NICE BLUE

It’s a nice blue day today. I probably write about the nice blue days more than I do the grey ones, but that’s okay.

I went for a walk to try to clear my head. The sky was almost Scandinavian - I mean high with altocumulus, white clouds on northern blue, fresh and hopeful. The afternoon sun made long bold shadows. I liked it.

I’m not well today. I feel really run-down, and that’s resulted in a kind of flu bug that’s zapped my energy. Cue the coughing and spluttering and generally feeling sorry for myself. Perhaps, I think to myself, I ought not to mention it and just get on with all the things that need to be done - that seems like the kind of thing that (for example) Sammy would do. Soldiering on.

I don’t think I’d make a good soldier. The army tend to iron-out the daydreaming introspectives, and I can’t imagine it would go down well to stop mid-battle and describe the clouds.

A STROLL UP THE SEINE

I’ve been in France. Paris, to be precise.

I walked up the river last night, just as the sun was falling behind the silhouetted buildings either side of the Seine.

It’s such a curious city. I spent a lot of that walk trying to work it out.

It’s young. There were a lot of young people sitting in huddles near the edge of the sparkling water. Some smoke, some listen to music. Some dance! At one point I found a kind of amphitheatre where couples span each other round very gently, while a portable speaker played folky jazzy music.

There were joggers too. They sprinted past, bobbing up and down, looking cool. Twilight hid them in shadow as they ran under the arches of bridges across the river.

Notre Dame was lit up. I last saw it in the 90s, long before the 2019 fire ripped through the east end of the cathedral. It is still in scaffold, despite the remarkably tall flèche that poked proudly into the golden sky. It is quite the cathedral! To the west, it was draped in banners - the tricolor of course, and the crisp yellow and white of the Vatican. I quickly realised that they were preparing for a papal visit. It was the thousands of white chairs, the remarkably ornate lectern and gigantic bank of TV cameras that gave it away.

Through theatre town and the bright lights of cafes and bistros, the tall tapering shape of the Eiffel Tower rises above the salons and ateliers.

The river sparkled with both the fading light of the sun, and the reflections from party bateaux steadily churning their way up the Seine. Many I saw were crowded with Parisian partygoers, dressed in dinner jackets and evening gowns. The sound of music, laughter, and chinking glass carried easily across the water.

It’s hard for me to work out how none of this felt like the version of Paris I expected. It’s all there isn’t it? The cosmopolitan city of cool romance, the suaveness and sophistication, the energy and love, alongside the pure history and drama of this extraordinary place. And yet. Paris is a city like a lot of cities, somehow parodying the version of itself given to us by every inch of film we’ve all seen. It’s a good reminder that sometimes our version of a thing is not the truth, and that we should always be prepared for the truth to be… well, more disappointing.

Could I live there? Non. Was i inspired to pick up a paintbrush or craft existential poetry? Non. Was it the real Paris? I suppose it was. By the time I was walking back, it was dark and the river seemed an inky ribbon flowing under prettily illuminated bridges.

Paris is like its river then, I thought to myself. Wide, mysterious, and beautiful. But, I would wager, a lot colder and less friendly should you really fall into it.

CUPPA SOUPS

I had a cuppa soup today. It’s a sort of inevitability. Working from home means finding yourself in the kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors - it’s just the way of things. If Sammy wasn’t so good at hiding the snacks, I think I’d be in some degree of trouble.

Anyway, eventually one of those cupboard doors swings open to reveal packets of instant soup. And that day was today. Chicken noodle.

Who knows what French people make of cuppa soups. It’s powder in a sachet you pour into a mug, then stir with boiling water. Fine for your emergency travel kit. Lunchtime on a normal Monday in a fully working kitchen? The cuppa soup is to cuisine, what painting by numbers is to mathematics.

I poured in the hot water from the kettle. Tiny circular noodles danced in the swirling foam - a brownish liquid the colour of milky tea. Teaspoon in, give it a stir… liquid. Would it thicken? No. Is the debate about whether a cuppa soup is a drink or a soup over? I’d say so. This was watery slop with noodle life-rings, presumably desperate to get out of the abyss as they bobbed round the mug.

