Remembrance Day, always the nearest Sunday to the 11th of November,  is a day for ceremony and ritual. At the Cenotaph in Whitehall, royals and politicians gather to lay wreaths of poppies.  The royals are attired in sometimes incongruous uniforms, all except the Queen, who must have more outfits of pure black than any woman alive. The politicians opt for dark suits and overcoats.  Michael Foot, one time leader of the Labour Party, was roasted by all the newspapers in the 1980s for appearing at the service in a tan-coloured jacket but perhaps today’s sleekly spun politicos are simply more mindful of their image than he was.

Massed bands play traditional arrangements of noble music and massed ranks of serving military personnel parade execute a flawlessly drilled parade. The crowds, it seems to me, comprise as many tourists as members of the British public and that wasn’t always so.

Until I was eighteen I attended the local Remembrance Day parade and service.  My father was a police officer and was often in charge of the parade – in fact, it’s almost my first vivid memory of him, striding out ahead of the Territorial Army, the Boys’ Brigade and the Girl Guides. I remember respectful crowds lining the streets and the deep silence as a lone piper played The Flowers of the Forest in front of the War Memorial.

Now I watch the Remembrance Day service live from the Cenotaph on TV and my mind tends to stray a little, a tendency not helped by the slideshow images in intense colour that the BBC feels it has to include. Viewers nowadays, it’s assumed, need something stimulating to look at even when the whole point of the occasion is to be in a quiet, thoughtful place. This year I noted trivia such as glove-wearing bandsmen, including a clarinetist with cut-off mittens.  I thought, that’s new, surely and what a bunch of sissies they are to need gloves. But the modern armed services are, I suppose, only being practical. I thought that Her Majesty looked suddenly older – or hadn’t I been paying close enough attention lately?  I noticed, and I was not alone, for the media leapt on it later that day, that the Prime Minister did not nod to the Cenotaph in the accepted manner. Myself, I thought that he looked dour and grey and tortured enough anyway for it not to matter.

There was a list of soldiers killed in Afghanistan in 2009 which scrolled across our screens.  The sadness as I read those names was, for me, tempered by a realisation that there were more young men in their 20s and 30s than there were teenagers. That’s a change.  And there was a film of the wife and mother of a young Welsh soldier which I found the most moving part of the whole programme. The wife had, one day, looked at the summit of a Welsh hill and determined to erect a Welsh flag there to memorialise her husband.  The mother stood by the flag and said that when she saw people climb the hill and read the inscription, she thought of it as someone thinking of ‘her boy’.

In the two minutes silence, which I always observe, both on Remembrance Sunday and at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, I do my best to mindfully remember.  I think of the only member of my family who was killed in war – my grandfather’s brother George, buried in France where he died from wounds inflicted during the last big push of 1918. Granddad served but survived and my father, as a policeman, was a reserved occupation in World War II and so exempt from service. I remember people I danced with at naval balls who were on ships that were lost in the Falklands War. I remember a friend who to this day is traumatised by the death of his fellow Para in a horrific incident in Northern Ireland. And I think of the people who died in recent wars, who are still dying.

There’s a curious fact about war – it is beneficial in advancing surgical methods, for battlefield surgeons must be resourceful and creative when faced with appalling wounds. And it can bring out the best, as well as the worst, in people.  Someone sent me a link to the story of the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department which, in World War I, used talented sculptors to give men back their faces, albeit in sliver-thin metal.  Plastic surgery too learns a great deal from war.

The inscription on the Cenotaph reads The Glorious Dead and it raises my pacifist hackles.  For what is glorious about death? And what is glorious about war? As a species, we seem to be irredeemably agressive and will no doubt go on making war on each other for many centuries to come.  But it’s a shame – literally a crying shame. Wilfred Owen’s searing poem Dulce et Decorum Est and Benjamin Britten’s savagely raw War Requiem are both in my mind even as I endeavour to remember, with quiet solemnity, not the wars that killed and continue to kill so many, but the human beings behind those lists of casualties. For even if I do not fully respect or agree with the conflicts in which they lost their lives, I can respect them. And I can be mindful and remember.

