Tag: Friends
Revival [6]
I decide that the origin is clearly not what matters. It goes against my grain somewhat to accept this, because wasn’t that what got me onto this story in the first place? Wasn’t that the intriguing question: how did it all begin? Still, nobody knows, and no one I met and talked to about it was able to give me any further hints or pointers.
There’s the legend of the two guys in their twenties and their dare, and there is the tradition that has established itself over time, and that’s all there is to it. Does there need to be more? Of course, everything has a cause and an origin somewhere, and probably this is somehow known: in the fabric of the common consciousness, unspoken, unexplained. It just happened, we all know it just happened, we kind of understand how it happened, and we’re all right with that. Or is it a case of avoiding something, some uncomfortable truth? What could possibly be uncomfortable in a truth about an event as friendly and as inclusive and as welcoming and as joyful as the Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll on the last Sunday of June each year?
I resolve to let go. This obsession with clear causes and rational effects. I’ve had, against all my expectations and severe reservations, a marvellous time in the unclothed company of strangers who turned out very much to be friends I hadn’t yet met. This belief I’ve held always, borne out by experience.
We are good people. Yes, we do terrible things—the litany of our offences against each other, against the planet, against the animal kingdom, against our own soul, reads like a catalogue of monstrosity, and we’re never more than an inch away from some appalling misdeed or other—and yes our history is littered with catastrophic failures of humanity, and yes: you watch your news and you feel a moment closer to despair before you’ve had a chance to change channels, but… take a Sunday afternoon like this in almost any town in England, or in any country, really, and, away from the agitation, unstirred by some cause or other, some issue or concern, given a set of basic parameters —that the fundamental needs be covered, that the fabric of the community be intact and healthy, that the framework that allows human beings to feel safe and appreciated be in place and not threatened by crime or corruption or despotic politics—you will find us getting on with each other, pretty much. Across generations, across creeds, across ideologies, across gender, across ethnicity, across religion, across our own little preoccupations, and large ones too, across the spectrum. It’s not spectacular, and it’s not difficult. It’s human, it’s normal. And yet, it is still remarkable.
This, I decide to hold on to. As a thought, as a hope. I know some will find me naive or deluded. I realise at this time of confrontation and conflict and unbearable regression into isolationist rhetoric; in this feverish atmosphere of allocating blame and guilt and shame while searching for simplistic solutions, it may sound almost glib to say: ‘we are good people.’ But think of the alternative.
Think of what it means if we decide, in the face of everything, that we are as terrible as the dreadful things we see? Then whatever makes whomever among us do wrong, in whatever way, will have won: we hand our worst version of ourselves victory over ourselves. Because yes, the bombing of children in war zones, the dumping of plastic by the container load in the oceans, the burning down of refugee centres, and the shooting of students at high schools: they’re all done by us. People. Like you and me. That is the horrendous truth, but it’s also—and that’s much harder to comprehend and as difficult to accept—the reason there is hope still. The people who do the most terrible things from which we recoil in disgust, they are not a different species. They are innocent when they are born and grow up with hopes and dreams of their own. And then things go wrong. Over time, bit by bit, through circumstances, through personal choices, through the need to survive, through the culture we’re born into, through what behaviours are reinforced. Through illness. Through despair. For every person who does something destructive, violent, inhuman, cruel, there is also the person they could have become. May yet turn into, given the chance. And vice versa.
So if we give in to despair, surrender to cruelty, and accept violence and destruction as the norm, then we feed them. We give our energy to them, we make them stronger. We start to meet hatred with hatred, instead of with love. We start to build walls, instead of dismantling borders. We start to arm teachers, instead of disarming society. We crank up the tension, instead of defusing situations, we add fuel to the wildfire, instead of extinguishing it, and planting new trees.
