Home, a Great Uncle and Change

It is morning where I am. The radiator burns itself up beside me, eager to fill the room with heat - but there's still such a chill down the spine of my back that it will take some time before I feel its benefits. This luxury of having the radiator on full blast is rare in this household. It is a luxury, bought at the expense of the absence of my parents from the house. With my brothers and I in charge the heat is inevitably cranked up and we are amazed that our house can be so warm. Amazed that we can control and change a feature that once seemed so natural and constant.

Beside me, if I just turn my head to the right, through the french windows is our garden. The garden of my childhood, with the hill that at one time seemed so high I could climb and roll down it a hundred times a day and never tiere of the glee it instilled in me. Now it hardly looks like a hill to climb as much as a gentle slope, created most probably by the suburban planners that partitioned lot from tidy lot in efforts to create first time buyers with their quiet proportioned square of family and marital bliss.

It is strange to be alone again in this house. In this Sunday morning space, which usually in our household is filled to the brim with church. It is strange to observe a ritual shattered. Strange to watch as the rules and customs that were once so clear and demarked can suddenly turn on their head and break years of dogmatism. The space within these walls is embued with safety, with sanctity. Yet the context in which our house sits is ruffled a bit more each time I return home. So much so that I realise I cannot think of it as the same 'home' as it was before. The measure against which right and wrong, home and prison, lot from proportioned lot are judged can never be as constant as we would like.
Each time I return I re-adjust this quiet haven to fit the dramas and intrigues of the lives that swim through and past it.

Signs of it are everywhere.

My great Uncle. A man of infinite dogmatism. A man of infinite, prickly kindness. A man with knarled, hooked hands and an amused glimmer in his watering eyes. A man who, until yesterday seemed as constant as the coffee and tea in the church hall after the sunday 'praise god together' service is breaking. He gave me my first taste of ice cream and of utter, unspeakable child-to-adult frustration. His excentricities were legendary. Our family simultaneously smiles and contorts our foreheads into worried lines over his new girlfriends, his decision to sell the family home and move across the country to follow his new wife, to decide that she is 'mentally disturbed' (read - is a golddigger) and return back to Suffolk again, his ability to cut friends or relatives out of his life (and inveribly his will which is one of his perfered methods of showing disproval). I hate and love his snap decisions, his letters to me that arrived in their customary typed envelope (printed and re-written atleast five times - due to the'computer demons' he would be grappling with - thanks to his decision to buy himself a PC and become a computer whizkid like my younger brother - but his inability to quite tame the 'beast'). Atleast three or four times every dinnertime conversation I find myself biting my tongue over a comment of his, or alternatively raising my objections only to be shot down, 'your great grandmothers were all lesbians you see - they hated men", or "now you see blacks just aren't as clever as the Indians - don't you think?". After a few choice letters from America were sent home to him this year I was given a thorough telling off for my "communist" tendencies, and told that I would not be where I am today if my parents and him had run off starting revolutions. A comment that is indeed taken on board. He is an expert at putting one in ones place, at teasing, at seeing issues in black and white.

Coming back to the UK this summer, I made my customary visit to him and his new dog (who has been sleeping in his bed beside him ever since she arrived so that she won't get lonely and because she's feeling a bit 'poorly'). I was wary that he had turned against me after the 'communist' put-downs and the implorement that "the world can never be changed - otherwise we'd have done it already."
We talked about the Caucasus and Georgia. I showed him photos of the people I met there, of my impressions of the place. I told him the story of my host mother in Georgia, a neurologist, who can't get work. He was appalled. Utterly shocked. "How can there be so much poverty? It's just madness isn't it - we have so much and we don't realise how lucky we are". His heart and soul were touched by the idea that doctors (he was a doctor before he retired) couldn't get work in Georgia. By the thought that there are places in the world where a PHD or a degree might not ensure you get work or that you can feed your children. "Well Becky - you must do something mustn't you?" He implored, "I mean, you love this country, this family that you stayed with has been incredibly good to you, you must find a way of your host mother getting to britain mustn't you?"

Unquestionably frustratingly, my great uncle is a product of his generation and equally unquestionably he is also one of the most generous and heartwarming men I know.

He is in hospital at the moment. He was rushed in as his brain is suffering atropsy. Over the past day the doctors say that his mind is going at a frightening pace. There is nothing quite as shattering to the custom and tradition of my family as the idea of my great uncle losing his dogmatic, witty and deeply affectionate mind. There is nothing he would hate more.

It seems such a human thing to want to do, to space out and customise, claim, determine, judge, and thus keep constant. Routine and the certainty of what tomorrow will bring help us plan, help us feel as though 'we know where we are'. The power of prediction is seductive in its certainty, and yet so false and simplified in its application. Change really does seem the only thing of which we can be sure and certain. And that goes not only for where I will be tomorrow. But who I will be, and in relation to what kind of world. My great Uncle and my home are two of my constants, were two of my constants. But, as my brothers and I have learnt that we can turn the heating up while my parents are away. So too, I guess we can realise the agency that we have in this process of change and the acceptance of it. It is not simply a case of sitting passively awaiting change to happen to us, it is implementing, creating, engaging in that change as best you can.