Fran Macilvey's Blog, page 61

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

We are in our favourite café, where we go most weekends for a simple meal, which is always the same. No stress, nothing complicated, and not a jus or a julienne in sight. Increasingly, I like plain cooking, conscious that procuring “haute cuisine” is often a case of stripping, mashing and creaming food to within an inch of its life and serving it in tiny portions, larded into unpalatable richness by lashings of butter, cream, eggs or sugar.

In the café, my daughter is leafing through the pages of a famous, fashionable ladies mag, peopled with implausibly beautiful style icons who fill me with vague nausea: women primped, pampered and primed into models of vacuous beauty simply to be served up on the platters of haute couture. So many pages of picture perfect ladies. Do they believe, or are they trying to make us believe, that beautiful women look like this? Or are the girls, photographers and producers part of a collective conspiracy, only in it for the money? My daughter invents a game: “woman”, “Barbie” and “zombie” and we spend a while considering. Some zombies, mostly Barbies – no Kens in sight – and a few, precious women who look like women and who are smiling. Wow.

Our little game got me thinking some more about why women wear makeup. We say that we feel good when we wear makeup, we feel better, more desirable. But do we go around looking at ourselves? Most of us have better things to do. So who do we makeup for? Some of it must be to persuade other women that we are doing the right thing, or to persuade ourselves that we belong with the desirable crowd. The old argument that women make themselves desirable to appeal to men still holds a nugget of truth.

The next day, filling in time, we were having a coffee in another café (daughter loves cafés) and on the other side of the room was a table around which sat twelve gents. None of them was wearing makeup or jewellery, and they looked fine with what nature gave them. Really, they looked good, even with that slightly glazed expression common to all Sunday morning foragers.

So, do women need makeup? Answers on a postcard….

Difficulties

Why does everything have to be so difficult? Discarding my clothes and relaxing, just seated on the edge of the bed, last night I paused and wondered. For once, I could look at this and see an interesting question, clearly expressed and heartfelt, but without the usual emotional downer that usually accompanies introspection of this sort. Even so, I was unsure there would be any answer.

To learn – that challenges can be overcome – with increasing ease?

Well, that felt like an interesting notion. Living is about daily practicalities. Understanding is not just about knowing things, and theorising on them. I know, for example, that love is the strongest force, and that life is easier and more relaxing when we give out love and can see only love in whatever happens to us and to those around us. I know, the more often I give out love and live in appreciation – every second, for everything – the nearer I come to living in the perfect present. For me, success means living so closely with the perfect present that we have no need of regrets, worries or fears. In that state, we don’t even need to ask, because a wish expressed is always heard and understood. Gratitude is the lubricant of our desires, as every wish is heard.

I believe this is where we are all heading, eventually. But life is a practical course, which teaches its lessons the only way it knows – by placing challenges before us and watching to see how we respond to them. Whether the car stalls at the lights, we are fed up with spinning here and there, we can’t see a way to the light at the end of a tunnel – if the lights feel like a train coming straight for us – despite travails such as these, life is always an enormous buffet with a range of choices. If we can hold on to that grain of faith which asks us to meet every consequence with the same light heartedness, we have really won the game.

We are meant to have fun with this. Options open out as we move forward in faith and optimism, and that is how we fashion our lives. It makes a good start, to accept that “difficulties” are only opportunities to learn how to be consistent, and then consistently, increasingly, successful, whatever we choose to do. Lots of difficulties, lots of different angles, these all challenge us, all the time. They ask the question, Are you faithful enough and strong enough to remember the lessons of last time? Can you do this? And this? Let’s try, shall we?

I am totally delighted that today my book and my blog are featured on WordPress http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/more-wordpress-books-authors/, a piece of good news which can be likened to the good fairy coming and blessing this house. Thanks so much, Ben Huberman!

Rebellion

Strange, this morning she remembered getting her legs washed. As she rose and was dressing, a picture came of her standing by the sink, bored in the bathroom, as the aya washed up and down with a cloth, bent below her. Bored but persistent, the aya would say, “Stand up straight” as Fran’s left leg bowed back at the knee, sinking her hip sideways. Annoyed and dismissive, Fran thought, “So what, this feels good, it’s only a leg” as the sinews stretched ever longer and the habit fixed itself. Odd child.

