Left.

I left Kazakhstan in 27 degrees of heat.
A day or so later and snow is forecast.

There will be frantic activity up on the ski slopes above the town. Almaty is hosting the Asian Winter Games in a few weeks time, and there is still much building of wooden hotels and chalets to be done up there, ready for the influx.

Near to my son's glass tower of an office block a terrifyingly perilous ski-jump rears into the sky. He hopes to be able to watch people hurling themselves down it from somewhere near his desk.
His own skis are ready, near the door of his apartment.
I try not to think too much about the slopes he will be attacking.
I'm not sure that it was such a good thing to have seen them; the rocks, the tree-stumps, the brand-new, untested chair-lift network.

It is only days since we sat in warm sunshine on the terrace of this Georgian restaurant. Fragrant woodsmoke drifted across the steep valley.
Two caged wolves paced nearby, their yellow eyes fixed on us.
All too close to them was a sort of pets' corner of rabbits and chickens. My son fought hard against the urge to pass the wolves a couple of chunky little rabbits.
Kazakhstan is said to have more wolves than Canada, although I'm not sure how anyone can prove that. I just hope those particular wolves will either be released or fed as the snow falls on the mountains.




Snow will be falling on the spacious avenues of Panfilov Park, just one of so many beautful tree-filled spaces in Almaty.




The leaves will have gone.
But life will continue in the little wooden houses in every side street and back lane, where they sit comfortably among the new glass and chrome and the old Soviet blocks.
Every ex-Soviet block has its own courtyards, with play equipment for children, drying racks for the washing and benches in the sun where you can sit and chat with your neighbours.
Every wooden house has its orchard, its vegetable patch, and many near the city centre have a cow or a couple of goats.
We have so much to learn about life-style.

Postcards from Kazakhstan

Beauty comes at a cost.
This is believed to be the largest wooden building in the world, built without a single nail. It is a very small part of the Cathedral of the Holy Ascension in Almaty, and it is built of wood to withstand earthquakes. Almaty sits on a major fault line.

In the past Almaty has been devastated by earthquakes and drowned in torrents of mud and melt-water rushing down the steep mountain valleys into the town.
Now the water is channelled along every street, irrigating the trees as it flows.
It provides water features and fountains everywhere. It makes the numerous parks lush and rich. It makes the city a lovely place to walk.

But then a lake, high in the mountains, empties itself down a valley and takes more than two hundred houses along with the rocks and mud and the great walls of melted snow.
This happened from Lake Esik in July 1963.



Now the lake is a fraction of its former size, still a favourite place for picnics and a starting point for hiking, but its earlier dam, thought to be protective, was swept away completely, and the valley is empty.




Fountains and water everywhere.

In the morning I sit near the fountains in the apartment gardens. It is over twenty degrees. I am wearing a tee shirt and a cotton skirt.
The little Kazakh and Russian toddlers living in the apartments also trundle out into the sunshine, escorted by their nannies and babushkas.
Everyone else is dressed as for the ski slopes, padded coats, scarves, boots.
Every toddler wears a woolly hat.
I get some analytical stares from impassive almond-shaped eyes.

Every toddler who can sit unaided is pushed in a chariot.
These chariots are shaped like cars or motorbikes, brightly coloured and fitted with numerous devices that dangle and rotate and chime and generally entertain their passengers.

Round and round they go.
Round and round the fountains.




After a few mornings of this the toddlers and nannies and babuskas relax about the strange white-haired old lady wearing barely adequate clothing.

I am approached by a tiny toddler in a spangled gauze skirt, a red velvet jacket embroidered in gold, red fur hat, gold tights, red patent leather boots.
She leaves her pink plastic chariot with the gold dangly bits and totters over.
She extends a shrimp-sized finger towards the zip on my bag.
I slide it open, saying, 'Open', and closed, saying, 'Closed',
I repeat it a few times.
'Closed', I say, and look at her expectantly.
The shrimp-finger points again.
'Open!' she commands.
There are cheers and applause from the watching nannies.
'English!' they say.