They’re simple choices, really: whichever version of ourselves we nurture will grow strong. And so I take my leave of Bournemouth & Boscombe and its famous Nude Beach Stroll. I salute you, good people, there, by the coast: I thank you, you’ve given me much food for thought and made me see my world differently. I wish you well!
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Revival [5]
As the day draws to a close, and the sun now lingers—mellowed by the dusky haze—over the horizon a while, down vaguely to the right, before bidding the shore goodnight, I start feeling just a tad chilly, and I’m not alone.
Much as there was no gong and no whistle, no starting gun and no fanfare to announce the beginning of the Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll this midsummer Sunday, so there is no clarion to call people back into their clothes, or to summon them into the pubs and the bars, or back to their houses, should they have no friends and made none during the day or simply show no inclination to hang out into the evening. Instead, with the colder air breezing in from the sea, and the rays at their acuter angle subdued, you start to spot a jumper here, and a cardigan there. The hats come off, for a while, as they are no longer needed for shade and not yet against wind, and the T-shirts go on, and once you’re wearing a top there really is not much of an incentive not to also wear something around your wriggly rump any more. So on come the shorts, gradually, and the jeans and the chinos, without anyone making a deal of it, big or small; and by and by, the beach and the seafront, the deckchairs, the benches, the plastic seats outside the beach huts, and all the promenade, they start to look ‘normal’ again.
Of course, I’m bound to find myself asking, what’s ‘normal’? And it’s not a facetious question, this, here. A Sunday talking to people—all kinds of people—strolling and pausing, stopping here for a drink, there for a tea, meeting friends of my new friends and their friends who introduced me to theirs, my frame of reference for any such thing as normality has been blown wide open, and it hadn’t exactly been closed narrow to begin with.
There was a university lecturer from Leicester whose sister lives in the country with her husband and their three kids; they all were out and about, the kids mainly playing down by the water, the adults mainly standing around, nursing pints. There was the former MP whom I thought I recognised, but I didn’t: I got her mixed up with somebody else, and from the wrong party. She was there with her boyfriend, and he had bumped into some mates who were actually kicking around a ball for a while. That was quite a sight, for, I warrant, these were not athletes… There was a bus driver and the obligatory cab driver too, and several nurses and teachers. Some middling managers of one enterprise or another, and a sizeable contingent of hipsters, in every sense of the word.
The overriding feel of the entire day was defined by nothing so much as by its extraordinary ordinariness. Perhaps it’s the mindset: the easing into this ease, the deliberate nonchalance of letting it all hang out, quite literally, and not paying attention, to any of it. All day long. I suspect that regular goers to nude beaches find none of this anywhere near as noteworthy as I do; I imagine that they’ve been saying so, all along. For me, it was new. Though not, hand on heart, entirely unexpected.
I don’t know what I expected, but planted in my mind from somewhere had been a vision of a perfectly normal day in the sun, with perfectly normal people doing perfectly normal things, in the nude. And that’s just exactly what it was. More or less. Of course, there was something of a garden party atmosphere, with all this milling and strolling and stopping for chats and Pimmses and fruit bowls and the ubiquitous tea. Of course, it was an especially leisurely day. In an especially ordinary way.
Is nudity a great leveller? Of course it is. Is it liberating? In some sense, no doubt. Is it practical? Absolutely not. Do I wish me more nude days in more towns of this world, just like this? I’m not even sure. One of the things that makes the Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll on the last Sunday in June every year such a special occasion is, perhaps, that it is, after all, special. And it really helps being by the seaside. Near a small town. (Or a couple of them, to be precise.) It helps being in England, maybe, I don’t know. There is still—after all—an unruffled no-nonsense albeit quaintly eccentric friendliness in this country that, with all the madness in and around it, manages just about to keep it sane. At least so it feels. Especially on a day like today. Or is it all just nostalgia? Am I hankering after a world that has changed beyond recognition, that simply no longer exists, and projecting upon what is there my idyll, in a quirky distortion?