The wiser adult knew her right leg was shorter. It had been mentioned, “Yes, an inch or so” which must not have been very much, since no-one did anything about it. But it made a difference. She had used to go to a cobbler who would fit a platform, and for a week or so, she walked more smoothly, without the lurch to the right, her hips relaxed and level. But the levelling platform wore unevenly and within weeks, the shoes had to be discarded as doing more harm than good. A new pair of shoes every six weeks? Too expensive after she stopped work.

Maybe her left leg was doing its childish best to shorten itself by bowing out. Maybe such small connecting things are known, yet we do not listen for them or discover them because we are so concerned with appearances, and travel the easier paths of disinterest. Is that our karma for not listening, for being disobedient, for not caring about the boredom and chores of others? That one day, we wake up and realise the trouble we caused had nothing to do with our legs, everything to do with our carelessness and subtle dismissal?

Brave Birds

An unseasonal piece, sparked by the singing of birds.

 

How did they do it, I wondered? All through the winter, birds sang, choosing their time to mesh with the breezy silence, even as snow drifted past the window: the piercing call of a blackbird, for instance, or the strident joy of the robin. While we huddled indoors with the heating on, cowering away from wind-blasted snow flurries, the birds sang, heedless.

How do they do it? They are small, buoyantly perched on thin legs, near the ground. Maybe through winter they doze in suspension, hearts barely remembering to pulse, during the worst weather, jerkily stretching their wings whenever false winter rays beckon them out of hiding. They would need hedges, lots of bushes and branches within which to hide. Holly bushes, perhaps. They would need water, wouldn’t they, and food from feeders? We started these things with such good intentions, sometimes, buying peanuts from the garden centres. The corpses of empty plastic tubes lie forlorn on the grass, as in Spring, the birds emerge to sing.

So small and powerful. So free.

 

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

 

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

“The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy

 

Happiness – 2

Through this in-between season, after the daffodils have gone to ground and the spring blossoms are dropping faintly from bunched pink and white clusters, as if exhausted by their profusion, leaving round tears on the windscreen, we wait for the unconditional warmth of Summer.  April and May feel fresh, brisk and a bit unreliable.  While we wait, in every wave of a branch displaying catkins, in every bursting bud, there is happiness.

Again, yesterday, I noticed.  When I am happy, everything feels stronger, freer and supported within a cocoon of possibility. Happiness is energising.  Is happiness the language of the soul?  Is love the medium, and happiness the expression of the soul’s gladness, when we listen to it?  More practically, everything works, when I remember to steer towards what feels joyful.  Energy shifts, time reorganises itself and peace is productive.  Strength returns.  Each of these signs must be evidence that our happiness is taking us the right way towards our purposes.  As I read today in another message, “smile, relax, it will all be okay”.  In happiness, the turning of the seasons offers joyful reminders of strength within boundless possibility. And, whatever happens, we are learning all the time.

Obtaining an ITIN

This article will only be useful to self-employed workers resident outside the USA (called “non-resident aliens”) who may find themselves dealing with US business concerns and/or earning money from affairs in the USA.

Perhaps you are a writer living and working in the Scotland, England or France, and you have just had the spectacular news that your book is to be published in America, or that your sales base is set to expand to the States. Congratulations.

It might be an idea to think about the tax situation. Businesses in the United States are required to deduct 30% for tax automatically, from every cent they send to overseas authors, unless that author has already obtained an ITIN, an Individual Tax Identification Number. Through a process of registration with the IRS, an ITIN then allows an American business concern to send a UK resident the whole amount of their fees and gains without keeping back 30%. The author then accounts and pays tax as they would for their other income.

Sorry. This sounds like a tax seminar, which was not the idea.

To obtain an ITIN, first go to the IRS website and print off the most up-to-date application form, which is called a W-7 form and complete it. Before sending it anywhere, remember to sign and date it.  With the W-7 form, also send certified copy ID and a letter from the US business confirming the basics of the deal.

Based in Edinburgh, I am fortunate. I took my passport to the American consulate here, based near Calton Hill. They provided me with a formal copy of my passport ID page, which copy included an embossed seal and a signature. On returning home, I immediately put my passport back in its safe place and resisted all suggestions, however tempting, to send it to Austin.

