Friends and bullies

 When you are little it is so much easier to make friends (well more or less everything is easier when you are a small child), you just meet someone randomly and say, "Do you want to come and play at my house?" and then you become firm friends very easily and quickly.  Or you don't see each other for a while and you drift apart but don't feel desperately sad about it. 

A picture I did for Trish from a 
photo of us sharing a towel on
Dalebrook beach in Cape Town

My first friend was Trish, and we met when we were both one-year olds.  Our mothers became friends even though there was a nine-year age-gap between them, and I just loved my friend's entire chaotic family of, eventually, six children!  Her mum became my second mother, just as so many of us become mothering figures to our childrens' friends.  We two were beloved best friends, even though we were quite different, in looks and in our natures.  We used to tell everyone we were twins although it was patently obvious that we weren't even related!  

My friend Maureen, a small woman still filled with
the huge life and vivacity seen in this image from
years ago. She is now 80 (!) and lives in Fremantle.

I have had several such deep and profound friendships through my life, some which have lasted most of my life.  It is a great sadness to me that each of my very dear friends now lives far away, in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, in Australia, in America.  

When we moved to America we left our entire history, from birth to mid-forties, such a jolt to the psyche!  

It took ages to make friends and most of them turned out to be South African, no doubt due to that shared history, that humour, that consciousness, those perceptions distributed only amongst your own countrymen and women.  

Now we have uprooted ourselves once more, and so we lose our American history of 21 years. As even older people it is that much harder to make new friends.  Neither Tim nor I are much good at small talk and we're both a little eccentric and different.  We are both the third child in our families, and we're putting it down to that!  Also, I am even more passionate about those things which outrage me than I was as a younger environmentalist/feminist/pacifist etcist.  This tends to put people off.   

Last year on our travels we stayed for a weekend with an old church friend of Tim's from long ago, who came to Portugal and married an advocate here.  They were astonished that I don't eat meat, as most people in Portugal are astonished.  (You can buy whole entire rabbits at the meat counter here!) Eventually, after several meals, and my refusal to eat even octopus, they asked me why.  So I explained, to the best of my ability, about the cruelty of factory farms and abattoirs and how animals are all sentient beings, with emotions and social structures and whatnot.  That scientists are discovering that the question to ask is not, "Which animals have emotions?" but "Do any creatures not have emotions?" 

And I told them about the book I read about a Giant Pacific Octopus in the New England Aquarium, The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, a beautiful study.  She speaks of a friendship between the author and an octopus named Athena, but the book also includes scientific knowledge of what is being learned about octopuses, and it makes us wonder about these magical creatures.  As humans we always look at everything from our own perspectives, our own intelligences, but it seems that even octopuses have their rich intelligence and abstract thought and even a sense of humour, and other strange and extraordinary powers, like the ability to pour their entire bodies into a bottle.  They are truly admirable, beautiful aliens.  

And not for eating.  

And then I spoiled it all by weeping. 

Wonderfully, and in spite of my sentiments for animals, these two have become very good friends of ours, and we love them.  They are kind and lovely people, we just feel differently about meat.     

And, the opposite of friends, 

are BULLIES.

Bullies are on my mind now because of two of my grandchildren starting high school.  Smartphones and social media have made bullying so much worse, as children can exclude others from whatsapp groups, badmouth them online with no reprisals, and a multitude of other sins.  The last few years of my teaching, several of my students were on anti-depressants already, at the tender ages of 15 and 16, and largely, I believe, due to all this kind of stuff, plus the enormous weight of information which bears down on us every day.  

The reader, having a birthday.

So many of us are bullied, and the bullying stays with us our entire lives.  I remember well my own first experience of it, when I was 6.  My best friend and I went to "Big" school the same day and we were happily ensconced together in our little wooden desks, when suddenly, on the second or third day of school, I was whisked away to demonstrate my reading abilities to a group of other teachers, and then to the very intimidating headmistress,  One of the teachers asked me when I learned to read and I replied, "I was born like that." at which they all unexpectedly roared with laughter.  To me it felt like I had always read, as my dad had taught me when I was very little.  And a solitary child with a chronic illness finds great solace in reading for hours and hours, so that she can forget her lungs' labouring breaths and travel far far away with her mind.    

