Half Time, All Done

This will be one of those posts. 

If I was to put the right key words into my blog search feature, I’m pretty sure I would find I’ve written it before, maybe even more than once. I’m not going to do that, though. I’ll just write it again. Perhaps I’ll say it better this time around.

Summer Equinox. The longest day. The shortest night. We’ve done it all now. Tonight, 23^rd June, is bonfire night in our neck of the woods. It’s Saint John’s Eve. Its timing is a small notch off the mark for exact Midsummer but it’s near enough and that’s certainly a large part of why it exists and persists. It’s the final marker whereon you can stand and say you’re right in the middle of the Summer. After that, it’s downhill all the way. Or uphill, depending on how you care to look at it.

That’s what I want to type about today (and not for very long, I feel). My feeling about the passing of Midsummer and indeed the passing of the halfway point of anything at all. It makes me a bit sad. Not overwhelmingly, all-embracingly flattened or anything as dramatic as all that. More just a dull feeling that the best is now over and the remainder is just a swift run down into something less good.

That’s how I kind of feel now. Now that the Summer Equinox has been and gone. The best part of Summer is now over, as far as I am concerned.

It’s a feeling I try to quell and, to be fair, I largely succeed. There are still some days in June left to enjoy, I tell myself, and July and August will be pure Summer times, even though August is Autumn, really. There will be lots left to savour and enjoy. Why, Summer is really only beginning. I tell myself all this, and I largely believe in it, but through it all, there is a little voice in the back of my head wheedling and complaining. “You know that’s simply not true,” the voice says, “it’s more than half over now and so the best is gone and what’s left is only second rate at best.”

I wish I didn’t have that voice in my head but it’s always been there, ever since I was a little boy. I subconsciously calculate the mid-point of any span of time and then I judge the first half as being the best of times and the second half as being, effectively, an over-extended and inferior end part. I do this with everything. Holidays, Christmas, bank holidays, seasons, TV series, books, you name it. Whatever it is, it’s half-over now and the best is certainly not still to come.

I’m doing it right now. It’s the weekend, a lovely time, by all accounts. But Friday evenings are always the best, because they’re furthest from the end. Saturdays are fine and Sundays are just a slow counting-down into Monday morning, when the week will kick off again.

More worryingly, I quietly do this with life too. Not in a big dramatic awful way, as I said above, rather just that quiet little illogical voice in the back of my head (61 next week, it ain’t really going to get much better from here on out, is it?). Even as I typed the word ‘illogical’ in that last sentence-but-one, the little voice is going, “What’s ‘illogical’ about it? It’s only common sense.”

As I said, it’s a feeling I don’t just simply accept. I rail against it. I battle it constantly. It’s now 10.40am, Sunday morning. I have a lovely long Summer Sunday ahead of me, to enjoy and to savour, and that’s what I’m going to do. The book I’m reading will be even better in the second half, you’ll see. This second triangle of sandwich will be even tastier than the first.

But that little voice stays and stays and we all know why it does.

Because there’s some small measure of truth to it. That’s why. The Summer Solstice is now over and the next stop is darkness.

Not it isn’t. It’s just not.

Ah, but yes, it is.

Chucking it Around

 

It’s a line I’ve been hearing quite a bit lately. “If you’re throwing it away, you can give it to me, mate.” Or words to that effect.

You see I’ve been chucking money around, a bit willy-nilly, on the streets of my town and people are starting to notice and pass comment, as described above, so I thought I’d better address it here before it becomes a national issue or something.

The main thing to understand is that I am not deliberately throwing my hard earned cash around on the street. Those who know me will understand how that would be an unlikely scenario at the absolute best of times. No, indeed, that is not the case. My newfound profligacy has nothing at all to do with a renewed sense of charity or altruism. It is something different entirely.

In fact, if it has to do with anything at all, it has to do with the ‘Paternoster Lift Effect,’ which I may have just invented. Before continuing, we need to make sure that we all know what a paternoster lift is. So allow me to write a word or two on that. And please understand, I’m not being superior or condescending in assuming that you may not already know what a paternoster lift is. You, who visit this blog from time to time, are well-informed and highly intelligent people. In all likelihood, I do not need to say anything at all on the subject. You’re with me all the way. In fact, the only reason I do so now is because I have a sneaking suspicion that I myself would not know what a paternoster lift is, if I hadn’t had to learn about it in college as part of architectural stuff, where every form of lifting device has to be covered, if only in the most rudimentary of ways.

A paternoster lift is a lift that never stops moving. It is also open at the front, no doors at all, so you step on when it arrives at your floor and you step off again at your desired destination. It sounds rather like suicide as an option for vertical travel but I hear that they work okay. I tend to think of them - when I do, and that is rarely - as a sort of a vertical escalator. Constantly in motion, step on, move with it, step off. Fine. But it does tend to create imagery, doesn’t it? Half in and half out as the lift moves between floors. Cut nearly in two, like that poor guy in ‘Damien – Omen 2.’

I’ve never seen one. A paternoster lift. I’ve seen pictures. That’s one at the top there. They’re few and far between now, I reckon, but I think they still exist. I read somewhere that there’s one in The University of Essex and apparently there’s loads of them in Germany. Maybe someday I’ll get to ride one. Maybe someday I’ll just take the stairs.

“But,” I hear you cry, “what has all this absolute hooey got to do with the reason you are now throwing money around town with evident abandon?” How can I possibly equate an overlong section on an obsolete elevator-type with a new-found propensity for town-centre largesse.

