Pandemic: foxes and sunsets and suicide

A couple of months ago, I saw a cat run across the garden with a pigeon in its mouth. I’ve never seen a domestic cat hunt such a big bird. The pigeon was upside down, white underneath. I did not see it being killed, just saw it being carried away.

I see foxes occasionally, once a year. One ran across the garden last week. It tarried for fifteen seconds or so on the wall, as if it were checking something. I was able to get a photo. It was huge - red and grey. Beautiful. I’ve seen it again since. Twice in a week.

I want it to come every day.

In between the pigeon being killed and the fox standing on the wall, uncommon events in this garden, the covid19 pandemic has impacted massively in the west. I recall watching reports from China in January, but of course did not think at all it involved ‘us’.

Now we are all affected.

Nothing feels real. 

Being chronically ill, I am used to spending long spells of time indoors, semi-isolated, but now the whole world is the same. It's getting a crash course in isolation and illness, in an alarming and dramatic way. The stuff of fiction.

Spring is happening, but it's dislocating. Daffodils have bloomed and withered, tulips are opening, the sun is warm if you shield yourself from the Scottish wind, but you cannot ever relax, the dread of this coronavirus is always there.

Six days into the lockdown, the weekend the clocks went forward, I heard my childhood friend had taken an overdose and was in intensive care. He has a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The unfolding of the virus and the isolation it imposed was too much for him, he was simply overwhelmed. I had spoken to him four or five times the week before, which made the news of his overdose even more upsetting. Against all the odds, after six days in intensive care, he regained consciousness and after being treated for bacterial pneumonia was discharged to a surgical ward before being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where I hope they will be able to look after him for as long as is needed. 

I remembered that when the clocks went back last October, my friend had called me to say he had  put his clock back at 5pm, in case he forgot. Before  the lockdown he was doing a writing class and I told him I would love to see his writing, and asked him to send me some. He said he wanted  to write a book and I told him writing a book was hard. I might just write half a book then, he replied. His mother has since told me it is poetry he has been writing.

What struck me when my friend was in intensive care and we did not know the outcome was that his mother, a close friend of my own mother’s, had been a huge support in the early seventies when my consultant anaesthetist father had taken his own life, living in the same town my friend and his mother still live in.

My current writing project is a (slow) fictionalisation of aspects of my father’s life. There is an early scene in particular, with withered flowers - hydrangea -  in this friend's garden in the 1970s. The scene has been in my head for many years, real, but now re-imagined in the novella-in-progress (I was delighted to discover a couple of  years ago, this poem by Rilke, 'Blue Hydrangea'). More than ever I've been thinking of the importance of storytelling. I have also been thinking of anaesthetists  as they are suddenly very much in the media – the experts on ventilators, so much needed in this crisis. In a 1960s' Polaroid, my father looks like a poet with his Paisley pattern cravate, drinking beer in Amsterdam.

The backs of my hands are cracked, my knuckles slightly bleeding, I've been overdoing disinfecting, using too much bleach, just so very afraid of getting infected from groceries/deliveries coming in. With ME your immune system is already in disarray, and we simply do not know how people with ME would be affected by covid19. It's too frightening to contemplate, given how unpredictably and aggressively this novel virus is affecting youngish, healthy people with no pre-existing conditions. There is talk in the medical community of how some covid19 patients are bound to develop ME afterwards. (Suddenly ME is respectable, the devastating illness you can get after a virus.)

In normal times, I spend much time sitting at my bedroom window watching birds and squirrels and sunsets. It's restorative, a gorgeous way to meditate and contemplate when you cannot do aerobic exercise. This process of contemplation has become even more important. Everyone is commenting on how much louder the birds are, they can be heard everywhere, surely a tiny silver lining of the pandemic.

Zaibunissa Street

I recently learned that Elphinstone Street (named after British official Monstuart Elphinstone) in Karachi was re-named Zaibunissa Street in 1970 after writer and journalist Zaib-un-Nissa Hamidullah. This interests me as Elphinstone was in Saddar, the area my paternal family migrated to in 1950s after Partition. I've read that Saddar was then full of book shops and (Iranian) tea houses. The streets were washed every day. Elphinstone was a street people strolled down. There was ballroom dancing on Elphinstone Street.

Today, the population of Karachi is approximately 16 million, Zaibunissa is a busy shopping street with over one hundred and thirty jewellery stores and most of the book shops have gone. Yesterday, I came across a purse that held earrings my Karachi family gifted me when they visited a few years ago after many years of little contact. The jeweller is in a building on Zaibunissa Street.

I looked up Monstuart Elphinstone, a Scot born in Dumbarton in 1779. I grew up five miles from Dumbarton - in fact, my GP practice was there - that's where we had our innoculations for visiting Karachi in 1974. And in early-mid eighties Coxsackie virus was locally being called 'Dumbarton Disease' because so many had become ill. I love how narratives link together, little synchronicities often appearing.

Learning to swim in Lahore; Muriel Spark and Kjersti Skomsvold

I recently reviewed Isambard Wilkinson's Travels in a Dervish Cloak, this passage stays in my mind:

Pakistani novelists of  a certain vintage remember a golden era in Pakistan's first decades when Anglo-Indians danced at Karachi's Metropole, hippies spun vinyl at discotheques, Pakistan was advertised as an exotic holiday location and Dizzy Gillespie beguiled a Sindhi snake charmer's serpent with his trumpet. That innocent age, if it ever existed, was dead.

It makes me nostalgic for a Karachi I barely know. We visited in 1974, two years after my father had died. I find myself scraping those memories up, trying to build a narrative (I have a letter that a visiting British doctor staying at Hotel Metropole left for my father who was then working at Jinnah Hospital in mid-1950s). I recall that we stayed in Lahore for a few days in the Intercontinental and that was where I learned to swim without arm bands. A far cry from the swimming lessons at primary school back home, where you would shiver as you were checked in line for verrucas. There was also an earthquake when we were in Lahore and all the dishes shook on the hotel breakfast table.

*

Many of us have been giving  Muriel Spark for Christmas because of the centenary of her birth. I've just re-read The Driver's Seat. I read it when I was about sixteen and didn't understand it, I am not sure I understand it any better but I much more appreciate the elegance and construction of this slim,  disturbing novel. And the humour is marvellous.

I just got a copy of Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomvold's MonsterHuman, which is now available in English. I blogged about her a few years ago and read her debut novel, which she started writing on post-it notes when she was very ill with ME. I'm obviously very interested in autobiographical, fictionalised accounts of ME and look forward to MonsterHuman. I see on Wikipedia that Skomvold also studied French at L'Université de Caen, which is a great coincidence as I was studying there in 1982/3 when I first became ill with Coxsackie virus, which later evolved monstrously into ME. We got ill at a similar age though I am a good decade older.

I love the start of new year, a whole new pile of to be read books on the bedside table:

Stairs and Whispers is an anthology by deaf and disabled poets that I have just started dipping into. It looks brilliant.

Syrian National Orchestra (and my tiny memory of Damascus)

I often think that literature and music and art are what keep us going. This is reflected in the moving story of the Syrian National Orchestra for Arab Music - forced to fragment as many of the musicians have now fled Syria - which reunited recently for a short tour in Europe.  One of the violinists, now a refugee in Germany, finds comfort in playing, it helps her express 'all this homelessness and loss and blood'. She teaches music to refugee children. Another musician, a qanun player, a refugee in Sweden with his wife and young children, says he doesn't find solace in music when he is sad, rather he struggles to play, as he feels 'destroyed inside'. The majority of the orchestra still live in Damascus. Whenever I hear the word Damascus, I think of us stopping off on our way to Karachi (my one and only trip there) in 1974, my Scottish mother taking me and my brothers to visit a year after my Pakistani father had died. There was a man at the airport in Damascus drinking tea in the cafe - a huge Formica circle-shaped bar - and I was scared as I was sure he was a ghost. I was only ten and had not met many dark-skinned men so it was not odd that I thought this man with sad eyes was my father.

'Five Years'

I cried last night watching this BBC Two documentary 'Five Years', which focuses on five key years of David Bowie's work. I loved most of his seventies' stuff, the later music less so. I also loved the clips - 1 hour 9 minutes into the programme - of him playing John Merrick in The Elephant Man, with exquisite vulnerability and beautiful ugliness.