Then just as suddenly I was pushed into another classroom a year above, where I had to read aloud, a lot.  I read to the class while the teacher marked books and prepared lessons, standing on a little stool so that everyone could see me, as I was very small.  Apparently they were amazed that I read so expressively and that I did all the voices. (Maybe that's why I became a teacher.)

When break-time came, we all went outside to eat our packed sandwiches sitting on the grass under the trees, and I went eagerly to find my friend, who was sitting in a circle of little girls all sitting cross-legged, who, when they saw me, the little freak who could already read and was moved up a class, all hurriedly scrunched up until their knees were touching so that there would be no space for me to fit in.  I walked slowly around the entire circle of about 7 or 8 children, and no one moved up to let me in,  So I just walked away.  I was utterly shocked and my heart hurt. 

And still does, to this day.  I was treated as a misfit and so eventually that is what I became.  But while I was becoming myself, I became strong, grew a (slightly) thicker skin, learned that ignoring someone mostly works, found my own different friends.  I wore strange clothes I made myself, went down my own path of poetry and art and stories and the green world of nature.  I was always happy in my own company.

I have heard other people's stories of being bullied, horrendous stories, where mine pale in comparison.  Boys getting stripped down and made to stand while everyone laughs at their genitals, an entire class voting against a child for some made-up issue, horrible physical and mental abuse.  

Margaret Atwood wrote about her childhood trauma in her brilliant book Cat's Eye, where a 'mean girl' bully nearly caused her death.   

The girl who was bullied just tried to deal with it all on her own, only told her mother when the near-death occurred.  It is interesting that, although I am 15 years younger than Margaret Atwood and grew up on a different continent entirely, my generation also just dealt with awful experiences.  Bad things happened to us and we just stoically carried on, we didn't tell our parents or complain to anyone, we just learned how to cope with the trauma.   

You can become quite cynical about human beings, can't you?  

The beautiful seascape

But yesterday we went to an art exhibition in Portimão, and there was beauty and colour and passion and creativity, and a lot of people looking at pictures, and an old artist told us his entire life story, just about, all in Spanish, as he was from Toledo, and had traveled down slowly to Portimão, over many days, in his van.  He is a passionate painter of Nature, and we walked away from his stall with a beautiful little seascape which will now become part of our Sea wall.  

Our Sea wall.

Self-portrait with shadows

And a watercolour self-portrait this week, with leaf-shadows added in Procreate on the Ipad.  I read a lovely description of self-portraits today, which I quote here from a critic writing about the winner of the second biennial Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize in 2013.  "Newbolt demonstrates how self-portraiture offers an opportunity for the artist to present their image as they know themselves - a platform for the individual to explore the potent, confusing, relationship between psyche and body."

Fires and Languages

We were due to go north to Porto and beyond for Tim to hike 3 days of the Camino de Santiago with our friend Bruce, who is hiking the trail in honour of his wife who died recently of Alzheimer's. But suddenly there were fires everywhere near the route, and our trip was postponed until Tim went up a day late while I stayed behind, as my lungs are rather terrified of smoke. 

The fire triangle.

Meteorologists talk of the fire triangle, which looks like this.

There's also a rule of thirties which seems to predicate wildfires: above 30C temperature, below 30% humidity, 30km per hour winds, and 30 days without rain.

In Portugal, as elsewhere, many of the fires are set by arsonists, which is as incomprehensible to me as the fact that the criminal Trump is running again for President, and that half the population of America support this insanity.

At various times during the days before he left, Tim and I were glued to the Portuguese CNN, which had constant updates on the FOGOS.  We struggled with the language of the reporters and the rolling headlines, a language which we have just begun learning.  Sometimes we would race to the translation app, trying to find meaning before the headline scrolled to something just as incomprehensible.  Pictures always help for context of course, and we could see that the fires were awful and that everyone was trying to help, brave men and women trying desperately to save their homes with green-leaved branches, using green vegetation to beat away at the burning vegetation, all that heat and the smoke with no protection for their bodies or their lungs.  

example of small creature
affected by the fires

The fires are under control now and mostly out, although there is still smoke in the air, a little, where Tim is walking today.  I always consider all the little wild creatures affected, and feel so sad with my sentimental heart.  It is strange that 'sentimental' has a bad rap.  In spanish, sentimiento means feeling, or sorrow, and sentimento, as in sentimento de compasión, is a sense of compassion.

