Of hopes and hygiene problems

Two weeks (tomorrow morning) to go…

There are so many things I am looking forward to being able to do again, it would probably be unwise to list them. Using cutlery. Being able to dress myself normally. Cooking my own food. Eating a pomegranite. Putting my hair up…

Unexpectedly, one of the activities I am missing most is washing my hands. I’ve never been one of those “wash every time you touch a door handle” hygiene fiends – I figure you have to accept that microbes do exist and sometimes they get you, and I normally wash my hands after the loo, before cooking, and (because I was taught to as a child) before going to bed. But I have, now, not washed my hands since December the 8th. Now isn’t that a disgusting thought?

I’ve washed my hand – the left one. At least, I’ve had it under the shower once a day (as soon as I got my “Limb-O” brand limb protector, that is), and have slopped it with liquid soap and sluiced it under a tap regularly. But the poor, puffy bits of the right hand that appear like extrusions from the end of the cast have not been washed in over five weeks. They’ve been wiped, with those disinfectant “handy wipe” tissues one can buy. These are, I was assured by the hospital, adequate for a time, from a hygiene point of view. But the alcohol-based stuff with which they are impregnated, while it may be removing bacteria, is also drying out my miserable dirty hand. If I moisten my exposed knuckles and then rub hard, the dead skin cells slough off in a greyish paste - and underneath is noticeably paler. It’s gross. It’s grotesque. It’s my own body, reduced to its fundamental basics; I am made of cells, doing their thing and then dying.

Please, you gods and little fishes, just let the other cells, the ones inside, be growing and packing in lots of calcium (or whatever it is that goes on inside a healing bone fracture).

Meanwhile in the wider world, natural disasters shatter homes and communities and lives, idiots get themselves killed doing stupid things in the snow, talented people who had something to contribute to the world die, and a long-lost Chagall painting goes on exhibition in London. At least that’s one good thing happening; otherwise the world seems to be in a right royal mess at the moment.

More on the good weekend...

Firstly – to continue where I left off, with John Ward’s murals in Challock Church.

I nearly modelled for John Ward, not long before he died. I met him and arrangements were made, but then he was unwell and it was postponed; then I moved to London and the postponement became indefinite, and then he passed away. I remember him as a lovely old guy, as deaf as the proverbial post but full of joie de vivre nonetheless. I have to say, too, that a lot of the time I didn’t like his work; cool and academic and a tad whimsical, it just wasn’t my cup of tea, though I could see it was marvellous draughtsmanship technically. I suppose for someone who makes most of their living as a portraitist it must be very easy to slide into playing it safe, to be sure of pleasing the clients – many of whom one may find tiresome in the extreme, but still have to charm.

I didn’t know until this weekend just past that he also painted murals in the church of St Cosmas and St Damian, which stands in a wooded valley on the outskirts of the tiny village of Challock Lees in the Kentish stretch of the North Downs. An old friend of my mother’s decided to take us to see them at the weekend.

He painted a rather over-tidy sequence in the Chancel in the 1950s, but then came back in 2000 to produce, with his friend Gordon Davies, a huge painting depicting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, set in the local Kent landscape, along the whole north wall – with the Challock Lees’ annual Summer Goose Fair standing in for Jerusalem at Passover, and local people in contemporary clothes crowding the scene. It sounds twee, but it isn’t. It works. The figure work is fairly conventional, but what makes the whole vast spread of the painting sing is the mass of details – the magnificent tree overarching the whole composition, and the animals, birds and insects amidst the foliage; the giant angel releasing little winged leaf-spirits into the air from abreast of the west wall; the classic Victoria sponge on the cake stall at the fête, the cat lurking under the table, the child clutching a teddy bear, the key to the church lying on the table in front of the current vicar, the girl caught just lowering her camera from taking a snapshot of Jesus passing by. The whole thing is packed with all the richness of life and painted with all the love of a long life richly lived. There is nothing chilly or academic here, the painting is very free, and full of delight, with the flowers of every season scattered over the whole. And, too, this is a world with no hierarchy. The vicar is as worthy of grace as the lapwing. And quite right too.

Mind you, if you want really great twentieth century art in a Kent church, then head for Tudeley, near Tonbridge. John Ward’s murals are lovely, but Marc Chagall’s stained glass windows in All Saints, Tudeley are simply astonishing. The first time I went there I wandered around the church crying with delight. Admittedly I cry easily, but usually that is at the theatre or over a book (or at funerals – I’m one of those people who always cry at funerals), or in some other situation when tears are being intentionally provoked. Not simply from being immersed in the pure perfection of colour and the miracle of light. Not from the seven days of creation in Chagall-esque imagery, complete with flying donkey…

In fact, if you only ever go to one Kent church, make it Tudeley; you will be blown away.