7.7 Brindle . . .

This is an instalment from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

The Foot and Mouth epidemic started in February, not the most exciting month for walks at the best of times, let alone ones where you couldn’t tread on anything green. Nevertheless we were lucky enough in Devon to have a vast network of tiny tarmacked lanes, largely free of traffic and fringed with banks, hedges and trees. These we trudged.
 
I had to keep Brindle on a lead as she was now deaf as well as disobedient so if she’d strayed into a field I would have had no way of bringing her back. If I’d climbed into the field I faced a large fine, not to mention alienating my farming neighbours. If Brindle had strayed she risked being shot.
    Having Brindle on a lead made me feel as if I was on a lead too and, while she was obviously missing all the interesting smells and carcasses, I was missing all the usual details of winter turning to spring. As my mother so eloquently put it later, ‘We never saw the bluebells that year.’ It was like a bereavement.
    From time to time, Brindle would sit down in the middle of the road and refuse to get up.
    ‘Look,’ her eyes would say, ‘I’m an old lady now. This is boring and I’m beyond tired. I want to be back at home, snoozing on my bed.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ I would say. ‘I’m bored too but we have to get our exercise. In any case it’s as quick now to carry on as it is to turn round.’
     She would haul herself to her feet, and we would struggle on be-leaded.  
 
In May Frog and I went on holiday to a Greek island, leaving Brindle with neighbour Claire and her husband Ben. Unfortunately there was a storm at the end of our two weeks on the island and the ferry was cancelled. We were stuck.
    The travel company doled out phone cards so that we could phone home and I stood in the rickety open booth on the village’s seafront, buffeted by winds, and dialled the UK, marvelling at technology. Here I was on a minuscule, barely inhabited, island. How extraordinary that a rusty contraption could put me in touch with someone thousands of miles away.
    Ben answered and he didn’t sound too pleased when I explained the situation and asked if they could possibly look after Brindle for another few days.
    ‘I just hope she’ll last that long,’ he grunted.
 
Luckily, the Greeks are used to the weather disrupting travel and three days later - by an ingenious route involving another bigger ferry and a cardboard hotel on a tourist trap island where we listened to disco beats all night - we arrived home.
 
The next day Frog and I took Brindle out for a walk.
    I was surprised that Frog had volunteered to come too. He didn’t normally. Perhaps it was the holiday, I thought. We'd done a lot of walking on the island.
    About five minutes from home, Brindle collapsed. She lay on the ground, panting, her tongue hanging out. Frog lifted her off the road into a gateway and laid her on the grass. I crouched over her, stroking her and talking to her, feeling pretty shaky myself.
    After a few minutes, as Brindle showed no sign of improving, Frog spoke.
    ‘I think we ought to go home and ring the vet. I’ll carry her.’
    I thanked god that Frog was with me. What would I have done without him? I couldn’t lift Brindle myself. She was far too heavy. I couldn’t have left her as she was. I would have had to wait for a passing car but that might have taken hours.
 
Back home Frog laid Brindle on her bed. Because she was panting so much, we thought she might be hot, so we put a fan on her.
 
‘It’s a pulmonary embolism – a clot on the lung,’ said the vet when he arrived. ‘There’s no hope, I’m afraid. She’s slowly suffocating. We have to put an end to it.’
    As if she understood, Brindle struggled to her feet and staggered outside, only to crumple again on the grass.
    All three of us – the vet, Frog and me – followed her out and knelt around her.
    The vet took out a needle and as he depressed the plunger I saw Brindle’s spirit burst from her body like a puff of smoke and streak northwards over the shed.
    It was in a hurry. It couldn’t wait to leave.
 
Brindle had waited for me to finish my book. Over the last three months she’d trudged the lanes with me even though she hadn’t wanted to. She’d waited for Frog and me to return from holiday. She’d made sure both Frog and I were there when she collapsed.
    Perhaps, in the end, she did what she came here to do.

To be continued . . .

7.6 Prayer

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right.

Brindle was now thirteen and beginning to show her age. She was grey around the muzzle and stiff in the back half. She didn’t need quite as much exercise as before.
    I’d hated the puppy stage. It had drained me. I had nothing to give a young creature. I wondered if we’d made a terrible mistake, taking her on. But then, when she was a year and a quarter, she turned a corner. She became grown up and almost began to look after me instead.
    She wasn’t allowed on the furniture but she was allowed to have two feet off the ground. In the mornings as Frog and had our breakfast in bed, she would place her front two feet on top of the duvet my side, with her two back feet still on the ground. I would put my hand on her head. In the evenings as Frog and I sat on the sofa together watching television, she would rest her front feet on my knees. It was wonderfully comforting.
    She was an independent creature, like Frog, and we’d had trouble training her. Or perhaps we were just hopeless at it. It was more a case of her training us to let her do what she wanted.
    She was also horrendously greedy, stealing the cat food at home and diving into next-door’s dustbin whenever she had the chance. She would strew its contents all over the road so that she could have a good look at them and snack on anything tasty. I would then have to go down with a black bin bag wearing rubber gloves and pick it all up.
    When she and I were out walking together she would suddenly scent a dead creature or remember a spot where she had once many moons ago buried the remains of some animal. Nose to the ground, she would head off at speed and no amount of calling could bring her back. When she did eventually return, of her own volition, she would often be carrying some foul bone in her mouth, or dragging a rotten carcass behind her.
    Nevertheless, with her stripey orange-brown coat the exact colour of Devon mud, her liquid yellow eyes and her inclination to plumpness, I loved the half springer spaniel, half labrador accident, and my walks with her were the highlight of my days.

    Then, one evening her legs went. She staggered round the house, unable to climb the stairs, leaving behind her piles of vomit. She looked as if she was drunk. We raced her to the vet and he pronounced a stroke.
 
I was by now deep into the encyclopaedia, realising that a year was not going to be nearly enough to complete it. I’d had a three-month extension of my deadline but was beginning to think that wasn’t enough either.
    The subject was vast and the word ‘encyclopaedia’ was more than demanding. It implied that I was passing on everything that was worth knowing about each subject, something I was far from qualified to do. What’s more, the book couldn’t be personal like a ‘devil’s dictionary’. It had to be authoritative.
    My migraines were striking more often, sending me to bed, unable even to think, which delayed the work even further.
    ‘Please God,’ I prayed. ‘Don’t let Brindle die just yet. I haven’t got space to deal with her death at the moment.’
 
I picked up my influences from everywhere, which was perhaps another reason I felt so at home in the New Age. I was brought up in the Church of England. Yoga philosophy had ingrained itself in me from my twenties. Psychotherapy over three years and a year of hypnotherapy had added to the mix. Wide experience of complementary medicine had imbued me with a belief in forces that we can’t yet explain scientifically and shown me that we are not victims of fate – we are in charge of our own health and well-being.
 
So, yes, even before I met Cheryl I believed in prayer, but I did it my way. I knew that if you put enough passion into your prayers they would be answered. But I also knew that what you wanted wasn’t necessarily what you needed and nor was it necessarily the best thing for the world at large.
    I had prayed and prayed for Frog to have a job in local radio but when he did I hardly saw him. And then Sam came into his life.
    Two years earlier we had been down to one car which was inconvenient as Frog took it to work with him, leaving me trapped at home, and I had prayed for another one. Soon after that, Frog’s father died and we were able to take over his.
    As a result, I was very careful what I prayed for and I didn’t pray for things very often. The best prayers, I had found, just fell out of me.
    And this prayer about Brindle was one of those.
 
And Brindle rallied, dragging herself up the stairs and wobbling after me on short walks, and over the course of a week or so returning to more or less normal.
 
At last I finished the encylopaedia and sent the manuscript to the publisher who was delighted with it and sent me my second cheque, the first having arrived when I signed the contract and the third due when the book was published in about a year’s time.
    All I had to do now was write ‘blurbs’ for the jacket (the write-ups that appear on the front flap and on the back) and check proofs. A piece of piss, as Frog would say.
    My migraines receded.
    I looked forward to returning to simple editing – working on other people’s books. To seeing friends and family. To having a life again.
    And most of all I looked forward to unrestricted walks with Brindle.
 