Another example

In Europe most people speak 2 or 3 languages.  As a generalization, many English people tend to rest on the laurels of English, believing they can get by. I do feel incredibly lucky to have had English as my native language. It is an extremely beautiful and expressive language, perhaps due to its large number of words, by some counts more than any other language.  Be that as it may, I am utterly in love with English, with the poetry of it, the familiarity of its sounds, it is as dear to me as the country of my heart.  At the International School of Boston where I taught for 17 years, I had an amazing passionate South American student who was bilingual in Spanish (her mother-tongue) and French, and fluent in English too.  Laura was a wonderful poet, and after two years of study with us, she began writing all her poetry in English, and when I asked her why she said, "Because it is the most beautiful language in the world!"

My introduction to other languages came when we were forced to learn Afrikaans from the age of 7 or 8, and I absolutely loathed it.  Even though I am a fifth-generation South African on my mother's side, still, the descendants of an 1840 British immigrant called John Webster clung stubbornly to the age-old hatred between the 'British' and the 'Boer'.  When I was little, the Afrikaners created the repressive state of Apartheid which set our country on a long trajectory of hatred and brutality and poverty, the effects of which are still extensive in the now democratic South Africa of 2024.  So there was also that going against Afrikaans as a language.

However, at the beginning of grade 10, I was fifteen years old, a budding poet and romantic. In walked this new, extremely large and rather beautiful Afrikaans teacher.  She kind of floated in, in that graceful manner which some very large women have.  She had bare arms and beautiful skin, and she graciously put her pile of books down, then swept around to face us all (I was in the back corner of the classroom, where the wicked students were always seated) and began reciting a poem.  An Afrikaans poem! Die Dans van die Reën by Eugène Marais.  My heart!  

Die Dans van die Reën (The Dance of the Rain) is a poem personifying the rain as a woman and how the

an old drawing of mine which sort
of captures the feeling of the poem

parched land feels when the rain finally falls.  Utterly beautiful and somehow untranslatable into English.  But you can read the original with a translation here: https://www.wattpad.com/8161821-gecko-jig-the-dance-of-the-rain-die-dans-van-die   That lesson was like being in an auditorium witnessing the most enthralling performance!  During those 40 minutes I fell in love with Afrikaans and never looked back!  No Afrikaans teacher had thought to teach us poetry before!  Or maybe I just hadn't been listening.

And then you find all the other attributes of the language, the humour, the perfect onomatopaeic words, the vulgar disgust of Afrikaans swear words, wonderful.

In grade 7 we had to choose Latin or French for High School, although there was only one French class and two teaching Latin.  So someone told us to say "I want to be a diplomat" to get into the French class.  I wonder how many of those french students ever became diplomats!  The teacher was a crazy old frenchwoman, Madame Doise, who taught us lots of old french folk songs and nursery rhymes, which are all still preserved in my brain and come rushing out at odd moments, word-perfect.  

In grade 11, my friend and I decided we wanted to be really good at French and knew Madame Doise was not doing it for us, so we persuaded our parents to pay for extra French classes with a private teacher.  This went along swimmingly until the old husband, who I thought was very dear and had become my friend, started coming on to me, quite aggressively, which put an end to that!

During lockdown Tim and I started learning Spanish with a wonderful Peruvian teacher, who happened to be the hero girlfriend who saved our son when he nearly died from Covid in Argentina at the beginning of the pandemic.   When they sadly broke up two years later we took lessons with Matthew's original Spanish teacher in Guatemala, Elsa, an extraordinary young woman who became our dear friend.  We spent a few days in Guetemala with her last year but now, since we have had to give up our lessons because of learning Portuguese, I miss her terribly.

Flowering.

All these languages in the little section of my brain labeled FOREIGN LANGUAGES vie for my attention when I am trying to speak just one of them.  Although I am really good at reading and understanding and also writing in all these languages, I can't say I am fluent in speaking them.  It seems that is always the hardest part of learning a language.  Afrikaans comes easiest to me and Tim and I use it often as a "secret language".  Sometimes when I have thought I was having a wonderful conversation in French, the person will suddenly look at me oddly and I come to realise that Afrikaans has won that round in the FOREIGN LANGUAGES boxing ring.  

