O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low:
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
from the tirelessly re-read, Twelfth Night
Saturday 25 October 2008
London Calling
The Strand from the Waterloo Bridge. Sunday, 19 Oct 08
Denmark Street, Friday, 24 Oct 08
At the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Windmill Street, Friday, 24 Oct 08
I am properly falling in love with London now, the place where bodies found under trains cause but minor disruptions to the Westminister crowd, where strays provide shelter to homeless people, where museums that hold the most famous paintings of all time are in turn hosted by bright graffiti, where free runners boast among men with stiff black coats, where houses are old and people are new, where rivers are proper divides and bridges real roads, where Europe is a playground park and Asia is indoors, where stony actors bump into laughing stockbrokers on the Tube, where everyone reads The London Paper on the tube and leaves them like seats for the next man in the bowler hat.
It is humbling and small to be a Londoner, to stand as a speck on the Waterloo Bridge knowing that the embers on your cigarette (not that I smoke) cannot burn more brightly than the stream of headlights both overhead and underground. If you stop to breathe, the crowd will walk through you, but on the The London Paper tomorrow, on the page titled "London Love", you know you'll find a two-lined poem asking to meet the sad raven-haired girl who stood still last night, and you will wonder just how many people will answer to this London's call.
And I know you don't care for London, and it does not inspire your dreams. But London is where I am, where (I now know) you will never be.
Monday 20 October 2008
Saturday 18 October 2008
And then I knew I was my own misery
"Shit, I'm the only Chinese in this freaking competition," I told my new teammate, surveying the 60-team debate tornament.
"Yeah, and I'm the only tall guy with blue eyes and brown hair."
What a wonderful world.
"Yeah, and I'm the only tall guy with blue eyes and brown hair."
What a wonderful world.
Wednesday 15 October 2008
An exercise in contextualisation
“Can see not? Can see not?”
KS’s raised chin was a poor substitute for the conventional pointing finger – now too deep within his orange Crumpler bag to be of any use.
“No.”
It was mildly exasperating sometimes to be with KS. Every muscle in his body seemed to be dedicated to a different activity. He never walked. He had to run, jump, skip, stride. And talk about three hundred different things at the same time. Now he was talking about the laksa he had for lunch.
“KS! Where is it!”
“Aiyah. You very lousy leh. We’re almost there – now can you see it?”
A temple of red and gold emerged from the thick of Kensington Gardens. Fortified by gates of scarlet rings, guarded by statues of the four main continents, on a dais of white stone steps, there sat the gold likeness of Prince Albert, reclining in a dome that promised to extend to the heavens. That was the measure of a Queen’s royal love.
“Damn cool. You know the story not? Prince Albert was the husband of Queen Victoria. They loved each other a lot. Like, a damned lot: they had eight children –“
“Why is their having eight children a measure of their love –“
KS silenced me with a glance and ruffled back into his theatrics. “Prince Albert died really young. When he died, the Queen very sad, so she built this thing for him. Cool right?”
He lowered himself into a squat and squinted up at the monumental love, dropping his customary social flippancy for a moment. I sat next to him, and in that moment, we held a woman’s immeasurable grief between our two shoulders.
“When my Ah Pa died, my Ma put a chicken out.”
“Oh, KS…”
My sympathy was shorted by the rudely modern sound of a digital shutter closing in my face. KS smiled softly behind the small camera he held up.
“Okay kid. I’m going. Got to work.” He was up on his feet again. The romance of history was truly past. He pulled out a tie from his bag that seemed to hold all the wonders of the world and ran it around his collar.
“Don’t so sad leh. You’ll learn to love your new home. Maybe you’ll be like me – don’t wanna go back.”
“Habitat.” I corrected. Not home. But KS’s newly oiled Clarks were skipping along the pavement. I watched as his receding figure was stopped by an American – no, Frenchman – all Caucasians looked like – who asked for directions to Gloucester Road.
“Gloucester? Right, take the left turn at the second junction from this way. Walk straight ahead and it should be just beyond the Zambian Embassy house. Did you get that?” KS clipped.
The man smiled his thanks, and the boy whom I grew up with in an island far away picked himself up a little taller and walked on into the streets of London.
KS’s raised chin was a poor substitute for the conventional pointing finger – now too deep within his orange Crumpler bag to be of any use.
“No.”
It was mildly exasperating sometimes to be with KS. Every muscle in his body seemed to be dedicated to a different activity. He never walked. He had to run, jump, skip, stride. And talk about three hundred different things at the same time. Now he was talking about the laksa he had for lunch.
“KS! Where is it!”
“Aiyah. You very lousy leh. We’re almost there – now can you see it?”
A temple of red and gold emerged from the thick of Kensington Gardens. Fortified by gates of scarlet rings, guarded by statues of the four main continents, on a dais of white stone steps, there sat the gold likeness of Prince Albert, reclining in a dome that promised to extend to the heavens. That was the measure of a Queen’s royal love.
“Damn cool. You know the story not? Prince Albert was the husband of Queen Victoria. They loved each other a lot. Like, a damned lot: they had eight children –“
“Why is their having eight children a measure of their love –“
KS silenced me with a glance and ruffled back into his theatrics. “Prince Albert died really young. When he died, the Queen very sad, so she built this thing for him. Cool right?”
He lowered himself into a squat and squinted up at the monumental love, dropping his customary social flippancy for a moment. I sat next to him, and in that moment, we held a woman’s immeasurable grief between our two shoulders.
“When my Ah Pa died, my Ma put a chicken out.”
“Oh, KS…”
My sympathy was shorted by the rudely modern sound of a digital shutter closing in my face. KS smiled softly behind the small camera he held up.
“Okay kid. I’m going. Got to work.” He was up on his feet again. The romance of history was truly past. He pulled out a tie from his bag that seemed to hold all the wonders of the world and ran it around his collar.
“Don’t so sad leh. You’ll learn to love your new home. Maybe you’ll be like me – don’t wanna go back.”
“Habitat.” I corrected. Not home. But KS’s newly oiled Clarks were skipping along the pavement. I watched as his receding figure was stopped by an American – no, Frenchman – all Caucasians looked like – who asked for directions to Gloucester Road.
“Gloucester? Right, take the left turn at the second junction from this way. Walk straight ahead and it should be just beyond the Zambian Embassy house. Did you get that?” KS clipped.
The man smiled his thanks, and the boy whom I grew up with in an island far away picked himself up a little taller and walked on into the streets of London.
Sunday 5 October 2008
Soho
Soho is a wonderful place filled with people from the fringe, high on the chimney smoke of commercial giants that makes real the illusionary possibility of success. Prices are high, men and women are cheap, and the lights are unfazed by the English rain.
20th Century Fox offices
Bloomsbury Headquarters
Paul McCartney's recording studio
No. 54 Dean Street, where Big Brother believes Karl Marx once put up.
Second hand (art)bookshop.
Ever wondered?
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