David Charters: And there was Perseus, son of Zeus, in combat with Medusa

Jun 10 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

IT WAS the end of our week’s holiday – a warm, brooding Sunday afternoon. The rain fell greyly from a sad sky, as I sank deeper and deeper into the armchair at the corner of the lounge, slipping into a heavy doze, dominated by thoughts of what had just been and what would be.

The battery-driven pendulum swung under the clock on the wall and I watched my memories passing into their glass – to be replaced by anxieties about the pile-up of work waiting on my desk in the office. It is always the same on the last day of a holiday.

Across the room on the sofa, my wife and our 12-year-old son were gazing at the TV in that desultory way of people trying to squeeze some purpose from an uneasy afternoon.

Their words droned in the back of my dreams, but suddenly the tone changed, enlivened by a figure on the screen.

“By thunder!” said my wife, gliding seamlessly into classical parlance, as she perched on the cushion’s edge, before releasing an avalanche of giggles.

“Look! It’s Dad! There’s no mistaking the manly curve of his shoulders, the heaving pectorals, the rippling muscles of his stomach, the seductive glisten of his thighs. Whorrrr!”

Sardonically, I raised the upper lid on my right eye to glimpse the picture. And there was Perseus, son of Zeus, in combat with Medusa, whose head was alive with snakes.

“Which one’s dad?” asked our son. Well, I feared the poor sofa would collapse under all the mirth-fuelled bouncing and whooping. The lovely turquoise of my wife’s eyes were polished by joyous tears.

However, I shut the lid on mine and returned to sleep and those memories, as the film sweated to its absurd conclusion.

Then, I remembered how the gales had howled from the sea, heaving against the ancient stoop of naked trees, groaning like tombs, while the long grass shrilled and the guy-ropes strained and the walls billowed on our tent, pitched in my sister’s garden in Ceunant, North Wales.

Our son slept in his padded bag on the ground-sheet, as the storm raged.

In my mind’s eye, I could see the nearby mountain shaped like an elephant, with its side hollowed by the wind and bony quarrymen, who coughed bloodily while the birds sang high.

I remembered, too, that irresistible Welsh sense of fun, expressed in the arrowed sign by the gate of the farmer’s field, which said, “Public Footpath”.

“Should we follow it?” I asked, as my sister’s cocker spaniel, Angie, tugged at the lead, and the boy appraised the sun’s position. He nodded and we walked along the path, which disappeared at the crest of a dip.

A miasma of gnats heralded the coming of a swamp – but not before our feet were in that peculiar grip of cold mud, known to all country walkers.

Once soaked, you never know whether to head back or squelch on.

We squelched on, through fields, thickets and more fever-swamps, until finally the path reappeared – running for a few yards to a similarly marked gate. How we laughed.

Sometimes, though, I love doing nothing, just seeing and thinking and listening.

My nature allows me to slump rather too readily into the lazy life, forgetting that resolution to help more with the household chores.

But my wife had not forgotten the promise I made to tidy-up the side of the garden, which runs between the conservatory and the fence, before which stand the three bins, green, grey and brown, given to us by the council.

We put a different type of waste into each of them, according to the colour code, in the fervent hope of saving the planet.

Anyway, it is along this stretch of garden that my wife and I place our sun-loungers, side by side.

I wonder now, if any of you keen-witted readers can guess whose lounger is placed closer to the bins, as if by divine guidance.

The trouble is that some shameless weeds have popped their brazen heads through cracks in the paving-stones.

This gives them an unbroken view to our Christmas tree, which has been shedding its needles in the far corner of the garden since Twelfth Night.

My pledge had been to remove it and the weeds during the holiday. In typical male fashion, I decided to leave this task to the last day.

But then I heard rain pattering on the conservatory roof – such a sweet sound.

“Sorry I didn’t get round to the gardening,” I said to my wife on the Sunday night.

“But I feared the damp would aggravate my arthritis.

“Don’t worry, Perseus,” said my wife, dabbing her eyes.

* LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk