Consolation prize

After the difficult conference call the consolation of friends, food, our new apartment and the sun shining until night fell.

The hard work I put into presenting the pros and cons of one choice may have fallen on deaf ears but I think the principle has been established (momentarily perhaps) that at least choices need to be made with access to facts and that competing  preferences and underlying motivations need to be brought out into the open where they can do less harm.

It has been a really stressful time - at times I have felt almost mad with it, getting up in the wee small hours to type down more things, to check figures, going over and over stuff, counting off my breathing off and then finding myself at storm force again in the weird psychic mayhem of it all.

I don't really understand why it feels so destabilising and yet there it is, it is. The particular constellations of a family, the alliances, the ruptures, the acute fault lines all play their part.

There is something about the last parent slowly withdrawing from the arena of family life, of her no longer being there as a backstop (even though we are all more than well grown), who was somehow mediating and moderating the almost primaeval tensions, jealousies and suspicions that belittle us in their intensity and that frighten and thrill with their strangely murderous intent. Is this all that is left of family?

When my dad died I remember waking in the night in the family home and feeling death so palpably near at the window. Dad had gone and death was there, peering in from the dark, eyeing me up, marking my card for the future. There was no-one between us any more. Just me and the abyss drawn nearer every day.

The family home holds so many memories, thankfully for me more of the good times than the bad, more of the love and togetherness than the bitter rancour and acidic hatred. And the thought of a rush to sell it, to dispose of it like so much hindrance in the face of a clean financial outcome and disperse all that it held fills me with horror.

And yet today hopefully we held our tongues enough, remembered our shared history, and found a way to keep in place the volcanic forces churning away beneath our more wise adult selves.

The photo is our Fiesole patio. The wind sawing high in the neighbour's pine. The train rumbling below in the gorge. The distant motorbikes growling up the old Via Bolognese. It's a long way from the old family home and also home itself.