A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I had been to the cellar to bring up Mathilde’s draught excluders and, incidentally The Compleat Housewife. As I mentioned then, the latter distracted me from my original purpose and I spent the afternoon on my ill-fated bread and butter pudding.

The excluders remained untouched in their folded state under my desk. But yesterday there was a further drop in temperature and I could no longer procrastinate in comfort. I was reading a newspaper when the draft caught me in the kidneys. I considered briefly wrapping the sports section round my midriff like the stallholders at the Bernese market, but then I felt the chill around my ankles, too, and began to realise a whole newspaper outfit might be required. It seemed an altogether simpler proposition to tackle the curtains.

But when I placed them on my bed and began to separate them out I discovered that one of them was a cuckoo – quilted, yes, and about the right size and shape, but not the indigo or burgundy of the others, nor the same material. It was red with a broad golden band in the middle. And in the centre of the golden band, not quilted in the usual way, but cut into the top layer of cloth and then folded in and sewn to the next layer down, was a swastika.

It was not the swastika so much as the style of sewing that caught my attention. In the afternoon my mind had been freewheeling around the idea of palimpsests, and in the way of such freewheeling somehow everything that came into my orbit was absorbed into this idea.

What triggered the initial thought was a piece of paper that had been stuck to a letter I was translating, and that was clearly covering up something already written. I realised how much more tantalising this hidden writing was than the writing that had been allowed to stand. But then it seemed to me that this was true of archaeological finds, any kind of research, layers of memory, of landscapes. Then I came across the exquisite scissorings of Myriam Dion. As a partially Swiss sort of a mole, I was raised on what was called the Schärischnitt, intricate cut-outs of rural scenes. They were not really palimpsests – just black paper, usually stuck to a white background, but sometimes hung on windows as some of Myriam Dion’s are too, allowing light to shine through and cast shadow patterns on the surfaces inside.

Dion’s medium is newspapers and her stated concern is with their ephemerality – both their content and their existence as an endangered species. In one exhibition the lacy newspapers hang like net curtains, the tiny parings lying in heaps underneath. In a way this is the opposite of a palimpsest: the images are strangely highlighted, rather than obscured, by the very act of cutting away. The time she spends with, say, a cover page depicting some major event, headlined today, forgotten by the world tomorrow but life changing to all those involved emphasises its import. Painstakingly removing the content gives the stories the gravitas they need but at the same time she has made the papers more fragile, more impermanent.

This cutting away, revealing and the enormous attention to detail seemed to share roots with the cloth I found among Mathilde’s draught excluders.

Something niggled. Uncle Ratty telling me something about the Mole family (he was always a better source than any of the Moles). An ancestor, an engineer, a widower, I think, who had headed off to Panama to advise on the canal. He had a daughter, a bit of a firebrand, inspired by Bolivar, Flora Tristan and the generations that followed. She had, so Uncle Ratty said, renounced the ties to her Papa because of what she called his odious associations with the Panamanian oligarchy and run off to San Blas to join the Kuna fight for independence.

Why did this come to mind? Where had we been? I can just remember being bent over something Uncle Ratty- dusting it off. Ah yes, a well-thumbed copy of Flora Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah. I remember looking at it, opening the flyleaf, seeing the inscription to said firebrand mole from her devoted Papa. When I queried the rift between father and daughter, Uncle Ratty admitted he might have got the story a little wrong, or merged it with the story of one of his own ancestors, because now he came to think of it the Papa had returned to England with the daughter – who had not been dragged, kicking and screaming but had been granted two rooms in the parental burrow to set up a press and shop-front for the influential but short-lived journal (1926-1935) Mole Libera.

Oh Lordy, how my threads get tangled. Where were they taking me? It’s true that Myriam Dion’s delicate pieces foreground different kinds of oppression and disaster, and the plight of those trapped by them, sentiments that might well have inspired firebrand mole, but I knew there was something else. And then it came to me. It was the cloth that the Peregrinations was wrapped in. This was, I now recalled Uncle Ratty telling me, a mola of the kind worn by Kuna women: layered fabric cut into patterns that revealed a different colour depending on the depth of the cut.

And it was just such an intricate form of cutting and stitching that characterised the thin quilt I had found among Mathilde’s draft excluders. I examined it more closely. One of the narrow edges had strong binding with a cord running through it, – and clips either end. This was not a curtain, it was a flag.

It took me on a serpentine peregrination through several encyclopaedias, atlases and history books, but none yielded any information. My luck only turned when I had given up and, because I was already sitting on the floor next to my larger volumes, had begun to browse through the travel section with the vague intention of finding out where San Blas was. And suddenly there, no longer bidden, was a photograph of a bakery, its front vibrant blue, and on its side, hovering over an emerald green landscape, a red and gold flag with a swastika at its centre.

