After the Storm

Quiet moment. There's no silence in the house because it's daytime and there are noises from the street and from next door, but I have some time to reflect.

My body is winning the battle against the invading virus, but nice to have some time without having to over-strain my croaking voice. And always nice when the fever breaks and the aches and pains recede.

Laurence was calm enough this morning to be able to talk through his experience of last night. He was silly to have been playing with a toy gun at all, but somehow, that wasn't something he connected with subsequently being surrounded by ten armed police officers. I guess when you don't know why something is happening, you don't give the correct responses. But from the police point of view, there was the man fitting the exact description they had been given, with his hand in his pocket. Gun or wallet? Who is going to take the chance?


How the Absurd blends with the banal sometimes. Lenten's comment from yesterday's post made me think along those lines.
We had stopped the TV when I answered the door last night. We were watching Green Wing. When we finally felt up to watching again, armed with a taxidermy heron, Dr. Statham beat to death a green-faced dwarf who had hidden in his office to scare him. He then dressed as a Mountie, jodhpurs and all, to take the body to the incinerator. I don't know why, somehow that scene spoke to me.

A couple of days ago, a man stopped me in the street on my way home from work. He told me that his son was looking to buy a place in the area and what I thought of the neighbourhood. I said I liked living there. And then I waited to see how many questions it would take to get to what he really wanted to ask me.
Three.
Ethnicity. Were there many Caucasians? I guess he already knew the answer. I wondered how many people had passed him before he found a Caucasian to ask. But I answered him honestly anyway. Mostly Chinese, not so many Indians and Pakistanis. He told me that his son was ok with Chinese people. Why did he tell me that? I wondered if he wanted Absolution from me.

Normality. There is one little area of quasi-normality that has entered my life. My new assistant at work. He is an education student, but he also teaches catechism for his church. So I can talk to him about religion just as part of normal conversation. That may seem an odd thing to say, but in teaching in Britain, because there is an obligation to deliver a 'broadly Christian' content to the curriculum, because we were allowed to celebrate and talk about Christian festivals, you never had to worry about mentioning God, anyone's God. But here, it's a taboo.
The Jewish schools can come for a programme and wear their prayer caps and have things they say in Hebrew, but I may not mention anything at all to do with religion. So it's something I have to actually THINK about in order to not do it.

And there is another 'normality' about my new assistant. He is well-mannered. He stands aside for me or any other woman to walk through the door, just as my own sons would. Just as I am used to.
It made me realise how I was starting to expect less. In the next programme after this occurred to me, I made a point of asking the boys to take their hats off inside and it turned out the class teacher was pleased. They try to enforce good manners in their own classroom, but it must seem as though they are fighting a lone battle.

The Absurd and the normal. We watched an episode of Peep Show series three. Everyone stood in the doorway to the bathroom berating Mark who was sitting on the toilet pooing. His boss Alan exclaimed how that was not normal pooing he was hearing. 'Illness is weakness Mark!' he said.
The absurdity of it. The normality of it. I love it.