It’s all very simple really. I used to enjoy not having a cover on my phone. Shoot me if you must but I enjoyed the sleek elegance, the futuristic nature of it. All that changed, as it was always going to do, when I dropped my sleek little phone, juggled it a bit between my hands, then saw it drop sideways onto the pavement. Shattered, my futuristic phone nirvana and the glass fronted face of the thing, all in one fell swoop.

So I bought a cover for it, after it had been repaired. But here’s the rub, the cover has a rim on it that runs around the perimeter and that rim creates a little edging around the side of my phone. So now, when I pull my phone out of my pocket to inspect or answer it, the coins in my pocket have sat into the rim around the phone and so, like on a paternoster lift, they are drawn up and out of my pocket on the edge of the phone where, once exposed to the outside, they proceed to fall off the edge and careen all over the street and people say to me, “I’ll have it, matey, if you’re throwing it away.”

So that’s it. My covered phone has become a paternoster lift for the coins in my pocket. I shall have to move the coins, or move the phone, or do something else entirely. But these things take time, you know? They can’t just be rushed into. Meantime, that one euro coin, right there at your foot. Yes, that one. That’s mine.

May I have it back, please?

Footnote - How did today’s blog come about? While thinking about what to write this week, I received a phone message and, in the act of pulling my phone from my pocket, I spilled a grand total of seventy-five cent out onto the pavement. “I know,” I said to myself, “I’ll write about that.” Whereupon another voice in my head said, “You’ll never manage 800 words on that.” And the first voice replied, rather defiantly, “Let’s just see, shall we?”

Have a good day, wherever possible.

(890 words)

The Frowning Nuns of Chiesa di Ognissanti

It was on a sortie to find some bottled water that I first happened upon the Chiesa di Ognissanti  in Florence. (Good start, eh?) It stood inconspicuous on an inconspicuous street and did not promise an awful lot from the front elevation. But the water was in hand, there was a moment or two to spare, and so I ducked inside.

Churches in other countries are often interesting and different. In Spain, the iconography all looks like Spanish people. Here in Florence was no exception, in fact it was extraordinary confirmation of the fact. The inside of Chiesa di Ognissanti was ornate and generous and filled with extraordinary things. Yet it wore its ornament lightly on its sleeve, giving every appearance of being a straightforward working church, with scheduled adorations, confessions, and cake sales all firmly on the notice board.

I didn’t stay long but I resolved to come back with Patricia and investigate the intricacies of the place a little more. I returned to the hotel, bottled water in hand. But not before I had witnessed the frowning nuns.

The church may be a working church but it is also a popular tourist destination. The legion visitors come in, they ‘ooh’ and they ‘ahh’ and they chat to each other and point and ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ a little more, which is fine, except there are people in the pews doing their everyday thing, trying to get a prayer or three under their belt. So, in a central seat, where they are hard to miss, sit two young nuns who are probably in their early twenties. Fully kitted out, they sit together and scan the aisles like wimpled hawks. They apparently have only one role, one raison d'etre.

They frown.

They frown at the touristy people who make a little too much noise for the respectful worshippers. They don’t frown enough to suggest that you should bugger off back to your hotel room with your bag of bottled water and leave us the hell alone. It’s a gentle frown, if such a thing can possibly exist. It’s a ‘please give us a break, we’re trying to get into heaven here’ sort of a frown.

I liked the nuns, almost as much as I liked the church. They were an unknown thing, their lives a complete mystery to me. Although, upon reflection, maybe less of a mystery to me than to many others. I was educated by nuns for my earliest school years and spent time in around the convent as a mass-server in my immediate pre-teen years. So maybe I know something. Lord knows what. As I watched the frowning nuns in the Florence church, it didn’t feel like I knew anything.

So I brought Patricia back some days later on the morning that we were due to get a train back to Pisa to fly home. We had both seen a lot of great stuff since I first sidled into the church so I wasn’t sure if it would still retain the wow-factor. Big ‘ol David is kind of a tough act to follow, after all.

I needn’t have worried about that. The church was even more impressive on my second visit because now we had some time to poke around together and unearth some the amazing treasures that sit openly on the walls, in the alcoves and, yes, even on the ceiling. There on the wall, a real-live Botticelli and, damn it all, if that’s not an amazing Giotto cross hanging over the left hand altar. Amazing, really. We were like the new Ripley, finding amazing artwork in dark recesses. We never had to insert a coin to light it up, unfortunately.

But was it a perfect visit? Well, no, it wasn’t and you’ll probably guess why. Yes indeed. The frowning nuns were nowhere to be seen. I had told Patricia all about them and was keen that she experienced them herself. Maybe even suggesting she go as far as to exclaim a little at some particularly striking fresco, just to get a little personalised scowl.

As we were making our way out by the right hand aisle, one the nuns magically appeared. In a highly incongruous move, she was brandishing a very late model cordless vacuum cleaner and she proceeded to hoover around the base of some timeless masterpiece with a studied but totally non-confrontational frown.

One other little thing happened. It doesn’t amount to a story or even, perhaps, to a satisfying conclusion to this little memory but here it is anyway.

Her hoover broke. Suddenly it wouldn’t work anymore.

The frowning nun frowned and frowned some more. She banged the side of the unit and shook it religiously. Then, rather memorably, she spoke. In neat, slightly accented English, she said, “Oh, no. Oh, no.”

And, if one was stretching it, one could perhaps imagine she was actually reacting to the ancient crucifixion scene she had so recently been cleaning up in front of. Frowning perhaps at a grand trio of sadnesseses: The elevated buzz of the tourists, the Passion of the Christ, and a complete and unexpected loss of suction.