On the road... 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

The Obsessive Diary

The beautiful and the damned at Electric House on Tuesday night where I got dinner before the kitchen closed, I sat at my favourite corner table from which I can see most others, they were on the banquets through the arch. He looked like Jim Morrison, it was impossible not to stare. His companions an inch less stellar but with that jagged razor of wild that would see them step too close to the edge. They didn’t see me. Even as I did a fly by to get another angle. They were polite to the waiting staff. Jim Morrison was used to eyes upon him. He centred their table. I wondered if all three of them were nice.

At Euston station the next morning sweating in the closeness of departures, not enough sleep, a heavy bag hauled from tube to concourse, coffee in one hand, a salad already collapsing in a bag. A man twisted with demons and propelled by some sort of rage weaved through the crowd, a small wide woman followed in his wake. I wondered if he ordered her to walk ten steps behind him or she did it for her own sake. They were locked in relationship. I put on my merkaba.

The sluice gate opening of a platform called, the crowd that was me moving as one, the cries and laughter of a man and woman: They looked the same! I’m so sorry! Thanks so much! Oh my God they looked at exactly the same! Two silver suitcases, handles up, ribbed sides, solid and hard and a story revealed itself of strangers happening to stand side by side with identical pieces of luggage. A misdirected hand, a distracted take, a comedy of errors that brought two people together on a crowded day. Would they fall in love? Would they never see each other again? As I descended the ramp I wondered at what point they realised the mix up, ran, said excuse me, I’m so sorry, but -. They were happy about it, laughing and full of apology. It was a beautiful thing.

A Quaker accompanied me all the way to Glasgow, an MA from Birkbeck, a medical journalist and researcher with tendrils reaching into the Society of Apothecaries, she was writing a non fiction paper when it become clear as Preston gave way to Penrith that a novel was trying to get out. I’m a story teller she said and I replied, Yes you are.

The walk from Glasgow Central to Citizen M may as well have been New York City in 1891. It all became clear in the baroque swirls and gothic curls of red Scottish stone where Carnegie got his ideas from; nineteenth century Manhattan is this green place - Central Park and Carnegie Hall, the original Gotham City.

Glasgow Women’s Library once the main library for that side of town, built and filled by Carnegie, the men’s reading room twice the size of the women’s at the time, the children with their own entrance round the back. It’s been in the hands of women for over a decade now and equality reigns. All are welcome. We gathered around a large low table made of outsized black slices fitted together like cake for purpose. A happily crowded room, wonderful humans, all, we talked Greenham and Fallout for almost two hours.

At the end a Polish woman asked me to sign her book with something I’d said. I knelt to lean on a chair and wrote, No fucker has the right to tell you who you are or how to live. She told me about the shock of coming to the UK in the nineties from a Socialist country where gender equality was written into the blood and constitution. I heard a pregnant woman turn down the offer of a seat on the bus claiming it was an insult to her principle. What is the second wave feminism? It makes no sense. I had to agree. I like having the door opened for me. So do I. When ideology imposes its weight over ideas which spring easily you have the makings of a scene confused by its own presence. Always offer to carry my bag. I will not turn you down.

Eleanor