blue flowers

Real people in background.
---Penelope Fitzgerald.

What goes on unnoticed, in and around you. Vision is the illumination of solitude.

Dinner with the usual suspects, down in Affers's basement. Served at 11. These reunions are becoming terribly weird and just so slightly uncomfortable. A lost friend returns after ten or fifteen years (last month I saw someone after 23 years!) and we all get together, remember our school days fondly, laugh at the same things (has anyone really changed that much over the years?); ask the same questions: where are you now, what have you been doing?

R recalls how he was fondled by one of the teachers (this is the hardest thing to explain and I'm sure anyone who reads this will misunderstand. If you've seen the History Boys you just might). The 'conversation' turns -as it invariably does-to prostitutes and 'dancing girls' and a subset of the group that goes to Thailand and the Far East...

M.M. said something interesting: that for this subset group it's not really about the cheap booze (though I'm sure that that plays an important role); it's more that they simply enjoy being in a group...in fact, they could go for the Hajj or Umrah and still have a great time.

And the strange thing was that no-one batted an eyelid when he made that almost scandalous remark, as he swiftly moved from talking about hedonism to religion. And it's not as if there weren't religious people amongst us (Hasan is, I think, a very quiet man who practices sufism and another, R, calls himself 'Rumi,' such is his devotion to the mystic).

As I left in the early hours, driving through the backstreets to avoid the police (I don't have a licence or a valid id card), the beam of light from my car's headlights suddenly picked up a small bunch of flowers that had been carefully, lovingly, planted in a very ugly street. Rumi commented how he loved such flowers in spring. To me they looked quite unreal, but maybe the light was playing tricks. As I turned the car they were plunged back into darkness. "So it is with our lives" , I thought to myself. Increasingly, we meet people now and only have a brief snapshot view of their lives..what went on before, what goes on after, God only knows. And the same applies to my friendship with bloggers.

I asked rumi, do you remember we took a photograph of the class on the last day of class? Who would have thought-and who could have known-how things would turn out? On that sunny day, when we threw ink at eachother and signed our names, who amongst us could have even guessed what lied in store? Some have ended up in prison, others have married and divorced, and still others have had heart atatcks and heart ache. Most of our teachers have passed away and are just a memory. And as I said that, I remembered the scene from a few hours earlier, and how it was announced that the 'fondler' had also died. Some of the guys cracked open another beer and just smiled to themselves.