Not from my experience today. The people I met and spoke with today are just exactly as I’ve always experienced them, only more so. Maybe that’s what the nudity does, more than anything: it lays us bare, of course, that’s pretty obvious, but does being bare make us more vulnerable? Certainly. In every way. Does being more vulnerable make us more honest? Very possibly. Does being more honest make us better humans? I like to think so. Honesty in all cases in all circumstances in all situations? Maybe not. Maybe a civilisation needs to mask part of its face some of the time (maybe some part of it even all of the time?); maybe in order for it to be civilised in the first place, it needs to be clothed, in something or other. Skins, textiles, manners, etiquette, agreed upon forms of conduct, the compact of the exchange to make it bearable, pleasant even…
I’d been taken, all through the day, with how civil everyone was. How unirritable, how forgiving. Perhaps that’s what it does to us, being naked: could it be that perhaps it encourages us, allows us, even, to forgive?
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Revival [2]
I grow interested in the myth. More than interested, intrigued. Why is it a myth? Clearly there must be some foundation to it. But nobody knows. Does nobody want to know? Everybody wants to know everything, always; but do they really? Is it kinder on the mind, and warmer on the heart, not to be certain, about certain things?
Who, I wonder, were these ‘two guys in their twenties’? Shouldn’t there be a plaque to them? Should they not be celebrated as local legends in their own, quite literally, lunchtime? (It was around then, after all, that they stepped into leisurely ‘action’, in the nude.) Do they still take part now, many years later, perhaps in their thirties, or even forties? They could be dads, by now; in fact, if—as in any respect other than their initiation of this curious custom they appear to be—they are fairly average males then all likelihood suggests that they are, by now, also dads.
Do they live in Bournemouth, still, or Boscombe? Did they ever? That may be a clue: perhaps they weren’t actually from here. Maybe they were just visiting, this is a distinct possibility. Because if they were native to the Bournemouth and Boscombe community then surely, but surely, somebody would know who they are. Then again, if, as has been suggested, some ‘mates’ joined them on their first stroll, then there must have been mates to do so. Maybe they were visiting too? Perhaps they were part of a group, of an Australian sports team? Maybe a language school? They could have been hearty Scandinavians, here to learn English! Or maybe they actually didn’t have any mates here at all, maybe they were just talking to strangers at first, but became readily friendly with them, and these erstwhile strangers who were now effectively friends had mates and they joined them, impromptu, and that’s how it all happened. Who knows. Well, exactly: who actually knows?
My early investigation into this matter of waxing importance—waxing, in importance, at any rate, to me—yields nothing. Yes, the Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll happens each year on the last Sunday in June; yes, it attracts a fair bit of attention nowadays: people come here from all over the region, even the country, maybe the world, but there is no website and no guide. No official history, and no reference to its founders. No club and no charitable foundation. More than intrigued now, I’m fascinated: how do these things come about?
My mind latches onto something, but it doesn’t know what. Maybe it’s my subconscious mind: it knows, it wants, it needs there to be more to this than meets the eye (though what meets the eye would, on occasion, seem to be quite enough…) and it thinks it knows that there usually is: so likelihood would suggest. And in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend. I want to go with that, that notion, that thought.
My mind senses, below reasoning, above intuition, that there is a connection and that this connection can be found. But not by ‘traditional’ means. (What, in any case, are ‘traditional’ means?) It realises, my mind, now, that it has to let go and take an approach that is not a route, that is not direct, that is not determinate or determined, that is neither logical nor pure, neither chaotic nor abstract, neither instinctive nor wise. So what is it? Perhaps I am overthinking it all, but that doesn’t matter: I stand on the beach looking out to the sea and I notice the air coming in from vaguely the right. Over there. By the headland. Is it a headland? Is it a beach? I like the waves, they are steady and impermanent at the same time. They are waves and they are particles too. They are full of tiny molecules, but that is not what I mean. They are wet but their power is implacable. If nobody knows, then maybe they need to be told.