I drank it. There’s no spooning it up with a soup spoon or tipping it away from you like it’s vichyssoise. No the only thing you can do with this kind of slop is knock it back. It is in a mug after all. So I did. I drained it. I slurped it like a hot chocolate and then tipped the sunken soggy noodles down my throat. That’s protein I suppose. But so salty! Why is there so much salt in these things? It gives the impression of hot bilgewater, expelled into the sea by a ship’s pump. Salty, frothy and brown.

I had a pal at uni who lived off pot noodles. Paul his name was, but he looked so much like 90s Liam Gallagher, he ended up being called ‘Our Kid’. Nice guy, but always hovering round the kettle. I think about Our Kid sometimes, wondering what he’s up to. He was peaky by Christmas. And to be fair, he soon migrated away from the snack pots.

I’m going to have to have a word with Sammy I think; see if she can’t find a way to sanction and ration a few snacks. I say ration because, yes, I am the type of guy who’d chomp through two packets of Oreos in an hour. Absent-mindedly of course, persuading myself that they help me concentrate.

I can’t be glugging down cuppa soups all week.

DREAMING SPIRES AND FIZZY POP

I’m in Oxford today feeling typically beleaguered and inadequate. It doesn’t help that the town is currently teeming with teenagers.

What is Oxford University playing at? Are they letting twelve year-olds in? I just passed a gaggle of them spilling onto the high street as though looking for fizzy pop and monster munch. Students used to wear scarves and pretend to be intellectuals. Or they’d bounce around in tutus rattling a RAG week tin. You don’t see that any more, do you? They were grown-ups weren’t they? Where are the berets and the philosophers? Come to think of it, where’s the tweed and brogues? This is the city of Dreaming Spires after all! No, what Oxford has, it seems, is a massive youth club.

It’s a nice enough day out there. Summer clouds and a warm blue sky. The trees are typically Autumnal now, and the sun hangs just a little too low and gleams white rather than warm yellow. The shadows are long too, falling in stripes across the pavement of bikes and teenagers.

So why ‘beleaguered’? I just feel a bit overwhelmed with everything at the moment. In lots of ways I’m skimming life, just about surviving my way between crises. It is exhausting - like being surrounded on all sides by potential problems but only having enough strength to fight them one at a time. I don’t dare consider how many of them there are.

And why ‘inadequate’? Maybe it’s these students just beginning the journey of their lives. Can you imagine only having lived for less than two decades? What must that be like? And to still have six or seven ahead? In this agonising world! I don’t envy them. And yet, perhaps I do. Or worse, perhaps I envy myself, similarly green, similarly young, floating my way through university, with unknowable energy and potential. And looking like I was twelve, no doubt.

THOUGHTS FROM THE INTERSECTION

Okay so something is up. Tough news at work today: one of my colleagues died.

He wasn’t someone I knew particularly well; I sat with him on a train last year, and I knew him to smile at. But still. Difficult.

It follows on from the shock and grief of Big Church Festival. There are enough people writing about that, and I don’t want to wallow in. The overwhelming emotion around (in church circles anyway) seems to be a kind of dull shock - as though it could have been any of us. Which of course it could. But wiser heads than mine have unpacked all that.

My question for God is a bit more self-centred. I’m wondering why this year has been so filled with grief. I suppose, statistically, people die all the time, so yes, it’s only likely that every now and then the stats bunch up - like buses, if that’s not too flippant to say.

Nevertheless, it does feel like something’s up. Is God softening my heart? Is this a season with a reason? Is it okay to imply (which I may just have done) that he’s somehow behind all this?

You can see why it needs wiser heads. My theology isn’t quite able to wrap itself around grief yet. I don’t feel mature enough, even though I sit at the intersection of faith, life, and death far more than I realise.

My colleague was young. Late 30s perhaps? He had a wife. Somewhere in Paris. Terrible thing really.

It is possible that God uses situations like this to work good. Maybe that’s the softness of heart I’m feeling - a lesson learned from pain and loss that heaven knows, can’t be learned any other way.

I miss Paul. I miss all that he was, and all that he could have been. I miss Heather. I still see her laughing at me sometimes and I wonder how I live in a world that neither she or he is in. It doesn’t really compute.

I’ll hold Sammy a little closer tonight, I think.