Thought Picnic: Deep down where love lives

The ins of deep

In my dream playing things of a time when what is desired is constantly renewed with feeling and engagement that warms you from the inside. The proximity and closeness that changes lives in assuredly noticeable ways even if the means of such transformation is not all clear to observers.

In my mind is the beauty of a city, a place that harbours memories so cherished by the sea and the things we do with the people we meet. I walk through on bridges, crossing roads to towpaths by marinas festooned with grand boats moored idling for ages. Yet, it is about being with rather than being at.

In my heart, I am in thrall of one who has touched me and brought joy into my being. Daily we see each other, more from afar than near and I wonder just what life we could make it. In the eyes, in the smiles, in the sound of laughter in reaction to many things said, each like a symphony played on instruments of unique personality, we relate so completely.

Thought Picnic: Letting vulnerability lead to love

No path is straight

I have shied away from reading manuals about issues that require a lot more tailoring to situations and circumstances than prescription as a panacea to an issue. Now, for instance, I take my medical prescriptions religiously, the only tailoring involved is the time of day when I take my medicine, it has to suit my life, my lifestyle, and my work, not impeding function, purpose, or energy to perform.

Then I look at things like my career, life-changing decisions, and love, none of which have followed a trajectory or even example, every path has been uniquely individual and maybe different, or where similarities can be seen, there are many other factors that challenge the premise of imitation. In many cases, other people’s lives do not follow a template of lists or processes, individuality is an often frowned upon characteristic in some cultures, deviating from a norm can lead to ostracism and hence it modulates the tendency to conform.

Mistakes as lesson notes

On the matter of love, sadly, I find no immediate example of close or distant relations of the generation before mine who have laid out a promise of anything near perfect, however, a study of their situations has informed the need and desire not to fall into the same mistakes they made.

If it is not the power dynamics of dominance and submission, controlling the means of provision, conformity to traditions, expectations and requirements of culture, transitional states of contrived convenience, imposition by reason of responsibilities especially after procreation, or infidelities condoned even in the face of humiliation and embarrassment of the other, love has had a stranger than believable meaning to the participants. In the longer term, they have separated, regretted, fought, alienated, castigated, abused, or neglected each other.

It is case of uneasy détente as their offspring negotiate the minefields of animosity if they can deftly avoid becoming the grass on which the elephants get to fight to complete exhaustion and rise again to continue where they left off.

Learning what we can do

This is where much learning has to begin, in understanding what love really is and how it is manifest to us. To many, love is a strange esoteric thing, made aspirational in fairy tales that suggest living happily ever after, the fiction of an ideal rarely close to real life. We are imperfect beings seeking a more perfect relationship with those we are attracted to whilst making allowances for the fact that nothing is ever completely done, there is a process of growth and nurturing that needs committing to, for enduring fulfilment.

We probably know how to show and give love, from a place of understanding or out of making amends for bad experiences that appeared to suggest love when it never was that. The past can have damaged people irreparably that they seek succour in anything, accepting everything believing there is some sort of security even as they endure the totally untenable when they should walk, if not flee from their abuser who either knows no better or sees that flawed dynamic as the best expression of themselves.

Love is a process

In another song we are told, ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.’ That is easier said than done, for knowing love, loving oneself and then getting the love you truly deserve could take a lifetime of failures and processes of elimination, the unlearning of things, the relearning of other things, along with a schooling of life with all its vicissitudes of good and bad fortune.

With our built-in survivor’s instinct, we look for ways to thrive in all areas of endeavour, a sense of independence, responsibility, self-awareness, and self-control sometimes denies you some elements of your humanity as vulnerability, weakness, infirmity, weakness, or incapacity, which are all part of the human experience. The superhuman may have many admirers but no friends or confidantes as we put ourselves outside the reach of those who can genuinely appreciate us fully and help us when our strength is not full.

Letting your vulnerability help you love

That is the more difficult part of the expression of love, knowing how to use it, knowing when to let go, appreciating when to give way or let be, and most of all being able to let yourself be loved like you should, purely, wholly, fully, unconditionally, and magnificently. You have to accept your vulnerability to be there and resist the temptation to instruct or construct barriers masquerading as understanding the depth from which love is shown to you and how it is expressed in word and in deed.

Like with nature, we need to become good fertile and watered ground in which the seeds of love can be sown to reap a bountiful harvest of the heart in full glow of a fairy tale that can only exist in the imagination of others. I can only wonder if we have the ability to rewrite our love stories when given the opportunity to work at it.

Essential Snobbery 101: Sir Hans Sloane disturbed

What we truly endured

Bluebird took me down memory lane, for what I remember is it was the model of one of the official cars granted to my father in his accountancy prime of the 1980s in the Nissan range, though now, I realise it was a broader model dating from 1995, the one in our fleet of vehicles being the U11 series. This was the thought on my mind as we sought the entrance to the King’s Road restaurant in Chelsea for brunch.