I decide to delve deeper and take a detour, via the sea. There is something somewhere that somebody would rather were not the case. I shall find it and let it be so…
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Revival [1]
The Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll is a joyous event that happens each year on the last Sunday in June. It starts at midday and goes on all afternoon, often into the evening, though not normally much beyond sunset.
Anyone can participate irrespective of age, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual, affective or otherwise expressed orientation, looks, or outlook: it’s really just an opportunity for anyone who wants to to wander along the beach in the buff and feel good about it, about themselves, about each other, and about the universe.
Since nobody organises it, nobody ‘owns’ it, other than the people who happen to be there taking part in it, and since nobody ‘owns’ it other than in the sense that everybody who takes part in it does, there are no rules, beyond those of common sense and kindness. What you wear or don’t wear is in fact up to you, but sunscreen is generally recommended. That said, The Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll takes place in any weather at all, and it is not unheard of for everybody to get perfectly drenched, effectively taking a half-day long shower, naked in the summer rain.
Many people, especially the hardier ones who cover the whole stretch from Sandbanks to East Cliff, like to don some comfortable footwear; and hats, owing to their pervasive usefulness, really come into their own here. They also come in all shapes and sizes: something of a niche subculture thrives, and participants with time on their hands go to town over creating their own, but this is by no means compulsory. You don’t even have to wear a hat. You don’t have to wear anything, that’s the beauty of The Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll.
Since carrying anything, including your phone and money, is such a pain when you wear nothing, there is hardly any trade or commercial activity that particularly caters to the nude strollers. Instead, a convention has emerged whereby the hundreds of beach hut owners—whether they themselves feel compelled to join in the general nudity or prefer to wear their usual beach attire, entirely as is their wont—provide cups of tea, coffee, biscuits, or, if they are of a particularly generous bent, glasses of Pimm’s to the strollers who stop by for a natter.
“There are,” after all, and as many a pub and cafe along many a coastline has written on a sign above the bar or on a chalk board by the entrance, quoting Yeats, “no strangers: only friends you haven’t yet met.” And indeed, lifelong friendships have formed here among people who have lived maybe three or four streets away from each other, but who have never found an opportunity to as much as say hello, until they stood on the beach by another near-neighbour’s hut, sipping from a mug or a cup and maybe dunking a biscuit or enjoying a vape or an old school fag, overlooking the rhythmic roll of the sea.
Some of these friendships flourish into love, and quite a few of the toddlers who run along on the pebbles here probably owe their presence to this fine, and, at the end of the day, very British tradition. In that same tradition, though, sex in public is frowned upon. That is not to say, of course, that after hours and after dark, in some of the huts, or over the water at Studland, behind some of the dunes, in the relative privacy of the midsummer moonshine, some love is not made in the old-fashioned way; but in the main, and certainly for as long as the sun sits anywhere in the sky, the day and the evening are fully family friendly.
Nobody really knows now how it all started, but legend has it that two guys in their twenties had entered a dare: to streak from the Jazz Cafe at the Sandbanks end of the bay all the way—some seven or eight miles—along the sea front to the Beach House on the Christchurch Harbour.
It was about lunch time, and they reckoned the sun was most definitely over the yard arm, so they had themselves a couple of cocktails for courage, stripped naked, and started to run. It took them all of about fifty yards before they were out of breath, and they thought that, while it is perfectly acceptable for mad dogs and Englishmen to go out in the midday sun, it was simply not the done thing to run. Instead, they eased into a gentle canter and then a trot, which readily transmuted into their stroll.
Strolling, they realised to their delight, had the immense advantage of allowing them to hold a conversation while progressing slowly but pleasurably along the beach, and of course their barefaced, bare-chested cheek and unclothed loins attracted a certain degree of attention. Also opprobrium, at first, it has to be said, but they were charming about it and talked to anyone who wanted to talk to them, answering offence with banter, and aggression with wit, and before long some mates and then some mates of theirs and some girlfriends and then some girl friends of theirs and then people who didn’t really know anyone but thought they were amongst a congenial bunch, started to join them, and by the time they all got to the Beach House they were having a regular blast.
