bag will take a different shape. I am in Cleopatra’s city and this isCleopatra’s thread, a story of failure for the most part (mine not hers) but no less a memoir for that. It already connects
more than I expected it would. I cannot see the final shape but I am confident that it is there to be seen.
Back in Socratis’s cafe in the early morning, the one he called ‘my cafe’, I have not yet seen him in his proprietor’s place.
Beside the dead fountain there are the usual tiny tables, yellow teas and the views over a sea creature with an electric flex
in her mouth. Low in the sky the sun is in eclipse.
Outside in the road this is a morning for the men in grey. There are vans with covered windows, military men, men with guns
and men with merely shrugs. The coffee-drinkers watch the soldiers as though they are nothing to do with them in any way.
Their studied inattention is as notable as if they were screaming out in protest.
No one glances at the sky where, for the past ninety minutes, a large bite of the early sun has been gradually obscured by
the passing moon, a partial eclipse, now at its fullest extent. Horses, waiting for tourist hire, have stamped their hooves
as though there was something untoward in the air. Grey-backed crows, accustomed to use these early hours for gutter-feeding,
have found the skies a temporarily safer home. But no coffee-drinker has even looked or paused as the sun has become moon-shaped
and the tracing paper sky above the tenements and palm trees is drawn, redrawn and drawn again in hazy shades of brown.
I should not be shocked. These are people of reason. It is fine for me, a visitor, to fix my mind in the age of the first
horoscopes. That is what a tourist likes to do. Perhaps their anxieties are as hidden as is half of the sun. Or maybe they
genuinely do not care. The Egyptianswho lived before the Greeks came did not worry about eclipses. Their priests were men of science who arrived early at the
knowledge that these bites out of the sun could be predicted. Far from proving man’s subservience to the heavens, they showed
his power over it. As for arbitrary arrests, those too were as common as light.
If Socratis were here I would tell him that Plutarch, one of the liveliest sources for the life of Cleopatra, came to Alexandria
once (yes, unlike Jesus, he probably did come) and gave the best description of an eclipse in all ancient literature. Why
does that matter? Any accuracy about events that we can still see ourselves is a useful test of writers from the past. I will
need Plutarch if I am going to say very much that is colourful and characterful about Cleopatra. If I can trust him about
the sun, I may trust him about a queen.
Socratis is supposed to be here soon. When he arrives, I will also ask him what today’s eclipse means to him and to his mother.
Anything? Encouragement? Encouragement too, I will say, for Cleopatra’s story, even though I am still only skirting its contours.
Why did I begin my rough-book version? A grateful sixty-year-old will often credit good teachers. But in the frozen flatlands
of Essex almost half a century ago, in the hardest British winter for four hundred years, it was a bad teacher who had the
best claim, a Mr G, a peculiar man even among a staff of some very peculiar men.
My second school, in a low, redbrick town called Brentwood, was founded as a sixteenth-century penance. In the reign of Bloody
Mary (as we new Elizabethans were taught to call her) Sir Anthony Browne, a local worthy, had ordered a Protestant boy burnt
at the stake. Our founder never thought the boy would choose to die, an Antigone of his time, when he had the chance to recant
and live. But like manyworthies he was wrong. Sir Anthony Browne became repentant. When the regime changed, there was added need for repentance –
and thus for building a school that survived cautiously behind an old red wall (the name of our school
more than I expected it would. I cannot see the final shape but I am confident that it is there to be seen.
Back in Socratis’s cafe in the early morning, the one he called ‘my cafe’, I have not yet seen him in his proprietor’s place.
Beside the dead fountain there are the usual tiny tables, yellow teas and the views over a sea creature with an electric flex
in her mouth. Low in the sky the sun is in eclipse.
Outside in the road this is a morning for the men in grey. There are vans with covered windows, military men, men with guns
and men with merely shrugs. The coffee-drinkers watch the soldiers as though they are nothing to do with them in any way.
Their studied inattention is as notable as if they were screaming out in protest.
No one glances at the sky where, for the past ninety minutes, a large bite of the early sun has been gradually obscured by
the passing moon, a partial eclipse, now at its fullest extent. Horses, waiting for tourist hire, have stamped their hooves
as though there was something untoward in the air. Grey-backed crows, accustomed to use these early hours for gutter-feeding,
have found the skies a temporarily safer home. But no coffee-drinker has even looked or paused as the sun has become moon-shaped
and the tracing paper sky above the tenements and palm trees is drawn, redrawn and drawn again in hazy shades of brown.
I should not be shocked. These are people of reason. It is fine for me, a visitor, to fix my mind in the age of the first
horoscopes. That is what a tourist likes to do. Perhaps their anxieties are as hidden as is half of the sun. Or maybe they
genuinely do not care. The Egyptianswho lived before the Greeks came did not worry about eclipses. Their priests were men of science who arrived early at the
knowledge that these bites out of the sun could be predicted. Far from proving man’s subservience to the heavens, they showed
his power over it. As for arbitrary arrests, those too were as common as light.
If Socratis were here I would tell him that Plutarch, one of the liveliest sources for the life of Cleopatra, came to Alexandria
once (yes, unlike Jesus, he probably did come) and gave the best description of an eclipse in all ancient literature. Why
does that matter? Any accuracy about events that we can still see ourselves is a useful test of writers from the past. I will
need Plutarch if I am going to say very much that is colourful and characterful about Cleopatra. If I can trust him about
the sun, I may trust him about a queen.
Socratis is supposed to be here soon. When he arrives, I will also ask him what today’s eclipse means to him and to his mother.
Anything? Encouragement? Encouragement too, I will say, for Cleopatra’s story, even though I am still only skirting its contours.
Why did I begin my rough-book version? A grateful sixty-year-old will often credit good teachers. But in the frozen flatlands
of Essex almost half a century ago, in the hardest British winter for four hundred years, it was a bad teacher who had the
best claim, a Mr G, a peculiar man even among a staff of some very peculiar men.
My second school, in a low, redbrick town called Brentwood, was founded as a sixteenth-century penance. In the reign of Bloody
Mary (as we new Elizabethans were taught to call her) Sir Anthony Browne, a local worthy, had ordered a Protestant boy burnt
at the stake. Our founder never thought the boy would choose to die, an Antigone of his time, when he had the chance to recant
and live. But like manyworthies he was wrong. Sir Anthony Browne became repentant. When the regime changed, there was added need for repentance –
and thus for building a school that survived cautiously behind an old red wall (the name of our school
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