Then the Foot and Mouth epidemic struck, affecting farm animals and causing over six million of them to be slaughtered and burnt all over the country. The countryside was placed out of bounds.

To be continued . . . 

7.5 Spirit Guides

This is part of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments, see right.

I continued seeing Cheryl on my own but less often, partly because I didn’t need her so badly and partly because she was becoming so busy. Everyone wanted her to sort their life out and it was hard to find a time when she was available.
    After the tarot group, she had started up other, much bigger groups, including an evening on crystals which I attended. But I didn’t like sharing her with lots of other people. It diluted her.

    When she announced an evening on ‘spirit guides’ however, I was intrigued and signed up.
      
As I explored the world’s major religions for the encyclopaedia, I realised that Christianity is one of the few that doesn’t recognise reincarnation. That legitimised my own experiences. After all, I’d known as soon as I first spoke to Frog that we’d been together in previous lives. I’d felt those lives stretching behind me in an echoing corridor. That knowledge, as well as the ‘blue sky voice’, had sustained me through all the ups and downs of our relationship since then. They were some of the most important events of my life. So I had no trouble in accepting that there is a spirit world.
    Karma too made total sense to me. It wasn’t punishment for bad things we’d done in previous lives. That was a total misunderstanding, like something out of the Bible’s Old Testament. It was the universe redressing a balance. It was us learning and evolving.
    Karma happened over multiple lifetimes as well as during each single lifetime, and according to Cheryl as we evolved karma happened more and more quickly. Life booted us as soon as we did something ill advised or unkind and I could see that so clearly too. The moment I mis-stepped, I crashed (not that I was a highly evolved human being – but I kept hoping).
 
In my research, I’d also encountered spirits in all shapes and sizes - animals, goddesses and gods, ancestors, elemental beings and nature spirits - and I had no problem with that either. Even if they weren’t part of Western culture, native people had complex metaphysical worlds of which they were part. Why should we think we knew any better than them? They knew more than us, if anything.

    And I'd had one or two strange encounters myself, such as the blue mist that both Frog and I saw, and the two men who materialised one night when I was in bed alone and then vanished.
    According to Cheryl, and according to my researches, we each have our own special spirit guide or guides, spirit beings – usually once human - with whom we have a special relationship. Those flashes of intuition, those ‘knowings’, those strange coincidences, can all be evidence of spirit guides at work.
    Now I was going to have a chance to communicate with my guide directly. I couldn’t begin to imagine what that would be like.
    I was slightly spooked at the thought of someone there all the time watching everything I did, but what the heck. Maybe the workshop would help with that.
 
There were some twenty of us in the group, some of whom I knew and some I didn’t. We arranged ourselves around Cheryl’s sitting-room one Friday evening, as the incense smoked and low side lights interrupted the darkness. Traffic rumbled past outside.
    Cheryl asked us to close our eyes and took us through some breathing and relaxation exercises.
    ‘In front of you’, she said, ‘you will see some stairs. Climb the stairs and you will see a door. Your spirit guide is waiting for you the other side of the door. Go through the door.’
 
Not much happened to me that evening. I’d done similar exercises during my hypnotherapy sessions with Pat and in some ways those had been more powerful.
    Slightly disappointed, I decided to try again on my own the next day when I was out walking with Brindle and paused for my usual session of what I called ‘meditation’ for want of a better word.
    Sometimes, I just sat, or thanked God for all the good things in my life, but often these sessions included breathing exercises from yoga, prayer, and ‘visualisations’ (imagining what I wanted) and affirmations (reeducating myself to be positive about everything) both of which I’d learnt from both Pat and Cheryl. Meditation itself however never featured as I’d never been able to do it.
    Because of Cheryl’s warning about the dark patches in my aura, I practised daily.
 
