On Beauty II

Does being beautiful matter? Does it, really? Does a butterfly know it is beautiful? Does a new-born baby know it’s beautiful? Does a wildflower, does a rose? No. No, of course not. These things don’t know, or care if they are beautiful or not. They just exist, and are beautiful in doing so.

And were there no mirrors to look in, would we know that we were beautiful? Does a hermit living alone on some life-forsaken, sea-swept island know that he is beautiful? Would being beautiful make him happier, somehow? How could it make him happier than the beauty of the iron-green sea whipped wild by the wind, or the grace of terns and gulls slicing currents of air with their scythe-like wings? 

The moon knows not that it is beautiful, but each night a million eyes lift up to gaze upon its silver light, and not one heart is left unmoved by its singular beauty.  And not one of those eyes, nor the faces they are set in, could ever hope to rival such beauty, though in our vanity we imagine that they might. We are enamoured by beauty, we are slaves to the aesthetic. We endeavour to harness it, become it, possess it. We perceive beauty in others, in nature, and shame ourselves that we cannot equal it. We should desist in our futile quest. Admit our ugliness. And be content with merely experiencing beauty, with creating it. 

Because painting a picture is more worthwhile than painting make-up on your face. Because gazing at the stars is better for your soul than rhinoplasty. 

Because when you're old you'll be ugly anyway, and on your deathbed you won't think about how beautiful you were or weren't. You'll be thinking of the way the light played off the water in the harbour that night you first kissed your first love. And how beautiful it was.

Hateful Horace

Horace sat in the Station Master’s Café hating everything. He hated how long he had to wait for his train. He hated the way his tea tasted, he hated the man who had served it to him and he hated the blonde girl with a nose-ring sat at the table next to him because she kept looking at him sideways whilst typing really quickly on her wretched laptop. He hated laptops. He looked around him, hatefully. He hated the fancy crisp flavours they had for sale. Pesto. He hated pesto. Probably foreign. He hated foreigners. He also hated the milk dispenser. Nice Cold Ice Cold Fresh Milk, it said. He hated milk. However, he did hate warm milk more than cold milk, because it reminded him, subconsciously, of his mother, and he hated his mother.

Horace hated the seat he was in and he hated the clothes he was wearing because they were black and he hated black. He hated how much he’d just had to spend on a train ticket for a train journey he didn’t want to go on, and he hated the Tarka Line especially because it was full of old women and tourists declaring how pretty everything was. He hated the rolling fields and verdant forests, he hated the otter-brown rivers and he hated the quaint old cottages and churches. He hated how most of the seats faced backwards.  He hated not seeing where he was going, even though he didn’t even want to be going there. The blonde girl was sitting across from him on the train and he began to hate her even more because she was typing whilst looking out of the window at the scenery, which she probably thought was beautiful, and not at her keyboard. He hated his shoes. They were new and shiny. He hated new and shiny shoes.

Horace hated the newspaper he was reading , and he hated the obituaries especially, and he hated them especially today. Horace hated the sound the train was making, and he hated the golden fields of wheat flashing past the windows and he hated the sky that looked like it would rain. He tugged at his black tie. He hated wearing ties. He hated the fact he had to go. Or rather, he hated the circumstances that meant he had to go.

He hated crying. He hated crying in public. And he hated the blonde girl even more because she kept looking at him crying in public and even though she was still typing she looked like she might cry in public too.

He hated his mother. He hated his mother. He hated his mother for dying. Or maybe he hated the fact that she had died. Which meant, (and this is a fact which he hated), that perhaps he didn’t hate her very much at all.

Or perhaps the blonde girl with the laptop was making it all up, and he wasn’t called Horace, nor was he going to a funeral, and he wasn't hateful at all, that was just what his face looked like. 

Cloudspotting

Fine cirrus etched in an arch

Over bulbous cumulonimbus;

The wispy comb-over of

A portly old gentleman.

The Unwanted Companion

I collapsed into seat 77a, coach B of the 18:06 from Paddington to Penzance. I checked the reservation ticket of the seat beside me to see if I would have the two seats to myself. Yes, but only until Reading. I settled down, took out my book (Ismailov’s The Railway) and the train rolled away, London’s outskirts flickering past like television in my peripheral vision.

By Reading I was engrossed in my book. I’d forgotten I was due a travelling companion. He appeared in the aisle beside me like some horrid apparition. Watery eyes bulging above puffy pouches, grizzled facial hair extending up towards them. Flaccid lips wet and shiny. His beige trench-coat was irredeemably soiled, but in a way that implied years of slow putrefaction, rather than a one off incident. Dirty tide-marks spread downwards from the collar, undoubtedly a direct result of his flabby, seeping mouth. He smiled at me. The sight of his teeth made my molars wince in horror.