Of course, the most committed of purists now follow the route in its fullness in the original direction, but there is absolutely no obligation to do so: if you prefer to stroll with the sun in your eyes and head east to west, that’s just as enjoyable, and if you simply want to sit on the beach or wander up and down a bit between the piers, that’s just fine.
The whole point, as anyone who knows The Bournemouth & Boscombe Nude Beach Stroll will tell you, is to be comfortable in your skin and to celebrate your communion with your fellow humans, free from stress or strain or pressure.
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Jupiter
I shall return to Saturn. I’ll not ignore it, not have passed it for good, unawed by its majesty, unwondered by its spheres. Unswayed. It sways me, Saturn; but not now. Now I am drawn on further, down—not down, across—the path: the gravitation is too strong, its presence too immense, I must succumb to Jupiter. For a moment. For a while.
For an eternity that lasts a fraction of a thought. For a whirl of a gas storm. For a communion. With Callisto. Io, Ganymede. Europa. These friends I have not met. These habitations. These absorptions; moments, these ideas. Sensations. My body, more than my spirit, attracts them and they me. We enter each other’s orbits, and dance. Moons they may be, mere satellites to a planet all of their own, but I enjoy them, their company, their zest, their life. Their juvenation. I visit them, they me. We journey not together, we relish the here. The nowness of it all, it is not mere. Have I not longed so long to be in the now?
This here is good, I like it, though it will not, doesn’t have to, last. The mightiness that overshadows us encumbers us not: we are not oblivious, but we don’t care; choose not to be intimidated by this massiveness, this bold inelegance.
The world right now, that world that is not this world and that is this world still though we may never wish it so, it bears great force, great danger; anger too. But not for us. We delicate ourselves out of its artless rage. We are not like that. Are not of it. It not of us. I no longer feel the need to explain myself, and I no longer long for the need to be free.
I am free, now, having got this far, and I relish that freedom more than I treasure my life. I am not Jupiter, nor ever want to be. That bulk, that pompousness. That body of hot air, covered in cold. That implacability. That dehumanising fervour.
And yet, these satellites, seductive with their charm. I’m glad I came here. Happy to have paused. I’ve long abandoned the idea of destination. These are sojourns on a celestial perambulation. How privileged I am. How powerful. How small.
Here, seeing Jupiter be big, be brash, though not beguiling, I believe my time has come. This is not new, I’d thought on one or two occasions once or twice before I’d felt the tug above my wings, but here I realise my strength is not outwith. You may be one and a half score septillion times the size of me, but you are no match to my mind. You have the mass; the sun has all the power: I have the intellect. To survive, to thrive even. To discern. To accommodate myself in this universe, or any other.
I launder my library of references by adding experience. The hunger to live. The need to swallow. The acceptance of millions of potentialities in one go. The taste and the texture. A slither of hope, of forbearing, of premonition. A spark of the imagination; a tenderness, returned. And wanted. Handsomenesses. No warriors, these, no battle axe ire, no strategy and no plan. No tactics. No goal. A glorious swim in the sea, a pool of tadpoles of random configurations, a swirl in the mind of the gods. Ye gods. Ye godlinesses. Ye buds of brimming boisterousness. Ye flowers and sparks. Ye spermly waggers of tails. Ye lusciousnesses. Ye beetrootjuiceredvoluptuousness. Ye inspiration.
Ye words.
Saturn calls me back, I know. I’ll have to detour there, a loop. This Jupiter wilfulness cannot last. I feel for Ganymede, I feel for Europa. Ye Kepler-452b. I feel for you too. I feel for my brother who is writing these words in a universe just like ours only different, having acceded that that’s what he’s doing without knowing why. I feel for my coccyx; I feel for you.