I had not followed Bowie's music for a long time but there was a time when he was all I listened to, in my teens and twenties (alongside Leonard Cohen and Frank Zappa). The outpouring of sadness on social media is, of course, not just the passing of an extraordinary and unique artist - aged only 69 - but the mourning of our own Bowie-wrapped memories (and that wrapping has beautiful, silver bows).

But now a shift has taken place and our memories are, in a way, suddenly hollow. 

I had all of his albums, my cousin and I exchanged 'Heroes' and 'Space Oddity' as Christmas gifts one year, I don't remember who gave what, but he was so physically beautiful on both covers. I remember how the 'Diamond Dogs' cover folded out. It was sumptuous. And how I could never get into  'Lodger', I'd play it over and over, hoping to like it more, but having to admit to myself I didn't...

I remember seeing the German film Christiane F. at a Glasgow cinema (no longer there), mesmerised by the Bowie soundtrack. The boyfriend I went with died many years ago from a brain haemorrhage,  I don't know the circumstances, we had lost touch, but I remember what I wore to the cinema that night, a long red cotton Indian print dress.

(I also remember the pink trousers I wore, dancing to 'John I'm Only Dancing' in the QM Union.)

I don't have a favourite track, it's almost impossible to choose one, but the song that always pierces me is 'Five Years' and it is in my novel. When I was told by a consultant neurologist in 1984 - almost eighteen months after becoming ill with Coxsackie virus - that I had myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and it could last for five years, I was horrified and truly didn't know how I could bear feeling so  ill for another five years. I was twenty years old. My character Helen Fleet says:

On the way home in the car, I hoped we’d crash and that I’d be killed instantly and Rita would walk away without a scratch. I kept thinking of the David Bowie song ‘Five Years’: . . . five years left to cry in . . . steady drums, louder and louder and louder . . . five years, stuck on my eyes, high violiny bit. (The State of Me, Chapter Five)

It's hard, I think,  to describe Bowie without resorting to dreadful clichés - all I can say is I have a lump in my throat and even writing this I have tears. Yesterday, I realised how much of a part he had played in my growing up. When I hear the tinkling at the beginning of 'Ashes to Ashes', I am back in my childhood living room in 1980, aged sixteen, not yet ill, watching Top of the Pops. At New Year, I tweeted this, it feels a bit dislocating now. 

The Appa Dance (made us happy as carpets)

We had much hilarity with MadLibs over the holidays. My eleven year old nephew introduced us to the game. You're asked for adjectives, adverbs, nouns, names and places, but only the questioner knows the title of the story. A narrative emerges, flash fiction, nonsensical and surreal. Appa is my nephews' nickname for me, sometimes they will call me Appa instead of Auntie Nasim. (My brothers and I had a very old aunt in Pakistan when we visited in the seventies, we knew her as Auntie Appa, we did not know then that 'apa' was Urdu for elder sister, we thought Appa (two 'p's) was her name.

The Latest Dance Craze

Have you heard about the latest dance craze sweeping Paris? It's called The Appa! Slip on your hunting shoes, turn up the speakers on your Christmas tree and let's master the moves that put this bleak dance on the map: put your hands on your shins, stomp your nose and strike a sad pose. Take fourteen colourful steps to the left, spin irresponsibly, then take two boisterous steps to the right. Throw your mouth in the air and sway your foxes from side to side. For the big finish, stick out your belly button and wiggle it excitedly. Repeat all of these circular steps until the song is over.

It reminded me of The Time Warp in Rocky Horror. In the early eighties, we spent many a happy night as students in the cinema, doing all the actions. In another Madlibs,  'happy as carpets' came up. I want to use that gorgeous phrase in a story.

*Update I received this photo on Twitter of the 'happiest carpets I know', stunning image of dyed rugs drying in Tangiers:

Sliding down Mt Everest

This is utterly gorgeous footage of the Himalayas. Made me think of both my dad and my stepdad. In the seventies, we visited Murree Hill Station - in the Himalayan foothills -  with my dad's family in Pakistan, after his death. And a couple of years ago, my step dad had taken to telling us that he had climbed Mount Everest in a day and slid all the way down. He was very well travelled, but we are sure this didn't happen. We got used to his false memories and stopped contradicting him, it was more gentle just to listen.

