A Rubbish View
A perfect day for walking. What spoilt it were the bulging bags of garbage that punctuated the most perfect beauty spots. What do these vandals do this? Why can’t they be bothered to travel to the tip.
Charlie and Angela once again loyally supporting us. What troopers they have turned out up be.
Bath Teashop
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another –
Let us hold hands and look.
She, such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop inglenook.”
John Betjeman, “In a Bath Teashop”
The 10.30am train from Oxford to London sped through the countryside. A couple sat opposite one another.
He was overweight with a blob of a face, bald, spotty and covered in tattoos. If you were an artist, you would have wiped off the paint and started again. She had a Christmas-pudding figure with the merest hint of a waist. Thick glasses, mauve striped hair and crooked teeth completed the picture. My first instinct was sadness that nature had been so unkind.
But one thing changed all that – one powerful, transformative thing. They were in love. Not just “fond of” each other or “the best of friends”, but deeply in love. They sent one another signals and shared secret smiles as they held hands, oblivious to everyone else in the carriage.
For an hour they traded with one another – with their eyes more than words. It was a tenderness that excluded the rest of us and created its own special sphere. A couple deeply in love. It made them beautiful – and then I understood the poem by Betjeman. Shortchanged on physical attractiveness but “a little lower than the angels”. They were unaware that, when I raised my Styrofoam cup of coffee to my lips, I was in fact toasting them.
In a world where our concept of beauty is continually shaped by photographers, fashion editors and filmmakers, it’s easy to forget that the ingredients that create and nourish exciting, satisfying and enduring relationships defy the camera.
As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Lost in Translation
Why can’t we, with our vast vocabulary, have a word like forelsket?
This Norwegian word describes the euphoric feeling of falling in love – when you can’t quite believe that someone so perfect has walked into your life.
And what about the Portuguese word saudade? It captures the bittersweet, melancholic yearning for something beautiful that has been lost – perhaps a love affair, a childhood home or a once-flourishing business. There is pain in the loss, yet also a quiet pleasure that such loveliness once graced our lives.
Then there is the Russian toska, a word describing a refined, elevated and appalling kind of boredom. Not the tedium that comes from a lack of pleasing stimulation but the kind that persists even in the presence of things that ought to delight us – creativity, wit, intelligence, history, even the universe.
The Turkish word hüzün expresses the gloomy sense that things are in decline and likely only to get worse. (Are UK newspapers suffering from hüzün? Just asking.)
Another example is the Indonesian word jayus – a lame joke that nonetheless elicits good-natured amusement rather than irritation through its sheer innocent silliness.
Lastly, the Spanish word querencia conveys the idea of a place where we feel safe – a “home” that doesn’t have to be where we live, but from which we draw our strength and inspiration.