Goodbyes

I left London on the 13th November 2010. Before leaving I was supposed to write a final entry to this blog. I wanted to summarise the way I felt, my thoughts about the upcoming future and my feelings towards the people and places that made my time in London so special and important.

However, I had no words. Goodbyes are weird things.

When you say goodbye you feel a bit like you are `breaking a contract` with your friends, your work, with London, with your life in general. And just like breaking a contract things change within a second, and you feel yourself become an outsider from that day-to-day existance that you have shared for so long with your mates, as though you have just jumped off some sort of ride.

Saying goodbye to all the people that have made my 11 years in London such an incredible time was difficult, and I found myself lacking the right words to really say how fortunate I consider myself to have met and shared my life with such wonderful people.

This is the legacy of one´s time in London- the lifelong friends you have made- and even though the city forgets quickly, the footprints of memory persist in some sort of parallel world where we will always be in London, in our 20s, doing the things we did and experiencing the emotions we went through together. That London - our London- does not forget, but quietly keeps these memories alive, like a small but significant secret that only few people need to know.

I can almost see the 19 year old myself jumping on the Piccadilly Line for the first time that first of September 1999. It was early afternoon. I had lots of bags and little idea of what was going to happen. Bizarrely, of that very first day I recall small things: the cold sunshine of South Kensington, the buzz of the city, that I was carrying the pot that I still use to make pasta, hearing someone saying 'Yep' rather than 'Yes' for the first time, the overall feeling of running towards a great adventure without being able to slow myself down.

Perhaps that 19 year old is still there, ready to start his great adventure, ready to live every year - every 365 days of London- as though they were his last ones.

There is a well down there.

Once upon a time people must have used that well. However, when I discovered it those times were long gone and the well stood there alone, in the middle of the verdant growth, covered by ivy and weeds. It was one of those old stone wells. I am not sure why it was there. I thought it was beautiful. There is something fascinating about things that stop being what they were created for and start being something else. A symbol, perhaps, or just the obvious proof that things are not always what they look.

I wonder whether immortality is nothing else than stopping being what we originally were meant to be, and becoming something that transcends that first purpose. For some reason that place became special to me. When things got too much or too crazy I would go for a walk through the forest, and either by design of some strange spell I would end up there.

In London we are surrounded by things that stopped being themselves and in that transformation they became immortal. The Tower of London, for instance, is not a fortress any longer - however it is a timeless symbol of the power and the history of this city. The same thing can be said about other sites (or just details) of London. Sometimes even people stop being just people and whether in life or death they become the symbol for freedom, love, or whatever else.

Becoming

Do you ever stop a second from your daily life and check back on what has happened and how you have become who you are now? The past and the the present are linked by a combination of events outside our control but also systematic decisions we have taken along the line that have reinforced our destiny. In a way it's a bit like becoming fat: it doesn't happen from one day to the next, but it is the result of systematic choices that we have made over a period of time. This might be compounded by things outside our control (e.g. low metabolic rate and all that) but ultimately we are the people that ate all the pies. Strangely we tend not to acknowledge this, and think about life as an unpredictable evolution of events, people we meet, things that happen. Perhaps there is too much to take in, and we simplify things in such a way that we take in very little.

If we take a step back and look at the 'deterministic' side of our life we might discover something very interesting about ourselves. One of these is that what we define as the 'loss of innocence' (the process by which we become less idealistic and innocent as we grow older) is actually quite the opposite: we become more innocent (i.e. free from wrong) over time, for we now would make less mistakes and self defeating systematic choices that we did in the past. In other words our younger selves were much more capable to make choices resulting in pain for themselves and others than our current selves. Ignorance leads us to trial and error. The younger we are, the more areas we need to discover. In doing so we are not Innocent, just blind.

This is a positive interpretation of growth, of becoming. As I said before we grow when we fulfil our potential. In doing so we become more free from wrong.

