The ups and downs families go through

Sitting on the coach carrying me towards Cardiff down M5, I was thinking of my friends and acquaintances in the capital of Wales. I looked forward to meeting them. There were two exceptions, though. One was a politician friend of mine whom I owe some money* and whom I decided not to contact before I repay the debt (no, it’s not as simple as you think: he is a generous person and I guess he’d be more happy to see me that get his money back; my decision was to motivate myself, not to spare myself an awkward moment – more a punishment than an evasion. Deep down, you should know, I am a man of honour: I may forget to repay my debts, but I never forget that I have them).

The other possible meeting caused me much more anxiety. I was to see after many years one of my closest friends in Cardiff and one of the most upright men I’ve ever met in my life. He was Muslim and had lived for many years away from his family. When I first met him he had just got engaged to his long-time flame during a recent visit to his native country. He had known the girl for many years, but until the formal engagement he had never had been with her on her own. I smiled - sympathetically – at the stories of their rare encounters and all the chaperoning by various siblings, cousins and friends that needed to be arranged. Thousands of miles away and separated for long months from her, he had remained faithful to her despite many unprovoked temptations. This is what he told me and this is what I saw during the time we worked together. Conscientious, hard-working, truthful and brave – Adnan was a true Muslim gentleman.  

Apart from warm family and neighbourhood, we talked about Islam and Christianity. We spent long hours discussing issues, each of us respecting the other one's deep conviction of the superiority of his religion.  He also told me a lot about his country, the great city he came from and his family.

I grew to know his folks. It was a close-knit and loving family. His dad was a lecturer at some college, his mom - a powerful and higly respected figure in the family - a housewife. I can't remember what his brothers did, but all in all, it was a family I could relate to (including the slightly over-bearing mom); a family that went through the normal ups and downs that tend to happen to close-knit, loving, families across the world; ups and downs through which the family I know best has gone too – with one exception. And I nearly shivered at the thought of what his voice would sound like, what his eyes would look like, what his thoughts would be like when I asked him about one kind of those ‘downs’ that has just crashed - or rather: has been crashing - on the heads of his family.

When I phoned our former employer for whom I expected Adnan to be still working (he was a very loyal man in all ways), I was told he had left some time ago. “Do you know where he is now?” I enquired. The reply which I got was even more painful than meeting him and looking into his eyes would be:

“Back in Aleppo.”

A prayer for Adnan & his folks: Allah, let them survive and enjoy peace. Should Your, oh All-Powerful, will be different, let them enjoy eternal happiness with their Christian friends.

*Actually I should feel quite good about it: at long last I owe money to a politican, and not the usual other way round.

(photo: via euronews.com by REUTERS/SANA)

Repetitio est mater studiorum

First*, just a little poignant thought: how many of you – the twenty-odd readers of (or stumblers into, so to speak) this notebook – did notice how late it was when I was setting out for that southernmost rock of Cymru? How many were concerned for me? How many thought of posting a warning in the comments section? .... Ha...., it's just a blog to you, isn't it?

Anyway, there was no way I could reach that extreme bit of Wales leaving more or less central Caridff at 3 p.m, unless I was prepared to walk in the middle of the night - and I wasn't.  So I reached Penarth instead (where a surprising number of my over-ambitious trips end) and rather than risk my life clinging to crumbling cliffs overlooking the cold and uninviting waters of the Bristol Channel, I ended up doing an urbane stroll down Penarth's more elegant sectors, full of late-19^th  and early 20^th century architecture.

This architecture never fails to put my imagination into overdrive, but at the same time I find it reassuring - just like the seething but seemingly umovable Victorians that lived in it (the architecture), and like the Empire they'd built.  Another thought, very bracing, that Penarth always triggers in me is how a mixed band of business-orientated aristocrats and some breath-takingly entrepreneaurial locals of lower classes wonderfully transformed the area into one of the world's most dynamic industrial and mining hubs. And don't we all love places that are going places?

So I was winding my way down the dark streets of P., when a house attracted my attention. It was a relatively new structure, but it was making conspicuous** nods towards older styles and conventions. I stopped and began to wonder whether I liked that approach or not (in a simar way that I always wonder whether or not I like Jabłonowski Palace in Warsaw***).   