I feel for you and I sense you are there, and I feel strongly for a new love a new warmth a new glow a new smile a new touch of a new hand a new face and new dimples a new tuft of hair and a belly button; a new mind, a new generous heart on the horizon. Where is the horizon, in space, in the orbit of Jupiter, near one of his moons? I baffle myself into submission and accept the reality as it is, though I know full well that there is no such thing; and there is no such thing as necessity, distance, perspective or pain. There is pain, it is felt, it is lived. Does it have to be, ever? It need not be celebrated quite so. There is no hate, it is an illusion, and there is no anger, it disappears. There is there is there is love.
I like that thought and take comfort in it although I can’t prove it, and I think of my new love on the horizon whom I haven’t yet met. Literally, have not yet met. We know each other, we are in communication, we are getting closer all the time, but the whisper of the unknown persists, and we both hold on to it a while longer, not because we want to, but because we want to believe that we must. So we must. So we do. We’re pragmatic like that, and we have lives to live. So we think, so we hope, so we trust.
I salute Jupiter for all his preposterousness and kiss each of his moons goodbye. I’m not sure I need to come back here: this was great, this was fun, this was excellent, while it lasted. But possibly, probably, for me, it has now run its course.
I bid thee farewell, most mighty of planets: you have been, I know, quite misunderstood. But don’t worry, my gaseous friend, so have we all…
< Neptune Mercury >
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3 Memories of the Future: A Leak and the Edgy Etonian
In the great scheme of things—and I like the expression ‘great scheme of things’: it suggests both that there is a scheme to begin with, and that it is great—my disorientation of this Tuesday morning is not grave. It is still Tuesday, I assume, though I haven’t checked, but there is no reason to believe that it isn’t, except perhaps for the time-space discontinuation that my being here at the Limonlu Bahçe now implies, if in fact Tuesday it still is.
I boarded a train at Clapham Junction 08:26 and it is now roughly half past eleven. The burger, as expected, was delicious. I don’t suffer from amnesia, at least not as far as I can remember. Ker-ching.
Italicising.
One word paragraphs. Short sentences, more so still long.
What confounds me is a memory of the future; I’m aware it’s a memory because that’s what it feels like and it’s how it constructs itself, in layers, like a relief or part of a sculpture that has age-old dust cautiously blown or brushed off it, and I’m certain it’s of the future because I have no recollection of it in the past, and since I’m not suffering from amnesia I would know if I had.
There’s a leak making itself known in my neighbour’s ceiling which has not been explained. It’s been there for a week now and it first showed itself last Sunday when I wasn’t even at home, I was in Cornwall. I received a message from my neighbour who lives in the flat below me, saying there is a leak, could I check; I texted back, saying I’m on the road right now but if it’s urgent, he should let himself in (providence: I’d pressed a set of keys to my flat into his hand the first time I met him, in case of emergency). He texted me back once again, saying that this was not an emergency and it could wait until I got back, since the stain on his ceiling was quite small and not growing bigger.
Three days later, on Wednesday, Peppe the builder who’s from near Pompeii (where, he tells me, the Mafia is) comes in and has a look around and is hardly perturbed. It’s not, he assures me, coming from my shower, and not from my sink. It might be coming from some old pipe between my floor and my neighbour’s ceiling, but it could also be from an unproof spot in the wall, possibly where there’s a ledge. The building is a hundred years old, after all: we should wait and see. Another three days pass (plus the Wednesday, makes seven in total so far), and again on a Sunday, my neighbour phones me up to tell me the stain has now grown, quite a bit. There has been no rain. I have not been doing anything untoward or unusual since last night, at least not that I can recall, and my recall of events, as has been established, remains intact.
