by David Loftus
This morning I was thinking about my father and his friends, Patrick, Derek, Ron and Pierre. Patrick was his brother, Derek his cousin, Ron his best school chum and Pierre his childhood pen pal. To John and I they were all uncles and the best uncles a boy could have. They often dined together at The Beeches and when the ladies retired to the sitting room the chaps would send us to bed, shut the heavy door to the dining room and reminisce, particularly about the war. John and I could never quite understand why we weren’t invited to these whisky-drinking, pipe-smoking natters but contented ourselves with listening in from our stairway hiding place, side by side so that the pillars hid us from prying eyes.
Father had spied in Austria at the beginning of the war, before being invalided home, much to his frustration. We overheard talk of German columns spotted and bombed, of the Resistance and the Occupation, of collaborators and friends.
John once asked Father ‘What makes a good spy?’ He was quiet for a long time and we assumed he wouldn’t answer. But then, in his quiet, elegant way, he told us to go up to the library to find our set of Beatrix Potter books. Up we rushed in our pyjamas, collected them up and ran back with them all downstairs, not sure where this was going. ‘If you can find Potter’s secret messages in the books, then you’ll make a good spy.’
Of course we both eagerly read the lot, cover to cover, end to end, and found nothing but tales of Jeremy Fisher, Peter Rabbit and Ptolemy Turtle. ‘Was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle code? Was Peter a Nazi? Was Mr McGregor a traitor?’ Father, calm as ever, ‘No poppets, you’re looking in the wrong places, looking within the narrative is far too easy to be spotted by a good spy.’ Hours and days were spent poring over Potter’s books, until suddenly, ‘Eureka!’ It was me that spotted the first, John the second, and me the third. Father smiled softly, cleaning his pipe, and returned to reading his Times. There were indeed hidden messages in Beatrix Potter’s books, but they were not words, they were illustrations, tiny hidden subliminal sketches, a carrot here, a bee there, but hidden, lightly drawn and not where you would expect to find them, little obscure messages to those in the know. Later in life I realized what an excellent plan our father had hatched to get us to read more. We had devoured the complete works in under twenty-four hours and I haven’t stopped reading since.
Saturday 21 April
An uneventful flight back from Stockholm to London
Saw Mother today and was greatly concerned at how weak she was. She tottered slowly to the door to greet me, barely walking ten cautious steps before needing a rest. She complained briefly that no one had seen her before reverting to the normal proceedings of ‘You know, darling, it’s nothing. There are so many worse off than me.’
The second day of summer and the garden is blissfully full of avian chatter, blackbirds full of chirp, the first swallow of spring and coal tits and blue tits. Even a cuckoo announced its treetop presence.
This week I have to travel to Cornwall and back, twice, and to Tel Aviv on a photographic assignment to capture some of the characters around the food of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a city I have long wished to visit. Chatting about it with Mother, she told me of walking up the Via Dolorosa in the old city of Jerusalem, believed to be the path that Jesus walked. The Way of Suffering, the Painful Way, the Way of Sorrow, from the Antonia Fortress to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, home of the ‘True Cross’, or fragments of it, the cross on which Christ was apparently crucified. She walked the route with an old friend from Cumbria, Winifred, who, as a Quaker, didn’t feel she needed to enter the Holy Sepulchre. For me, even as a non-believer, having travelled all the way to the point that so many believe is where Jesus died for mankind, nailed to a simple wooden cross whose base still resides protected for time immemorial, I think I’d want to take a peek. But no, Winifred sat and enjoyed the early-morning sunshine while Mother went in alone.
She told me it was crowded, far too crowded, with overemotional tourists and pilgrims from all over the world. I’ve seen pilgrims arriving at Santiago de Compostela at the culmination of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route and that is only the burial site of St James; this is where Christ met his fate and the church is a fraction of the size. It was oppressively hot and alarmingly overcrowded but Mother, easily claustrophobic at the best of times, shuffled her way to the front to see the fragment of the cross. She’s never told anyone this but when she got near she had the most extraordinary out-of-body experience where she became totally at one with herself, totally unaware of anyone around her, blissfully silent, calmly deaf to the noise, the coughs, the emotional wails of those around her. She described it as being deep within a bubble, aware that she was looking at herself, but that she saw also herself alone, no one else there in the church, deeply, deeply moved, so silent that one would hear a pin drop, and completely unaware of the passage of time. When she eventually decided it was time, she left her silent, peaceful state, her bubble, and walked outside into the bustling heat of the Way of Sorrow. Poor overheated Winifred asked her, ‘Where on earth were you all this time?’ and for once in Mother’s life, she didn’t have an answer.
