It’s one of those four letter words,
like kind and love and like and hate and road – this last in tribute the Romanian who rang the programme I did about four letter words, having explained no, I was not inviting bad language, to say it was her most important four letter word. When I asked why, she explained “It can take you to something you want very much, and away from something you dread.” I told her I couldn’t express that in Romanian, I will never forget her. And real is a powerful little word.
It’s the opposite of fake.
“It looked so real” we say and it is a profound compliment. “He’s just such a fake” we say of a politician we don’t trust, a public personality (usually an actor) we can’t like. Real food tastes quite different from the made up stuff and real trouble is real (underlined) trouble – in health, or debt, or relationships, personal or professional.
Part of my Christmas for the last three years has been a craft fair sponsored by Selvedge magazine.
I can’t remember how I got to the first – there’s a shop with the same name, I probably rang them, I’d read their publication – but I moved heaven and earth to go the next a year later. I found small special things, I looked and admired. Even the colour palette is uplifting. And this year reserving the tickets proved unbelievably complicated until the wonderfully named Hester said “I am sending you two free admission, print it out , forget it, nobody should have to go through this.”
So Annie and I went yesterday, to a beautiful church (St.Mary’s, Wyndham Place )
where the fair was twice as big as before and well lit and for nearly three hours all you heard was the happy buzz of people talking and making room for one another, and everything was real – wood, cotton in many forms, wool, velvet, gold, vermeil and silver. We didn’t buy very much, we wandered around happily, we came out into the hush of the back doubles of Marylebone, And I fell.
I don’t know how I did this — not drunk, no difficult shoes, beshert.
I missed my teeth, my nose, ankles, neck, even my glasses. I have a black eye which swelled up immediately and my left knee is bruised and grown painful so I shall have arthritis in both. Oh joy.
The pharmacist was sensible, had no ice pack and warned me that on blood thinners, one of the post stroke medicines, the bruising would be considerable. And it is. Was I dizzy, pain in the head, blurring of vision ? No. I bought arnica. We found an ice pack in the second chemist and had a late lunch/early supper in a restaurant I know where, as we waited for the bill, a handsome woman with a tiny mark under her right eye, came over and said “I can’t leave without saying to you, that will look so much better in a week !”
It was all real, real kindness, real consideration, real knowledge. Like the Bulgarian who sat next to me yesterday, before I had the black grape special under my eye, whose English was not fluent but remarkably pure. He was surrounded by a miasma of loneliness. And we managed a real conversation, real good wishes, real exchange. And he saluted as he got off the bus with the raised fist of solidarity.
That’s only happened to me once before, and never from a European.
While on the bus home I sat next to a young woman (she looked 10 years younger than she said she was, from Kildare) with her arms full of a splendid seven month old called Huck – as in Huckleberry Finn . And we talked about the Irish and how my father had told me “When you go there, remember, they are not English – the Romans never got there. They have their own history…” When she got off the bus, she hugged me round Huck and kissed my cheek – “Don’t change” she said.
You remember that tree I wrote about that I imagined hung with all the good and kind things that have happened to me ?
I think it’s real.
Annalog 