If I look at the myself on that very first flight to London when I was about to turn 20, and the myself now that is about to turn 30 (I bet you can tell which is which! ah ah) it comes to my mind all the choices, the mistakes, the lessons that 19 year old person was about to learn. He would look for happiness in the wrong places, he would get hurt, he would hurt others along the way, he would make necessary systematic choices. In so many ways I am more innocent now than I was back then, especially if you consider the place I was coming from. I wonder what the 40 year old me will think of me now, whether he will stop and check back on his own becoming.

An obsession for perfection

I find very interesting how obsessed we get with perfection and how much we hate our imperfections. We want the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect partner.

However, we have very limited empirical experience of perfection and if we were asked to define what the perfect body, job, partner etc look like we would probably struggle after the first few obvious and rhetorical words.

The truth is that we have probably never come across perfection. So why are we so obsessed in achieving it? Also, how can we achieve something that we cannot even fully describe?

Plato thought that when we die our souls ascend to a world of perfection, the 'Hyperuranius' (which yes it does suspiciously sound like 'Up your anus'), where we come across the Ideas. The Ideas are the perfect representation of everything. For instance, the Idea of 'pen-ness' is the perfect representation of a pen. Plato says that when we reincarnate in our next life we forget about the 'world of the Ideas', however our souls miss it so much that we spend our all life trying to replicate what we saw there.

Like when you wake up from a beautiful dream and you try to recollect it but you cannot.

In other words, we spend our whole life trying to replicate our experience of the Idea of pen-ness but can only master some shitty pens. We are never quite happy with our pens, but they are the best we can do. Plato's allegory is interesting because it brings to our attention that the acceptance of imperfection is not a weakness but a strength.

Accepting our limits and how much of those limits we still need to explore is the first necessary step to understand who we are.

Pushing ourselves should perhaps not be aimed at becoming something that we do not know (our so called perfect self), but it should a journey towards the realisation of our own full potential. Perhaps we are perfect when we have achieved our potential and become the best we can possibly be, rather than aiming for something which does not exist and never was.

Glee

Glee is the latest TV show that has taken Londoners by storm after a very successful first series in the US. The story is simple: take High School Musical, make it a little bit more grown up and turn it into a TV series.

The ingredients are all there: a group of kids that don't quite fit in but they bond over singing (and boy do they sing!), an inspirational teacher, an evil teacher who cares only about the cool and popular kids and who is against the singing club, some modern teenage themes (being cool at school and being losers at school, someone is pregnant, someone is gay, someone is fat, someone is disabled, others come from minorities etc etc) and lots of feel good singalong moments.

It all sounds perfect for Hana Montana teenage girls fans looking to branch out to yet another unrealistic American drama. So why does everybody love Glee? Women, men, young, old, commoners, celebrities, gays and straights?

Surely it is not because it reminds us of high school times: these TV shows are obviously written by people who have forgotten how awkward high school days were and keep portraying teenagers as super confident mini adults. My high school choir days were definitely nothing like Glee.

And it is not because we identify with any of the characters in particular: they all seem to be quite uni dimensional, characterised only by the one thing that they are (gay, cool, cute, ugly, loser).

These people are modern day's smurf. But then again, everyone loves the smurfs, and it might well be because their uni dimensional lives make more digestible the complexity of real people, including ourselves. It's like dealing with 'one thing at the time', rather than trying to make sense of all things at once.

Glee is like that. Each piece of the show represents something we are or we have been, whether it is a particular aspiration, a dream, a fall, an experience. Just like the smurfs Glee can simplify the myriad of things we have experienced when we were young and that have changed us forever.

But whilst in high school we spent hours in our rooms masturbating and trying to make sense of what was going on, the Glee kids just dance and sing it all off, and they seem happy and free at the end of it.

Perhaps Glee is much more realistic than we think. Just a little more abstract.

I hate it. However, I have seen all episodes.

What's your view?