Sunday 22 April
Holy Mackerel – two separate trips to Cornwall this week
Last night I dreamt of the first swallows of spring, and of bad omens and a long confession of sins with The Beeches’ local vicar. He was a chap, weirdly, I never trusted. I recall how he sat in our garden next to me, despite the cold and damp, under the purple hazelnut tree where John and I would lie on our blankets as young children, gazing into the sky, and he told me ‘John is in a better place . . .’
I asked him if he’d ever met identical twins, and no, he hadn’t. Did he know that John had been an argumentative atheist? Well no, he didn’t. Had he any experience of heaven, I wondered? Well, no, he hadn’t. I got up, turned and walked away. It’s strange, but whenever I walked past him as he gardened and trimmed his vicarage hedges I was convinced that he pretended he hadn’t seen me.
On the train, delayed and past midnight. Tired!
The confessional with Mother’s vicar was brief, and to be honest, fairly accurate.
‘Father, I have sinned, I feel I could have prevented my twin’s death.’
‘Move on, my son, he’s in a better place.’
‘Father, I once threw a stone into Lake Lucerne, but didn’t look as I threw it and it hit the only swan on the lake and killed it.’
‘Move on, my son, in England you would have hung for treason, but Switzerland is neutral.’
‘Father, John and I tried to invade San Marino.’ (We did this once at school.)
‘My son, you were caught, and anyway if they weren’t Fascist they were Stalinists and therefore bad for the health.’
‘Father, we tested a bomb and blew a Fascist’s garage door off.’
‘My son, I’ve already told you about the Fascists.’
‘Father, I wrote anti-Stalinist graffiti in the Soviet embassy’s visitors’ book.’
‘My son, I’ve already told you about the Stalinists.’
‘Father, so “merde dans la boîte aux lettres”?’
‘My son, okay too, but not very nice.’
‘Father, I stood lookout while our chum Paul nicked the Dada Manifesto from the library.’
‘My son, how Dadaist of you.’
‘Father, I hired a car, a V8 Pontiac, for a week and drove all around the Bahamas, but had not passed my test or had driving lessons, but looked really cool.’
‘My son, luckily for all, you drive at the pace of a snail.’
‘Father, I hate cats, but I love all other animals.’
‘My son, cats are the spawn of the devil like Fascists and Stalinists’ . . . and so it went on. John would have enjoyed its recapping over breakfast.
In the pub following a lovely shoot with Nathan Outlaw while Marie, my art director, showed me pictures of her kittens in an attempt to sway me to the dark side. Something about the day made me start wondering again whether the sharing of one’s personal journey is
actually a wise move.
My dislike and distrust of cats is the polar antithesis of my love of birds and animals. Walking to my breakfast meeting at the Colbert this morning, along Battersea Park and over the Albert Bridge, I saw a tubby tabby cat that looked like it had a mouse in its jaws. So smug and proud, waiting for its owner to show off and say ‘Hey, meow, by the way I know you didn’t ask, but I’ve killed for you again.’ And the owner will post a cute pic on Instagram of smug tubby tabby, all doe-eyed and innocent, its evil filtered and forgotten. Anyway tubby tabby the evil-eyed little crapper didn’t have a little mouse but a baby hedgehog! Miss bloody Tiggy-Winkle! I never forgave our cat Whiskers for its slaughter of five baby blue tits that I had persuaded to nest in my little wooden RSPB nesting box attached to Father’s garden shed. It was utter carnage and I can still remember the bereft tweeting of their confused parents as if it was yesterday.
