Jerusalem

I have never been a religious person, so I had mixed feelings on visiting Jerusalem, centrepiece of organised religion and religious dispute too. We drove there after a fraught day of work, and a slightly fraught drive, although as we arrived early evening most of the traffic queued it's way in the opposite direction, not so much streaming as leaching from the centre. 

The old city walls were pale and warm in the evening light, like bleached sandstone. We entered the old city through the Jaffa gate and plunged through into the Suq al-Bazar, a narrow stepped street dividing the Christian and Armenian quarters. My feet slid on the polished stones, more marble than sandstone, worn shiny rather than down. In the street were triangular wedges abutting the steps, positioned to allow cartwheels to go up and down without being shaken apart, but standing on them in flip-flop sandals took the soles away from you. 

My friend led us surely through the streets, and quickly, I had time to notice the side streets, the doors set into walls and cave-like shops behind them, time to notice the graffiti, and the sun piercing shafts through the lace-like stonework on the tops of the walls. We abruptly turned a corner and went down steps into a courtyard and into the church beyond, this turned out to be the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. By the door we entered, a slab of stone that Christ's body was said to have laid upon, and several women kneeling, rubbing it with cloths.

Naively, I did not know that this is where the body of Christ was supposed to lay, I suppose I assumed that with the resurrection that there was no tomb. I read later that it is also the site of the crucifixion. My friend told me that the church was administered by several different Christian sects, and in the queue for access to the tomb, the group behind mentioned that wars would break out over the placing of candles. The arches drew the eye upwards to the domed ceiling as we waited. 

I was a little unsure of being there, knowing that I do not believe, but that other people do, I hate to be a tourist of belief. I told myself it was silly to be so timid, as this was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of opportunity, and decided to go into the Aedicule. It was irrelevant anyhow, although dressed in a T-shirt like a couple of my (male) colleagues, the guardian decided I was improperly dressed and turned me away.

After looking at a couple of the other sites within the church, we left and again followed my friend. Unsure of the way, we went through back streets in the Muslim quarter, walking through boys and young men playing street football games. I hadn't realised that even in the Old City, it was still a living neighbourhood, it was heartening to see that it was not only a tourist trap. Past a street of shops, under cover, a high roofed tunnel where men sat and smoked through water pipes. A boy ran alongside us and told us "It's closed", and sure enough, as we headed to the end of the street, I saw the outline of the Dome of the Rock; and guards told us that it was closed to non-Muslims at that time.

Back out, taking a left, and through another broad tunnel, after sending our bags through a security tunnel, we emerged into the broad expanse under the Western Wall (the presumably politically correct term for the Wailing Wall). More barriers. There was a wall which allowed people to look over at the Jewish worshippers, and they were themselves segregated into a men's and women's side. The sun was setting behind us, and we walked up steps to a viewing point to watch it finally disappear. The battery in my camera died.

Back through the Armenian quarter, where the shops were all closing up, most of the tour buses having left for the day, and retracing some of our steps up the polished stone steps. Stopping for a coffee by the Jaffa gate and reflecting. I had iced chocolate, the cocoa grains gritty with ice against my tongue as the temperature swooped downwards. 

I think I approached Jerusalem with an open mind. I loved the streets and the stones and the buildings, the archways, some vaulted and turning into tunnels, the living part of the town cut into the walls. It felt like somewhere to explore at greater length, but somewhere you would need to explore for a while before it seemed familiar. I recalled getting completely lost in one area of Venice, even though we had a map, even though we followed the street signs, but still not being able to head in the right direction; Jerusalem had that air about it. 

But, despite the closeness and consanguinity of the different parts, the different quarters and religions, the impression I took away was of difference, of exclusion. Each religion, or place of worship I suppose, each of them excluded others for grounds sometimes religious, sometimes (it seemed to me) due to blind prejudice. It reminded me that religions are built on the "If your name's not down, you're not coming in" principle; worship as we do to be included or else. I do not see a religion of inclusion, of acceptance of the diversity of humanity. Jerusalem is indeed an exclusive symbol

Quietude

A small small English town, barely even a village, peaceful in the early morning sunshine. I got off the ferry and drove here, in the opposite direction to all the lorries bursting to offload their produce from the continent. I notice how I think of it as Mainland now, more central to the world than the country I grew up in. Ich bin auf der Insel. Friends excuse me, when I do something 'odd', like not wearing a jacket first thing in the fresh morning when I know I will be inside all day, watching the sunshine warm up the tarmac and concrete around the office, they say, 'Oh she is from the Island,' as if my peripheral position is in itself enough to explain strangeness.

