Skip to main content

Moments in London

The first moment, between meetings, was walking down Old Compton Street in Soho, laden with fashion magazines (all those glossy pages make for bulk), a labour of love, on my way to browse the poetry section at Foyles and being struck by how gay the street was. This might strike the informed as a statement of the bleeding obvious but what I mean was how normal it all it felt. All moral progress is fragile - what was acceptable in an Athenian square in one historical epoch, disappeared the next (as it were) - but here, now, however briefly, was a space that felt given and right. Here was a city's cosmopolitanism (and capacity to be indifferent to difference in a healthy way) on display (though the red trousers and the blue shoes was one display a guy might have rethought)!

A connector to the second moment was remembering a 'gay event' at the University of London Union in the 80s (indoors on a Saturday afternoon) and outside was not one but two transit vans of police, lest what foul happenings might be cooked up by the queer people inside! Times do change...

On my way to my evening's event on innovation, I strolled through Cartwright Gardens past Commonwealth Hall, my home for two years (no blue plaque yet but I am working on it)!

I realized suddenly that it would be thirty years this October since I crossed its threshold one autumnal Saturday afternoon, unloading my trunk from the parents' car to begin a life of independence (as it is called).

I was swept over by a rejuvenating sense of what an adventure it has been, is being. A sense easy to lose track of in the folding events of every day. This was in spite of my not being able to claim that it were the happiest time of my life partly because it had a strand of unsettling misery that in fact ran right through it, partly because life got a lot more interesting, and finally my hope that happy riches continue to lie in store!

The innovation event was held at Logica whose offices are in the rejuvenated area around King's Cross station (that thirty years ago were seedy and steamy indeed) and their conference room had a most fantastic view of the canals below and the hills of north London above. Fond as we English are of bemoaning our place and our hopes - here was a room that bore witness to an alternative narrative - full of bright people, generating innovations either in established firms or new start ups (and many of the later created by bright people from 'over there' - Eastern Europe mainly in this case). It often requires you to be seen through other eyes to value what you have.

What a difference it might make to all those grumbling souls about 'bleedin' immigrants' to wonder why it is so attractive (and a clue is that it certainly is not our 'generous' benefit system or our affordable housing)!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev