XV - Returning Home
I snuck home to Putney this afternoon. It was a little odd at 3:30pm – a usual time for Sunday Evensong at a cathedral – to be joining the morning Eucharist. I’d been alerted about a technical issue and was happily free, though the problem had been solved without me. The family were all resting from a very hot episode at the beach, and I’d just sat down with Verghese’s excellent The Covenant of Water. It was lovely hearing those well-known but far-off voices – I occasionally glanced at the screen but computers really aren’t any good in sunshine, and I was somewhat supine on my treehouse balcony recliner. The 10am service has got longer since I left but I didn’t mind at all in my relaxed configuration – I thought the music came across very well and particularly enjoyed Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring. Everything clearly is going strong at home – though someone should take the curate out for a drink on Wednesday night, and maybe phone any bishops you know and tell them it’s going to be alright.
But it was strange seeing life going on without us. One of the things that’s hard to perceive is the passage of time in the lives of others. My head cannot get around the fact that the first children I baptised are now going to university. I had my first encounter with this last year when I married a girl whom I prepared for Confirmation. It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, though in the Netherlands. Perhaps it’s just that your forties is the decade you begin to be old. I realised watching some tedious “Reel” that I’d stopped paying any attention to pop music in 2014 (with the exception of her Holiness, the Taylor Swift), and have increasingly withdrawn to the 1990s, or "Dad music" as Oberon will inevitably call it.
Yesterday on the beach, however, a recently married Indian couple happily estimated my age at 28. Which, of course, I told them was almost exactly right – that particular awkward juxtaposition of words being quite definitely appropriate. Apart from on days when we’re catching a train, I do feel younger here. Rhiannon told me that I caught the sun, to which I, in all innocence replied, “oh, I’ve really been trying to stay out of it.” No tan is a healthy tan as my brother has always said. Today, she got more burned than my other brother who, once, having been sunburnt playing cricket, applied after-sun and then went back out into the sun to field for forty overs. Today’s incident did, though, provide a useful homeschooling lesson to show the children the harvest of folly. Humility is everything, as she will tell you.
Rhiannon, who has been ill for a week, has been feeling a culinary homesickness. You can, of course, get many Western foods here, but they never quite ring true – the cooks cannot quite resist a last-minute pinch of coriander or cumin. I never experience homesickness, since having grown up as a bad and ungrateful child, but I did have a moment running through Agonda beach in the heat of the day to get money and a tuc-tuc (to return Apollo, whose temperature has flared up again, back to the safety of air-conditioning), with sand chafing everywhere (it was a bit like that old Castrol GTX advert – you may remember the line “metal grinds on metal” – always used to put my teeth on edge), when I did feel, “I wish I was anywhere but India”. Heat can easily feel relentless and inescapable. It’s not quite a “first-world-problem”, as people used to say, but I doubt I’ll have much sympathy from anyone reading this in February in the UK.
Hilariously, I often hear Famous-Five stories as we go to sleep. Nothing could be more English. Rhiannon, who grew up on the wrong side of Gerard’s Cross, didn’t grow up with them, but hearing the stories, I can remember again the smell of the solid red hardbacks we had as children. As if in sympathy I saw a wonderful voluptuous white retriever in a kayak going up the river this morning, like Timmy off to Kirin Island to find ingots of gold.
So it’s slightly hard to believe that life continues in Putney. I suspect we will look like strangers on return – Rhiannon all pink with peeling patches, and especially Puck who has grown 3 inches since Christmas. He now goes by the name “Shah Shah the Tiger-cub” and calls me his elephant as I lead him haphazardly round India. I hope I will not look older even if I have fallen even further behind with pop music, though given that I’m getting a lot of exposure to Enid Blyton and Rudyard Kipling and not enough time to finish The Covenant of Water, sermon references may be reassuringly familiar to older members of the parish.
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