Last train leaving. Photograph by Islay McLeod
I moved between the star of Christmas and the bells: a strange time for a flit. Change has a built-in emotional architecture designed to produce an anxious set of impatient, often uncharted, challenges. (Whenever I say goodbye to a place of endearment, there is Cole Porter’s refrain as moved in soulful song by Ella Fitzgerald: ‘But how strange the change, from major to minor; every time we say goodbye’.)
Where has all this stuff of flotsam come from – long-time gathering? So many discarded bits of paper of a life passed and yet; ‘so long’ to so much?
Moving to sheltered housing has a uniquely poignant significance with the overpowering sense of catching a very last train. Yet the move has given me the opportunity of a better and warmer set of rooms free of the omnipresent damp and cold slime that bespoilt so many of my books, damaged my clothing and hurt my chest.
When the lady from the council gave me the details, I found the offer embarrassingly emotional. How I am going to manage the psychological logistics of this change? Is the venue the well-kent local departure lounge that I had heard spoken of in morbid whispers?
‘No,’ she attempted to assure me, ‘this is simply a new phase in your life: a new set of rooms with new views’. What I did not expect was the sheer physicality of the move. The flit-flat is up ‘a stair’, 17 steps with boxes of books provides more than a sair heed of trauma, I assure you. But the auld boys from our bus-pass group came and helped. Even certain family members offered.
But apart from the brutish physical and indeed emotional excess there was the niggling fear of change itself – an act of involuntary cowardice. Unquestionably, change brings with it the almost incessant suspicion that the process will not be managed to a satisfactory conclusion; that calamity will inevitably find itself up the next step? Yet with all the contradictions there comes a daily advancement of gaining something new and fresh with an accompanying pleasant tingle of excitement.
Certainly the new view is startling even through the dull grey-stained wet mist of South Lanarkshire. There again is the discreet dualism of the beauty within the bleak dankness of near-winterish desolation. Looking south there are the distant soft breast-like hills around Tinto. I can see across the Clyde past the ubiquitous windmills beyond Lesmahagow and I can just catch a peep of the photogenic green fecundity of the Clyde Valley by Crossford.
Then, as the books are laid out in display (as opposed to the usual disarray), I quite randomly pick out an old (ancient) text from student days: a TS Eliot anthology. His plays I had known as well as his more popular sermons in verse but I simply ‘cut’ the edition and found the closing verse in East Coker from his ‘Four Quartets’. Serendipity is almost a belief system for me and there in the final stanzas I read with such astonishment that I called out spontaneously, disturbing the quiet peace of the place.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For here in the soft words of the shaman/poet was the reassurance I was desperately seeking. What a wonderful message for my changed circumstance and indeed for all of us as we move into a new year.
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure…
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Kirkcaldy-born Thom Cross is a former head of the Jamaica School of Drama at the Edna Manley Centre in Kingston and worked in the Caribbean for over 30 years.