Photo by theboybg

paintit wee toes
in nippit Manolos

rid jaikit belted
sae tight she’s
fair pechin’

a mooth
like she’s sooked
twa’ soor plooms
an’ found them
ower wersh

readin’ the windaes o’ a new place
firtae gae huntin’
fir designer gear
an’ saving weans
intae the bargain

a cruel glimmert
o’ sun casts a beam
ower her cheek
pierces the maquillage
an’
Oh Goad
she’s
nae lassie.

Aye weel, neither did we
me an’ Jimmy – Jimmy McCutcheon
wi’ his mammy’s best
picnic basket unner wan airm
an’ his ither
aroon ma waist

A’thing inside that basket wiz reed tartan
flask, paper plates, even spoon haunels
Mrs McCutcheon
Senga tae ma maw, fir we lived up the same close
had ‘haspirations o’ grandeur’ Maw said
Maw niver missed an opportunity tae maungle a common saying

He wiz a braw lookin’ laddie tho’
nae awfy tall but then nane o’ us were then
Said he knew this place -
doon the braes – and wid ah like to come
fir a picnic wi’ him
Course, ah played hard ti’ git fir
a meenit or so, bit baith o’ us kent
that wis jist a gemm

A’body knew doon the braes wiz
a place lads took lassies fir winchin’
an’ we said whit a bonny place it wiz
Truthfully it coulda been a wee patch o’ dandelions
an’ dog muck
behind a factory
fir a’ the attention we peyed it

Ah wore ma schuil uniform minus
blazer ‘n tie
an’ he wiz got up in
thae drainpipe breeks ‘n pointy shoes
we thocht wiz the bees knees then

It wis an awfy hot day ah mind
ye could smell the grass soakin’ up the sun

Actin’ posh, ah wiz mither
layin’ oot tartan cups ‘n paper plates
like it wiz Sunday tea
Tae ma dismay
Mrs McCutcheon had pit in twa slabs o’ her Dundee cake
ma Maw’s cake wiz ten times better
she said Mrs McC used awfy cheap mixed fruit

We hid a morning roll each
slathered wi’ butter
washed doon wi’ Barrs dark cola frae the flask

An’ then he kissed me
Aye he wiz a guid kisser
no that ah’d much tae compare wi’
bit aifter that kiss
ah’d hae gone tae the ends o’ the earth
fir Jimmy McCutcheon so ah wid
-jist like that lassie there ah wiz

Jimmy McCutcheon ‘n me niver hid any more picnics
a week later
aff he goes wi’ Janice Rae
an’ noo they’ve three gran’weans
Mind, it disnae grieve me
Jimmy went oan the booze early
Janice hid a hard time o’ it
their weans aye snotty nosed wi’
shoes fu’ o’ holes

Aye it’s funny innt it – whit brings it back
Jimmy McCutcheon ‘n the picnic basket

I wrote this first as prose in May 2009, but it’s always felt more like a poem, so I made it into one.

Oor young airms
polished the lang mahogany coonter
each mornin’
till ye could see yir face in it

Wrapped in tissue paper fir decency
we sold girdles
the colour o’ murdered lobsters
that clamped yir thighs thegither
sae hard they wir
mair effective in stappin’ weans
than johnnies
The Deluxe wans came wi’
an extra packet o’ suspenders
like octopus legs

Snowy white semmits
in a’ sizes frae wee bairn
tae pig bellied butcher
bit Gentleman’s Small
wiz the maist common
fir baldie pigeon-chistit craturs
wha bore nit a whit o’ resemblance
tae Marlon Brando

Ah favoured the jumpers,
saft as a woman’s breist,
duck egg, rose pink
and the colour o’ the
sands at Aberdour
wimmen wha had haspirations
(like mah mither)
wore them wi’
silky horse-heid scarves
tucked in at the neck

Mah best haundwritin’ wiz employed
in the makin’ o receipts
but mind, ye had to press
awfy hard oan the paper
Miss Bain wiz that stingey
wi’ the carbon

ower the hour’s fallin’
that eight leggit beastie
workin’ sae industrious

wan shank hingin’ oan
tae the silkety guyropes
while thithers mended
a web sair torn aboot

by an Edinburgh bluster
sic a seamstress she wiz
belly laden wi’ weans arachnidan

a pause tae
break fast wi’
wan shrivelled wee flech
then abseilin’ back
tae the safety
o’ mah windae frame

