The Elder Statesman -- Peter Leyland

                                                

                                                The Elder Statesman  

Now if that heading sounds like the title of a play by Henrik Ibsen, well you’re on the right track, and if the first incident I describe sounds a bit like the part in that Jon Fosse novel,The Other Name, where he gets lost in the snow with the dog, Bragi, but is rescued by a woman who tells him that she knows him already, then you’re even warmer. Anyway, I’ll start with the first bit, begin at the beginning as the storyteller tells us. 

 

It started with a hold-up at Gatwick, you know, where the plane sits on the tarmac for a couple of hours, interspersed with frequent announcements by the pilot in Norwegian, until you worry that you’re going to be late for the conference registration. But then you hope that when you are under way to Trondheim the pilot will make up the time, even though they’re an hour ahead of us, or is it behind? You know you’ve made that mistake before, but no it’s ahead, so that means it’s even later, and when you arrive at the airport you hurry for the hotel bus forgetting in your haste to peel the paper strip off your post office card full of kroner so of course it doesn’t work; and you’ve paid with that expensive Master Card.

 

And when you arrive at the hotel, you hurriedly change and ask the hotel to order you a taxi for the conference centre, which they tell you is only five minutes away, so when after about fifteen minutes the taxi driver lets you out in the middle of a swathe of buildings where the most recognisable feature is an enormous metal steam engine you know that something is wrong; but as in life you are so often lucky and you encounter a young man who tells you that you have come to the wrong university but that he is going that way and can escort you back to the right one; and he turns out to be a Liverpool supporter and has in fact visited your home city and is happy to chat on about it even though you are an Evertonian; and after about thirty minutes walking and talking you are outside the university building where you are supposed to be.

 

“Peter!”

 

And when two of your old friends, Berit and Laura. hail you and embrace you and let you in to the glass building where you should have been earlier and where Alan is reading the story of Momo by Michael Ende, which is about the oppressive nature of time and the Men in Grey, to an attentive audience of about forty people, you know that you have arrived.

 

It is the next day and you find that the conference itself is everything you could have expected it to be and you sit in a small group with two Iranians, two Italians, and Alice, whom you already know; and you talk about the essays you all have written about exploring belonging and meaning, and which Patric has collected into a booklet and handed out to all of you, and you listen in the group to each others' stories and essays; and Alice, as is her way, devises a drama through which to tell her story.

 

And in the evening there is a buffet supper in an annex to the university which with its chattering and clattering is always the most difficult for you with your hearing loss but eventually you are able to talk to Dalila, who was in your group earlier, about wine which everyone is drinking happily and copiously by this point, and her family are exporters of wine to China and one to one it is much easier for you to hear; and eventually Linden and Alan and Helen indicate that it is time to pick up the bus back to the hotel where you are staying and you leave with them.

 

On the second day you participate in a collaborative writing activity with a different group – Veslemoy, from Norway; Susan, from Switzerland who you have met a number of times before at ESREA* conferences, and Christian from Chile who speaks Spanish, which you know a little of; and you compose a group poem starting with random objects that you have all brought to the conference and yours is your cap which is a useful device for keeping the sun off and the cold out, and later you read out the poem by the group:

 

The feel of my hat

upon my head, I say

This is me

who I am,

and also is my people

their breath, their rhythm.

The touch of water

how weightlessly it

carries me home

floating with life’s stream,

connecting me to

my heart and the inner

compass that is guiding this

journey onwards.

 

The Pilgrim’s Way. Leia **

 

This activity is followed in the afternoon by two walks led by Laura and Linden. During the first one you share inner and outer landscapes with Laura, who you have also met several times before, and the conversation is free and open; and then you return to the centre where another walk is being planned which will lead to a fjord where the group is meeting for supper. This walk is longer than the last, about 5km, and you think about not joining it, but making a different journey; and Helen, who is an old friend, says, Hey Peter let’s get the bus there, and we do, and Helen by some process of knowing just how buses work in regions which neither of you have ever visited, enables you both to take two or three buses and a short walk and end up at the right destination in a bar where you chat with the same freedom which the conference is facilitating, and you drink deeply too of some sparkling alcoholic drink whose name begins with an a but you can’t remember the rest of it. And so, when a rather tired group of everybody else eventually arrives at the same bar for supper you are not sorry that you took the path less travelled by, and you eat hungrily the meal that you have ordered, and you pay for it with that post office card.

 

The last day when it comes is unlike any other, for Patric suggests that you all meet and talk freely on whatever subject and wherever it takes you, and by some trick of space, or self, or time, a group of eight, and all younger than you are, gather around you and soft chairs are pulled by them into a semi-circle, and you appear to be the purveyor of some existential truth and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is mentioned by Kasia and by Julita who are from Poland, and the group discuss African novels and Chinua Achebe and the nature of colonialism, and cancel culture, and the word exchange is deep and satisfying; and the group then flows together outwards to join with the other groups and the whole company sits in a circle and a script is passed around in many different languages and it is your turn to read and you choose the Spanish script:

 

He descrito todos estos hechos como si ya hubiera ocurrido. Podria huberlos descrito como si todavia estuvieran en el futuro. Para mi, hay muy poca differencia.

 

And the finale is a drama performed by two people who have met at the conference and who have devised a performance, walking towards each other and connecting, and one of them who was originally from Iran had performed another drama on the previous day which showed herself wrapped completely in white-tape bandages and being helped to release herself from those bandages.

 Photograph from Twitter 27/6/23

Translation: I have described all these events as if they had already happened. I might just as well have described them as if they still lay in the future. To me, there is very little difference.

*European Society for Research into the Education of Adults

**The other three objects were drumsticks, a water bottle, and a silver cross necklace