a glimmer of hope for the future.

FLAMING PYRES AND FIREWORKS

Jeremy Bentham, preserved as
an auto-icon. Great idea

Councillor Kate rings us every morning to check we're still alive. Prof Gloom's favourite thing is to get to the phone first and put on his recorded message voice: 'You have reached the Dufton residence. To ascertain if either of us is dead, please press 1...' She used to get quite cross but now she's resigned to our cheerful morbidity. She even mentioned to an official at the crematorium the other day my own wish to be pushed out onto Belfast Lough on a flaming pyre, but he seemed to think there might be a problem with the regulations. My other idea (involving a large display cabinet and a taxidermist) wasn't well-received either. I can't think why: the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham has been sitting around decoratively at UCL for many years. But the man at the crematorium did say I could have my ashes fired from a canon or attached to a firework. I am now torn between this and being made into a paperweight or piece of jewellery.

George Saunders' brilliant novel 'Lincoln in the Bardo' is entirely set in a Georgetown cemetery, where a motley company of ghosts bear witness to Abraham Lincoln mourning his young son. It is witty, macabre and profoundly human - my favourite book of the year. I've also just finished reading Maggie O'Farrell's 'This Must Be The Place' - why have I not read her before? And why did I know so little about Ruth Bader Ginsburg until I went to see RBG, the documentary about her life? This quiet, courteous, infinitely steely US Supreme Court justice has spent most of her legal life fighting for women's rights, and, now in her eighties, is still fighting.

It's a good thing there are these antidotes to the prevailing gloom and doom, because life often feels like a party that's gone on too long: good fun to start with but less appealing as everyone around you gets drunker. Not that I'd blame anyone for drinking themselves into oblivion: the news is so hideous, it frequently seems like the trailer for a disaster movie, or a particularly nasty reality TV programme. A bizarre mish-mash of shock, horror and impending doom, all mixed up with celebrity scandal, political skulduggery, sporting melt-downs and - the bane of my life - Public Opinion. (And here we have Sadie Sanction who witnessed last Tuesday's tragic events: 'Yes, I saw it all with my own eyes, so I did. She just reversed into the driveway and smashed straight into him. She didn't even stop, just drove off as fast as she could. The whole community is devastated. He was just the loveliest wee garden gnome...')

The other thing I find strangely cheering (although I know this won't be to everyone's taste) is reading about impending cataclysms. I'm indebted to Kelly McCaughrain for directing me to a New Yorker article about the Cascadia subduction zone. No, I bet you didn't know about it either. It's even more terrifying than California's San Andreas fault, and like that one, it's not a question of whether there'll be a giant earthquake one of these days, but when. (Scientists estimate 13000 dead, 27000 injured and a million displaced in the next major rupture.) Add to that the fact that a large chunk of La Palma is scheduled to collapse into the sea one day, sending tsunamis racing across the ocean to drown the east coast of America - and imagine if both these events happened at once! - and it does make worrying about Brexit, Trump and global warming seem a little pointless.

The Cascadia subduction zone was only recently discovered. So who's to say there isn't a major fault-line lurking somewhere under County Down, just waiting to blow us all to kingdom come? If nothing else, it would definitely beat flaming pyres and fireworks for providing a dramatic exit.

A TALE OF TWO PUZZLES

The Reading Room

On Christmas morning Professor Gloom found a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle in his stocking. It was called The Reading Room and featured a lot of books and, appropriately, a telescope. I got one too: The Fantasy Bookshop.

I usually limit myself to doing jigsaws while I'm talking on the phone, waiting for food to cook, or listening to something on the radio, and I like to do them downstairs on the dining-room table. But Gloom got to the table first this time, so I decided to do mine upstairs, in my study. Big mistake: every time I went up to my desk to work I ended up doing the puzzle instead.

Fantasy Bookshop (This might be the one that was finished first.)

But there was another problem - almost immediately an unfortunate element of competition crept in: who was going to finish theirs first? We pretended there wasn't a race going on at all, but of course we were both hell-bent on winning. So someone would casually remark that they were going to work on their novel/ paper/ Greek revision - and then sneak off to their jigsaw. Words were exchanged and feelings ran high, there was even an accusation made that someone had UNDONE a bit of the other's in the middle of the night...

Modesty forbids that I say who won but I don't think we'll be doing any more for a while, not at the same time anyway. We won't be eating any turkey either. Professor Gloom won our Christmas turkey at golf. I don't even like the things - give me a goose or a duck any day - and this one weighed in at almost 9kg. (And given the secrecy surrounding its collection - at the dead of night, from the back of white van in a carpark - I strongly suspect it fell off the back of a lorry.) With 500g of butter under the skin and stuffed with onions, garlic and lemons, it wasn't too bad, but there's still an awful lot of it in the freezer, so if anyone missed out on turkey this year, you know where to come.

In between the eating, drinking, puzzle-mania and old movies on TV, I managed to read a few books. 'Crooked Heart' by Lissa Evans had been recommended on Radio 4's 'A Good Read' and turned out to be a funny, touching story about an orphaned war-time evacuee and his profitable (and criminal) business partnership with a crooked foster-mother.

Before that I read 'Grief Is The Thing With Feathers'. I had to read it quickly because it was intended as Kelly McCaughrain's Christmas present but luckily it's a slim book, a beautiful, haunting - and funny - poem to loss, partly related by Crow, who will stick in your mind forever. I also bought Myra Zepf's wonderful picture book 'Don't Go To School!' for the various grandchildren. (It's the first of her books to be translated into English; the others are all in Irish.)


My own Christmas presents included Stephen Fry's 'Heroes' - a witty re-telling of the stories of the likes of Theseus and Jason - and  Madeline Miller's 'Circe'. (I'd bought this one some months earlier: what I do is I buy presents throughout the year, and give them to Professor Gloom to hide until Christmas. I'm so old now that by the time I open them - assuming he remembers where he put them - I've forgotten all about them, so he doesn't have to rack his brains about what to buy me and I get delightful surprises that I actually want. A win-win situation.)

Anyway, I greatly enjoyed 'Circe'. Even before my son had the good sense to marry a Greek wife, I was in love with all things Greek. I soaked up mythology as a child - I even had a cat called Circe. In Miller's book she's a remarkably honourable immortal, and well-disposed towards humans - apart from the ones she turns into pigs. But the rest of the gods are an absolute shower: arrogant, touchy, dangerous, and continually at each other's throats. I was frequently reminded of our politicians... and I'm not sure a bunch of Greek gods wouldn't do a better job.

And now I see Jan Carson is compiling a fantasy literary government. This could turn into a good game. I'm still working on my own list but it will probably include Mary Poppins and Gandalf. And possibly Charlotte the spider from Charlotte's Webb - a creature of infinite patience and attention to detail. Which is exactly what you need for jigsaw puzzles.