Summer Holiday
13 August

This week has been a holiday week for me.

It's the first complete break from work that I have had since February. What with having the ceilings in the bedrooms replaced and then coping with the aftermath of the car crash, it has been a more than usually heavy year on the domestic front, financially speaking.

Consequently, following from last year's miraculous holiday cruising the Baltic, Ross and I decided that we would forego a formal holiday this year and have made do with a weekend in London and occasional day's out.

Frankly, I was ready for the break.

Looking back on that week in February, I spent a lot of it painting window frames. Well, this week has been mostly about decorating too. We finished off the back bedroom a couple of weeks back and it was really good just to open a few of the boxes that have been filling the house. For example, the talking books are back on their shelves and I've started to listen to Robert Hardy reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.

Since then, we have pressed ahead full steam with the small box room and, with a lot of effort, that's now pretty much done too. I've been doing some tidying with the glossing but the shelves are back on the wall and, gradually, the books will come out of the boxes.

And then it's on to the front bedroom where I've started stripping and filling in cracks. I'm calling it the front bedroom or the master bedroom rather than our bedroom as there's no certainty that the room will merit that title. My friend Colin has often said that I am too quick to embrace the symbolic but it does seem to me to be an irony that, after six years of living with the original decoration and just as we are about to claim the room for our own, Ross opens up the possibility of going separate ways.

Way back in time, when we first decorated the kitchen, I used the Solti recording of Wagner's Ring to provide my soundtrack whilst I was working on my own. I've decided to re-visit my copy of the Goodall recording in English to see me through this task. It's OK but there really are long stretches of tedium in between the gloriously beautiful or monumentally exciting moments.

Looking back in my card index, I find that the last time that I attended a complete Ring cycle was in 1984 at Bayreuth. Every so often, I get the feeling that I should give it a go again. And then I listen to the thing and, deep in the middle of Act Two of Die Valküre after Wotan and Frika have clashed interminably and then Wotan is recounting the whole story so far to Brünnhilde, I think "God, this is boring". Why would I want to invest the time and energy and the money in enduring the whole thing over four nights?

The French say that Wagner has some mauvais quart d'heures; I think that they have underestimated the time span.

So, anyway, I've been decorating. And I've been de-scaling the toilet and renewing the seal around the bath and sorting out someone to paint the outside of the house and putting books on shelves and sorting out some activities for the next Children's Meeting in September and getting the car looked at because there were some rogue warning messages flashing up on the dashboard and investigating getting the carpets in the two smaller bedrooms re-laid and getting a ball park costing for carpeting the front bedroom and getting my teeth seen to and getting the central heating system maintained.

I am, in fact, doing all of this work on my own as, first off, Ross had two days' work over in West Kirby and then he went off to stay with his parents. I'm only moderately OK about being on my own but he has said that he's going to use the time to do some thinking. I'm really pleased about that because the waiting is (to use a Liverpool phrase) doing my head in.

So, I'm keeping myself busy but trying not to beat myself up. The list of things for me to do may get done but, if things drop through the net then, well soddit. Usefully, I had a session of reiki already booked and I returned with some further insights.

• I am not afraid of what may happen. I am fearful that the future may hold the end of my relationship with Ross. But I am not afraid. I shall endure even though my heart may end up being broken.
• When Richard and I finally split up in the spring of 1991, the main thing that I felt was a sense of waste. If my partnership with Ross is to come to an end, then I shall be very sad but I shall not regret one minute of the past decade and more. The whole experience has given me so much. I am wholer and more complete for having known Ross and so none of the time spent with him can be called a waste.
• All of this process has really shaken me up. But then, maybe I needed to be shaken up. Maybe I had become complacent about Ross's needs and desires. Maybe I had just accepted that, because I can see a trajectory into the future, so can he. Well, I am no longer complacent.
• Janet asked me if I thought that Ross could survive on his own and I said that this was not a problem for me to sort out. And I mean that quite straightforwardly. As Ross's partner, I am more than happy to participate in his support. If he wants independence then I have to trust that he will sort out the means of support for himself. I am not with him out of charity. I am with him because I want to be with him and I accept the situation that accompanies him. If I am not his partner, then I have no desire to sign up to being either his parent or carer.
• Janet also supplied one of her little pearls of wisdom. She reminded me that, for all my thinking and covering as many bases as possible, Ross will probably come up with completely different issues that are pertinent to him rather than me. I know that, when the time comes, I shall have to be very careful to listen in as gentle a way as I can.

And I wouldn't like anyone to think that it has been all work.

Ross and I went for a lovely picnic on the waterfront on Thursday lunchtime. Glorious day and glorious view out over North Wales.

