Ecce Romano 6: My Thanks to Britta

"Fear is such a charlatan... it hammers on your door like a bailiff with piles"

It's been some time, but then I say that a lot these days.

For lunch my father walked me, with now obvious zeal, to a reastaurant he knew of near Marylebone. I remember its layout so clearly I imagine that I am still digesting my meal and even in memory that place functions as MY dining bar would function, in the future, or in another life, if only there were someone hanging around to perceive it.

Let it flow now, dear reader.....

Walk in off the street alone or with a friend. Sit either up at the bar counter (on the right) or at a banquette style booth (yup, on the left) and order at your leisure from a short menu. The food arrives either through a hatch behind the bar or within a dummy lift drawn from the basement kitchen.
Eat
Talk
Pay
Leave Happy

That day, hmmmm, 14 years ago, we ate salt beef sandwiches on rye with gherkins and mustard so hot your eyes bled on the table cloth. We had a short glass of lager apiece and my father downed an espresso in one. In and out in 30 minutes.Perhaps it all started there? How odd. A dining bar is all I would ever wish to own. Life is good. It must be, I just said so didn't I?

It will be light soon. I cannot sleep so I have made a tea of the following ingredients:Verbena, mace, cinnammon, rosehip, cardomom, star anis, dried ginger root, cloves and a few other anonymous spices. Royal Tea, as a berber from the middle Atlas called it.

I cannot help but let my thoughts wonder off into the long grass. How will all this be? How will that? And will I be more lonely, or less? I have suffered from impatience more than many.

I drank warm milky tea in my bottle as a baby. Hot mugs of strong, milky, sugary tea were the first of many subsequent vices. Coffee had its fun with me in my late teens, it still abuses me from time to time. In my 28th year it reached its terrible zenith, and I did suffer.

This tea is good but I do not yawn. I have rolled another cigarette and remembered why it is that I do not yawn. It is the latent effects of marijuana (and the late coffee of course) that conspires against my aching back. A bar or two of a song plays repeatedly somewhere and thoughts, like families of curious tourists, offer passing comments and reflections as though I am lying half dead in the street, as though I don't even have a say. There is certainly not a place on Earth where I could find peace from this steady procession of thoughts, mourners at a wake with an eye for the bar. Never a dull moment.

But during those ugly times when I feared for my ultimate state I had the savvy to learn some tricks. Can I take credit for that? Hell! Why not?

There is never one thought. They grow from one another until they die out and one finds oneself back again staring into the Great Real. And when one has returned that is the time to smile, yawn even and imagine it all on the other side, a player in your own fantasy, made up as you go. Fear is such a charlatan. Always using the same old tricks to hoodwink you, steal your pocket money and pack you off in a cold sweat down some deserted pier with nothing but a broken lampshade and a fistful of broken dreams.

It hammers on your door like a bailiff with piles, but only when you are tired, only when the planets have got it in for you. Then it sells you crummy advice on a promise, makes noises of distrust about your lover and leaves with your last truffle trodden into the rug.

In a quiet moment, lie back and watch the thoughts do their thing. When they leave you, pick up the last one by its tail and make it walk back through the train, pointing out the sights on the way. If you can work back through five or six of these trains you might learn a few things.

Things I learned:
1. I am not responsible for my thoughts.
2. I have a choice in whether or not I allow a thought to develop or morph into another.
3. Fear doesn't give two craps about me.
4. Fear needs a negative thought like the devil need an invitation.
5. Anxiety is the clue, I work back through my thoughts from the first moment of angst. What caused it?

Honestly, this wasn't planned and you probably don't want to hear about it. Well good luck to you. I've been feeling lonely, blue all day and I miss that German girl with the terrible English. She was brave enough, looks that made me thank God, and she made me laugh out loud, over and over, until I needed a damn nurse or a some massive Turkish masseur to thump me on the back. Damn she made me laugh! Haven't laughed like that since I was a boy, before those dreams that changed everything, made me think. Love to see her again, have some lunch, smile at one another. Hell, I'll fly over for the day, anything to laugh like that again!

Poxy romantic....

Ecce Romano