But I love them, all these arguing tongues, I find them fascinating and confusing and beautiful and startling and astonishing, and they have opened my mind to a compelling maze of cultures and histories that I would never have ventured down.

And the art for the week is a reworking of an old self-portrait, I have been loving collage this week!

Tests and portraits

As I get older I notice that when older people get together, they often bring up their medical issues, their aches and pains, their recent operations.  I myself loathe talking about such things with strangers, and hate hospitals and being sick with a grand passion.  (I know, everybody probably feels the same way about being sick and hospitals.)

But of course, getting older means that things do begin failing and changing, and I am talking about this now only to illustrate kindness in this, my newly adopted country, Portugal.  

My grandpa smoking a pipe with his boy,
my incredibly young dad, sporting very
funny hair. 

I have been a pretty constant and unwilling visitor to doctor's offices and hospitals all my life, because I inherited my grandfather's lungs, which were thought to have become problematic after being mustard-gassed in the trenches of the Somme during the "great war".  But I think they were probably pretty bad to begin with and his lung problems were exacerbated by the gassing.  This kind of asthma seems genetic, as several of my family members of three generations suffer from asthma, some being worse-off than others. 

A painting I did of Childhood. 
Notice the lungs/elephant ears.

When I was a little girl there were no great medical solutions for my illness, so with flu and exercise-induced asthma, I spent quite a large amount of my young life struggling for breath, and quite often our irritable doctor, who also happened to be my godmother, would at last give me what seemed always to be the last option, an injection (what it was I still haven't been able to find out), which  basically knocked me out like an anaesthetic.  

How it felt. (ipad drawing)

I suppose the reasoning was that if your entire body is relaxed, those little airways would also relax, enabling the breath.  They were the strangest experiences though, because it was like being thrown down a black hole, from which I would slowly rise up, hours and hours later.  I would dazedly walk through to the toilet from my room, and after doing the longest wee ever, would gaze into the mirror above the bathroom sink for ages, examining my face.  Was this the same Anne Radford that I knew? And if not, who was I?  How could I find myself again?  

In 1990 someone invented inhaled corticosteroids, which changed my life (also that of my younger daughter who sadly inherited those damn lungs as well).  

Anyway, since 2020 I have had a pulmonologist checking up on me so I had to find a Portuguese pulmonologist, who ordered tests.  

For the Pulmonary Lung Function test, you have to sit in a kind of clear airtight box with clips on your nose and perform various breathing exercises, which involve various kinds of torture for an asthmatic - like having to wheeze out all your breath from lungs which have no more breath left long before the technician gives the signal to breath in again.  Before which point you come to believe that you are about to faint, start seeing the blackness behind your eyes, and, after the third attempt, go into full-blown panic!  

Upon which, the incredibly sweet Filipa comes to your rescue, opens the horrible claustrophobic door and leads you out into the light, walks you around, tells you you're fine, puts her arm around your shoulder and gives you all her strength.  

When you go back in, you know she is with you, she maintains eye contact the entire time, she talks with her low sweet Portuguese-accented words, tells you she is with you, but that it is you who are strong, you who can do it, push that air all out, all out, you can do it, it's you! .....  Okay breathe in!

And I did, and I could!  

When it was done, she took me out of the box and gave me a huge hug. She was tall, like a friendly tree, and my head fitted on her shoulder, and I cried a little from all her humanity.  

The kindness of strangers was something which decided us on this new country of ours, and this is just one example of so many experiences we have had.  

Ella and the dove

Recently I have been loving making block-prints, which were always such a surprising delight for my students at the International School.  In fact, most people remember doing lino-prints at school, I think it is a stand-out memory of school art.  The mirror image of what you have drawn and carved out, and the myriad ways you can print.  Magic.  

I made a block of my granddaughter Ella who is a dreamy book-loving child, so I chose a mourning dove to sit with her, because they are symbols of peace and loyalty, and are also very pragmatic birds, as is she (pragmatic, not a bird.)  [Fun fact about doves which has nothing to do with Ella, is that they are rare among birds as they can suck up water using their beaks like a straw, unlike other birds which have to tilt their heads back to drink.]

Luna and the magpie

Then I made one of Luna, using a magpie as her bird, as they are curious about everything, and talk and sing a lot!  Luna is all those things too!