I stopped in one of my favourite places, high on a hill with views to both the sea and Dartmoor. Taking out the handy plastic bag I always carried with my on my walks, I parked my bum in the middle of three beech trees standing sentinel in a line across the field.
    It was a blowy January day with a mixture of sunshine and cloud giving a hint of the spring to come. I lifted my head and enjoyed the fresh air on my face.
    I was nervous, but determined to go through with the exercise, so closed my eyes and in my imagination walked through the door to meet my spirit guide as we’d done the previous evening.
    Suddenly information was streaming into my brain.
    When Jo and I were very young my father used to take us to his office on Saturday mornings. There we played on the manual typewriters while he caught up with some work. Every so often we would jump as the Telex machine in the corridor burst into life, clattering, shaking and spewing out thin strips of paper with words on them. We would watch it, fascinated and slightly alarmed. Where did the words come from? Was the machine alive? Did we need to tell a grown-up what was happening?

    Something similar was happening now, except that this time I was involved too.
 
As information streamed into my brain, I found myself asking in my mind about everyone I knew, about what their purpose was and how I could deal with them. Each question was answered in detail.
    Then I asked about our beloved Brindle.
    ‘She was human in her previous life,’ shot back the answer, ‘but reincarnated in dog form this time round in order to learn continence and obedience.’
 
I grew frightened. Who was speaking to me? Would the words ever stop? Was I going mad?
    The stream stopped instantly.
 
I raced back down the hill, with Brindle at my heels. I couldn’t wait to tell Frog what had happened, even though I expected him to scoff.
    I also wondered if he would understand ‘continence’. In this context, I understood it to mean not being greedy, either with food or with life - holding yourself back in the present when it was necessary for either yourself or other people.
    In spite of being dyslexic, Frog was good with words – he read the dictionary for fun - but he didn’t have my knowledge of word derivations (which came from my languages education) which helped so much in understanding precise meanings.
    I should have known better. As always, he surprised me.
 
He was in a t-shirt of course – he wore one all year round – and as usual he was wielding some tool outside. A rake, I think.
    He leant on his rake while I gabbled excitedly.
    ‘Well,’ he said, when I’d finished. ‘She’s not learnt much of either.’

To be continued . . .

7.4 Tarot

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

There is also a third and, I hope, final version (published 5 September) of the previous instalment ‘A New Age’  which you might like to read before this one, if you haven’t already.

Frog had a pack of tarot cards and several books on their history and meaning, and he’d impressed me when we first met by doing me a reading.
    I found the cards fascinating and spine-tingling, with their strange markings and mysterious characters such as The High Priestess and The Emperor. I couldn’t read them myself however as the pictures in his pack were symbolic rather than real, with stick people making stylised gestures, and the more I read about the cards the more confused I became.
    So when Cheryl offered to teach me about them, I leapt.
 
At the same time, I was researching their background for the encyclopaedia.
    They first surfaced, I discovered, in Europe in the fourteenth century but may have been much older than that and drawn their influences from all over. The Hanged Man card for instance derives from Norse mythology. The early New Agers related the entire structure of the pack to the Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition that dates back to before the Middle Ages. The four suits reflect the traditional elements of earth, air, water and fire, also found (with extras) in Chinese traditions dating back four thousand years.
    The early twentieth-century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, whose ideas had stuck in my mind after I read about them (in my blue Penguin Introduction to Jung’s Psychology) when I was twenty-one, called the images on the cards ‘archetypal’, by which he meant that they were the bricks of our ‘collective unconscious’, a layer of the psyche common to all humans and which we are born with. This is the layer that surfaces in dreams, fairy stories and myths.
    The cards may originally have been used simply for ‘divination’ (fortune telling) but they may also, according to the early New Agers, have been a record of the mystical side of all religions, kept secret for fear of persecution – and perhaps ridicule I thought.
    No wonder I was confused, no wonder the cards gave me the shivers, and no wonder I had always conducted my real life in secret from everyone except Frog, seeing as so much of what makes us human had been forced into hiding for so long. It wasn’t only me.
   