She wiz a wee wumman
wi’ a sad hairt
the early hurts
niver healed richt
a’ the love
stappit up inside insteed

She wiz a wee wumman
wi’ a proud hairt
long ‘oors ‘n years
scrubbin’ flairs
fir posh weans
bein’ beholden tae
naebidy
aye and proud tae
o’ bein’ at times
richt thrawn

She wiz a wee wumman
wi’ a lonely hairt
which she’d no’ admit tae
bit showin ye her treasures
an’ photies o’ a’ the folk
lang gone
she wiz a’ lit up again
taken back tae times
when she wiz maist
loved.

I blame it all on Tolstoy. For I can date this appalling habit to a few weeks in the summer when I was 17.  I was reading, for the first time, War and Peace.  It was one of the books that all my contemporaries were reading that year – you couldn’t claim to be part of the gang if you didn’t read certain books, and I so desperately wanted to be part of the gang.  I don’t remember what the other books were – I think Franny & Zooey had come and gone by then. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth would be for the first year at college when earnest, socially important reading was the thing and would of course be accompanied by the doomed poets of World War I and the Bloomsbury set.

Anyway, back to War and Peace.  Hands up anyone who hasn’t skipped lazily over all those Russian patronymics and the detailed description of the battleplan for Borodino? Honestly now.

I don’t think it was the patronymics that did it in my case, for my favourite book before that was Gorky’s My Childhood.  I didn’t so much read that book as consume it, going back for second and even third helpings. My first real romance was coloured by the fact that I read Gorky continuously on the bus journeys to and from meetings with my beloved. The wintery streets of Stirling became windswept tundra and the bleak cafes with steamed up windows where we spent our days were transformed into Grandmother’s kitchen complete with a tiled stove in the corner.

I had never read a foreign author before unless you count Nevil Shute (!). A Town Like Alice made a big impression on me when I was in my early teens, although I didn’t grasp the essential fact that Alice referred to the town of Alice Springs until I’d read it several times. For me, it was simply a glorious love story with an added dash of The War. The film of it with a young Virginia McKenna and some ruggedly handsome chap only added to its appeal.

I had found, badly concealed at the back of a bookcase, my parents’ copy of The Victory Book. This book contained some pretty horrific photos of concentration camp victims, bomb-flattened Hiroshima and Mussolini hanging in the town square and it was obviously judged to be unsuitable reading for an impressionable teenager.  It may have been produced by Picture Post, to which my mother subscribed throughout the war and on into the ’50s.

My book diet in the years leading up to War and Peace was heavy on Daphne Du Maurier and Charles Dickens. There was an unspoken understanding that one should read at least one Dickens novel before reaching the age of majority.  Mine were Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations.  This was before Oliver Twist became Oliver, The Musical and The Pickwick Papers a Sunday teatime TV serial.  Alas, the wonderful 1946 film of Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, has proved more enduringly evocative than the book. Many years later, I prepared for the role of Miss Havisham in a contemporary opera called something like Miss Havisham’s Veil.  I was looking forward to yards and yards of decaying wedding frock and a magnificent dying scene. I don’t remember what became of that project – was the opera never staged or did they dump me from the title role? I’ve continued to read A Christmas Carol in the run-up to the festive season out of sentiment and because it crams quintessential Dickens into a manageable length.

Du Maurier was a favourite of the book clubs of the time and loved by Hollywood movie makers then and now. What teenage girl of my vintage couldn’t immediately identify the source of the opening line ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’ It’s Rebecca of course. I identified strongly with the title character – she was wild and beautiful and her handkerchiefs were embroidered with an R, just like mine were. Mine came in packs of five from the Co-op of course, but that made not a jot of difference to me.

I’d never been anywhere near Cornwall, but I imagined it to be a slightly more romantic version of St Andrews with added pirate wrecks.  I bestrode those windlashed beaches with my faithful dog, dancing curls escaping from a headscarf carelessly donned and drank tea from a tin mug with some gnarled old sea dog who called me Miss Rachel.

