What a gorgeous weekend it was!

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 10 March 2004 13:00:40

Visited friends in St. Andrews over the weekend and it was soooo therapeutic. These are the same people who I stayed with over New Year and who have the house next to the harbour with the big fireplace, high ceilings and shuttered windows. Lovely. The 'Charity shop clothes party' was very funny. Kimonos, suits stolen from The Jam album covers, long flowing yellow dresses, items which surely came from a production of Hamlet, French tourist chic, and Haircut 100 shirts (showing my age!) seem to have been the main 'attractions'.

The main highlight of the weekend though was getting together with Jen, a friend from Washington whom I met at Lampeter Uni 5 years or so ago. It's strange, we become friends, she graduates and lives in Washington for a couple of years while I do my final year at Lampeter and go to St. Andrews for a year, I graduate and head South, she starts at St. Andrews, I start at Glasgow and finally our paths cross. It was fantastic to catch up with her and to hear something of her travels, inner and outer. Jen is getting married in July to a guy from New Zealand, so with all the international jet setting she's been doing recently we inevitably talked about airports as hubs of humanity and how bizarre it would be if you could track the movements of everybody on the planet to see how often your paths crossed. Jen is one of those people who can entertain such conversations without questioning my sanity, which is very much appreciated, and this is just one of the qualities which make her a very fine and much appreciated person.

Anyway, all this reminded me of a short story by Douglas Coupland called 'Hubs', which is about the Pope kissing the tarmac at Anchorage airport on a refuelling stop. Coupland's point was that Anchorage airport is a 'nowhere place', it only exists for the purpose of sending people elsewhere, it is in effect a vacuum, a nothingness, a hub, validated only by its destinations. And the Pope gets on his knees and kisses the nothingness. Which seems to me something akin to what the classic mystics of Western spirituality (Eckhart, John of the Cross, the Beguines, etc) have always done. Kissing the nothingness not as an expression of nihilism but as an erotic affirmation of our 'trusting lostness', of our complete non-control over those tenuous threads which bind us to life, and of those almost totally unrecognised forces which keep us alive.

Anyway, Saturday is another darkroom day and I'm really looking forward to it. Shall report any new discoveries.

Oh, and sorry for the irregular blogging....a bit busy lately.