And on Monday we attended the Peter Blake retrospective at Tate Liverpool. I've only ever known Peter Blake from his work in the 60s. Memorably, he was the person who designed the front cover to the Beatles' album Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I liked the later works enormously, especially his Ruralist work in the 1970s and more photorealist stuff of the 80s and 90s. And it was pleasing to note that he has enjoyed friendships with both David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin.

We also took in Centre of the Creative Universe which surveyed Liverpool's contributions to the arts scene national and international since 1945. It was good to see John Baum's Windermere House again. This was Roger McGough's house in Sefton Park and I remember the canvas first being shown at the Bluecoat in the 1970s when I worked for Merseyside Arts. I can now see it in the context of photorealism and the Los Angeles influence on modern art. Oh, the advantages that 50-year-olds have over 20-year-olds. There was also lots of photo journalism which was extremely nostalgic for me. I liked Edward Chambré-Hardman's Mersey Tunnel Interior and Vanley Burke's Toxteth, not Croxteth.

On Monday we watched Brian de Palma's The Black Dahlia. Well, it was alright. It was well staged. There was one creepy, well choreographed set piece - the deaths on the stairs (de Palma likes that particular setting; he's obviously in thrall to the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin). The acting was mostly good and there was a particularly grand guignol performance from Fiona Shaw. But, really, two stars is as much as it can reasonably muster.

There was at least one fine, redeeming feature. At last, young Josh has seen fit to show us his tush. May we commend him. It is a particularly pleasant, firm little tush and deserves to be aired more often.

Tuesday night we watched Pierrepoint. This was the story of one of England's last hangmen. During his career, he killed (executed) over 800 men and women. He was involved in the execution of Nazi war criminals. He hanged Timothy Evans, wrongly convicted for murder committed by John Reginald Halliday Christie. He was hounded as public sentiment turned against capital punishment. Timothy Spall was excellent in the title rôle and Juliet Stephenson gave a strong portrayal of his wife, content to live off the earnings but sickened by the source of the money. It was a fine work but much of the detail (right down to some of the dialogue) appeared to have been lifted straight out of A Perfect Execution. Maybe they both used similar source material. Just two stars for dissatisfaction.

Wednesday/Thursday gave us The Good Shepherd which was a very good film in the Le Carré/George Smiley mould. Crits that I have read have pasted the film for not being an action adventure, for being slow and for not developing the characters. Yes, the pace is slow but that is because the treatment is intensive. The characters don't say much. What is interesting is what they don't say and what they are thinking but not saying. And eventually it's about betrayal and love rather than explosions.

I've been watching some films on my own too. Shortbus was, as advertised, explicitly sexual. It shows how much things have changed in twenty years that this film can not only be made and distributed but also be available for loan from our local library. Aside from the sex, the film is a simple tale of angst and relationships in New York. Without the sex, it would still have been an enjoyable film - just not as quirky or as worthy of new comment.

Next up was The Da Vinci Code. I wasn't expecting much from this. I'd not really rated the book when I read it but it did have the merit of being pacey. The film squandered even that virtue and was leaden in the extreme. A waste of some very good talents.

I've also been reading stuff too. I polished off Mrs Harris Goes To New York by Paul Gallico. I guess like many people of my generation I know him as the author of The Snow Goose and The Poseidon Adventure. This was a sentimental piece of whimsy in which Cockney charwomen with appropriate aspirated accents bring about goodness for all without ever waving a fairy godmother's wand. The writing was clear and there were well-judged moments of tart asperity but I wouldn't recommend it. My mum will probably love it.

I've also completed Michael Tolliver Lives the latest novel from Armistead Maupin. Maupin in one of my heroes. I really love his Tales of the City sequence of books and I loved his last novel, The Night Listener. This work picks up on the life of one of my favourite Tales of the City characters after an absence of nearly twenty years. Michael is in his mid 50s and in a loving partnership with someone over twenty years younger than him. There were times when my current life and the fiction meshed too comfortably for comfort but, overall, it was an excellent read that I enjoyed enormously

Any of my troubles, of course, are put into perspective when you look at what is happening elsewhere.

News from the farming community has been dominated by an outbreak of foot and mouth. And immediately everyone remembered the terrible time in 2001 when something like 7,000,000 animals were slaughtered and the countryside was virtually closed down. None of that got a mention in this Journal at the time. I suppose that I was too busy settling into Crosby to mention it.

This comes on the top of a summer floods with crops devastated throughout the Midlands. I heard one commentator talking about how the land would not recover until next April. Higher food prices are inevitable.

And yet all of this pales into insignificance when you consider the calamity caused by the monsoons in South Asia with something like 28,000,000 people affected by floods in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. It's difficult to register the scale of a calamity like that.