Novembers Remembered

Berlin Wall remnant beneath the Bösebrücke, March 2018

William Macleod Way, Southampton, November 2018

There's a lot of "remembering" going on this November weekend, what with the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Mauerfall yesterday, and Remembrance Sunday today. Like so many who were not actually there, I have strong, but heavily-mediated memories of those heady days in Berlin in 1989. Yes, I, too, was a virtual bystander, watching amazed as events unfolded, just 650 miles away.

As it happened, I had recently replaced my television, going from a 12" B&W portable to an 8" colour portable (a beautiful but tiny picture encased in an improbable amount of beige plastic housing, like a 1980s vision of a smartphone), so whereas a few years previously I'd watched the Falklands War and the rise of Solidarity in Poland in monochrome in a draughty Bristol flat (not to mention Hill Street Blues), now I was watching yet more history in the making, this time in colour in Southampton. With no small amount of envy: like, I'm sure, many 35-year-olds settling into modest professional careers, I couldn't help but feel that real life was now happening elsewhere. After all, in another, perfectly feasible existence, I could so easily have been present in that crowd. But, in the life I had actually chosen – as a middle manager in a university library – I confess my main thought was, Hmm, well, there goes East German literature... Tschüß, Christa Wolf, Franz Fühmann, Stefan Heym, u.a.! Tut mir leid, but your entire subject matter just fell over.

Berlin Wall remnant, March 2018

Here today, in our present day November reality, I'm getting the distinct impression that autumn is arriving particularly late this year, at least down here on the mild, rain-soaked South Coast. This week was our first real foretaste of wintry temperatures, but there have been no morning frosts at all, so far. So far, in fact, the milk waiting on the doorstep first thing in the morning [1] is still just about warmer than the milk in the fridge. Somehow, this seems a suitably bland objective correlative for the Brexit-induced stasis we're enduring in this disunited kingdom. Will it never end? Winter is coming...

So I thought I'd take a look at last November's photographs, and see whether these confirmed my impression, and was pleased to discover a cache of pretty much an entire month's worth of unprocessed raw image files taken with my Fuji X70. I think last year at this time I was so deeply into some photo-collage work that I wasn't paying much attention to the "straight" photographs I was also accumulating at the time, any more than one would pay to any other quotidian, reflex action. I take photographs: it's what I do. True, always having several cameras on the go doesn't help, either; one of these days, I should commit to one of those one camera, one lens, one year experiments.

Anyway, the pictures below (from a November 2018 walk on Twyford Down, near Winchester) were taken just a bit further on into the month but, even so, the evidence is pretty clear: leaves not just turned, but leaves already gone. "Bare ruined choirs, where once the sweet birds sang", and all that (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73). The beautiful raking late-afternoon light, of course, is a constant of planetary geometry. But when the sky is a solid lid of grey cloud, as it has been round here lately, there's barely any sunlight at all, raking or otherwise. Will it never end? Winter is coming... It would be nice to see a proper bit of autumn first.

1. Is doorstep milk delivery a thing elsewhere in the world? It is dying out here, for sure; my continued loyalty to an increasingly unreliable service is probably an inherited reflex from my father, who, as I wrote in an earlier post, felt a duty – part survivor guilt, part simple, good-hearted fellow-feeling – to be generous towards a man whose face had been half-destroyed by some wartime trauma, and preferred to work in the dark of the small hours.