I had to carve out the cheeks and foreheads very deeply so that no ink could seep in there, because both girls are 11 with those still-perfect faces.  

After Luna, I decided to do a self-portrait, because although I have done about a hundred self-portraits over the years, I have never done a block-print one.  I didn't have to carve out deeply, because at 69 my face is filled with laughter-lines and worry-wrinkles and sun-spots and just all the usual ways in which skin shows its age.

Me with red hair

I chose a hoopoe (a name which has always evoked laughter amongst the youngest in our family and even more for its binomial name Upupa epops africana) as my bird, because they are a lovely henna sienna-brown, which my hair was for the majority of my adult life. 

Anne and the hoopoe

A version of this bird lives in Portugal, the Eurasian hoopoe, but I first met them when I was a child, as they are South African birds too, and my heart will always be with that country, which built my bones, which made my fragile, tough, caring, brave, sensitive, passionate soul.

How to mark my 70th year on earth?

The end of a beautiful birthday day!

Nine days ago, Ten days ago, no, Eleven days ago I turned 69. (I have begun this several times.) As my dad always loved to explain, I have now entered the next number year, my actual 70th year on earth! So I would like to mark this momentous year in some way. It began with celebrating with 3 of my 4 children, and 2 of my 4 grandchildren, which was amazing and hasn't happened for many years.

A couple of days ago Tim and I wrote down our goals for the next year. I am old enough to have enough experience of goal-setting to realise that you should set yourself smaller goals, achievable goals, so that you don't constantly sell yourself short, feel guilty and give up. 

 

My blog became 3 books!

I am no stranger to long-term goals, some achieved, many not. Yet. 

 In 2010 I kept a blogpost going for 365 days, a journal of learning to run in my beloved meadow (lifelong asthmatic) and a sort of self-portrait every day. I achieved that one, which was called Two Resolutions.

Beautiful architecture in Valencia

When we went traveling for 18 months in 2022 and 23, after selling our house in Massachusetts, I wrote a blog weekly, until its links on Tim's Facebook and my Instagram were shut down by a complaint. After this sad event, I still kept my usual diary, but no blog. Until now. I hope it doesn't get shut down again. I am not sure what I said, except that maybe someone objected to my telling of a moment of anger and disappointment in Spain because all the most beautiful buildings were originally built for the glory of god. (And yes, I am an anti-religious person, believing religion responsible for so much evil in the world: wars, violence against women, degradation of the environment etc.) 

Art from this week: Tree of life block-print

So, my new Two Resolutions are: To write a once-a-week blog, a sort of memoir, and to include my best art from that week. 

 I want to write this story because there are fewer years in front of me than behind me, and my life has been an interesting life, a big little life.  My own life, like no one else's.  I have lived such a lucky life, in reality. I have had my share of delight and grief, the same as anyone you get to know. I have felt myself unlucky many times, but with the broader viewpoint of older age, have realised there has probably been much more luck than unluck. Even though I live my life in a state of permanent potential outrage, being a conscious humanbeingwoman living in the 21st century, I still know and count my blessings. (And no, God didn't give them to me, you can just be blessed. Full stop.) 

 So here we go, with my earliest memory, for the memoir part. Our driveway had a wrought-iron gate on to the street, and I, being a curious almost-3-year-old, thought I could see better up and down the road if I stuck my head through the bars. When I grew tired of looking, I found I couldn't pull my head back out through the bars! After wriggling around for a while in this head-jail, I started to screech and stopped some cars, whose drivers came over to see if they could help. (This was a long time ago and small children played unsupervised much of the time.) My dad heard the screeching and the commotion from the now small crowd of helpful passers-by, and came over to resolve the problem, which he was generally good at. I think it was vaseline which finally did the trick of freeing me, although I believed for years the story my big brother told that my dad had just wrenched the bars apart with his brute strength.

Me and my dad.

That fits better with my childlike view of my dad as superman. My dad had enormous hands, I've never seen their like, and he could do such gentle things with them, like fix broken birds and other creatures I brought home when I was a little older.

My dad's hands, fixing a broken bird I brought home.

I can safely say that my life has progressed in a similar pattern to that wayward, inquisitive little girl's first remembered experience.