Cats are evil and Whiskers was the Dr Evil of evil. She once shat on my pillow so that my overtired late-night flop onto plumped-up linens became an overnight stay in A&E. I never executed my revenge on Whiskers for tit carnage and Pillowgate or the multitude of bird-killing sins, dragonfly beheadings, butterfly downings and face scratchings, but tubby tabby nearly got my pent-up wrath for killing Miss Tiggy-Winkle. Birds have enough to cope with around the Mews with trees and hedgerows making way for concrete patios and air-conditioning units without the added terror of tubby tabby and his cronies. At least sly Mr Fox will eat whatever he can be half-arsed to catch and not just plonk it down at your feet like a barbaric satanic offering. Several of my cat-loving chums are vegetarians – how warped is that?
Walking to my meeting, trying not to think of the crime I had just witnessed, I was reminded again of how much the inner London dawn chorus has changed. I spotted a coal tit, the odd blackbird trying its best in the newly flowering magnolias, its song ever beautiful, but all is drowned out by the shrieks and caws of the green parakeets that fill the trees and raid their nests. Now these vivid interlopers could probably do with an uninvited visit from tubby tabby if he wasn’t so fat and lazy to go high enough to try.
I arrived on time to my early-morning meeting, bumping into several friendly faces as I walked, bathed in early-spring sunshine. My poor friend didn’t look well, her left eye inflamed and watery. She’s been struggling with problems with it for some time and has been on antibiotics and steroids, had scans, biopsies and now has a cataract, all caused by a nasty infection a few years previously. The cause? Cat shit. A cat-shit parasite is living, unable to be removed, behind her eyeball. It’s like a scene from Alien, and she doesn’t even have a bloody cat! She’s an avid gardener and, as all gardeners who don’t have cats know, cats will either shit at home in their litter or they’ll shit in someone else’s backyard. Not in their own – oh no. They’ll kill all the birds, voles and hedgehogs but they won’t shit in their own backyard. So my poor friend somehow rubbed soil, tainted with cat shit onto her beautiful face and that cat shit contained, as the one on my pillow will have done, a nasty eye-burrowing blindness-inducing parasite that likes to live between your retina and your brain.
Did I say, I don’t like cats? I really don’t, and neither did John.
Monday 23 April
Back in Cornwall
Why am I writing this diary? The main reason has to be to improve that terrible 50 per cent statistic, that half of identical twins who lose their twin die within two years. Heads or tails, fifty-fifty, live or die. I’m a success story in the survival department, as is Tim. One other identical lone twin I tried to help, not long after I met Tim, took their own life just before our first meeting date. One less death in the world and the suffering hinterland that exists beyond that death has to be worthwhile. It’s not just sharing the manner of his death and confronting the facts and the people involved, it’s sharing the intimate secrets, the ‘white pants men’ and the sock cricket and the prayers before bedtime stuff. I wonder whether I want to share those with one and all. But if one removes the joyous adventures of sharing a life with a genetic copy and instant and inseparable best buddy, you are just left with the trauma.
Beautiful things to shout about today:
Goldfinches in the hedgerows of moss-covered birch. Impossibly verdant greens as a backdrop to their flashes of gold and red. First time I’ve seen them in years.
A tiny but intense rainbow over Tintagel, King Arthur’s Seat.
Bluebells and whitebells among the trees, swept by the constant Cornish winds.
Spotting one of the tiny scars on my face, left by John’s fingernail as he held my face too tightly in our cot, unwilling to take his eyes off mine.
Photographing fish at Nathan Outlaw’s restaurant. We opened a bag brought in by the local fishermen and inside were two enormous cuttlefish, still alive, pulsing with thick black ink, the brownish mottling changing constantly to try to blend with the black sacks of their capture, their bodies glowing brightly with a lurid greeny-blue iridescence, literally glowing in the darkness, I assume as a last resort in its quest for survival. Amazing.
Tuesday 24 April
Cornwall to London, and back to Cornwall, in one day
This evening I was at the award ceremony for the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year awards, which is held every year at the Mall Galleries in London. It is special this year as I am now the chairman of the judges, an honour bestowed on me that I take oh so seriously.
