A friend came to stay with me last October, and stayed, and I am delighted. He’s a friend of intermittent acquaintance over some 6 or 8 or 10 years, I forget exactly when we first met. Our meetings were always fairly intense, however, and, before he moved in, had included his coming over on two occasions in the summer, when I talked to him for eight hours and he to me for eight minutes. I was in fact surprised when he called to say he’d like to come over the second time.
We’d arranged to meet on another occasion a few years ago, pre-Covid, for dinner at a spaghetti place in Antwerp, after which, at his invitation, we climbed the tower at the end of Antwerp’s old harbour, which is the Museum van de Stroom, a concept museum that remains open till midnight, if all you want to do is mount the escalators to its roof for an outlook over the town. Upon reaching the summit, we were invited by a pastor who was there with a telescope to view the planet Saturn. We did. What an ethereal sense one gets from seeing, not a photograph of a celestial body but, rather, the real thing, in the stone, as it were. The pastor inquired whether we’d be interested also to view the planet Mars, and we readily assented. A few adjustments later and there it was, the Red Planet. In a gap in our chit-chat, a thought came to me as I regarded this wonder. “I know someone who is going here,” I said. The pastor’s answer floored me: “Oh, yes, that’ll be Brad Moore. He came to give a lecture to our astronomical group.” It can be a surprise when you meet someone, just like that, who knows someone you know. What astounded me with this coincidence was the fact that it wasn’t even an Earthly connection, but a Martian one. Brad is in SpaceX’s programme for Mars.
My lodger does Too Good To Go, which is the modern-day equivalent of what e-Bay used to be. E-Bay was where we would go to acquire an object of our desires, but refuse to pay a penny more than the rock-bottom price for which we could extract it from its owner. There was a time countdown, and as zero-hour approached, fingers would twitch on mouse buttons ready to outbid the next deadly rival by the whisker that would secure for you the prize.
There’s no bidding in Too Good To Go, but the fingers, they do a-twitch nonetheless: one minute after the goodies go up on offer, the package, it is a-gone, a-gone, and a-never called you mother. Unless you snaffle it, of course. And then, it can be that generosity knows no bounds, for, that evening, Kurt he doth return homeward, laden with the loot. For 4 euros, a pinch off, he returns with meat, veg and pre-packaged sandwiches for an army. An army of ants is still an army.
In the past, I would travel the States and be accosted by large, lit signs announcing “All You Can Eat for $10”, and it was construed to mean “Everything you can stuff down your gullet, and all you pay is ten bucks”. With Too Good To Go, it also means “All of you, every last one of you, can eat, for a total sum of just ten dollars.”
Brad and I appeared together on stage in, I believe, two productions. As the ribald pair of goons in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – he as Belch and me as Aigucheek. And in Kit Marlowe’s Faust, me as Faust and he as Mephistopheles – not the only occasion on which I have danced with the devil. He’s now back, last I heard, in Los Angeles, a city very close to my heart, not just for its fond memories of Orange County and friends of yore, but because of its function as dancehall for the devil and its counterbalance function of being a place of untold kindness and worthiness. When Sinatra sings of Nancy, he asks whether we ever heard mission-bells ringing, and, in that line, my thoughts turn to the missions of California. Tony Bennett’s heart, God bless him, he is still going strong, may well be in the northern cousin, but mine is for ever in Los Angeles, the city of the queen of the angels.
I do less dancing these days, and have become a stay-at-home Joe. Kurt, my new lodger, keeps himself to himself but our paths cross in the kitchen and we enjoy very much an hour of communal table of an evening, besides which he busies himself with mending what needs mending, and repairing what needs mending: he’s very much of a practical bent.
When I forsook Facebook, some were so very kind as to enquire why I was leaving. I will profess no prescience about the portal, but, besides my reasons as explained at the time, my decision was, I feel, vindicated by the subsequent controversies that the firm Meta has found itself embroiled in. I oddly felt a gap in my life in the months that ensued and decided to reinvest myself in a similar portal geared more to the business end of things, at LinkedIn. I also became interested in a web log published by a former US government minister, a certain Robert Reich, who can of occasion tend to the polemical but offered me a new insight into matters Stateside, and so I signed up for his “free version”. The website where he publishes, this one, has a button underneath that says “Start Writing”, and I pressed it in order to impart my thoughts to Mr Reich.
Instead, it led to a place where I could do much more than simply that: a place where I can impart my thoughts to the world, or at least to that portion of the world that wishes to read them. It’s this: The Endless Chain, and it’s a title not arrived at without some thought. A chain: a series of links, one connected to the other, leading from a starting point to an end point, forming a guide and a stronghold as it does, but simultaneously binding us in to its path, stretching between the anchor, where it starts, to the windlass, from which it is unwound. Without end, for those who believe it to be without end; with one, for those who don’t. A guide to those who see it as a guide; and a burden to those who must drag it along behind them. Straight, when taughtened by the haul; flaccid, when the effort lacks.