I sent the original certified copy to the London Embassy at: Internal Revenue Service, 24 Grosvenor Square, London, W1K 6AH, along with the completed and signed W-7 and an original letter from my publisher. I took several good copies of both supporting documents so that, if the post got lost, I would not have to go back to the US Embassy or ask my publisher for another letter. (What? You forgot to take a copy?)(How embarrassing).

In my covering letter to London, I wish I had asked them to send the ORIGINAL certified copy of my passport on to Austin, Texas. As it was, someone in the London office returned the original certified copy to me and forwarded a bad photocopy to Austin. Six weeks later I got a letter which meant, “We need to see the original certified passport ID” though it took me four hours of telephone calls to confirm that.

For these purposes, a US Consulate is treated as equivalent to a department of the US government, and is not merely an “acceptance agency”. Therefore, no further proof is required, provided Austin see the original certified copy passport.

It is worth mentioning that while an ITIN covers all earnings in the US for five years, each separate transaction with a different company (for example, receiving an advance of royalties with a publisher, negotiating audio fees or appearance fees with other entities) requires you to complete a separate W-8BEN form. We keep hold of our ITIN papers, but we have to send off W-8BEN forms for each instance, and often, the US business will ask to see an original, inked copy of the form, which can be downloaded from the IRS website, but which may take two weeks to arrive in the US. If your fees are slow in coming, check whether accounts payable is still waiting for an original W-8BEN form, and send it asap.

I hope that is helpful. I apologise that this sounds a bit dry and formal. I am not a lawyer any more, but if anyone would like clarification, please just ask, and I will do my best to help.

Loxodonta – Part 2

A small boy, Ali, saw the bulldozers and builders move in and tiptoed away. When he tugged at his father’s sleeve and asked, “Why?” the old man just shook his head and mumbled about the old days, about men who moved all the time but never saw anything; and the growling animal that drank dark water. Whatever that was, he knew that something wonderful must be coming, more beautiful than the forests and lakes that stood quietly behind his house. Otherwise, why would anyone choose to destroy the trees that freshened the air? His father looked doubtful, but Ali thought it must be a miracle they were making.

He grew older and watched men in strange, up-and-down suits come and go, arrive and leave again in their jeeps, their vans and land-rovers. Sadly, when he saw the mess they made, the noise and heat they added to an already parched land, he turned around and left, his shirt tails flapping in the wind. At home, he cast off his western gear that cut into his back and under his arms. He threw a blanket over his shoulder and walked out, behind the compound into the forest that he had grown up with, that was shrinking.

He headed to the darkest, deepest part of the trees and smelled dampness near a hot face of rock. Tracing it with his fingers, he felt a darker line and followed it to the base. He bent, crouching close, and pulled away sharp grasses, exposing the fresh, welcome scent of wet earth and rotting vegetation. The tang of water bubbled up from beneath. Drawn towards it, wanting to know where it led, he carefully followed a snaking line of slick silver until he had walked perhaps two kilometres. The sun overhead made his shadow thin but he followed the snake water as it gathered strength.

Birds flew around his face, dipping and swooping to drink, then weaving away. Once or twice, a crested starling or a swallow came close, wing feathers touching his forehead, claws close to his crown but he swept them quietly away and continued his precise pacing forward. He did not tire easily, and could comfortably walk a swift ten kilometres in an afternoon. The water blackened and deepened, becoming a strong, drifting line which drew Ali ever deeper into the forest. Alone, he was surrounded by secret life: the calls of scarlet starlings and flapping crane, the swooping cries of monkeys and the chatter of gibbon colonies high up in the canopy. The undertow of insect hum was reassuring, though it carried a faint hint of menace.

Up ahead he saw, in a clearing a hundred metres or so farther on, another rock face towering skyward. Much smoother than the earlier stone, it seemed to guard the forest: immutable, silent and powerful. Quickening, Ali reached the wall and glanced up the smooth igneous surface. No foot holds here. No way forward. And the river was before him, disappearing in a blur of water. As he was about to turn and retrace his steps, he thought, “Where does it go – not through rocks?” He frowned and crept closer to watch.

Loxodonta

 

An aged bull was rubbing his back lazily against the truck of a broad acacia tree. Beneath its prickly branches, shards of deep shadow were welcome in the heat of midday. The red sandy earth beneath his feet was bright and baking, hot enough to cook a body. From the lone male, a breath escaped in long, laboured sighs of several minutes. His ribs, clearly visible through his skin, lifted and fell gently. Eyes seemingly vacant, he scanned the horizon and counted.

