It goes like this, according to Lotte Lenya:-
Well, it’s a long, long time
From May to December
But the days grow short
When you reach September
And the autumn weather
Turns the leaves to grey
And I haven’t got time
For the waiting game.
And the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days
I spend with you
These precious days I spend with you.
-------
All days are precious. Life is short and it goes fast.
In the last few days, the mass media here has been reminding us that it’s the tenth anniversary of 9/11. A personal anniversary for me is that today is exactly 30 years since I first set foot in India. I have thought about India, in one way or another, every day since then.
In Southwold last week, I noticed in the bookshop that some of V.S.Naipaul’s books have been re-issued. His books ‘An Area of Darkness’ and ‘A Wounded Civilisation’ were the first books I read about India. What disturbing titles. Heavy.
Where to start with all this? There’s plenty of it but the days grow short.
To get the ball rolling, here is the start of the diary I kept back then in 1981:-
“ We landed at Dum - Dum airport. The in-flight film had been ‘This Is Elvis’. From where I was sitting I’d seen two screens. Watching one, you could see what would appear on the other 30 seconds later. The soundtrack, coming through headphones, was not synchronised with either.
Dum - Dum airport is in Calcutta. As we circled down to it some buildings emerged from what I took to be the jungle. I’d never seen the jungle and wasn’t seeing it then. The town grew out of the ground. From above it looked wet, green and still.
It wasn’t still when we landed. Small tractors drove up to the plane to collect the luggage. A couple of men had guns - some form of police with thin arms.
We were met by a woman from the British Council in a sari with her hair in a bun. We shook hands with her and got into a Land Rover. We saw strange sights on the drive into the city. A haystack twenty feet high and many yards long floated down a canal, a single, small brown figure at its helm. Water buffalo walked deliberately along, unperturbed, as if all this was normal.”
My first smell of India. I love that smell. I hate that smell.