But back at the ball with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, his friend Pierre Bezukhov and the enchanting Natasha Rostov…  Prepare yourself, I’m going to be irreverant here about what is regarded as one of the world’s greatest novels.  Has this reputation anything to do with the fact that, superficially at least, it’s got something for the girls and something for the boys? Frocks and family in the sumptuously portrayed Petersburg of the Rostovs.  Shalkos and sabres at Austerlitz. I confess, though,  to slipping back into the spirit of the novel when dancing an onstage Polonaise in a ballgown of purple velvet (Eugene Onegin).

But somewhere in the pages of Tolstoy’s magnum opus, I began to weary of  the endless detail, the complicated cast of characters. I began checking the page numbers – still only p.345, that was bad news, P.R. was already on p.577 (he and I were competitive readers). Would Natasha ever find happiness? And exactly how long was a Russian winter? I quickened my reader’s step and found that if I skipped most of the paragraph relating to Maria Feodorovna’s lineage, it didn’t make much difference to the storyline. And who needed to know so much about Pierre’s exquisite pain and inner turmoil, for heavens’ sake?

The rest is history.  Since I began to read seriously (a precocious five to six year old) I’d savoured every word. Mind, there was a guilty episode of binge reading the entire Famous Five series while on holiday with a pal.  She went fishing in the burn for tadpoles and I sat on the front steps glued to my books – I was 9.  But with War and Peace I truly began to skim read. And the habit’s endured. It’s shameful, I tell you, shameful.  It has to be the reason that I rarely remember much of the piles of books I read. But I can’t stop myself. All those carefully crafted sentences that an author sweated blood over are left in the slipstream as I turn the page to find the important bit.  Rather than having the gravitas of a serious reader as I age, I’ve become a reading flibbertigibbet. I know for a fact that I’ll never read Proust now – why would I read someone who’s even more verbose than me  but with better vocabulary?

And War and Peace, the cause of my downfall? That weighty tome with its back cover half torn off (and pages 345-577 looking suspiciously unread) has been consigned to the bin. Count Leo never did manage to engage my passionate imagination and youthful reading fervour like good old Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky.

Ah cannae bear
tae see the world wear
sic a sleekit smile
aw richt in balance
sae ah watch insteed
thae glaikit eejits cavortin’
oan the box
‘n draw the blinds richt tight aroon mah wee hoose.

Whit keeks oot frae thon dark-kirtled fankle
hiz the brains o’ a yow
whaur once wiz reasonin’
as sharp as a needle jag.

The early Greeks, who gave us the term, believed that madness was a divine punishment for former sins. Many psychiatric and psychological conditions include the word mania. And one of them is manic depression. Nowadays, it goes by a more politically correct name – bipolar disorder.

Here’s a clinical definition:

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depressive disorder or bipolar affective disorder, is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a category of mood disorders defined by the presence of one or more episodes of abnormally elevated mood clinically referred to as mania or, if milder, hypomania. Individuals who experience manic episodes also commonly experience depressive episodes or symptoms, or mixed episodes in which features of both mania and depression are present at the same time. These episodes are usually separated by periods of “normal” mood, but in some individuals, depression and mania may rapidly alternate, known as rapid cycling. Extreme manic episodes can sometimes lead to psychotic symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. The disorder has been subdivided into bipolar I, bipolar II, cyclothymia and other types, based on the nature and severity of mood episodes experienced; the range is often described as the bipolar spectrum.

You can take that definition and run with it if you like. You can tell yourself that such familiar names as Einstein, Van Gogh and Beethoven were all bipolar, that you’re in good company. But how bipolar disorder works in the life of an ordinary human being is something else.

You may be called over-dramatic from an early age. Over-emotional, too prone to wearing your heart on your sleeve. Over-sensitive and cursed/blessed with an over-vivid imagination.

But as an adult, when the switch in your brain (set permanently on a random fluctuating pattern) is on Up, people will describe you as charming, vivacious and charismatic. They applaud your talent. You are a high functioning member of society with great communication skills. You possess a brain that’s sharp as a tack and that’s simply stuffed with creative ideas. You’re a risk taker, courageous and bold. Although some will find you a little intimidating or fast-paced, you’re generally well-liked and people see nothing abnormal in your behaviour.