The pictures of food we saw on Google Maps after we realised the Chelsea Farmer’s Market had been gentrified to the standard of unrecognisable and inaccessible, this became our fallback. The young lady, nails all done in a shade of pink that would appear as just pink to men, looked like she had taken on a part-time role as a waiter, untrained, nervous, and unsure, like she was just earning a crust she did not need to be able to go out to party with her girlfriends.

All the appearances of sophistication and shabby chic were soon dispelled, the service was unsupervised and unprofessional, the food pitiable in presentation, I had to scrape the dollops of hollandaise sauce off the eggs royale and still had enough to paint the walls, if I was so inclined. We sat through it with regret and left in haste, for one should resist posting a review on TripAdvisor, for a couple of stars would be overly generous to the lasting impression. Like a Jehovah’s Witness proselytiser, I did half shake the dust off my feet as I left.

Everything off in this place

Then, for the first time ever, I set foot in Harrods and nothing, absolutely nothing, endeared me to the place, and it is why I had never been there before when Fortnum & Mason had proved its standing.

Stopping over at a Harvey Nichols café for a cream tea, two ladies refused to be seated beside us. I won’t want them for company either, as they looked like Madeline Ashton and Helen Sharp, the two protagonists of Death Becomes Her, so artificially enhanced to occlude any semblance of natural beauty that once blessed their visages. Perchance there was a child in that restaurant, it would have squealed in terror at sighting them.

In a fashion for the history

Another patron was so grandly attired in exorbitant designer label apparel that altogether failed the basics of coordination, and it did nothing to enhance her; she was more a clothes ass than a clothes horse. All that money and no fashion sense. Yet, I am informed that having the same designer label in 3 textures and 4 layers of clothes is termed Ghetto Fabulous; what do I know about fashion?

This area of Chelsea and Knightsbridge with its pomposity of class, old and new money, and antiquated aristocracy long past aspiration or adulation, that radiates from Sloane Square was named for Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physicist from the 18^th Century, who was buried at the Chelsea Old Church and out of whose bequest formed the foundations of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum in London. The unsavoury aspects of his provenance and activities are not accounted for in this piece.

Training for London

Holly was a doggie

Boarding the train, the train manager announced with an all too familiar accent, quite probably Nigerian, especially with the way he said shop, with a b sound at the end. Meanwhile, I feared we would have to endure the frequent coughing of the man sat almost opposite me, especially in these pandemic times when everyone appears to have dispensed with their face masks.

Thankfully, he alighted at Stoke on Trent, just around the time he was becoming a nuisance, as not only had he forgotten a rather essential facemask, but he should also have brought his headphones too. My reserved seat was occupied when I made it on the carriage, I gestured to the lady as I looked for a place to put my luggage, little did I know that she was occupying two seats because of her dog.

The dog, and I know nothing about dogs was Pomsky, a crossbreed between a Pomeranian and a Siberian Husky, quite presentably nice looking and friendly, her name was Holly, and I am pleased she did not see me as prickly as ivy.

A rather senior moment

On arriving at London Euston Station, I did some shopping and made to check for the address of the hotel where I was staying. My shock at the realisation that I had been caught by the February-March paradox of non-leap-years, as my booking glared at me with the notice, ‘In 28 days’. I had booked for March and what to do?

I could not beat myself up in the things I had allowed apart from having booked a deal I could not cancel, I simply logged on my app ignoring the predictive screen that appears to present the next rather than the current month, in the assumption you do not make urgent bookings and scanned through the list of outrageously expensive to generally affordable deals to book another stay, for the two nights I was in London.

Holly is my host

The black cab driver was unusually helpful and consequently engaging, he came round to help me with my luggage, and we talked at length about how London had changed from about 30 years ago. Quite good banter it was places that had changed hands or been lost to history or his brushes with the challenges to his Knowledge of London, it is amazing how the obscure can be revealing.

On getting to my apartment hotel, the ladies at the reception were helpful and friendly, and at this hotel, they are known as hosts, I had even had my accommodations upgraded, what do I know? She helped me to the lift and gave me the room card, her name, Holly. Fancy that!

Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LX

Out in the cold of the city

Then I eventually stepped out to do some shopping for dinner, something simple for something nice and fast, I thought as I looked at my smartwatch to see how cool it was before braving the wintry conditions of England’s northwest.

It was just six above zero, I did not need to dress for Tundra, I was already in my walking gear, grabbed a shopping bag and out for a brisk walk to the end of the road and it was impeded on the pavement by family groups walking four abreast holding hands that I had to mutter, Excuse me!

