This isn’t a good place to be if you need cheering up today…
We liked Pingu on television as much as the next family with young children. We had some Pingu books, too. But there is one, the title of which I’ve forgotten, which I always found almost impossible to read. It’s the one where Pingu and his friend go walking and fall down a crevasse. They have to slowly work their way out again, and show a lot of bravery. And as it’s a book for toddlers, they don’t slip to their deaths.
Today it’s fifteen years since a friend of mine and her husband had a very similar experience, the difference being that their falls were fatal. They were climbing in the Canadian Rockies, and when I say climbing; think ice axe and all other gadgets on the most advanced slopes and ‘paths’. I’ve kept the cuttings from all the major papers, where they made the front pages, but find I still can’t read about it.
I just felt that Eva and Luke and their unborn baby needed to be mentioned again, somehow. It feels strange to think how soon the years pass.
And I continue to find climbing and ice adventures hard to read. Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness was a borderline case.
Do others have similar reactions to seemingly ordinary topics?
I am so sorry to hear of this. And I do think it is good that you observe it here. Even to people who of course could not have known them.
I don’t know–I think we all have our loaded words and contexts. We are coming up here on the twentieth anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which pretty much destroyed our downtown. The town has since been rebuilt, though it was slower than you’d think, and now the anniversary stories are rising to the surface again. Two people were killed on the other side of a brick wall from me, though I didn’t know it at the time. But I acted fairly bravely in the moment. The funny thing is that the downtown association is collecting earthquake stories, and I am finding myself strangely reluctant to cough mine out on command. Having to tell this story over and over has turned out to be one of the problems with it.
This is the thing. Most of us have a reaction to something ordinary, which others don’t share. (Now I think earthquakes are extremely ‘not ordinary’, but I never think of them.) What does get the whole family, though, are the neighbours’ bonfires. They smell exactly like when we had a fire in the attic, and we always have to check that we’re not smelling another fire that needs the attention of the fire brigade.
Good to remember your friends, Ann.
I used to use the common phrase “you could be knocked down by a bus tomorrow” till it happened to my lovely friend Douglas Hill two years ago, on a zebra crossing, and he died.
It’s one I use, I’m afraid. I suppose until we can put a face to something, it has very little power to upset.
I have a friend who still thinks it’s OK to joke about amputations, but it’s not even slightly all right.
I am sorry about your friends and their baby. I have a climbing acquaintance who says he has lost a friend to climbing accidents on average once a year since he began. My daughter goes climbing. And I could not read The White Darkness because a character is described as walking (I think it was )as if he had Alzheimer’s. I stopped right there like I had been punched. My father had just been diagnosed.
I don’t like to hear about climbing, even though other activities will be just as dangerous. And the Alzheimer’s thing will only be bad for me when I have a more personal connection with it. But it’s true, we all have something that gets to us.
I don’t think I have any such triggers in my own head (clearly not enough bad stuff has happened to me), but I do have a friend who won’t read a book until she has sworn testimony that no dogs are harmed in the course of the story. All other pain and suffering are admissable; but she won’t open a book if a dog is going to be hurt or killed.
No Susan Cooper, Mark Haddon or Patrick Ness, then… Shame.
Yes, I was up at an outdoor play festival in the redwoods a couple of weekends ago. Further north, fires were still raging in the hills. So it seemed a little inappropriate to have the battle going on in the background of Julius Caesar represented by smoke drifting in.
You’re right, earthquakes are not so normal even here. Aftershocks are the thing no one who hasn’t lived with them quite understands. They can go on for weeks afterwards, and tend to keep everyone on edge. But the hard thing is that if you are in an old wood building, of which, in Santa Cruz, there are many, a bus going by can feel like the same thing. Which is too bad, as there are a lot of buses.
Yes, I know what you mean.
I don´t like reading about colitis ulcerosa (because a niece died of it) or the tsunami in 2004 (some friends lost their son, his wife and their two little children).
After some years it does get easier, though, and I think it is better to feel sad now and then than to forget friends and relatives you have lost.
bookwitch, what a sad post, but as Dorte H says, “it is better to feel sad now and then than to forget friends and relatives you have lost”. And even though we didn’t know your friends who died, you’ve helped us know them.
So, Dorte, how about the new book by Michael Morpurgo, called Running Wild, which is about the tsunami? Who is it for, and who will have to avoid it?
I think I’m OK with that subject, although Morpurgo books generally make me cry. And he does harm dogs, fictionally.
I haven´t heard about it, but it is probably not for me.
Today I heard from a friend who suffers from colitis. Enough worries for one day!
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