Na, nu wissen se — nu is zu Ende. (Kurt Tucholsky)

I’m an orphan. It’s a strange feeling.

A friend of Prima’s who had helped hang up lamps and assemble Ikea furniture in my father’s new flat in May said on the bus home “you’ve got a way cool grandfather!” I can only agree.

He taught me to swim, to ride a bike, to use tools, to catch a ball (no mean feat, because I was as astigmatic as a child as I am now and didn’t see in 3D until I got glasses in my forties), to bake sponge cake, to appreciate German wine and indeed wine in general, and to think in a particular way that seems crooked but is actually straighter than the default. When I was eight or so he took me outside on a clear moonless night and said “now try to imagine what’s behind the stars!”

His presents were above all practical in a subversive way: timber and carpentry tools for my seventh birthday, a net to catch sticklebacks and a tank to keep them in at eight, my first pocket-knife at nine (which led me to think that that’s the statutory age to have a pocket-knife, and to treat my daughters the same). When I left home he gave me a hundred guilders to buy kitchen things. I still have some of that set, after more than thirty years.

His last word was, characteristically, “No.” It was the answer to the nurse’s question “wouldn’t you rather get back into bed?” Alive until his death —no embarrassing half-life in sedation for him— and stubborn to the end.

This morning I cycled to the swimming pool through “best of November” weather, wind and rain and general nastiness, thinking I’d collect my reward by swimming in it. But no! There was a sign on the gate that you pass with your pass, stuck so that nobody could miss it: “Outdoor pool closed. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

As soon as I entered the indoor pool area (where the changing cubicles are) the chlorine fumes got to me, worse than usual, probably because there were more people in the water. I said to the woman who was sitting there supervising “that’s not an inconvenience, it’s a disaster!” It turned out that the coordinator had made a mistake in scheduling shifts, so that there was only this one woman supervising today, and apparently a surfeit of people tomorrow. Another regular outdoor swimmer said “the people who use the outdoor pool don’t need supervision!” — but if anything does happen, this woman will be liable, and it was perfectly reasonable not to take any risks.

I pondered swimming indoors, but I couldn’t face three-quarters of an hour in that stink and went home, not without misgivings. Missing one day won’t be disastrous for my fitness, but now I can’t say any more that I haven’t missed a single day, I’ll have to qualify it. I tell myself now that I should at least have tried and that the chlorine fumes can’t have been that bad. But the smell did make me queasy from just standing there; indeed worse than on a normal day and with no prospect of being out the other door in a moment.

The rain stopped the moment I was on the bike again (i.e. when I’d normally have been swimming) and didn’t start again until I left the supermarket with a bag of groceries too full to close. Go figure.

Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)

A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?

When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.

But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.

They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.

This one was sitting on our next door neighbours’ [1] window sill and wanted scritches. Later, she sat on the window sill of the shop across the road and wanted more scritches.

[1] who are dog people, definitely not cat people.

(late October)

Across the road from where the other lot was, popping up almost a month later and in much greater number.

There were even some on the bike path.

Look what we found in the organic supermarket flour:

Linseed, with a side order of sunflower seeds. A girl found the first few and alerted me, so I could sift the flour before making fruit and nut prosphora willy-nilly. I didn’t tell the supermarket —in order not to cause them to recall it and waste a lot of good food— but apparently someone else did because the shelf is now ominously empty. In New Zealand, according to my friend who lives there, it would have been marked down with a warning.