20th June 2001
Chasing Barnet

End of the World
10:52. I'm sitting here in the hospital canteen eating a very oily and not particularly palatable breakfast, pontificating on the ways life is unfolding about me. Okay, maybe not pontificating, just wondering. Pontificating sounds too poofty, too prissy, too constipated... which is conceivably how I'll end up after this meal is done. Note to self : read up Hirschsprung's disease...

So. I'm at Barnet General Hospital, at the End of the Northern Line. The first time I got off the train at High Barnet station, I was struck by the way the track just... ends. Slightly beyond, a thick copse of trees stretches meanderingly on as far as the eye can see either way. There's a chain-link fence running just in front of the mini-forest, emphasising the finality of it all. Train. Stop. Here. World. End. Here. It's like being in one of those ancient apple II computer role-play games... do any of you remember those? Where you could just pick a direction and walk until your party ran up against the End of the World. Sometimes it was an invisible barrier you just bumped futilely into trying desperately to get to imaginary rewards on The Other Side. As programs got more sophisticated, more plausible obstacles appeared - infinitely-stretching mountain ranges or forest, interspersed with boulders, or city walls, or...... In real life it's a chain-link fence at the end of a railway track, labelled curiously enough, London Underground - do not tresspass. I confess, at times I feel like walking up against it repeatedly to see if I get that gratifying dull beep noise signifying an invalid operation...

Having concluded my pre-amble ramble, I'll move swiftly on to the blood, gore and sex you're all waiting for... oh, sorry. No sex please, we're English...

Guests should be seen and not heard
A friend of mine has written about another friend of mine's predicament. Whilst consoled by the reaffirmation that I have more than one friend (:p) I found that just a little unethical (for personal reasons only I will probably ever understand). I'm more the sort to try to help the bloke solve his dilemma, without waving his dirty linen around, even if all names had been removed from it (Calvin Klein, etc...) I suppose for all my "open" writing I remain a very "closed" person. What really irks me though isn't that she wrote about it - I don't hold anything against her for approaching life differently to myself; I'm the one who's weird - what irks me is the responses she gets in her guestbook. Her faithful crowd of almost cult-like followers writes little "encouraging" snippets after every post she makes, giving their own 2 cents worth on any and everything she writes. Nothing wrong with that either, except when the 2 cents worth tend to roll around in a disgustingly fawning manner... And they try to desperately apply everything she writes to their own liffle humdrum lives - nothing wrong with that, either - unless you've never experienced anything like that yourself and are just mis-applying the tragedies of which someone writes to your own rather unremarkable life. Let her, as the writer and voice of wisdom have her own little shelter from the maddening crowd in her own little internet-abode, I reckon. The "noise" on her guestbook page is such that you can't discern the real and sincere from the superficial anymore.. or , quite possibly, this is just me being strange, and trying in my own flawed way to empathise through my own life-experiences.

My page is a safe-haven - for myself. Largely unpublicised, largely unread except by a specific few. My guestbook, a room within that haven for trusted friends and perhaps the rare passerby, to leave their marks, just to remind me that they're still there, to "touch base". I like it that way. I write, as I have written before, for myself. To express feelings I mightn't necesarily do in real life, to put to paper thoughts I might not want to forget, to leave occasional personal notes to friends. God forbid if my guestbook ever became a critical, or rather, uncritical appraisal / praisal page. I don't care what readers think about the things I write, or the way I write them -- to my mind, at least, I know that I write well enough to make my points understood, and occasionally, powerfully enough to make grown men cry (subliminal onions, that's my secret...) If they should glean pearls of wisdom from the experiences which I pen, and apply them to their own lives, then so be it. Good. If you want to tell me all about it, by all means -- email me. Or leave a private message in the guestbook I suppose.

Perhaps the real difference is simply that I'm an intensively private person under a deceptive guise of eloquence. Words come easily, when they mean nothing at all...

World without end
More sweet nothings -- I've been thinking about limitations, having just learnt some paediatric neurodevelopment. I think most of us aren't limited by our abilities; I think, in fact that most of us have never even begun venturing anywhere near to the limits of our abilities, because we're crippled by the perceptions of the people arond us, and the rules they overtly or subtly impose on us. We're told we can't; we're told we're not good enough; we're told we're untalented - and so we're afraid to try; afraid to explore the depths around us to which we can plunge, or the heights to which we might soar. A blind baby takes far longer to learn to crawl than a sighted one - to him, the darkness all around represents a poteential abyss, the floor around him, in the absence of his mother's benevolence could just disintegrate into nothingness and send him hurtling into the great unknown, and unimaginable harm...

In much the same way, many of us fear to take those tentative first-steps. I have many steps I burn to take, and have taken comparatively fewer than I would have wished, but those that I have - Fencing! Debate! Dancing CEROC! Studying medicine! Daring to break my own heart even... those I treasure, and am grateful for... Each crack we make in the shell we wear around us brings us 1 step closer to the light of day that all of us, consciously or subconsciously yearn for. (and don't give me that NHS line about the light at the end of the tunnel being discontinued due to financial difficulties...) It's not hard to be talented - It's hard to dare to start trying...

The Kingdom, power and Glory
I visited the hospital chapel today for a brief half-hour. I don't do it often; I've passed through countless hospitals now without ever stepping foot into these little sanctums of absolute peace, in the midst of the chaos of life, death and suffering. Whilst there, I observed that only the sad and stricken ever visited, with their pale, waterlogged handkerchiefs pressed to their pale, waterlogged faces... and it set me wondering. Why do we only remember Christ in the depths of our grief? The message He left us was to remember - but in joy, and gratitude, surely?

Joy and gratitude - something you find in many contemporary Christian churches today, untempered by the sobriety that pervades most of the more conservative Anglican and Catholic churches. Those just aren't "cool" anymore to the layperson, apparently. I've argued the need for sobriety several times now with friends, who sometimes become defensive. I don't see anything wrong with rejoicing and being glad, but I think at least that there's a role for sombreness as well. I can't help but feel intimidated - and slightly aggrieved when I step foot into a happy-clappy charismatic service (fortunately, I've not done that often in this life...) because there isn't any sobreity at all. No sanity. No checks and balances. Nothing to ensure the maintenance of propriety. No sense of posterity, no... remembrance. Revelling in the now and hoping for tomorrow, but forgetting the "then" - except to fleetingly pay lip service to it. The point of ritual, of sobriety is to stop us sliding into the moment. To stave off the eventual degeneration into profanity. Prophylactic religion, almost... "Christian" cults are, to my mind the end result of forgetting how to be sombre...

End of the Word
It's funny how some people spend lifetimes looking for something, and never find it, whilst others set themselves to dedicatedly not-looking and get run over by those same things. It's also funny how, when you really need to say something truly significant, you struggle... because the significance somehow makes everything hang in the balance... Enough time wasted... I have to get back to my books now. I'll just end with a vocal refrain (complete with melody, but you'll have to imagine that) that's been running through my mind all day for some reason... "you're all that I need, but am I all yours?"

finito