I say intact. I have a terrible memory, if truth be told, and truth be told. What’s the point of telling anything, if it isn’t, essentially, true. Both the leak and the young man who’s been to Eton have not yet occurred, at least not to me, but I remember them clearly, I remember the leak more clearly than I remember the young man, because he appeared after several drinks at a bar and he sounded unfeasibly posh. He said so himself: “I just sound unfeasibly posh,” is what he said. And he did sound unfeasibly posh, it was most incongruous. He was wearing a hoodie-kind top, though it may or may not have actually had a hood, and he was worried about losing his hair. His hair looked fine to me, but then I lost mine at his age, so perhaps I’m just used to the concept of early onset alopecia; apparently it’s genetic.
He fretted about sounding too posh to get girls and professed that he much preferred the company of gay men because they were funnier, he thought, than straight people in general, and he was losing hair over losing his hair—which to me seemed unfortunate as well as unnecessary—and he was dressing down so as to mask the unfeasible poshness of his voice. I liked him immediately, but he got into an argument with my friend whom I was out with that night, even though I told them both to be nice to each other, and later on they did the same thing again. That was a curious evening. I’d already been chatted up thrice by three women, four times if you count the one who came up to me twice. That doesn’t usually happen: I must have signalled approachability.
The young man who’d been to Eton had a gay dad and a gay godfather. And he was rather too fond, I got the impression, of coke. He offered me a tiny bit from a practically empty sachet that he took from his wallet, scooped up onto the rounded corner of his payment card, which means I must have read his name, but that didn’t register. The instant dislike that my friend had taken to him was now getting stronger.
The young Etonian whose name I may have read but which did not lodge itself in my mind, at least not consciously, asked if I wanted to get some more and I said I wouldn’t know where or how but in essence why not (I’d had rather more than one or two drinks…) and he said he could get some straight away, but we couldn’t, for reasons I didn’t quite understand, go to his place for this, even though it was just round the corner. I didn’t think it wise or even just comfortable to stay where we were and do Class A drugs right under the noses of the bouncers, literally on the pavement, and also I didn’t have, nor did I want to spend, any money.
We left it at that and at one point the bouncers ushered us inside (it was coming up three in the morning) and the young man came back and asked us for a pound to get home but I genuinely didn’t have a pound on me, I had been paying by card all night long, and my friend didn’t like him, so he didn’t give him a pound, and then the young man showed his edge a bit and started abusing my friend, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because the music in there was too loud, and my friend looked perturbed but took it all in calm resignation, as if that were just the kind of thing that normally happens at the end of an evening, unpleasant though it may be; and that, I thought, was that.
Except once we were outside, the Edgy Etonian suddenly materialised again and I asked him what he’d said to my friend and he apologised, saying he’d got carried away a bit, or words to that effect, and my friend left and I said goodbye to the stranger who had nearly been pleasant enough a random encounter to become a friend too, but had now rather spoilt it, and I worried about my friend because he’d looked so dejected and also he had to get back to Earlsfield, which is right in the middle of technically nowhere, especially if you’re travelling after three in the morning.
None of this particularly fits anywhere, I realise, but I remember it as I sit here in this garden of civilised repose, in one of the trendier portions of Istanbul. Except none of it has yet occurred, it was all yet to come.
I check my phone. No, it is still Tuesday, coming up noon. High time, I sense, although with a crushing vagueness as to what this might mean, to ‘get going’. I order a Bloody Mary.
< {Reflexion} 4 The Sultaness (Reclining) >
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Revival [6]
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Istanbul
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EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
If you are the owner of the link that brought you here, please update it; or if you know them, then please do let them know.
Thanks & enjoy.
Revival [5]
This post has moved. You can now find it here.
EDEN was originally published in random order. Starting 1st August 2018 it is being reposted in sequence. To follow it, choose from the subscribe options in the lefthand panel (from a laptop) or in the drop-down menu (from a mobile device).
If you are the owner of the link that brought you here, please update it; or if you know them, then please do let them know.
Thanks & enjoy.
EDEN by FREI 