For a few months now I've woken, worked, and gone to bed with the radio on ~ something I thought I'd never do, but these last few months have been unusual ~ something wonderful ended with a suddenness that shocked me, followed by another, more drawn-out loss. I've written about all that.                                      

The voices began to rise, from chattering to shouting to drumming. I'd been trying to stop drinking ~ I've written about all that too. When I drank, and the sounds subsided, I was left with tinnitus ~ 5 years on the end of a chainsaw will do that to you, if you don't think to use ear-protection. My tinnitus is crickets. I have a place by the sea,  and when there's a swell, and the windows are open, the sound of water on sand and shells drowns the crickets out, and I sleep easily. Never long, but easy.

Over the last 2 or 3 years however ( I hate that word ) I've spent a lot more time in this garden, where my mother lived until recently ~ I swear I've written about all that somewhere too. There are real crickets here, but nothing like the ones in my head. Rather than drown them all in alcohol I began to rely more and more on the radio. Classic FM, Oldies & Goldies, friendly talk-back, BBC etc. until on the 17th of last December, Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in Tunisia.

Since  then, my radio ( radios - 2 in the house, one in the garden, one in the car ) have been on news, 24 hours a day. I sit in the car in shopping centres waiting for stories to finish ; when I fall asleep the stories inhabit my dreams ; I wake to news ~ there's been a lot of news, north, east, west, south since Mohamed died - floods down here, earthquakes in Brazil ; Egypt, Yemen & Bahrain, Lebanon, Greece, Afghanistan, China, New Zealand, Japan ...

Over the last week or 10 days my attention has been more and more focussed on Benghazi, in Libya. I know about Benghazi from my dad ~ he was part of the 6th Division the Italians surrendered to there in February, 1941. As a child I'd pore through his albums of small sepia photos - the Pyramids, the Nile, Tel Aviv, Alexandria, Piraeus, Crete, Benghazi. There was a story to each picture ... I put together a history of North Africa, and my dad was there ...

 The guy on the right with the pipe and his hat on backwards is Lieut. Dick Latimer, a lifelong mate. This was March '41, at camp outside Benghazi. Before  Greece ...

Benghazi was  established by the Greeks, c. 525 BC, as a trading outpost. It was called Euesperides, and traded in sylphium, a herb now extinct, according to wiki.

It's since been Persian, Egyptian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine & Ottoman, Italian, Allied, German & Libyan. Ever Libyan, I guess ~ but never really Gadhaffi's brand of Bedouin. You might remember Reagan bombed Benghazi ( and Tripoli ) in '86. During the Italian occupation ~ 1911-41 ~ the architecture took on subtle & not-so-subtle changes. Mussolini's influence was/still is apparent ~ the Grande Albergo Berenice Bengasi, for example ... It's called the Al Jazira now ~ empty 10 years awaiting renovations ~ the other side faces the water ~ easy to imagine my dad in sepia or black and white, on the verandah with a beer ... he was 25.

My eldest daughter just turned 25. He never met her.

After the war, dad bought some land and built a house, planted a garden, helped raise four kids. He died in '79.

I was in the studio I built with a mate ~ ok Mark did most of it ~ up in the bamboo at the back ( I've written all about it, Still Life ) this morning, radio going full bore about the Situation in Libya, making a watercolour copy of a pastel I'd given a friend in Chicago.

Steve took a photo of me drawing that picture at the time, a few years ago when he was out here :

You might just make out a figure down there on the sand, lower right.

Anyway there I was this morning, voices from Benghazi on BBC, painting this picture ~ dip, mix, paint, wash, dip, mix, paint etc. ~ wiping my brush between colours on a lone serviette I'd found in the kitchen ~ one of my sisters had gone through all the drawers and thrown out everything save what she thought I might need, this final month here ~ I'd never noticed this serviette before ( I'm 58 ) ...

That's the serviette there, folded, with a brush across it ... there was a word on it caught my eye :

For the first time in what seems to me now like months, I switched off the radio.

I put the brush aside. Picked up a corner of this piece of linen I'd been using to wipe bristles on for the last six weeks and shook it out ...

... hey dad, you ol' bastard ~ you did all that deliberately, didn't you ? Just give me a bit of warning next time, okay ?

Love,

Kim