One, two, three men and a jeep found him as he was slumbering, rocking quietly to stay on his feet. He was such a venerable age that his long tusks swept forward in long, low arches that almost touched at the fore, and which emphasised the thinness of the head beneath. The approaching men, who smelled bad from walking and hunting in the heat, surrounded the bull without a word, creeping in slowly and peacefully.

“He’s an old fellow. Makes our job easier, doesn’t it?”

“Sure. At least he’s had a life. How old?”

“Dunno. Probably near ninety, from the look of his feet and his tusks. Check out the tears on his ears, too. Looks like we’re doing him a favour.”

One bullet was enough. The shot was louder in the shade and the report shocked dazed birds out of the trees. Their weapon was meant for much tougher prey than this animal, who slipped down, sank and keeled over almost without a sound. There was no hurry and they waited, lighting cigarettes. Five minutes later they figured he was dead. Ten minutes after that, two great tusks were lying covered in the jeep, the body of the last elephant left to decay where it lay.

This band of men was not to blame for extinguishing the flame. All slow-moving guardians of the savannah had been shifted out of the way with the advance of suburban Africa. The savage yielded to the tame. Wild creatures incapable of domestication were judged pests and routinely cleared off land needed for agriculture, away from fish ponds. Precious wet patches and shimmering marshes were reclaimed for growing food and the forests harvested for wood. Bulky elephants made easy targets for Russian-style semi-automatic machine guns. Picked off singly, or butchered in families as they grazed, washed or licked salt from secret deposits, they gradually disappeared.

Their ivory was shipped to the east to make aphrodisiacs and potions that sold for thousands of dollars in the Asian markets. The West, too, with its hunting parties and exclusive safari deals had a hand in the demise of Loxodonta. Skeletons were scavenged and scoured to make talismans and powders. With the demise of the elephants – though no-one cared enough to notice at first – native trees, matured to hardiness over thousands of years gradually thinned out and disappeared, like the hair on an old man’s head. Gradually, the savannah became a bare expanse of sand, with rocky outcrops and low-lying shrubs clinging to the edges of housing developments. Losses were gradual, unseen until dust kicked up everywhere because the trees were not there to hold it down. With their vast, extending root systems, trees were like the tap in the sink, keeping the water in the soil. Without them, and without the elephants to partner them, the stuff of life gradually disappeared, leaving a giant dustbowl on the World’s largest continent.

Acacia became endangered, and although it was monitored for growth and germination success, lab results were stunted and inconclusive….not enough could be done, quickly, to save the species, so scientists, who had been flown from Zurich and Amsterdam and America to help with the problem, worried. From their purpose- built labs they sent out distress signals around the planet, hoping to find a cure.

On the fringes, other watchers waited, just as they always had. Men and boys at the gates – the gardener who clipped the bushes into shape and kept down the termites with creosote and sprays of sparkling water from a coiling hose; the houseboy who swept aside the dust every morning and afternoon and straightened the mats – knew that the world flattened up here would soon crumble into powder. The glass would shatter and the bricks would bake.

Loxodonta – Part 1

 

An aged bull was rubbing his back lazily against the truck of a broad acacia tree. Beneath its prickly branches, shards of deep shadow were welcome in the heat of midday. The red sandy earth beneath his feet was bright and baking, hot enough to cook a body. From the lone male, a breath escaped in long, laboured sighs of several minutes. His ribs, clearly visible through his skin, lifted and fell gently. Eyes seemingly vacant, he scanned the horizon and counted.

One, two, three men and a jeep found him as he was slumbering, rocking quietly to stay on his feet. He was such a venerable age that his long tusks swept forward in long, low arches that almost touched at the fore, and which emphasised the thinness of the head beneath. The approaching men, who smelled bad from walking and hunting in the heat, surrounded the bull without a word, creeping in slowly and peacefully.

“He’s an old fellow. Makes our job easier, doesn’t it?”

“Sure. At least he’s had a life. How old?”

“Dunno. Probably near ninety, from the look of his feet and his tusks. Check out the tears on his ears, too. Looks like we’re doing him a favour.”