Suddenly, and without a clear reason, I remembered standing outside another house, in Sydenham in South London. I was there with a friend of mine. Our medium-sized unlisted company (which is how I presented our venture to unsuspecting customers; in fact I was the Chairman of the Board, the Marketing Executive, the P.A. to the Marketing Executive and part-time labourer; he was all the others) had just bagged our first building job in London. We had been talking there for a few minutes, glancing from time to time up and down the impressive turn-of-the-century edifice on the outskirts of the Crystal Palace Park and speculating how many more jobs we could squeeze out of it. Then when a small car pulled over next to us and two young women got out.

“You’re not …?”,  asked one of them when they passed us on their way to the house’s main door. The question included a phrase I didn’t know, so I asked her the meaning. I got it and greeted it with laughter. (I can’t remember all the details, but knowing myself I may well have asked the woman to repeat the phrase a few times to help me memorise it and give me further examples of its typical usage). Then I reassured her that “we weren’t****”

So now, standing outside that house in Penarth the situation and the phrase came back to me. I smiled and repeated the expression aloud a few times, an old learning habit of mine, just to make sure it’s available should a need arise to use it.

As luck would have, just then a small car pulled over across the street. A friendly, (foolishly) tax-paying, middle-class family got out and must have noticed me immediately:  standing outside their neighbour’s house, in dodgy trainers, a pair of jeans showing a lot of wear-and-tear, with my Cockney kind of cap on, unshaven, intensively looking at one of the windows (if fact at the ornamental bits around it, but how could they have known?) and saying to myself: 

“Casing the joint… casing the joint...”

 

*Possibly inventing a new stylistic device – let’s call it past-edit - I decided to un-post some stuff I’ve already posted in order to achieve consistency and an unobstructed transition for this text (that was if fact written before the removed posts, which I’ll re-publish soon).

**a silly adjective to use when discussing architecture, I guess.

*** which was simply rebuild, but with the modern interior and modern materials used it does feel like a a through and through modern building pretending to be like  old one - and not just a reconstruction).
**** but in a way, we were.

 

Make Yourself Necessary

There are contingent beings that go and necessary beings that continue.
I am evidently contingent.
Mission: make myself necessary - and stay.


(Only God is necessary; mission: make myself - with some help from a friend - ...; anyway, it's beyond my imagination, but it seems - doesn't it? - like a safe, reasonable bet to cling to God like mad.)

Philosophy (the Executive Summary)

At the end of the philosophical path there are no answers, there is no understanding,

There is only staring at (and - if you're still able to - contemplation of) nothing; or the Lord.

Photo: Ubeda+Flandes?

The Intelligent Samaritan

"...it is one thing to say that the relief of poverty and suffering is a duty

 and quite another to say that this duty can always be most efficiently and humanely performed by the State. Indeed, there are grave moral dangers and serious practical ones in letting people get away with the idea that they can delegate all their responsibilities to public officials and institutions.

...Once you give poeple the idea that all tis can be done by the state, and that it is somehow second-best or even degrading to leave it to private people - it is sometimes refered to as 'cold charity' - then you  will beginto deprive human beings of one of the essential ingredients of humanity: personal moral responsibility.

...If you allow people to hand over to the State all their personal responsibility, the time will come—indeed it is close at hand—when what the taxpayer is willing to provide for the good of humanity will be seen to be far less than what the individual used to be willing to give from love of his neighbour.   So do not be tempted to identify virtue with collectivism. I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?

 ...the role of the state in Christian Society is to encourage virtue, not to usurp it."

[Margaret Thatcher, at St Lawrence Jewry, City of London, 1978]

PS And here is the infamous and misrepresented line, in full context: "There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people, and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves, and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate."


(From now on if someone uses the 'no society' quote against that brave, generous and wise woman, I'll punch,or at least insult, them.)

A Creator’s Flagship* or Freaks of Nature?

"...with the gun of death pressed against your head..."

(if you don't mind me qoting myself)

Immersed in a stillstand-bound universe (about to blow up**), rounded up by nature that doesn't give a damn (or which damns, actually), with the gun of death pressed against our heads ...dreaming of eternal happiness - who the hell are we??  

*with a hole in the hulk designed by a mad angel and cut out by a greedy couple;

**just covering more possible options; I wouldn’t like to put anyone off my blog owing to my being conspicuously unscientific, but I have to admit I don’t keep up with physics - as a metaphysician, all I need to know, I guess, is that I sometimes trip over it.

Top photo: (via: http://elitedaily.com; the story: "Man Accidentally Kills His Friend After Putting Gun To His Head To Scare Away His Hiccups") 

Bottom photo: us  (via: calvarychapelabuse.com/wordpress)