Now that I had a location pin-pointed I could dig with more confidence. In 1925 there had been a revolution in San Blas, the Kuna won independence from Panama and declared the Republic of Tule. The flag was theirs. And the trigger for revolution? Moves to westernise Kuna culture, to stop the wearing of molas.

The swastika is of course an ancient symbol, dating back well over 2000 years; its meaning: the sun or light, but more often everlasting life. It didn’t last long, the Republic – only eleven days.

But the memory of it has.

The draught excluders are still under the desk.

*Links to the artworks and images are indicated in red.

Tante Mole’s companion, Mathilde, made decisions – just like that. She held no truck with the ins and the outs of a thing, and appeared never to suffer regret once a decision had been finalised. She was a terrifying creature who still haunts me in wig and gown, casting judgement in recurrent courtroom dreams; dreams in which I am helplessly trapped in the dock. But, as Tante Mole never ceased to tell me, Mathilde’s decisions saved many lives. And yes, they may have been fast but that was because attached to a sharp mind were years of knowledge and experience.

Uncle Ratty just allowed decisions to happen – an apparently seamless transition from thought to action. It was as if there were never any dichotomy, no bicameral warring, no either or.

Great Uncle Mole could not have been more different; he was the Great Deliberator. If a decision had to be made he took a sheet of Quad Crown paper from the map cabinet and attached it to his drawing board. He would write the question to be decided in neat capitals at the top, underline it in red and then beneath it rule a vertical line down the centre. One side was entitled Pro and the other side Con. Sometimes he would just list the pros and cons, tally them up and accept what the numbers told him rather than fiddle about with qualitative detail. Sometimes he expanded his analysis with a timeline, projecting likely outcomes, one year, five years and ten years ahead.

This is all very well if a mole is contemplating moving continents, building an ark, or planning a train robbery, but the decisions I make are about scene sequences, paragraphs, sentences – occasionally just a single word. I fear putting pen to paper because once a word is written it has a presence. A sentence, paragraph or scene has even greater presence. It would be alright if I could contemplate this whole to perfection before committing it, but I can’t; so at some point I have to wrestle with changing what I have written. Changing occasionally means expanding, but much more often it involves replacing, or worse still, extinguishing, and it is I who has dominion over the words, who has to decide whether they are chosen; this mole (the one that so over-empathises with the material world that it holds its breath while washing a grape lest it drowns) that has responsibility for their fate.

Things that are not chosen continue to clamour, as I am sure I must have done as a small, wheezy foreign mole who was never chosen if ever a side or a team was selected. Mercifully, my school did not engage in sports so this did not often happen. The unchosen cast their shadows. There are more of them, than there are of those selected. They rumble just under the surface like a resentful Greek chorus.

There is of course an in-between option, when something has not yet been rejected, it just simply hasn’t been chosen, and perhaps one or other choice will just atrophy with time. It is the kind of approach that accords with the definition of politics cited by the post-war French prime minister, Henri Queuille, as the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant. But prevarication weighs heavily, too; all those unmade choices clogging up the poor mole-mind.

Some say go with your immediate feeling – trust your gut, your first intuition, but I am so slow that my second thoughts turn up for dinner while my initial intuition is still wondering what it will have for breakfast.

But sometimes a decision is easier if it is thrown into the lap of the gods.

When the time came for a sibling and I to sort through the parental burrow we were overwhelmed both with a sense of intrusion and by the extent of it all: the papers, the cupboards and drawers and boxes and crates and shelves and desks and suitcases and trunks and cellars, and the piles that had accumulated in the fifty years the family had occupied the burrow. Where to begin? I picked up our late Papa’s divining rods to guide us towards a starting position. It twitched towards the parental bedroom, twitched again towards a pile covered with a large Indian embroidery. My sibling plucked the cloth away like a magician and there before us stood the biggest chocolate bunny we had ever seen. It was absurd, it was a license, it was a reward, and it gave us a place to begin.

And it reminds me now of my late Mama’s advice to toss a coin if I couldn’t decide. But that was worse than the original dilemma, having to choose between heads or tails would led me to paralysis. What if I chose the wrong one? It was only much later, long after I had left the burrow, that she pointed out that if I thought I had chosen the wrong side, it was a clear indication that the opposite decision was the right one.

Somehow I had always accepted that which ever side the coin fell sealed the fate of the decision. The idea that I could use my free will never entered my mind.

I have coins, and I still have the rods. It’s a slow process this writing when you have to rely on these instruments for every word you write.