Discovering Anita Desai and Malcolm Lowry

I hadn't read anything by Anita Desai before, but just loved her gorgeous, short novel Clear Light of Day, a collection of disappointments and sadnesses, sprinkled with joy as two sisters Bim and Tara look back on their childhood in India in 1940s and their lives post-Partition. Here's a short clip of Desai  talking about Indian writers writing in English. And a longer interview here. Also, I recently discovered the writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), this Oscar-nominated documentary from 1976, 'Volcano, An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry' is on YouTube. It's a compelling and disturbing portrayal of the debauchery and devastation of alcoholism and the cycle of perseverance and rejection and success in the writing life. I couldn't watch this film in one go, it's a disquieting experience, I watched it over a few nights,  the soundtrack is jangling and alienating. One of Lowry's friends interviewed, years after his death, wipes away a tear saying: 'The idea of such a talented man going so wrong... He could cope as long as he was drunk...' This resonates,  thinking of my own father.

Fathers & stepfathers & childhood homes

I was surprised - and flattered - last week to learn I'd been nominated for a *Scottish Asian Women's Award, in the 'achievements against all the odds' category. I wondered what I had done to qualify: it's five years since my novel came out, though perhaps someone saw The Scotsman story or the repeat of the BBC Alba documentary.  I don't, to be honest, feel particularly representative of Scottish Asian women, though I am proud of my Asian roots, they are part of who I am.  If I see an elderly Asian man in the street, my heart collapses gently. I often say I feel  'fake' mixed race as my Pakistani father, born in British India, died when I was eight and I didn't really grow up between two cultures; I am more in tune with what an alcoholic father is than a Pakistani one (I'm in the painfully snail-slow process of writing about him - unexpectedly painful in several ways - although it is a highly fictionalised account). He was doing his medical degree in Bombay at the time of Partition, and I'm fascinated by what that must have been like for him.

I actually withdrew my name from the awards as I couldn't attend the judging panel, it was far too short notice, I must always plan my energy meticulously, though I think they are still trying to arrange a later date for me. I do, of course, feel representative of women (and men) with ME and if this nomination can spread awareness, that is fine and dandy.

I spent yesterday with my Greenland-born Danish stepdad, he continues to drift into his own wee twilight world of dementia. Sometimes, I sit with him and google Greenland just to see what comes up. We look at videos of Ilulissat, the town where he was born, and he exclaims, That's the hospital! Or That's where Per and I had our confirmation, pointing to the beautiful old church. The house he grew up in is now an art museum with a permanent collection of Emanuel Petersen, a Danish  artist. He was overjoyed when I showed him this.  

I was in my own childhood home last summer for the first time in almost thirty years. Last year, some of my Pakistani family visited Scotland, I hadn't seen them for many, many years, we went out to Loch Lomond in two black cabs, ten of us, and we stopped outside the old house. Like a scene from a movie, we lined up against the wall and had our photos taken. The owner was in her garden and kindly invited us round the back to have a look. I was  physically and emotionally shattered from the trip and when I saw my uncle's heels disappearing into the kitchen I thought I was dreaming, but sure enough the owner had invited him in. I went in after him and it was surreal to be in a house that was mine and wasn't mine. The stairs up to the bedrooms seemed so steep and I remembered how I would have to sit down to rest halfway when I became severely ill with ME. The most surreal thing was to look out the window of the back bedroom and see my Pakistani cousins' children playing on the swing.

*update: Uuganaa Ramsay won the Scottish Asian Women's Award 2014. I reviewed her book MONGOL here.

Radio 3: Childhood, memory, autobiographical narrative & fiction

I have been for some time now been attempting a novella which involves a fierce scraping of my memories in order to fictionalise events in the life of my Pakistani doctor father. Apart from the usual writing/energy challenges, it feels like quite a brutal mining of myself, and for reasons beyond me the narrative is emerging as third person omniscient. A writer friend suggested that the technical challenges of this point of view mirror the emotional challenges. I like that theory.

I am, therefore, fascinated more than ever by childhood, memory and  narrative.

Some interesting radio programmes from Radio 3's 'Free Thinking' series:

Autobiographical writing and Contemporary Fiction', a 15 minute essay slot which explores the complex intertwining of autobiography and fiction, the blurring of selves: 'These gaps between the different versions of the self leave spaces for fictional invention'.

References are made to Lydia Davis, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt.

