Don't Ukraine on my parade
I blog about promiscuous sex, and what happens? The world joins in. Clive Owen on becoming a gay icon through The Children of Men: 'I'm putting it down to the fact my character is mean, rugged - and above all available.' And then Scarlett Johansson declares that it's 'irresponsible' not be regularly tested for STDs. 'One has to be socially aware. It's part of being a decent human,' she affirmed, adding that 'on some basic level we are animals and by instinct we breed accordingly.' So we can fuck like rabbits (on a basic level) but be socially aware (on a non-basic level)? Nothing like having it both ways, I guess. I've already admitted (in the YDN) that no-strings sex has its pleasures and, in a world with many small cruelties, is at least rarely designed to hurt the partner. But as for being socially aware - well, I'm now prohibited from giving blood due to my (gay) sexual history, which isn't very socially aware, I shouldn't have thought.
More words to be reclaimed: progressive (depends where you're going), democrat (very rarely used by believers in majority rule) and indeed Progressive Democrat (highly debatable).
Catching up with old friends at the weekend, a fellow former undergrad was reported as being a national champion at a French martial art.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. Presumably they run away, but do so very fiercely.
Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I was despatched to the Ukraine Embassy (Visa/Consular Section) in Notting Hill today. This is basically a dentist's reception area with two glass grilles, behind one of which you can collect visas for 20 minutes each day, so heaven help you if you can't make it between 11 and 11.20, and behind the other you can speak to a real person, a real person so obviously Ukrainian (blue eyes, broad forehead, slightly flattened features) that he could, with no trouble at all, be readily plucked from an identity parade of Eastern Europeans. This said archetype informed me that the passports I'd come to collect had been posted the previous day.
I questioned this. He confirmed it. And then I received the sort of smile that, in previous days, would have translated as 'your relative will be spending 30 years in the Gulag.'
To make matters worse, the damn Ukrainians beat Scotland 2-0. And it fluctuated between shower and downpour in London, cats and dogs and random quadrupeds, and now my suit smells like wet border collie.
Moreover, having been nice about the trains, this morning's return ticket from Birmingham to London cost £108 (not my money, thankfully). And it was delayed just south of Watford.
En route to the Ukrainian Embassy (Visa/Consular Section), I was stopped and asked directions by a couple. Now, what if my assistance enabled that couple to commit crime, eg burglary of a house on the street they were seeking? Moral: you are not responsible for the consequences of other persons' actions. You can only do the good deed (the right thing) and not give thought to the morrow. Okay, Kant (amongst many many others) got there first, but today was a nice illustration.
I also learn that today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day in the US. Okay, I'm gay. Now can I get on with my life?
And then because I was getting altogether too pleased with myself, God left me a copy of Metro in the return train, open at the METROscope. I believe neither in astrology nor Metro's version, but here was Leo for today:
'Forgiveness and compassion feature in your relationships now. Can you bring yourself to step down off your Leo high horse and see that others are only human - and that you're not perfect yourself?'
Mea culpa. For all some causes (and means by which they are promoted) rub me up the wrong way, I can hardly regard a 'Breast Cancer Month Awareness' group as anything other than unutterably right. For all I may believe my opinions are right (and if you don't believe yours are right, why precisely do you have them?), others may differ and even the ways in which they are wrong can illuminate my understanding. For all I think I have factored in the influence of my background, I can't possibly have learnt everything about a subject, and others from different backgrounds who matured with a different set of assumptions - I think of New Yorkers, for some reason - can help me defend my assumptions and sharpen my thoughts. One need not live in an intellectual or spiritual vacuum to do this. Everybody is agnostic at some level.
As well as little cruelties, life is also filled with many small kindnesses, some of which, being founded in restraint, will not be known this side of the grave. But it is well to thank God for them and to confess those moments when we did not offer such kindnesses. It is one of His great mercies that we can never know just what others have done for us.
I remain dubious about the wisdom or sanctity of public confession, at least in this therapeutic age, so I note that 'compassion' means not merely kindness or sympathy, but 'fellow suffering.' This emphaises its nature as a heavier spiritual task than 'mere' kindness, though kindness is not to be undervalued; but rather. as I think Charles Williams put it, its reciprocal nature as echo of and participation in the Atonement.
