Easter Sunday and here I sit surrounded by flat screens and the hum of hard drives. For the next three days I will be putting in the hours as I bring home the project that has been the focus of the last ten years of my life. In the heart of my own perfect storm I have decided to join the world of bloggers and speak to strangers about the day to day events of my life. Obviously this is an act of vanity, no matter how we dress the phenomena of blogging in the clothes of contemporary literature, but then surely we are all possessed of vanities. So when did I decided to take on this public expression of my own triumphs and failings? Well it was yesterday in the supermarket that I thought, "You know, you should start a blog about all of this." You see my reading glasses were broken and as I am spending hours in front of these flat screens I desperately need them to see small lines of text clearly. So once I dropped off Takayama at the supermarket, I walked away to look for an optician who could put my right lense back into the frame. I knew there was a shop in one of the arcades on the Holloway Road and found it without much difficulty. Inside an elderly man sat on a chair waiting for the woman with her back to me to finish repairing his glasses. After a few moments she turned and said, " Just a moment please." "Do you do repairs?" I asked, this was rather stupid as she was holding a pair of glasses in one hand and one of those delicate small screwdrivers used by opticians in the other. "Yes" she replied lowering her head and staring out at me over the top of her own sparkling frames. "Can I just leave these here and come back in fifteen minutes." I said as I put my glasses case on her counter. "That's fine." She responded. "Dzhehnkooyeh." I replied and left with sneaky intent. London is a wonderful place, in many ways I think we are justified in claiming to be the heartbeat of the global multi-culture. Currently there are over 200 different languages spoken in our shops, schools and communities. For some of us indigenous English this is a very threatening position to be in but for me, with my love of languages and peoples, it is a playground for the soul. I think I have become quite good at detecting national identity from the accent it creates when English is spoken as a second language. Such perception is quite self satisfying but the challenge then is to translate this egoistic pleasure into a more expressive and sharing experience by learning something of a language that is not your own. The smile of the optician told me that I had guessed correctly that she was Polish. When I do get it right people look at me with a clear question in their eyes; "How does that middle aged, balding, pony tailed, cockney, know to say thank you in my language?". When I get it wrong the look in the eyes is very different; "Who is that wierdo?" I had left the shop to take advantage to indulge my passionate mistress with some quality time. Slipping into a pub I quickly secured a pint of her seductive delights. Ahhh, the exquisite kiss of English Real Ale, a life long devotion, a constant companion and friend in times both hard and happy. Clearly I am acting like a complete scoundrel, it is mid afternoon, Takayama is in the supermarket doing the shopping and I have sneaked into the pub for a pint at the first excuse. Perhaps I am eroding your sympathy for my character but this is not really a blog about vanity, for there are many such glittering self por[be]trayals in our media world, but if these writings are to have any value then surely it should be because they reveal truths no matter how subjectively. How true it was that my glasses were unrepairable because of the chips on the edge of the lense was not certain in my mind. I was more certain that there was only one small chip when I left them there and now there appeared to be two and both much larger than the one in my memory. But there lies the problem, my memory; a most unreliable device with a history of failure on details small and large. Besides, I had left the glasses there unqualified so it would be churlish of me to complain that the efforts to repair may have caused unprovable damage. I had wandered away to my mistress abandoning my responsibility for the sake of personal pleasure. I have a habit of this type of irresponsiblility. For instance, I can quite happily diverge from my responsibility to you right now, having left Takayama in the supermarket, having left my glasses in the opticians I could easily leave my narrative to talk about that word 'churlish'. After all it is such a wonderful word and tells us so much about the real beauty of the English language. You see, once I had returned from my time with indigenous peoples in Australia I became fascinated by the history contained in our landscapes and languages. English is such a wonderful journey for those who wish to explore it. Constructed from the history of invasion and migration of the tribes of Europe, our spoken word speaks to us of the past if we develop the listening skills to hear such echoes. Listen to churlish, say it, speak it out loud, question not only it's meaning but its sound and its history. "It's German!" I said to my friend Jon who had just used it in his speech. "How can you say that?" he asked. "Listen to it, CHURL-ISCHE. The ische sound, that's what gives it away, if you listen you can hear it is a German word." I pulled out the Oxford Concise Dictionary, one of my best friends for many years now. "What do we think it means?" I challenged Jon to an act of definition. How often do we use words we think we know but actually when challenged find it hard to definitively reveal their meaning. "Well it sort of means to be ungrateful I suppose." Jon said. In the dictionary it is revealed that a churl is a peasant in the Old German language and therefore our meaning of the word churlish descends from the snobbery of our Norman French invaders towards our Saxon ancestors. This prejudice survived into the social fabric of our language by refering to ignorant or ungrateful behaviour as churlish. Perhaps it is ignorant of me or even ungrateful of your attention to leave the path of the story I began to tell in order to indulge my own fascination with language. If so, I ask you to forgive me as I forgave the possibility that the optician had further chipped my lense in her efforts to repair my glasses. "Well have you got any cheap reading glasses?" I enquired. "Of course, please, my assistant will help you." From the room behind stepped forward a tall and attractive young woman who captured my interest immediately as she was dressed in what appeared to me to be a slightly eccentric manner. I cherish [German?] eccentricity as the quality of an interesting character. This woman wore those cheap brown boots that fit loosely up to just below the knee and are lined with fake lambs wool. From just above her knee a red skirt like a large tube connected her legs with a torso covered in a blouse of too many ill contrasting colours. The red of her skirt was dull, lacked vibrancy and had an effect quite the opposite of the more popular 'Freudian Red'. The patterns in the blouse destroyed any sense of harmony between the constiuent parts. What made all of this quite strange and oddly alluring is that this young woman had the form, grace and looks of a classic beauty and carried the seemingly discordant attire with an air of personal style rather than folly. I have to admit it, if that woman had said to me "I want you, I want you now.", I would have given it some serious thought for a nano second. This may not seem much of an infidelity to Takayama but it is by far the furtherest I would ever consider straying from her affection and love. I took both the nano second and a cheap pair of reading glasses with me and returned to the supermarket to look for my precious wife. My standard approach is to walk along the tills that filter the money from our accounts in return for over packaged commodities and looked up each isle for 'Takayama sign'. As she is only five feet something tall my method of search relies on the fact she loves to wear hats of a distinctive nature. This time though I could not detect her "bear's fanny" hat, so went to stage two, wandering the isles in search of her smile. Somwhere just past the yoghurts I came across a lonely trolley and immediately recognised the contents as ours. Four bags of organic carrots and six large cucumbers, a tin of berlotti beans, four pots of Onken plain yoghurt, a bag of tangerines, a piece of skate, a piece of hake and a piece of salmon, several bags of different types of nuts or seeds, some green eating apples, assorted peppers and The Financial Times. I looked about me but there was no sign of Takayama. Looking down at the trolley again I wondered how many people could identify their own trolley of food as I had done. Clearly I had no doubt this was ours but why, what was it about the recognition process at work here? Surely our basket cannot be so different from anyone else's and then I looked at the six large cucumbers, "Hmmm....." I thought, "...maybe I should write a blog about such things!" Takayama appeared at my side and I told her I had found the trolley and recognised it as ours. She laughed and smiled broadly at me. We are so happy together that even a nano second of male stray thoughts dissapates with the moment of her smile that is 'imprinted on my inward eye which is the bliss of solitude'.
The Mistress and the bore.