Inception

There is lots going on right now... as usual, especially when you haven't been writing in a while! I started my new job, only week two! Every day I am more sure that it was the right choice and I think God had a plan for us to stay in London a bit longer term!

We have been having great weather since I don’t remember how long ago… probably since around the London Marathon, and that was last Sunday 17th April, so that is almost one week ago! We have had the high pressure in Europe and have been stealing the sun from Spain, where they have had to cancel multiple typical processions of the Holy Week, among them probably the most famous one, la ‘madruga’ from Sevilla, this is what my brother was telling me as thinking about it I haven’t been quite paying lots of attention to the news.

Well, the news, they are just dominated with everything Royal Wedding here in UK at the moment… I am not saying that with any bitterness though, I am myself an avid consumer of all things ‘Hello’ so the prospect of a Royal Wedding in the UK Royals is a major major event.

So, talking about the weather, today started with beautiful weather, like every day this week, around 25 Celsius. I was off to take my son to Stansted as my brother was picking him up to take him to Spain to spend the Easter holiday, the nursery is closing, so this is a creative way of dealing with it!

We got talking, about the great things that my son has been doing lately, he was just 2 years old beginning of April, and he is really cute now, very strong personality, full of life and energy! It is always bittersweet when he is not around… like other parents, there is a strange mix of looking forward to having some time to sleep a bit longer, or to simply catch up on that book that has been on your table next to the bed for too long, but when they are not around, after having a coffee and a satisfying one hour to yourself, you start missing them and realise that you are kind of bored!

We were also talking about a family friend, who has not been feeling well lately… she has cancer, and we fear that she could be approaching the end. My brother was remembering her partner’s sister in law, who passed away around a couple of years ago, she fought cancer once but came back and took her away. He was remembering how she used to talk about her son, who was probably around 6 at the time, she was telling how she felt so sad about the fact that her son would not remember much of her… I only met her briefly myself, right after the first time she had cancer, I think about her and her son many times… I can totally empathise with what she was describing, it is not selfish at all, what she is talking about is the essence of life, about having your children and living enough, not to hold on to them, but to see them grow and become happy people, and helping them along the way.

On the way back from the airport I was thinking a lot about this while I was listening to the soundtrack of ‘Inception’, the movie of the last summer. It’s so hard… so many people don’t even feel alive; always looking for answers; always looking for the next best thing. For others feeling alive is just literally about the physicality of the word.

I was thinking inception is one of those words that for us who speak native Spanish is a bit of an obscure word… and when I say that what I mean is that you can recognise immediately that it comes from Latin, but we don’t have any word in Spanish like it really as a noun, perhaps only in adjective form, ‘incipiente’, but yes, we know is about the origin of something, is at the beginning. It’s a great soundtrack, I have grown more and more keen to listen attentively to soundtracks and this is certainly one of the best from last year.

Beginnings and ends. On the way home the beautiful sun started disappearing and I could see some lightening in the horizon. The closer I got to London the more it was raining. Certainly a mixed day, from sun to rain, much like many other days in UK, where we say that you could almost have the 4 seasons on the same day.

I came home and checked the view from my balcony. We are leaving this flat soon, it’s a bit too hot and definitely too small, but I will surely miss the view, from Canary Wharf to the North all the way to Greenwich on the South East, the gorgeous Millwall inner and outer docks, with the pretty houses at the bottom of the Isle of Dogs. We are only moving to another flat in the same building, but the view won’t be the same. Often, as in live, the view will just be different, some things will feel like new beginnings, some things will still feel comfortably familiar, like a hug from that person you love, even when they are not here any more, it will still stay with you forever. Bittersweet.

Restoring our human spirit

Today the news are talking about the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the fears around a potential nuclear disaster in the region, about fighting in Libya between Government and rebels, the UK Foreign Office advising British nationals to leave Bahrain now after the state of alert was established yesterday, one of the biggest paedophile networks having been uncovered in the UK, an woman from Tanzania being obliged to live as a slave in UK for 4 years after a woman from UK promised to pay her 21 pounds per week but then didn’t allow her to leave the house and obliged to sleep on the floor of the kitchen…

With days like this it is hard to find anything that can keep us thinking about anything positive… It is definitely a hard time, hard for so many who have family, friends, affected in any of those situations, people who know others who are affected… we cannot avoid finding ourselves wondering what’s the point of all this… is God trying to tell us something, especially with all the natural disasters?

Among all these sad news at least a couple of things have been positive in the last days. On one side, news from the London Olympics camp, we are now around 500 days away from 2012 Olympics and tickets sales have just been launched yesterday. Another anecdote regarding Olympics related news, I read in the Financial Times that some hotels have already increased their prices almost 300%!

The other positive piece of news is about the Cutty Sark, which was burnt almost completely and was pretty devastated 4 years ago. Prince Philip was visiting the restoration works today in situ at Greenwich, you can check the short report through the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-12756046.

So among all this natural disasters, fighting among people, people being mean and abusive towards children, towards other people… I almost feel that the story about the Cutty Sark provides a metaphor and some hope that, although some things may become really devastated, our hopes should not be. Like the Cutty Sark, which has lived more than 4 times what its builders had expected, which has survived storms, corrosion, fire and is now just being restored and transformed so we can still enjoy it and cherish it… something tells me that although it will indeed take time to restore our faith in others, our faith in nature, time after time human beings have demonstrated that we are extremely resilient. It’s still time to deal with the magnitude of the disaster, but once we have done that, we will be ready to restore our human spirit.