I also liked the sentence: 'Memories are revised every time we remember'.

And here on childhood and memory, a longer 45 minute programme: 'Who's Got Hold of Children's Imaginations', writer Patrick Ness suggests that writing is 'the novelist's way to pin down the world and . . .  contain anxiety'. (8.30 mins)

Watching Glastonbury made me feel old...

I watched snippets of Glastonbury, it made me feel old, though not as old as The Rolling Stones (have never been a big fan but loved their wrinkled energy, Kenny Rogers too, he made me smile). I learned of new bands. I really liked: The xx, Stealing Sheep (gorgeous girls), Jake Bugg (gorgeous boy), Weekend Vampire and Laura Mvula. I thought back to the Loch Lomond Rock Festival, held in the old bear park -  we had a bear park and a bear escaped one year. I remember seeing The Buzzcocks, and I brought home a boy called Michael - in my memory, he slept in the bath (I was fifteen), but I can't  see my mother having allowed that.

Guising

I loved Halloween as a child. We'd get dressed up and go round the doors, we called it 'guising'. We'd come back with polythene bags full of apples and oranges and swedgers (sweets) and nuts, and if we were lucky,  a coin or two. We'd keep the bags under our beds 'til the apples started to rot. I remember going to a neighbour's house with my brothers and the grandad was there, our chemistry teacher, and I sang 'The Happy Wanderer', (we called  it 'A Knapsack on my Back'). I still blush, I was/am such a crap singer. And I didn't know then it was religious (God is in the last line, don't think we ever got that far).

Jim'll Fix It

Watching last night's Panorama, What the BBC Knew, in which the BBC investigates itself,  I was  reminded of how deeply we were all anaesthetised - for want of a better word -  in the seventies and eighties about the reality of who Jimmy Savile was: he was avuncular and eccentric, he was a good man; he was up there with Blue Peter and John Craven's Newsround, part of the safe furniture of childhood. My wee aunt with Down's Syndrome, a couple of years older than me, used to love him and I can see her vividly, grinning and giggling, her blue trousers, legs crossed, sitting on the floor watching Jim'll Fix It.

Last night showed a clip of Jim giving out medals to some cub scouts, instead of individual medals they got one big joint one, and he looped the medal strap round all of their necks. At the time, this would have been seen by us as playful and affectionate - watching now it's like he was putting a noose around their necks.

I reference Jimmy in my novel, my very ill character Helen wants Jim to fix it for her to be better. It's 1984. It feels odd  to re-read these words now.

At the weekends, I would sit clamped against the radiator or lie on the couch while Sean and his friends watched videos. Sometimes Ivan was there. The highlight of Saturday was watching Blind Date. I would fantasise about being chosen and worried sick about being sent on a date where you had to walk a lot. Sean said I should write to Jimmy Savile: Dear Jim, Please can you fix it for me to be healthy? I’m twenty-one and live in Scotland. I could see myself sitting in the television studio, with the medal round my neck, grinning idiotically at the audience. Rita and Nab would run on with tears in their eyes, thanking Jim for the miracle.

The  current disturbing BBC calamities aside, like so many, I cannot understand how others 'knew' of Jimmy Savile's crimes, but remained silent over the decades. Different culture back then or not I just don't get it.

Stunning

The Olympic cauldron was stunning,  that is no exaggeration, the copper petals floating up to form one single torch, I had tears. I also cried at 'Flower of Scotland' in Danny Boyle's wonderfully quirky and emotive opening ceremony, and at Muhammad Ali carrying the flag. It was a bit dislocating to see Kenneth Branagh (recently in Wallander) as Brunel, but you were reminded of what a great actor he is, so much in his eyes. The Palestinian athletes brought tears to me too. The Pakistan team - playing hockey - is, sadly, not expected to win any medals, and I thought of my (pretty crappy) hockey 'career' at high school. But Pakistan is making the Olympic footballs, did you know? I'm not really into sport, and obviously don't play, these days, but I can relate to the process of pushing yourself to your absolute limits to get something you want more than anything - in my case, The State of Me being published - and facing hurdles, and overcoming them with pure self-belief and perseverance (and a spoonful of luck). I also very much admire physical stamina and talent and endurance, and wish all the Olympic athletes the best of luck! (I'm fickle with my support, at primary school I got into trouble for cheering for Ireland at a Scotland - Ireland  hockey match - I felt sorry for Ireland as they were losing.).