I can sympathise but hardly compassionate with the family of Paul Hunter, the snooker player who died this week just short of his 28th birthday. To be brutally honest, it came as a huge shock that somebody famous younger than me could possibly be dead, leaving a wife and baby daughter. Cancer is not a 'crime against our species', as the usually reliable Paul Hayward wrote in the Mail, but it is a killer of the young and innocent, and it is at these moments that the sky darkens and the Atonement looks very bleak indeed.
RIP.
More words to be reclaimed: progressive (depends where you're going), democrat (very rarely used by believers in majority rule) and indeed Progressive Democrat (highly debatable).
Catching up with old friends at the weekend, a fellow former undergrad was reported as being a national champion at a French martial art.
Yes, I know what you're thinking. Presumably they run away, but do so very fiercely.
Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I was despatched to the Ukraine Embassy (Visa/Consular Section) in Notting Hill today. This is basically a dentist's reception area with two glass grilles, behind one of which you can collect visas for 20 minutes each day, so heaven help you if you can't make it between 11 and 11.20, and behind the other you can speak to a real person, a real person so obviously Ukrainian (blue eyes, broad forehead, slightly flattened features) that he could, with no trouble at all, be readily plucked from an identity parade of Eastern Europeans. This said archetype informed me that the passports I'd come to collect had been posted the previous day.
I questioned this. He confirmed it. And then I received the sort of smile that, in previous days, would have translated as 'your relative will be spending 30 years in the Gulag.'
To make matters worse, the damn Ukrainians beat Scotland 2-0. And it fluctuated between shower and downpour in London, cats and dogs and random quadrupeds, and now my suit smells like wet border collie.
Moreover, having been nice about the trains, this morning's return ticket from Birmingham to London cost £108 (not my money, thankfully). And it was delayed just south of Watford.
En route to the Ukrainian Embassy (Visa/Consular Section), I was stopped and asked directions by a couple. Now, what if my assistance enabled that couple to commit crime, eg burglary of a house on the street they were seeking? Moral: you are not responsible for the consequences of other persons' actions. You can only do the good deed (the right thing) and not give thought to the morrow. Okay, Kant (amongst many many others) got there first, but today was a nice illustration.
I also learn that today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day in the US. Okay, I'm gay. Now can I get on with my life?
And then because I was getting altogether too pleased with myself, God left me a copy of Metro in the return train, open at the METROscope. I believe neither in astrology nor Metro's version, but here was Leo for today:
'Forgiveness and compassion feature in your relationships now. Can you bring yourself to step down off your Leo high horse and see that others are only human - and that you're not perfect yourself?'
Mea culpa. For all some causes (and means by which they are promoted) rub me up the wrong way, I can hardly regard a 'Breast Cancer Month Awareness' group as anything other than unutterably right. For all I may believe my opinions are right (and if you don't believe yours are right, why precisely do you have them?), others may differ and even the ways in which they are wrong can illuminate my understanding. For all I think I have factored in the influence of my background, I can't possibly have learnt everything about a subject, and others from different backgrounds who matured with a different set of assumptions - I think of New Yorkers, for some reason - can help me defend my assumptions and sharpen my thoughts. One need not live in an intellectual or spiritual vacuum to do this. Everybody is agnostic at some level.
As well as little cruelties, life is also filled with many small kindnesses, some of which, being founded in restraint, will not be known this side of the grave. But it is well to thank God for them and to confess those moments when we did not offer such kindnesses. It is one of His great mercies that we can never know just what others have done for us.
I remain dubious about the wisdom or sanctity of public confession, at least in this therapeutic age, so I note that 'compassion' means not merely kindness or sympathy, but 'fellow suffering.' This emphaises its nature as a heavier spiritual task than 'mere' kindness, though kindness is not to be undervalued; but rather. as I think Charles Williams put it, its reciprocal nature as echo of and participation in the Atonement.
I can sympathise but hardly compassionate with the family of Paul Hunter, the snooker player who died this week just short of his 28th birthday. To be brutally honest, it came as a huge shock that somebody famous younger than me could possibly be dead, leaving a wife and baby daughter. Cancer is not a 'crime against our species', as the usually reliable Paul Hayward wrote in the Mail, but it is a killer of the young and innocent, and it is at these moments that the sky darkens and the Atonement looks very bleak indeed.
RIP.
posted by BoB at 3:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home