The awards were followed by a gorgeous dinner at The Wolseley with my Blue Peter chum Barney, Ange and ‘the Ps’ (Paros and Pascale). Then a mad rush in a cab back to Paddington to catch the overnight Riviera Sleeper, a wonderfully old-fashioned experience, back down to Port Isaac. I loved the sleeper and found its gentle rocking profoundly comforting, reminding me of stormy nights living on the boats. As I was rocked to sleep I chuckled as I remembered John’s wee-wee-in-the-face dare on the Flying Scotsman on our trip to the Orkneys many moons ago.
That trip was memorable for so many reasons. John and I were seventeen going on eighteen and for the first time we ungratefully argued with our parents about not going. ‘The Orkneys would be so boring, we don’t want to go with Nanna, we want to stay at home with our friends, we don’t want to hang out with Ian and Jean-Marian.’ I’ve relooked at photos of the trip and John and I look utterly sullen and miserable during the sea crossing to Kirkwell: two moody young punks, all badges and spikiness, both needing a slap around the back of the head. We must have ruined the build-up to going away.
Of course all was forgotten in the days that passed. They were the longest summer days that we had ever experienced. The sky was rarely ever dark, and when it was the night was filled with Milky Way brightness and a constant firework display of shooting stars. The endless white beaches and aqua seas were filled with the most beautiful cowries, which Father told me were used as money in some countries. We did our utmost to collect them all and it was certainly here that John and I started our obsession with beachcombing. Some of our happiest times together were spent on hands and knees, backs bent and burning as we crawled slowly along the foreshores collecting shells, pebbles and pottery. Often we would finish a day creating a collaged display of our finds in typically competitive manner for Father to judge on content, originality, patterning and display. In the Orkneys a shark tooth or cowry would beat a top shell, which in turn would beat a pink jewel of a clam shell. The holy grail of our searches, which in the Orkneys remained elusive but Padre insisted was worth hunting for – clever Father – was Viking artefacts.
We loved everything about the Orkneys and admitted to our exhausted parents that we had been a pair of miserable gits and ungrateful sods. I’d taken my Olympus Trip with me to the beach a few times and found for the first time that I was really enjoying using it. John continued to sketch. Scapa Flow, where a great aunt had watched as the Nazi fleet was scuppered, the Ring of Brodgar, the Viking settlement at Skara Brae – I clicked away. I shot the most extraordinary sunsets over the stone and took
my first portrait, a colour shot of my brother Ian, laughing, head thrown back, sitting on the beach at Skara Brae. I miss that Ian, the little brother with not a care in the world.
Friday 27 April
Yesterday I came back from Cornwall after another lovely shoot with Nathan, such a great man and chef, so delicate and refined. I also wrote to Jamie Oliver, with whom I’ve done so much work over the past twenty years. I’ve been taking stock of where I am professionally and creatively at the moment and Jamie’s friendship is very important to me. I feel I’ve been a big part in creating his global brand, but for various reasons, other than finishing a book on Italian nonnas, we have hardly worked together in the past year or so. In a pre-Paros and Pascale world it would certainly have thrown me, but with my ‘Holy Trinity’ around me and a host of inspiringly creative projects ahead of me, I feel good, I think!
I flew to Tel Aviv shortly after my return from Cornwall. Spent a fitful night dreaming of John and Orcadian beaches. Among the many bracelets that adorn my wrists, tangled between silver skulls, ebony turtles and Buddhist beads, there are hidden two Orcadian cowries. They’ll never make me rich, but their history could not be more special.
I’m travelling alone, on a commission to capture chef Barak Aharoni in Tel Aviv along with his suppliers and local haunts. John warned me in Greece that I would struggle on solo adventures but I feel I have no choice but to break my promise to him. I find the city hard to capture, it doesn’t have the immediate beauty and patina of decay that can colour images so atmospherically. Even the old port of Jaffa can feel quite new, the restored buildings hide modern galleries and smart homes. I am struggling to find my mojo.
Saturday 28 April
The Norman Hotel, Tel Aviv
A listless day of many mistakes, I feel tired and as a result clumsy and susceptible to error. I sat for a while watching the sun rise over the White City in Tel Aviv, accompanied by a pair of jackdaws, tilting their heads to me and ‘tjacktjackling’ at me, watching me with their eyes like black pearls in silver heads.