The small English town has a long shingle and sand beach, spiked with dark wooden groynes to prevent the coast from taking a Sunday stroll down to the next village, and from there, maybe even across the Channel to the old enemy, France. This morning though, there are very few people around, it is early, for England, around 7am. I would already have been in the office back home, but here, a couple of joggers, and a couple of sprightly pensioners out for a morning walk are the only people I see. The road along the beach is also mostly undisturbed by cars.

I would not have driven here, even for the beauty of the beach, if I had not been here before as a destination, and if I had not had 10 hours before my next 'appointment'. The beach huts are a couple of miles up the promenade from the faded hotel and guest houses. A couple of miles away from where my great-aunt had lived, and the house where my mother was born. There is a photograph of me here in the swimming pool car park at the age of sixteen, all bleached curls, towering over my brother who at fourteen had yet to put on his growth spurt to reach his six-foot-plus adult height. The huts back on to the swimming pool.

Even so, the town is not really familiar to me, in those days it was a good six hours drive from the parental home, longer if we had the caravan on the back, and after sixteen I begged to be left at home, for what teenage girl wants to spend time cooped up in a caravan with parents and brothers? I remembered that as a young child, we had come here and I had slept in my great-aunts house. I remembered the garden, and the path that led behind a tiny sports club, with corrugated tin fences. It took less than three minutes to get to the beach from her house. She left it though, towards the end of her life, moved to sheltered accommodation around the corner together with her husband, they were in a familiar place even if the rooms were not.

She had cool paper tissue skin, and a particular scent or perfume, I don't know which one it was, perhaps the smell of her face powder, but together it gave her a subtle beauty, a distinctiveness that seemed all her. Quiet and almost elegant, not breathtaking but peaceful, something calming. Whether it was her age or just her I don't really know. The small town has the same qualities, neat but not ostentatious, pretty but not eye-catching. Seeing it in repose, quietude.



For Muriel
more pictures here (scroll down)

A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention.

Starting in January
a daily challenge, to
pay attention
to the world
observe it and
polish it.

Spatial memory

I got into my car again today, the first time for a week.  My memory, so bad in some areas is fine when it comes to learned tasks such as driving.  I perfectly executed the wiggle reverse to get to the door of the garage, and all in the thirty or so seconds between pressing the remote button for the garage grille to slide up, and before it starts to grind down again, thinking no-one is coming.

The car was mostly well behaved on the way to the tyre garage, but I was distracted, as I went into Industriestrasse from a different direction to normal, trying to pick the most used and hopefully least slippery route.  It was not only the physical memory of driving, moving feet and hands in autonomic rhythms that I was thinking about, but also the memory of driving down particular streets.  I have driven the same street to work most weekdays for the past three and a half years, a pulsed drive, stop-start with it's seventeen sets of traffic lights.  There are alternative routes which take around the same time, even though they are kilometres longer, but my mind likes the directness of this one, almost door to door on the same road except for the last couple of hundred metres.  Definitely an autopilot road, point the car in the right direction and I'm almost there.

A more satisfying feeling is that of sneakily beating the traffic, from knowledge of side streets, or the sequencing of traffic lights.  I only have one chance to do this on my current way home, I can nip in round a couple of Einbahnstrasse and pop out at the road into the garage when other cars get held up by cars turning on and off the street the other way around.  Is it sad that I can still remember my 'favourite' traffic cut?  I guess it must be a little, especially since I haven't driven on Canal Road in years, but I reckon I could still pick the moment to shoot around the red lights on the main road and jump the traffic waiting there by using the Valley Road loop, pretending I am going to Tesco's and veering back onto the main road at the last minute.

These are hard wired memories, through repetition I suppose, and I wonder why 'normal' memory doesn't work the same way?  Words, feelings; they fade faster.

intemperate

I love the cool feel of this New Orleans doorstep, captured on a day where the temperature and humidity were high enough (and the exercise of ambling around strenuous enough) to send rivulets of sweat down my back and into my waistband.
A handful of weeks later, back at home, today the temperature is not forecast to go above freezing point, suitable for wrapping up in scarf and gloves and visiting the first day of the Weihnachtsmarkt and the first Glühwein of the year.  Outside the leaves are limp, those on the bushes with cold, and those on the ground sodden with yesterdays snow.  My Aran jumper, knitted twenty years before as a student in Bradford, is fished out of the cupboard in honour of the start of Winter with a capital 'W'.
The underfloor heating, turned up in my bathroom, bathes my toes after the shower.  Like walking on a beach under the evening sun.  But it is not so easy to imagine myself there, I cup my hands around the coffee and wait for the sun to come up.

full of beans

they wrinkle, like my fingers

in the bath, smooth skin

lost to history

The past is a foreign country...

