walking & talking all over again

May 31, 2009

Circle Limit III

You might have noticed that blogging is not happening with much conviction here. But more likely you haven't, since you've almost certainly not been reading the site anyway. So it evens out. Nevertheless, I feel I should at least make a stab at some kind of posting, if only to give myself something to look back on in future when my already-failing memory of this period has given up the ghost entirely. Think how novel it will all seem then.

So, there was another trip to the Isle of Wight for the bank holiday weekend, and very splendid it was too.

The territory covered was very familiar, but there were some small triumphs. In particular I managed to ascend a couple of steep and moderately technical hills that have hitherto defeated me. I put this down partly to stubbornness, and partly to a sense that I may not be attempting them many times more and it therefore being time I put the fuckers in their place. It also helped that I approached them in the lowest possible gear.

In any case, it was good to once again visit the pretty but largely empty outpost of Freshwater, and to make the now de rigueur pilgrimage to Christine's Enchanted Valley, all in very lovely weather. The former trip was rather long and arduous and left me completely wrung out. Given that, I expected to hate the latter, but actually it was just about right. Sunshine improves these things a lot.

Back in London, Pierre Rigal's Press at the Lilian Baylis helped to exorcise the memories of Rambert's recent travesty. I took Kym, and we both enjoyed a very clever exercise in choreographed claustrophobia, with Rigal ingeniously and athletically filling a small and dimishing space.

Much of the glorious weekend was spent in the park, notably on Saturday when old flame Matthew once again joined me to skate with Alastair and Davide. Nearly everything was beautiful, and those things that weren't don't merit discussion. I wish my balance were a little better.

I've been haunted lately by an experience of Ian's a month or so ago. He found himself on the bus next to a woman who was crying because she hadn't had the courage to hold the hand of another woman, a German tourist, who was dying in the street; she'd been crushed by a van rolling down a hill. I can't even express the suffocating sadness of this event, the victim struck down out of the blue, gasping her last in an alien city, hundreds of miles away from her loved ones and everyone she knew, who in turn might hear nothing of her lonely death for many days; the horror-struck passer-by, shocked and off-guard, unable in the heat of the moment to offer the succour we'd like to imagine we all would, devastated by that failure, guilty and sobbing; even the van driver, carted off for manslaughter after a moment's carelessness on a routine delivery. Above all the awful sudden arbitrariness of it, the lack of warning and purpose and reason, the paper-thin tissue of happenstance that separates us at every moment from a pointless and unexpected end.

It is shocking in this case because it is so relatively rare here, in our rich and orderly city, but that same flimsy boundary is being crossed all the time, all around the world, and so many people even now are gasping their last, looking around dizzy and uncomprehending as the blood rushes out and their mothers and sons and lovers are nowhere to be seen and there is no-one to say goodbye to. No-one to even care.

This has always been the case, and I've always known it. So have you. I don't really know why it has struck me so this time, why it has left me asphyxiated by a sense of fragility and impermanence. But it has.

This could all end so easily, without notice, at any time.

I'm not trying to pretend that this is news.

Posted by matt at May 31, 2009 11:43 PM