Forget learning Russian.
I am teaching English here!

A Letter from Kazakhstan.

I need not have concerned myself too much with Olga and Vladimir, although it is useful to have a few, a very few, phrases and polite greetings.

Valentina the Cleaner came yesterday, and we needed no formal phrases. She had picked me some apples from her garden, demonstrating ably how she had reached up and picked them....'This one? Niet! This one? Ah yes, this one is good for the Mama. Tak, tak, tak.'
In return I presented her with a pot of Gentleman's Relish.......'Put it on bread, small, small, little thin.......' . My son has no toaster. I mime putting bread under the grill.
'Ah ha!' says Valentina. 'X Factor!'
Universal understanding.

Valentina irons my son's shirts most beautifully. She mops and polishes the tiled floors. She talks to me, and I tell her I can't understand a thing she says, but indicate that I am full of admiration for the quality of her work.
She admires the quality of my son.
She says he is very, very bolshoi (big), which is true. Valentina indicates that big mothers make big sons. She looks me up and down and we agree that I am bolshoi, too. (But not as bolshoi in some dimensions as Valentina.)

Valentina polishes the furniture, the ceramic hob, the worktops. She arranges coasters in a star pattern on the table. She stands back to admire the results. She checks the chandeliers. There is no dust.
I sense disappointment. I think she would like more sparkle, more glitz, more of the razzmattazz that rich folk can buy downtown. Stuff like gilded indoor fountains, bear-skin rugs, fancy whips with a deer's leg as the handle.
Nice stuff. The top floor of TsUM (the Harrods of Almaty) is full of temptation.

Before she left Valentina came and sat with me for a while. We chatted in Russian and English with an almost total lack of comprehension on both sides.
Then she began to sing. The volume increased until the chandeliers rattled. She threw back her head and let rip.
I applauded.
'X Factor!' she said again, and I realised that she may be over-estimating my power and influence back in the UK.
But when Simon Cowell comes to Kazakhstan Valentina should be right at the front of the queue.


Today I sit here, in my son's spotless apartment, overlooking snow-capped mountains.
I can hear children playing in the school playground next door. The shouts and squeals and laughter of children at play creates an atmosphere that is universal. I think I can understand what they are shouting and squealing about, whether it is in Russian or Kazakh or English (but it certainly won't be in English).
These children look cleaner and more formal than many I see in England. They are smartly dressed. Their school shirts are blindingly white and their blazers well-brushed.
When the whistle blows and the children are summoned back inside I can hear the band practice from the military academy just up the road.
I can hear the call to prayer from a nearby mosque.

Multi faith, multi ethnic. Full of trees and fountains and sparkling mountain air.
This is a beautiful place.

Not Getting to know Olga and Vladimir.

I'm off quite soon, off to visit my son who lives and works in a remote part of Central Asia.
In the meantime I struggle with Olga and Vladimir.

I need to get to grips with these two, because for some of the time I will be free-range in a very foreign place. I want to be able to wander around and chat to people while my son is at work.
I will take my small-scale sketching things, because I have learned that the way to attract a bit of company is to sit and sketch.
If you want to keep people away you sit and write in your Moleskine notebook, but if you produce a sketch book and a little box of water-colours you have someone sitting beside you in no time at all.
At least, that is what happens in England.
What will happen in Kazakhstan, I wonder?

Which is why I'm working on Olga and Vladimir.
They are Russian, but many people in Kazakhstan speak Russian.

Olga and Vladimir meet at a business conference.
'Hello!' they say to each other,'What is your name?'
They exchange names. They tell each other how nice it is to meet. They agree that Moscow is beautiful. They agree it is time to part. They say goodbye with no apparent qualms.
That is Lesson 1 Part 1 of the multi-disc set of Conversational Russian. It is called Getting to Know People.