The foreigners in my block live in a past country; they use their storage cellar as a wine cellar.  Seriously.  I was just taking the duvet cover out of the machine, trusting it would have cleaned off the cat vomit.  I knew there was someone else down in the cellar as the lift had whirred and the lights were on.  The demin blue cotton flopped out of the machine umbilically as a man behind me said "Tag," and walked out with one bottle of red wine in his hand. 
There is a wine bottle prison in my cellar and I'm wondering, wondering.  I wonder some more about someone who could incarcerate their wine below stairs like that, mine is always to hand, there are ten bottles less than 2m away as I type away at the kitchen table.  What must it be like to treat wine as such a special thing, a treat, where a journey with a special key is needed to retrieve the treasure?   Of course I wondered if some of the keys in the block were duplicates and if I could find my way in there?
I know then that I am the criminal foreigner.

Wir haben Angst und sind allein

A facebook chat about the songs on my i-pod for the gym got me musing, mine doesn't include any dance tracks with high energy and bpm to keep me bobbing along on the cross-trainer. 
I'd listed several bands that I had on there and a friend suggested I should have some Prodigy  instead of the (mostly) indie rock that I picked as being suitably loud and distracting enough to keep my mind off of the monotony of turning those pedals again and again and again... 
Breathless of course once more today, but I still try to sing along with the words, and it occurred to me that I don't have much of an ear for music, but that my favourite songs are all those with (imho) fantastic lyrics that say something to me or evoke a mood. 
Sure the music is underneath, driving the song on, and the 'tunes' I like are building swelling tunes, starting with a simple melody or riff which grows and grows behind the words and the words expand with it and it swells, fills you up and hits a crescendo. 
I have to try so hard not to sing out loud too, gasping "Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking when I said I'd like to smash every tooth in your head," or "In the end all you can hope for, is the love you felt to equal the pain you've gone through," or "But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, what the hell am I doin' here, I don't belong here," would raise a few eyebrows from the fitness trainers and other gym-bunnies.
Still, today I guess I found the exception that proves the rule, foreign language songs, the lyrics only partially understood, and the partial understanding good enough to satisfy my lyrical urge, and it's true, "Gott weis ich will kein Engel sein."

an ordinary week...

The lady's body has fallen off the toilet door, she is only a round circle, a head.  Inside there is a new hand dryer, powerful but smelling of vacuum cleaners, call me a Luddite but I'm gonna stick with the paper towels.  My skin still smells of chlorine.  When I left at dawn for the swimming pool a right-angled green caterpillar was sitting on my windscreen wiper.  How did he get so lost?  Why would a caterpillar sit on my car in an underground garage when the grass is burgeoning, the rhododendrons are flowering.  What made him leave his caterpillar hatchlings, the happy brood Apple, Core, Skin, Pip, Husk and the others, to end up in this sterile place?  I mentioned this to the man I was drinking with, we were born in the same hospital, perhaps the same bed; he thought I was drunk and went back to talking about music.  My fingers typed, computer programming, e-mails, oh some fun e-mails, and now this, the bulletin of my week.  My head is not a round circle but a maelstrom, incoherent today.


Inspired by ThinkingTen Members Pick here

High rise

The 6th floor of the tower block is good.  Lower you couldn't see as far, higher and the scale becomes un-human.  Morning, the view off the balcony of other blocks and the grounds below with the people below sweeping, picking at the plants, holding dogs on leads, it's like a panoramic television.  It draws the eye from the sky.  The sky, today I can see the sky, it has lifted from the top of the buildings where it has squatted, sultry and moist, for the last couple of days.  The ghost skeletons of skyscrapers resolve into metal cages on top of the buildings.  The sky is still a grey white palette, but now tinged with yellow weak sunshine. 
In the morning too the frogs have stopped their baritone moaning; in the absence of pigeons to irritatingly coo at all times, the frogs took this niche in the night.  The angry dog on the 8th floor of the adjacent block, the one that belongs to the angry man and his Indonesian wife, that dog wants to become part of the accepted night chorus and spends it's time auditioning, it's bark raw.
I can hear conversations float up on the air but they don't intrude as I don't understand the local language.  The mornings are pleasantly cooler after hot days and self-inflicted fevered evenings; mornings I relax with coffee on the balcony and slip back into the book I am reading.