My funny walking gait is like a tiptoeing catwalk speeded up, imagine a less clumsy Charlie Chaplin in a silent film. Then I could be quite observant of how people walk or run, the expectation is putting one foot almost directly in front of the other as best as possible, a dawdle is as upsetting as to seem out of place, and so was it as a lady appearing to jog towards me sent dread to my thoughts.

What we ignore is here

Meanwhile, I pressed on, dodging the crowds that massed around Palace Theatre and the little voices in a long line across the road chatting to each other was as long as I would only have expected at a school. The dark belied the sense that theatre was open a bit early as the children waited for the lights to cross the road chaperoned by a stand-in lollipop man, probably a teacher.

Not a mask in sight, I in my sock balaclava face mask wondering if I had time-travelled to no memory of an ever-present pandemic, even Prince Charles has tested positive and on the phone to one of my dearest, she suffered quietly as I prayed for a full recovery to strength and verve.

To the warren they burrow

The security man at our local supermarket recognises me and greets me as I enter, I would sometimes ask how he was doing, he is unassuming though never dare to determine what store security would do when called to a situation. Soon, they are in a swarm and the person is overwhelmed, it is uncomfortable to watch what I witnessed at the train station local store a few days ago.

After my shopping, the queue in the front of the theatre was as long as it was raucous, the excited kids on probably their first cultural event out in years. Falling down the rabbit hole of my curiosity, I see that Alice in Wonderland in pantomime has come to town on the community programme of Pricewaterhouse Coopers, the accounting house. Breathe, you’ll soon be home and far from the milling crowd to make another stir fry whilst Brian watches on the phone.

Thought Picnic: Separated from many roots and cores

Things that made things

One cannot suggest it is a matter of estrangement for it is not, there is a useful and productive relationship with one’s forebears even as it appears nothing necessitates proximity or visitation with the passage of over three decades.

Deep in the recesses of unfathomed reaches of memories probably long forgotten yet consequential, attitudes and demeanours might well have been conditioned to the contemporary.

It is a matter of medical certainty that a truncated gestational sojourn required being situated away from maternal succour for over two months. Then in periods of farming or fostering, addressed in the link following, the guardians for reasons best known to them starved their ward. [ITV: Why thousands of West African children were privately fostered by white families]

Groomed in the briars

The conditioning of lack presented a fear of need and in view of that, every opportunity that presented sustenance was exploited even though it was wrong. Trust reposed in many was abused as victims were made of the innocent.

By terms, initial bonding was deprecated, the consequent associations seemed contrived even if for responsibility, love, and parentage, a relationship developed with all the strains of conflict and troubled adolescence. One belongs without feeling a sense of belonging apart from what is defined by affinity, obligation, or duty.

One is neither bound nor compelled, the celebration of them is one that keeps the conscience from being seared, in the much that is owed and the little that is spared, the accounting for what is done, whilst frequently misunderstood, cannot occur between any other. For all the apparent excuses that are available, the truth is in a life experienced than in the situation desired.

God save the Queen and I

Beyond the turmoil

The Sung Eucharist for the Fourth Sunday before Lent had much of an accession theme as it was quite ministering to my state of mind. As much as I had the intention of attending to celebrate the platinum jubilee of the reign of our Sovereign Lady, Elizabeth our Queen, along the way was the funfair for the Chinese New Year at Chinatown that I did much to miss on my return.

The Processional Hymn climaxed at the quietude of these lines that I received with a sense of gratitude.

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still small voice of calm!

New English Hymnal (NEH 353)

During the singing of the Gloria in Excelsis, sung only by the choir, you follow what is being said so far until between the orchestration of music and singing, you are lost in the mystery of Latin imitating the esoteric of the spiritual, like the transponder of an aircraft switched off and untraceable in flight until, near the end of the journey, you grasp what is going on, just before the final Amen.

At the call to serve

At the Gradual Hymn before the reading of the Gospel, I found some encouragement in my apparent vulnerability from the ending of the first and last verses.

Will you let my life be grown,
In you and you in me?

Thus I’ll move and live and grow,
In you and you in me.

Common Praise (CP 662)

I was tapping my left foot to the Scottish Traditional melody of this hymn as I was signing and meditating on the words of it. It is known as the Summons, the call to service and ministry.

Though, keeping with the spirit of monarchic significance, during Communion, the choir was in full voice signing Zadok the Priest, composed by George Frideric Handel for the coronation of George II in 1727. The lyrics of which derived from Scripture are in their simplicity not as orchestrated as the singing, and the gender is not changed for the sex of the reigning monarch that we would do for the anthem God Save the Queen; written in 1745 also during the reign of George II; that we sang in two verses without the controversial middle one, at the end of the service.

Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon king,
And all the people rejoiced and said:
God save the King! Long live the King! God save the King!
May the King live for ever. Amen. Hallelujah.