Tricks Of Memory

Ailz was going through papers looking for tax documents and found a letter I'd written home from school when I was 14. I'd been on a orienteering exercise over the weekend- and, yes, I remember it well- the emerging view from the hill as the mist burned off, the trespassing that got us arrested by a farmer and eventually sacked from The Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme- but what I'd written about to my parents (in my laboured, neo-Edwardian prose) was an incident I'd totally forgotten. My compadre and I had been walking down a lane in the mirk when a voice hailed us from a hedgerow. "It's cold and dark,"  it said. Weird. Inexplicable. We lost our bottle and set off across country to avoid it.  Afterwards an older boy who had been organizing the exercise owned up to being the ghostly ambusher. Didn't we feel like fools!

Now that's it's been jogged my memory insists it hadn't forgotten really, just misplaced the information, but I don't believe it.

Kim

1. Who is Kim? Good question. Kim has a whole portfolio of identities-everything from Sahib to low-caste Hindu. Which is the real one? Stupid question.

The character with the strongest and most settled identity- Teshoo Lama- is the one who values it least.

Playing the Great Game is also a way of breaking free of the Wheel. A spy has no caste, no fixed persona, no bonds. Hurree Chunder Moockerjee is a very fearful man because it suits him. He is and he isn't. He has arranged for his timidity to serve him.

Persona is a courtesy we offer to the world so it will know how to deal with us. We're fools if we allow ourselves to be taken in by what we say we are.

Kim is almost free of the Wheel. The only thing that brings him back to it is love- love of particular persons, love of the Wheel itself.

2. Kim is a very short book that expands in the memory. It contains the whole of British India- or seems to. Kipling is a writer who sees no need to go on and on about a thing once it is said; let the reader do the fleshing out.

Sorted

Earlier this week we had an electrician come in and replace the light in the kitchen and a plumber come in and fix the leak from the bathroom which was causing paper to peel off the ceiling below. It turned out that the waste pipe from the bath was broken- not cracked- broken,

Ruth reports that the leaking boiler back in Oldham has been mended. Thank you, Ruth.

We got notice this morning that the power of attorney is in place. Ailz asks if- now I'm an attorney- I can demand an hourly rate for answering the phone.