Rhubarb

Chopping rhubarb is utterly, bastard exhausting but it makes a lovely noise. And produces tons of water when you cook it (this, my first time). My friends gave me some home-grown at the weekend, the smell reminded me immediately of Henry and Michael, my mother's bachelor uncles, who wore green cardigans and were smoking and coughing every time you saw them. I think Henry only had one lung (I think he had TB). They would give us wee pokey hats (made from newspaper) of sugar and we would dip in the rhubarb from their garden and it was sour-sweet, delicious, a treat we looked forward to. Am still coughing, especially when I speak, it is beyond ridiculous, and exhausting. Tonight, I ate stewed rhubarb and thought of Henry and Michael in their old green cardigans with brown buttons.

The poetry of dementia (1)

My Danish stepdad is (gently) forgetting his English as his dementia progresses and  last night he, quite fabulously, referred to fish fingers as 'fish pins'.  Lamp posts are now 'light poles' and lifeguards are 'sea rangers'. My mum has been ill and  as we waited for her having out-patient tests yesterday, he said: 'She is no ordinary, everyday human being of any kind, she is my wife.' Tautological, but wonderful (and heartbreaking). Later, my mum and I were chatting about how she is never  ill - the only times she recalls are malaria when she took us to Pakistan in seventies; having to have a salmon bone removed by general anaesthetic during a trip to Finland in nineties, and, more recently, a slipped disc. My stepdad turned to us and said: What's that about Ed Miliband? 

'Salmon bone in Finland' heard as Ed Miliband: the poetry of dementia.

Lining up

When we were kids we lined up our Easter eggs on the window sill in order of size. By the time you took the egg out of its enormous packaging it was half the bulkiness. Separating the chocolate halves without breaking them was a skill. And finding the wee packet of smarties, or other treats inside, always such a thrill.

Oh golly...

Golliwogs maybe started as children's dolls, but there's no denying that 'golliwog' is - and has been for a long time - a deeply racist slur. I bet Carol Thatcher would not have used it had there been a black person present in the green room. It's right she has been dropped by the BBC (Jonathan Ross was allowed back because he has some kind of talent, Carol Thatcher is however utterly replaceable).

I even worried about using the word in my book - my (white) character refers to an old man in the hospital cafe - it's early eighties:

One of his eyes was sewn shut and he had golliwog badges on his lapels.

I left it in because in the seventies, you collected marmalade jar labels and sent off for a golliwog badge, and wore it on your school blazer. (Yes, I was a mixed race child innocently wearing a golliwog badge on her blazer.) And referring to the doll as golliwog was one thing, referring to a person as golliwog another.

However, in 2009 the word is clearly wrong, it feels wrong, in any context. Language changes as people evolve, but obviously Thatcher hasn't caught up. My brother and I used to go to the swing park and say the worst swear words we could think of - with glee and just for the hell of it. We were nine and ten. Maybe Carol and Prince Charles and Prince Harry could get together at the swings and have a racist word fest?

'Gweep'

This review appeared on Visual Bookshelf yesterday, it made me happy as the reviewer is most erudite and well-read:

An excellent read. For me, even though the main theme is one character's illness, this is a novel with much more to say about life. In observing the details of day-to-day existence, the wit is sharp and the insight acute. The narrative hops deftly between styles and keeps its pace and focus right to the end. In particular, the passages on loneliness and loss are movingly portrayed. The praise in the reviews is thoroughly deserved.

And I got a lovely letter today from the daughter of my old French teacher - I had sent her a copy of TSoM a couple of weeks ago after receiving a card from her to say he had passed away. He was in his late eighties, I guess, a lovely man, and we had been exchanging Christmas cards for the last eight or nine years, he'd got in touch after seeing a letter of mine in the press in reply to a GP who was slagging off people with ME. I think he would have liked the novel and in fact there is a reference to an incident which actually happened, concerning the main character mispronouncing 'une guêpe' (means wasp). That was me in fourth year and I said 'gweep' and my teacher was almost crying with laughter. Little did I know that almost thirty years later I would be sending a copy of my book to his daughter (whom I do not know), with 'gweep' in a chapter.

Happy New Year, everyone, when it comes.