Green Soup of Dreams

One of my 'signature dishes' is the Green Soup of Dreams. This soup will fill you up whilst providing you the great majority of your 5-a-day, and it is so low cal and low fat that it is perfect for Monday night detox or summer readiness routine.

It is so tasty that you can serve it as a starter when you have guests, accompanied with some nice bread. Last but not least it is the simplest soup to make which doesn't come already prepared in a carton. Give it a go and leave a comment.

How to make it (3 people).

1. Take a mid size pan.

2. Put inside the pan one red onion (cut in half), 3 garlic cloves (whole), 1 vegetable cube stock, half fresh chili, florets from 1 broccoli, half cabbage grossly chopped, a bunch of mushrooms, a bunch of frozen peas and either: a pinch of saffron or two tea spoons of curry spices.

3. Add water until all vegetables are covered. Boil the water and cook for 20 minutes.

4. Liquidise all vegetables, garlic etc with a bit of broth (the soup needs to be thick). Add a pinch of salt if needed.

5. Serve with black pepper, a gallop of fresh yogurt or cream of Parmesan (as you wish).

PS. The broth is very nice too, so you can serve it in an espresso cup as a pre-starter

PPS. You can change any of the vegetable with any other green vegetables of your choice (e.g. spinach, courgettes, etc).

The Mad Hatter

Strangely, I have always found Alice in Wonderland a story of great sadness and loneliness. After running away from a world which is far too small for her, following the hopping hope of self actualisation, Alice wanders through a complete unknown land, meeting characters that she is fascinated by but ultimately she is terrified by and cannot fully relate to. These characters look at her with interest but detachment, as though they are all more inclined in playing with her than saving her from dangers that appear to be trivial and irrelevant to anyone but her. Her journey is literally a journey of shrinkage and growth, of progress and regress. She is selfish but not egotistic in her path to asserting herself as the doer and not the done to. She goes from following instructions to fighting the establishment, but she never quite makes the status of hero. Her personality is sweet enough for people to take a second look, but anachronistic enough to be voted off the big brother's house on the first round.

Her time in the Wonderland changes her forever, it gives her insights that people in the normal world cannot even contemplate. You would think that going back home would be a blissful ending. In reality it's not. The experiences, range of emotions, dangers that she went through have made her aware of how limited life can be and how far those limits can be stretched in the right circumstance, and it all becomes a curse she cannot get rid of. In the normal world nothing is quite so 'wonderful' and she has to accept that she just won't be able to share with anyone perhaps the most important experience of her life.

Is London just like the Wonderland? In my time here I have seen so many people come and go. When they leave the look in their eyes is like Alice saying goodbye to the Mad Hatter. That looks says: it's all bonkers here and it's time to leave, but hey I will miss it.

Icarus' Fall

This winter seems endless. It is only the 20th of February but it feels like we have already gone through eight months of sleet and freezing mornings. The months between January and March are strange months in London. I wouldn't define it as a period of hibernation. Hibernation implies regrouping, resting, repairing. This period feels rather like as though the highs of summer and the festive season are necessarily followed by a balancing low. These are the months when we feel like Icarus falling. We call it 'I hate winter', 'SAD', 'fucking tube!' and in many other ways.

In those moments of high we feel like we must be experiencing happiness, for life seems so full, so meant to be like this. However, the slump that follows the high season always reminds me of the good old Greeks, and in particular Aristotle, who professed that long term happiness is never found at the extremes. A lot of religions and philosophies identify ultimate happiness as the lack of extreme emotions. One of the reasons for this is that extremes depend on each other to exist. In other words we can experience extreme happiness only if we have experienced extreme sadness. Aristotle thought that long lasting content is found in the removal of this rollercoaster of emotions.

Londoners do exactly that, they live through extremes. And perhaps that is why long term happiness is so elusive in London, and inevitably people 'move to the country', or seek the sun, or go for something less intense. Perhaps they do it for self preservation. In their mind they are making a life choice which is just a natural progression towards a happy life.

Perhaps they are just starting from scratch.