Frog joined me in learning about the cards from Cheryl, as did a charming but alcoholic musician, ex-partner of Beth who had introduced me to Cheryl. We sat round a table in Cheryl’s moody sitting-room, curtains drawn and incense burning. I felt as if I was going to be inducted into the mysteries of the universe.
    The best known tarot at the time was the Rider-Waite pack of 1909, named after its male creator and publisher but omitting any mention of its female artist Pamela Colman Smith. This was the pack Frog had, whereas Cheryl used a modern pack called the Cosmic Tarot.
    As she fanned it out in front of us, real people with recognisable expressions flicked past. I craned over them, hardly daring to breathe in case I missed something.
    ‘There are twenty-two Major Arcana,’ she began.
    I’d already looked up the word ‘arcana’ and knew that it came from ‘arcane’, yet another word for secret and yet another word like ‘occult’ ‘esoteric’ and ‘hermetic’ loaded with extra meaning, not all of it complimentary. For me however these undertones only increased my fascination.
    She picked out a few of these cards and placed them on the table – The Lovers, The Chariot, The Star – and something stirred deep inside me. I knew what Jung meant.
    ‘These describe our soul’s journey and they begin and end with The Fool.’
    She held up a card which showed a jester dancing on the edge of a mountain with a little dog dancing at their heels. The picture touched something from childhood, something I’d forgotten until then. It reminded me of how I felt when I met Frog.
     ‘The other cards are arranged in four suits like playing cards.’
    She sprinkled a selection, and people doing things I recognised, like yoga or DIY, or kissing, or fighting or clutching their heads in pain, confusion and sadness, popped up.
    ‘These cover everyday ups and downs.’
    Yes, I could see that so clearly.
    ‘They are arranged in four suits – pentacles, swords, cups and wands.’
     I tingled. Even the names sounded magical.
    ‘Pentacles cover the practical, physical side of life, swords represent thoughts, cups our emotions and wands creativity.’
    How obvious. How simple. Now it was all starting to make sense, in a way none of Frog’s learned books had done.
    ‘The four court cards represent real people. Look out for them when you’re doing a reading.’
    She pulled out a few. Princesses, Princes, Queens and Kings.
    ‘I’ve always identified with him,’ said Frog pointing to a card called the Prince of Wands.
    Yes, I could see that too. The prince was a young man with an open face and long curly hair, like Frog’s hair when I met him. Exactly like Frog, he had thoughtful eyes and a dimple in his chin.
    ‘You can lay the cards out in any order you like, so long as you’re clear in your mind what the positions mean. These patterns are called “spreads”.’
    I remembered all the complicated arrangements in the books and the diagrams which had only made me more confused, and breathed out, my shoulders dropping in relief.
    ‘Let’s try a few.’
    And so we began.
 
We continued to meet as a group, reading for each other again and again until the given meaning of each card was fixed in our memory.
    Like hypnotherapy the cards uncovered a part of me that had lingered for eons in the dark corners of my mind. They helped me to see connections, make stories and find ways out of seemingly impossible situations.
    I began to understand that they weren’t the work of the Devil, they were a language, and once you’d learnt that language you could do with it whatever you wanted.
    Or so I thought at first.
   
One day Cheryl asked me to read for her.
    Two cards popped up. Death, a skeleton with a scythe and ruins all around. The Tower, flames shooting from the top of a tall building and people plunging to their death.

    I began to shake.

    ‘There are no “negative” cards,’ Cheryl had said. ‘Everything that appears is there to help us. If a card appears upside-down, note that but turn it the right way up.’
    Why then did these two cards terrify me?
    I forgot everything Cheryl had taught us about their meanings – sudden change, change forced upon you because you’ve left it too long - and stared at her, speechless.
    Cheryl nodded back at me and I knew that she knew what they meant, what they meant for her, even if I didn’t.
    Then I realised that the cards weren’t simply cardboard pictures after all. Sometimes a higher power spoke directly through them. 

To be continued . . . 

  

7.3 A New Age (version 3 of 5 September)

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information on the series and a list of instalments so far, see right.

NB This is yet another version of this post – a third and, I hope, final one (published 5 September).

