Lazy Blogging

[This was written last August as I meandered around Italy; it's still vaguely relevant and I haven't the time just now to create an entry about what has been flitting through my mind of late.]

Yet another return to the abandoned blog – I wonder how long it will be resurrected for this time? As a general rule, I start blogging when I am dealing with something significant in my life. Chances are that I won't directly write about the relevant event, but reaching out the odd feeler into the virtual stratosphere is a way of becoming reconnected once more.

I have often thought that some people appear in your world for a brief period, to serve a particular – not necessarily identifiable – purpose. And writing this makes me remember waiting for a friend in a bar in London a few years back. It was relatively busy, but I managed to get a table to myself and settled down to watch whatever it was on the television. I think it might have been Wimbledon. Anyhow, an elderly gentleman was looking around for somewhere to sit, pint in hand, and I offered him the spare seat at my table. I had been feeling particularly anti-social at that point, wrapped up in whatever was bothering me. But we started talking; I remember he was visiting from Ireland, and had spent the last few days in the archives at the British Library.

Honestly, I don't recall much else. Other than he made some very perceptive remarks to me, comments that for some reason I needed to hear at that point. It was as if a guardian angel had temporarily popped down for a pint. I have met such people on trains and planes, people you have a particular and utterly unexpected conversation with that reveals something about yourself or the world that makes it all become crystal clear for a moment.

On a recent flight, I was parked next to a large ginger guy armed with a McDonald's paper bag – the sort of person you eye up in the departure lounge and quietly hope you aren't seated next to. He turned out to be the most harmless and charming of geeks (a commentator for a card game called Magic The Gathering...), although that image was somewhat shattered when 'Fifty Shades of Grey' somehow came into conversation and it was revealed he is also, and I quote, a 'sex therapist for S&M couples'. The presence of two young children just across the aisle fortunately forestalled any in-depth information about this side-line of his.

There was a point to mentioning him. (Good God, my blogging skills have gone downhill in the past two years. I hope I remember how to write before you all get bored of such postings.) Oh yes. I said to him that I was off to Italy to check out a cottage, somewhere to put down some roots. And store my vast supply of books. He loved this – the fact that I could see nothing unusual or untoward about 'putting down roots' in a country that was not my own. And he understood it.

You see, the way I live my life makes perfect sense to me. My seemingly erratic bouncing from pillar to post. If I take the last year, I have – without so much as a second thought – sidled between four continents. I was pretty taken aback when someone I had thought of as a friend said to me angrily that I never followed anything through, and why should I ever expect to get anywhere that mattered with that sort of attitude?

She proved a few things to me with that remark. First off, that yes, some people do only enter your life for a specific time period. Without her kindness and friendship, I wouldn't have dealt with Hong Kong. And secondly, that I am capable of producing pretty strong reactions in people. I am, ha, Marmite Woman.

The problem with Marmite is that, however much you love it, too much might be a bad thing.

This posting is dedicated to all those fleeting glimpses of guardian angels, and to the people who will stick with me through the years. 'No man is an island, entire of itself', wrote Donne. I think I'm a pretty isolated peninsular of a person, but am always grateful for the narrow causeway linking me to the mainland.