Perceptive people, however, may notice that you have an edge of desperation. And they’d be right, for underneath, there is indeed a desperation to hang onto the Up, to keep the creativity, the sharpness. A desperation to finish projects that you started with such immense enthusiasm before the switch moves to Down. A desperation not to let people down who you care about. And a desperation not to let people see how your inner life really is.

Being Up is, quite literally, an intoxicating experience. Passions and ideas flood into your brain and you live in a brightly coloured world where every new idea is the one. Sometimes you can’t keep up with what your brain’s throwing at you and even your speech centre becomes garbled. It’s a runaway train but it’s damned exhilarating. Up’s darker side though is Signor Agitato, when the train’s come off the tracks and you’re trying to control those racing thoughts by sheer willpower.

In an effort to become more balanced, you try every medical treatment the world of psychiatry knows. None makes a significant difference, although the side effects increasingly debilitate you. You undergo long periods of therapeutic counselling and find a deeper understanding of your condition. Applied to your everyday life, that understanding changes nothing much. Eventually, you give up and go it alone.

You wrestle with the question of disclosure. You know deep down it’s a lose lose situation. If you tell people about your condition, chances are they’ll be sceptical ‘everyone has mood swings, what’s so different about you?’ or downright judgemental (see the opening paragraph). They may argue that you’re not bipolar, you just suffer from ‘a little depression now and then.’ Most of all, they’ll be damned uncomfortable with your disclosure and many may decide to give you a wide berth from now on. Accordingly, you spend your life alternating between telling people and keeping it a dark, deadly secret.

The largely hidden world of Down is a bleak one. Your previously sharp brain has grown a fleece of ewe’s wool and the world of colours has turned to a blurry grey. You’re physically exhausted and your motivation to even get out of bed is minimal. You sometimes remember that you do have meaningful talents and skills but as these completely vanish in Down, you can’t believe in the veracity of this and downgrade them to meaningless.

In an attempt to escape this blackness, you indulge in self-destructive behaviour. Anything all-consuming will do – booze, drugs, compulsive eating, gambling, sex. These incapacitate you in various ways so that you are at least distracted from the black hell of depression. But they will also drive away even more people in your life.

You make excuses for missed deadlines and meetings. Then eventually you simply cut off the phone and don’t reply to your emails. No lie would be convincing enough. And even if you could convince people, there’s no way of telling when you’re going to be Up again and functioning.

Over time, the Ups will be more and more shortlived and perhaps more extreme and the Downs more sustained. The Ups become a desperate race to accomplish things before the Down hits. It’s at this stage that disappointed friends will begin to drift away, unable to cope with the unremitting rollercoaster ride. They’ll go in search of more normal company. Who can blame them?

Now you find it hard to plan a life, because the pattern is so random. If you promise to be somewhere on a certain day three months hence, where will your mood be by then? Your confidence plummets and you stop trusting your own instincts. Was this or that decision made when you were overly manic? Severely depressed?

Anxiety starts to tag alongside Signor Agitato. The normal filters that allow you to function begin to rust up and your world grows smaller and smaller. You fear that you have become less and less socially acceptable and that perhaps it’s best not to inflict yourself on others.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have around you at this stage loving, understanding and supportive family and friends who are in it for the long haul. This can be crucial to how the life of someone with bipolar disorder pans out.

But from everything I’ve told you, you can see just how corrosive a condition it is. It’s hardly surprising then that people who are bipolar will more likely than not lead a solitary life. That they will often be hospitalised at least once. And that they will have a high suicide rate. It doesn’t seem like such a good payoff for a few fleeting moments of high creativity and charisma.

I made a couple of designs to be printed onto mugs.  One was for a friend who was a keen gardener and the other for a guitarist friend. I remember having a lot of fun making these.

A tiny thread of print edges the roses design – the names of the old-fashioned roses that both she and I loved – the albas, musks, bourbons, chinas, rugosas. She knew immediately what the names were.

On the guitar design, I included a series of guitar tabs which are actually the first bars of a 12-bar boogie.  I teased the guitarist that he had to reach for his guitar to find out what those tabs sounded like!