Meanwhile I was still working freelance from home, copy-editing and proofreading books. I liked the independence but the work was beginning to tire me. It made my brain ache as it was too intellectual. I might once have been a brain on legs but I was more than that now – or so I hoped.
    I worked for several ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ (MBS) publishers as that was a genre starting to be popular and was something I knew a little about and was interested in.
    Even so, during the course of my work I kept coming across words I didn’t know and couldn’t find in any dictionary, just as ‘reiki’, ‘feng shui’ and ‘tofu’.
    Someone should write a dictionary of all these new words, I thought, but no one appeared to be doing so, and eventually I realised that someone was me.

From what I already knew, I put together a synopsis and wrote some sample entries, for what I called a New Age Dictionary, ‘new age’ being a term that was increasingly used to describe the new MBS movement. I envisaged it as a sort of ‘devil’s dictionary’, not as scathing as Ambrose Bierce’s, but slightly tongue-in-cheek nonetheless.
    Three publishers were interested and I chose the one which seemed the most honourable and the least likely to interfere with what and how I wrote. However, they wanted me to call the book an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary and I agreed, not realising how much that title was going to change the book’s content and how much work it was going to mean. I asked for a year in which to write it.
    And so my New Age Encyclopaedia was born.

Because the book was now an encyclopaedia, I felt duty bound to include a whole array of subjects, from complementary health to alternative, Eastern and native spirituality, and set off on my quest for enlightenment.
    I found a small MBS section in Exeter library and a shop in Exeter’s Fore Street - a scruffy hill outside the city centre where the independent shops lurked and which Frog and I called Exeter’s Left Bank. The shop, called Evolution, specialised in all things esoteric and had a large section of new and used MBS books. Cheryl worked there sometimes, both on the shop floor and as a psychic.
    Frog and I also increased our visits to the Somerset town of Glastonbury which we already loved for its vegetarian cafes, its dramatic tor (hill) and the colourful array of ageing hippies who sold their wares on the pavements. Frog called them ‘acid’ casualties, acid being the hallucinogenic drug LSD which I’d never dared take – I didn’t trust my own sanity. Why would I want to make the world any more scary and strange than it was already? – but Frog had several times and survived, apparently.
    Glastonbury had been a spiritual centre for thousands of years, first pagan then Christian, and claimed to be the site of Avalon, the mysterious island where King Arthur was buried. It was also situated at a point where many powerful ‘leys’ converged.
    Leys are straight lines which run between prehistoric sites and geographical features, thought to have been created as route markers or to mark energy flow. I knew about them from Frog, who had several books on the subject and a collection of maps which he’d overlaid himself with a gridding of this mysterious phenomenon.

First I needed to find out where the term ‘new age’ came from.
    The story began, it seemed, in the late nineteenth century when a group of people who called themselves ‘theosophists’ became interested in the esoteric (secret) and mystical traditions which they considered lay behind both Eastern and Western religions.

    At the same time a group called The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was reviving Western occult (hidden) practices such as witchcraft, tarot, magic and astrology. The society was hermetic (closed) because most of the practices were considered deeply wrong and counter to Christianity, if not illegal. (Witchcraft for instance didn’t become fully legal in the UK until 1951.)
    According to astrology the Earth, because of its wobble, moves to face a different ‘sign’ (arrangement of stars) of the Zodiac (star belt) every two thousand years or so. Round about now (give or take a few centuries) we move from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius.
    During the Age of Pisces, institutions, religions and centralised power dominated. During the Age of Aquarius, we will have greater freedom and equality, more connection to nature and each other, and an emphasis on individual spirituality.
    If only, I thought.

None of this was of course exactly new as it had been a large part of the 1960s’ ‘counterculture’. Frog and I had unfortunately only been in our teens and still living at home at the time so unable to participate fully but the influences were flying around and we’d both explored them as much as we could. I’d done it in secret as usual through books, and Frog through books and music.

During the 1970s I’d branched out through travel and Frog through drugs – as we put it. When we met we had one book in common - Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, an account of his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, something I (unlike Frog) only knew about in theory. 
    And then during the 1980s and ’90s we’d been busy marrying, working and setting up home.
    Now, I could explore the whole subject in more depth and, with Cheryl’s help, put some of it into practice.

To be continued . . .