Here I’ll stay

Two years ago, when I’d just moved into this house and couldn’t get online, I’d go to the internet café on the Desborough Road and compose a blog post in an hour. One post, “Being Ordinary”, is an example, perhaps the only one, and didn’t work out too badly. Where did that simple spontaneity go? Two years ago is distant like childhood— and close at hand like yesterday.

The Desborough Road—having fictionalized its name, I can talk about it freely. It’s on my most direct route to the centre of town. None of the shops is part of a big chain, almost all are run by immigrants or at any rate cater for immigrants: hairdressers, take-away food outlets, groceries, newsagents, funeral parlours, pharmacies. On the other side there are blocks of flats; churches, one of which holds all the big Afro-Caribbean funerals, which when they occur tend to disrupt local traffic; a launderette, Pakistani beauty parlour, pizza take-away and one of the finest old-fashioned hardware/ironmongery stores in England, specialising in tools for the furniture industry. It’s a reminder of what was, like the Victorian factories still standing, though few make furniture any more. How does this place of exile appear, to the migrant workers who buy international ’phone cards and transfer money by Western Union to Poland, Zimbabwe, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Karachi? I can only guess, having at times like them lived as an expatriate. I’m proud that they choose to come here, legally or otherwise.

In my imagination, Desborough Road is a parade, a catwalk. It’s not Tooting Broadway, but just as cosmopolitan. When I see a man dressed in clothes made for posturing, in a period drama, for example, I imagine the impression it would make if I dressed like that to go down the Desborough Road. My normal self-image is to be an invisible observer, not part of the scenery; but there must be some part of me that wants to be noticed, and even cut a dash. If life is a movie, I’m not just in the audience.

I’ve started to read Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille, but it’s slow-going. Instead of just reading and trying to understand his mind, I find myself pondering parallel questions. He starts off with the idea of immanence or indwelling: for example one animal eating another. “The animal is in the world like water in water”, says he. I have difficulty in following his argument, but it occurs to me that I, as an animal, no different from the slug except for my greater complexity, sometimes succeed in being in the world like water in water. Perhaps even on the Desborough Road, for I see the highest fulfilment in being consciously part of my environment. It wraps us on all sides like a blanket, and caresses us on the inside too, for we breathe the ambient air, and use it to re-energize our cells.

Here I live, and here I protect myself from its dangers and dirt and vermin. Here I make myself safe and comfortable, here in a little piece of the world connected to all the rest, to which I belong, of which I am a part.