I don't feel I am getting to know Olga and Vladimir, but will press on.

Olga and Vladimir meet again. They remember each others' names. They ask each other how they are. They are both well. They part again, but now I sense a lingering regret.
Things begin to warm up. Olga wants to find the way to the Post Office. She wants to buy a stamp. I expect she needs to write home to say she may be away longer than expected.
Now she wants to find the Bolshoi Theatre. Is she going to buy tickets and invite Vladimir?

By Part 2 Valdimir and Olga are in a restaurant; beer, borshch and salad for Vlad, red wine and chips for Olga. Oh, and an omelette. And white wine instead of red. Then coffee with milk and tea with lemon.
They summon the waiters repeatedly. 'Young man!' 'Young woman!' they cry. Olga changes her mind about the chips, the wine, the tea. Vladimir asks for the bill. It's really not promising.

I knew it!
By Part 4 Olga is off to the football stadium and Vladimir? Well, Vladimir is heading for the hospital. He is on the number ten trolleybus, three stops away from the hospital.

They never get it together. They buy samovars and matroshka dolls, but separately.
They make an attempt to go to the Puskin Museum but it is closed on Mondays, and, of course, it happens to be Monday.
Vladimir has a mild dose of man-flu and goes to hospital, but is told to take an aspirin and stop fussing. Olga loses her handbag and is locked out of her room.
The pair of them go to supper with another colleague where they partake of three bread rolls, a half kilo of cheese, tomatoes and three bottles of beer.

One wonders about the quality of the conference as well.
I expect things are different in Kazakhstan.

Tilting.

One step outside the garden door, and autumn is there.
It is there in the goose-pimpling air, the heavy cold dew on the lawn. the filaments of cobwebs highlighted by the low level sun.
As the day warms it is there in the blushing tomatoes. the fattening grapes and the competitive scrambling of birds in the thickness of the vine.

The grapes are not good for people.
An enthusiastic friend made wine some years ago. It was awful; bitter, harsh.
I tipped the remainer of the bottle down the sink, where it fizzed and foamed and left the sink sparkling.
Good for stainless steel.
An American friend made grape jelly, but it was so sweet that we might as well have eaten a bag of sugar.

So now the grapes are there only for the birds, and I wait for the Fieldfares to come for their share.
In the meantime starlings, blackbirds and sparrows argue and scamble for fruit, nipping off ripe and unripe indiscriminately.
An athletic-looking cat, new to the neighbourhood, watches from a fence-top.

The blackbirds have spent the summer colonising the garden. They are proprietorial about its contents, spending so much time trying to prevent others from eating that they can hardly feed themselves. They posture and fight - male to male, female to male, father to daughter.
The other birds eat on, noisily, fussily.

Bounty for the sparrow-hawk, too, plummeting into the vine, pinioning a shrieking victim.
The other birds rush panic-striken away and the sparrow-hawk plucks and rips in silence.
Such passion and brutality in a small town garden.

Overhead, on the edge of the hills, a family of buzzards spiral and mew. Two adults with three offspring this year.
Just watching.
Their chance will come.

The sky is empty and silent of the scimitars of martins, swifts and swallows, screaming high in the summer evenings. I try to note the day they vanish, to wish them safety on their perilous, incredible journey back to warmth.

One night soon, if I am very lucky, in the still and chilly dark I will hear autumn in the rush of migrating birds, high, high in the cold starry sky, following flight paths older than Man.
The birds are always ahead of us in their knowledge of winds and weather for their unimaginably vast migrations.

Earth is making its slow tilt again; here towards darkness while the other side receives its share of warmth and light.

Pareto in the Attic.

There has been a lot of interest and a certain amount of disbelief about the keyboards in my attic. I do not exaggerate; well, not all the time, and for those of you who urged reduction of the collection, here's an recent photograph.
My musical son came home for a day and a night.
The charity shops did well, as did a local school running an after-school music club. Now there is this modest collection, plus one or two others lurking in a spare bedroom. I haven't really counted.