One bullet was enough. The shot was louder in the shade and the report shocked dazed birds out of the trees. Their weapon was meant for much tougher prey than this animal, who slipped down, sank and keeled over almost without a sound. There was no hurry and they waited, lighting cigarettes. Five minutes later they figured he was dead. Ten minutes after that, two great tusks were lying covered in the jeep, the body of the last elephant left to decay where it lay.

This band of men was not to blame for extinguishing the flame. All slow-moving guardians of the savannah had been shifted out of the way with the advance of suburban Africa. The savage yielded to the tame. Wild creatures incapable of domestication were judged pests and routinely cleared off land needed for agriculture, away from fish ponds. Precious wet patches and shimmering marshes were reclaimed for growing food and the forests harvested for wood. Bulky elephants made easy targets for Russian-style semi-automatic machine guns. Picked off singly, or butchered in families as they grazed, washed or licked salt from secret deposits, they gradually disappeared.

Their ivory was shipped to the east to make aphrodisiacs and potions that sold for thousands of dollars in the Asian markets. The West, too, with its hunting parties and exclusive safari deals had a hand in the demise of Loxodonta. Skeletons were scavenged and scoured to make talismans and powders. With the demise of the elephants – though no-one cared enough to notice at first – native trees, matured to hardiness over thousands of years gradually thinned out and disappeared, like the hair on an old man’s head. Gradually, the savannah became a bare expanse of sand, with rocky outcrops and low-lying shrubs clinging to the edges of housing developments. Losses were gradual, unseen until dust kicked up everywhere because the trees were not there to hold it down. With their vast, extending root systems, trees were like the tap in the sink, keeping the water in the soil. Without them, and without the elephants to partner them, the stuff of life gradually disappeared, leaving a giant dustbowl on the World’s largest continent.

Acacia became endangered, and although it was monitored for growth and germination success, lab results were stunted and inconclusive….not enough could be done, quickly, to save the species, so scientists, who had been flown from Zurich and Amsterdam and America to help with the problem, worried. From their purpose- built labs they sent out distress signals around the planet, hoping to find a cure.

On the fringes, other watchers waited, just as they always had. Men and boys at the gates – the gardener who clipped the bushes into shape and kept down the termites with creosote and sprays of sparkling water from a coiling hose; the houseboy who swept aside the dust every morning and afternoon and straightened the mats – knew that the world flattened up here would soon crumble into powder. The glass would shatter and the bricks would bake.

Fran

The last hours of the term had come and gone, and with it the last day of her schooling: The faded purple jackets, the wrinkled socks, the scuffed shoes, the bare legs beneath prickly tweed skirts. All these things were at home only in her memory now, as well as the sounds and calls that went with them, the slope of the ground in this spot, or the shade next to these bars. All in the past. Next year it would be someone else’s turn, and she was too old to do any more of this.

With a small sigh of longing, she walked to the gate, always one of the last to leave. This time she was old enough to take herself home and did not have to wait to be collected, as her mother forgot: nineteen next birthday, she was old enough to get home alone, even if she took a long time. There was no hurry, she didn’t start at her new studies until October – so long! Almost four months.

Suddenly she heard a voice: “Fran!” and felt the arm of her friend, the teacher, over her shoulder. A close goodbye: A real hug! Her spirits leapt for this sign of love, “Good luck, Fran, you will be fine!” and a heart-wrapped embrace in strong arms, the sort Fran would fall for. Now, no-one would say anything, there were no raised eyebrows. It was all okay. There were kisses on her cheeks, and she smiled up into eyes which glimmered. They said nothing, though both meant, “Thank you. If I don’t see you before, see you in heaven!” and it was finished.

Raised up, Fran was happier now, and more confident. She knew it would be all right. And that next year, although it would all be different, unusual, to be learned again, no matter. The bruises of lost friendship were already healing, fading.

Fran was used to moving, to change, to a feeling that nothing lasts. And yet, her friendships meant a lot to her and anchored themselves deeply. Nothing much could really be said – it was all a look, a smile, a passing word – but the resonance stayed, hanging like a perfume, and was never forgotten. Fran, for all the rooting up and re-setting, each time weaker in a new place, was a deeply loyal woman, and knowing. She knew what she was doing, when she gave her heart so easily. She knew that she would not stop loving those she fell for. And time, distance, age meant nothing. Death was not the point. It would all work out, it was all understood, allowed, agreed at the end. She knew she would see her friends, her lovers, even those she had adored from a distance. She would see them all again.