Musings on travelling

On my trip here I was musing on the land as seen from above. 

The first leg of the journey, into Schiphol I saw Dutch canals and irrigation ditches across fields subtly out of alignment, each at a slight angle to the next.  The sun reflected off the parallel water lines across each field.  A spiders web shone out of the flat landscape.

As we flew down towards Hong Kong airport I saw some strange islands.  The rim of each seemed normal, beach, tree covered hills rising out of the water, but the insides of the islands were inverted.  Huge steps led down from the crest of the hill, greys and browns, circle steps inside the island, as though it plunged down and penetrated below the sea bed.  Poor insignificant island, heart quarried out because its land was more useful elsewhere.

The ferry across the South China sea to the Pearl River delta is not even a tenth full.  The exotic names are not much of a pull compared with the capital and capitalist paradise that is Hong Kong.  It bobs up and down on the water and I look out through salt stained windows.  Going outside on the ferry is impossible, there is nowhere you can go, they like you contained in the right place here.  I sit inside and look at the sea through the salt, and try to think of another way to describe the water, but it can only be described as jade.  Green and opaque with a hint of turquoise when the sun lights it.  I stare at it and it is a surprise when the waves break in a froth of white foam and not in semi-precious stone chips.

Where to though?

Time was running out. It was now 12 days since I had last mailed him; 8 days since he mailed me back. But the time was for sure ticking by. Perhaps I could look at it the other way round; time is running in... or up? It is getting richer and fuller and there are more things to do with time now that I am not waiting stupidly for him to contact me. That's the theory anyway. So why did I spend another 20 minutes today when I should have been working looking with aching eyes at the last mails? On my own in a quiet office, the sun on the windows soporific and sluggish like my thoughts. The sun runs through it's rutted arcs in the sky according to the seasons and perhaps so do I. Now is the season for looking around and realising time is running out. I wonder where to? Do I want to go there?


Posted at ThinkingTen in response to the Take it away Tuesday prompt:  Time was running out
http://thinkingten.ning.com/profiles/blogs/where-to-though

Stupid habits

Like sitting at the computer with your leg crossed underneath you; any fool knows you will end up with pins and needles but you do it all the same, you notice the strange bouncy feeling when you get up and try to walk on the numbed leg before the sudden nipping pains start.
Like picking at scabs, saying you're being careful, you're just taking away the crusty bits across tight pink healed skin until you pull too deep and the blood flows again.
Like cats and top-heavy stemmed wine glasses do NOT mix.
Like "I'll do it later"
Like re-reading your old words, hoping to see a different nuance, something to lighten the absence of hope.
Todays wine bottle, Marqués de Ballestar Reserva 2005, has a little net of gold threads around it, perhaps that will make me feel special, or at least help me forget that I am not.

Candle designers

On the face of it, it shouldn't be too difficult a job, it's not as if there weren't several tried and tested designs or templates to pick from.
The red conical candle however had overflowed as it burnt down, the molten pool had run over the edge and from a flimsy beard was sluggishly feeding a little wax butterfly on the tablecloth.
The pale yellow egg shaped ones, specially chosen for Easter were very pretty, the wick now about half way down inside the egg so that they glowed with an inner light.  But the waste, the shell of useless wax left behind bothered her; and more unsettling that someone had deliberately designed them to leave so much left over.  Perhaps she could source some wicks, then she could carefully melt and swirl the remnants together, and a new raspberry ripple pillar candle would be created, that would burn straight down and true, the two separate candles saved from uselessness and melded into a new life together.
She snorted at the ridiculously romantic fantasy, and dug the ice-cream out of the freezer, stirring in meringue pieces and extra sauce, settling down with the latest novel and it's swashbuckling anti-hero.

Persistence of memory

A couple of days ago I pasted a status update on facebook and quickly, two responses came, from people I used to work with and with whom I would be more friendly if I lived in the same country.

jkdavies left work 4hrs ago and is still stressed...

• "That's natures way of telling you to open that second bottle of red"
• "Nothing's changed there then? Crack open another and chill!"

And though I hadn't seen either of them for 3+ years, they both correctly predicted I had already managed a nice bottle of red wine and was contemplating the next... 
Was this persistence of memory, were they picturing me the way I was when I last met them? 
Or was it perhaps a persistence of personality, am I now at that age where my thoughts become set and changing my habits is as likely as the wakening of a coma patient?