'The Pareto Principle' fits well. Eighty percent of the stuff in the attic was owned by twenty percent of the people living in the house at the time the collection was amassed.
Now something like eighty percent has been assessed as superfluous, twenty percent remains. As there is now only one person living in this house there remains eighty percent of other peoples' belongings filling twenty percent of the attic.
There is a lot more room in the attic, even with the eighty percent.

Pareto did some interesting work. Eighty percent of effects come from twenty percent of the causes. Twenty percent of pea-pods contain eighty percent of the peas. People wear twenty percent of their clothes eighty percent of the time, eighty percent of our phone calls are made to twenty percent of our friends. Which indicates that we get more of a buzz out of dealing with our enthusiams, and focusing on those activities which give us the best outcomes, which, in turn, is hardly suprising.
When we get it right we get eighty percent of our happiness and satisfaction from twenty percent of our activities. That includes being able to see a bit of floor space in the attic. Deeply satisfying, as was my time with my son. Very satisfying to do something together, even as mundane as visiting the local rubbish tip.
Perhaps in retirement we could boost that a bit and get a ninety/ten result, except that it is impossible to measure happiness as a percentage of anything.

But the most profound aspect of Pareto's work tells us that eighty percent of the world's wealth and resources are controlled by twenty percent of the population. If that.

P.S. For those of you keen on circuit bending - here's my son

On Reflection.....

A little while ago 'Pohanginapete' responded to a comment I left on his blog.

'Often I've thought,' he wrote, 'that the turning point in a person's life must come when curiosity no longer outweighs reflection; when we begin living in our own history we begin the process of no longer creating it.'

Oh, cor blimey, gadzooks, what a wake-up call!

He was not to know that I had spent the previous five weeks in a welter of self-pity, recrimination, reflection....wallowing, in short. Living in the past, trying to see the past in a different light, wishing I had done or not done this or that - and then this or that would not have happened, or would have happened differently.

Oh yes, the perils of recollection.

How do you downsize, ridding your life of clutter, without the attendance of a life-time of associations? Everything I touch in this house triggers memories. Three and a half years since my husband's death and I finally take his unworn shoes to the Oxfam shop.
The practical de-cluttering is hard enough; but then there is the emotional.

Finally, I can be ruthless with personal papers and letters, but I have to read them all, just to make sure that I haven't missed anything important, any memories my sons might want to record.
The reading brings laughs and smiles and terrible shocks; for life was not always as I thought it to be. Sad things, once read cannot be unread, just as regrettable words, words spoken in anger and frustration cannot be unsaid.
With the best will in the world, we are isolated individuals, and there is an inevitable point when apology is no longer possible, and history cannot be revised in a more favourable light.

I can make copious contributions to the Oxfam shop. I can shred papers. But how much interior mental clutter must I retain?

In this situation it is relatively easy to use distraction as a means of avoidance.
I'm quite well versed in the processes of bereavement, I can acknowledge its stages in myself. I hope I can be of some help to others. I work for 'Cruse Bereavement Care'. I can occupy myself, stay busy, think of others.
Distraction has its uses.
Usually, in the past, my thoughts wriggled through a cacophony; family noise, work noise, trying-to-shop-in-lunchtime noise.
Now they bubble up from silence.

This, for me, is the turning point in life. The silence.

I realise I wrote about this when I first started blogging 'here'.
It remains a challenge, greater now than ever before.

I work on creating new, meaningful history - as opposed to distraction.
I ask my younger son, now that he has his own house, to come and remove the twenty four keyboards he still has in this attic (I do not exaggerate, he does something called circuit bending). He asks why, and I say I might want to move. He is somewhat shocked.
I tell my older son I'm coming to visit him. He lives in Kazakhstan. He promises me a business class ticket.

I cannot help but live in my own history. I would never be able, nor would I wish to discard it, but, hopefully I can build on it.