Wednesday 23 December 2009

the human race... don't you love it?... yes i do...

its the only possible way to cope with it
...

So, behind me as I write, the ancient shabby room of off-white, faded cream and faded olive green is being furnished with Christmas…
...
In our 17th Century Dutch hovel, bang central Fort Cochin… The elegant but grubby guttered Portuguese Dutch English Indian streets and houses of the Keralan tourist zone of Kochi/ Ernakulam.
The streets white and ordered and rough-edged… beautiful basilica of santa cruz… old houses … deep cool interiors through antique doorways… courtyards of drying spice… the strong scent of ginger in the byways of the, errr, strikingly named Jew Town…
…The clean streets stretching south out of the tourist zone into the filthy, the cluttered, the ramshackle and the stinking… where the Keralans live.
3-an-hour ferries, Chinese fishing nets, old Jewish quarter, fish landing, pushy restaurant touts, racks of colourful silk, parching heat, mosquitos with jagged rapier probosci, clandestine booze, female tourists in semi-Indian dress.
Our humble abode rickety, dilapidated, and none too clean…After some uncharacteristically up-market accommodation choices we went for ...the romantic shocking and characteristic cheap over the clean, sterile, ordered and expected…
Went for this… With the charm of the antique. And a sense of the unique. And a certain quasi-European mystique. Though at every step a… creak… And in the rain, I’m sure, a leak. And down the walls many a … streak.
Ahem. [Hoorah for bad poetry… of which I shall not, errr, speak]
...
So P is trying to not look on the dingy side of life… and we have to work at the room to make it pleasant. Clean it ourselves. Net it ourselves. Cool it ourselves… with an ingenuity we do not as yet possess….
Thick walls, old wooden shutters, heavy creaking floorboards, thin partition walls, stone balcony … all scuffs and mottles and streaks and stains and cracks and flakes and long-dead pipes and cobwebbed corners and hanging electrics and rough mortar and layered paint and ill-cornered colour and bowed wooden panels and paper-stuffed holes…
And a plastic Christmas tree with a garland of white flowerbuds, plus shiny hanging decorations and fresh flowers… All the product of five hours of hard-shopping over the water round Broadway where we wasted an hour queuing for Avatar, accidentally found, but couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and so kept shopping and struggling with the bustled noisy crowds thickening and thickening into the early evening, the barkers like honorary cockney wideboys… To return, not laden enough…
...
I love metropolitan ferries and river buses … Bangkok, Istanbul, Vancouver, even Winnipeg and London… The beauty of the ride and the water against how they’re matter-of-factly everyday, industrial even, and frequently filthy… The city reinvented from the water… The eye on the ferry, inches above the flat plane of luminescent silver-grey water, beneath a sky grey except where coalfire red from the unseen but sinking sun.
...
Its the oldest room P has ever stayed in… she says its like sleeping at her grandmother’s twenty-five years ago. While I once stayed in a 12th Century French basement so it’s probably [memory… memory] the, errr, second oldest room I’ve ever stayed in.
The 12th Century French basement was a weird one… near Aubenas, near the Ardeche, mid-South… this old woman gave me a lift and offered me the place… it was originally a tiny one-room house, the walls were more than three foot thick, and two bigger but not big rooms had been built on top of it, up the slope, a hundred years after… I remember driving up the thin valley to the plain it was on… hair-pinning our way up through the rock and green until we came out on to the wide shallow valley, itself an intricate and irregular patchwork of small green brown and yellow fields, which rose on both far sides to small hills… one of which was crowned with a village of white stone … the other with a village of black stone… the first the Catholic village, the second the Protestant village… the village in the white hats, and the village in the black hats… so, seeing as how that area had seen some awful religious wars, with many Protestant/ Huguenot communities being wiped out … and, oh yes, this being the human race… on at least three occasions the men of one village had, some ugly morning, snuck down one slope and up the other to massacre a sizeable proportion of the other village …
And still the villages sat there, the white and the black, facing each other with what seemed like an old and festered resentment
...
The human race… don’t you love it?… yes I do… it’s the only possible way to cope with it

... and the Portuguese, when they came, gave the Jews of the Malabar Coast much the worst time anyone ever gave them... pure anti-Semitic bloodlust... while they were building the original of the lovely Basilica

The human race… don’t you love it?… yes I do… it’s the only possible way to cope with it

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