“Is this seat 78?”

I wanted to lie. I have seldom felt such an overwhelming impulse to lie as I did in that very moment. But it would have been an incredibly transparent lie, made utterly redundant, besides, by the fact that his behind had already begun its slow descent towards the seat that was, of course, 78.  

Then the smell hit my nostrils and the impulse to lie was swept away by the impulse to vomit. He smelt of what his coat looked like, and that was just the top note. I resolved to breathe only through my mouth. I felt a little as though I was drowning.

“Where are you going? I’m going to Plymouth,” he announced, in exactly the kind of voice I’d imagined he would have, the kind children have stranger-danger nightmares about. He was taking up an extremely unnecessary amount of my personal space. He had putrefied my air. He had disrupted my reading. I couldn’t even look out of the window, because I could see his reflection, drooly lips shining gloriously in the evening sun. He had, in short, ruined this train journey for me entirely. No. He had ruined trains for ever. And I love trains. I smiled, and replied, “Exeter,” whilst silently pledging that I would escape, at any cost. There were spare seats taunting me out of the corner of my eye. He leant into my side a little more, and I began to taste his smell on my tongue. I considered just holding my breath for the next two hours, but realised, with defeat, that this was not humanly possible. 

Then he got up to go to the toilet. He asked me to look after his bag. This was my chance. This was my chance to escape!

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t just leave his bag there – what if it got stolen? I couldn’t bear the guilt of it. Maybe it would be ok. Maybe I could strike up some sort of conversation with him. Maybe I could learn something.

Then he came back and said, “That’s better!” in a way that made me think of him defecating and I retched, invisibly, inaudibly. I regretted my fleeting moment of kindness, wholeheartedly.

I tried to focus on my book, but I felt much too uncomfortable to become absorbed by it, just as one might feel too uneasy to fall asleep on an inner-city night bus.

But then he turned to me and said, “If you look to your left, you’ll see a white horse!” and I expected to be utterly underwhelmed by some field-bound beast of burden. And there before me, spread out in splendour on a rolling, sun-drenched  hillside, was a huge white horse hewn into the chalk. The beauty of it floored me. And in that moment I felt like an awful, awful person for the hateful thoughts I’d had about this poor bedraggled soul who was nothing more than an innocent receptacle of beauty, beauty that he’d chosen to share with me, a complete stranger, a complete stranger who’d spent forty minutes silently cursing his very existence. His humanity humbled me, humiliated me. I was unworthy of sitting beside someone who wanted to show me something so nice, when I’d done nothing to deserve it.

But by then the smell, his closeness, everything had gotten too much. I told him I was going to the loo, and couldn’t bear to meet his gaze as I, much to his suspicion, I am sure, brought all my baggage with me. Liberated, I found a seat in the next carriage, and sat in peace watching the sun light up the dove-hued clouds in a syrupy haze, setting thistles a-glow, glinting off rivers and marinas, making the dark-green trees burn emerald.

I could still smell him in my nostrils. I almost missed him.

Almost.

Hilda Hates Tomatoes

Hilda pushed her tomatoes round her plate. They didn't look very appetising. In fact, she was of the firm belief that tomatoes were the single most disgusting foodstuff known to civilisation. When her mother wasn't looking she dropped one under the table into the cat's mouth. The cat ran outside into the garden and exploded.

Hilda saw it through the window. It happened so quickly. The cat just burst, like a fluffy balloon filled with red. Like a dropped melon. Her family didn't see it. They just saw Hilda's mouth drop open like a broken trapdoor.

"What's wrong with you, Hilda?" "You look like you've seen a ghost."
Hilda's eyes stayed fixed on the red patch where the cat was on the lawn, right outside the window.
"The... the cat exploded," she said.
"Oh yeah, this is like that time you said you saw a bear skiing."
"Oh YEAH! And it was just a fat man with a beard and a brown jumpsuit."
"Liar liar pants on fire!"
Hilda tore her eyes from the window and looked down at her plate, stymied and shell-shocked. Then it hit her.

"DON'T eat your TOMAAATOES!" she exclaimed vehemently.
"Or what?" her brother sneered.
"Or you'll explode! You have to believe me!"
Her mother and father looked at her, bemused, wondering what had gotten into their otherwise fairly normal little girl. Her brother was laughing at her, her sister looking at her with that disgusted look that thirteen-year-olds do so well. Then her brother stabbed his fork into a slice of tomato and brought it up to his big-fat-clown-mouth in faux-slow motion. Her parents smirked, then grimaced guiltily.
"NOOO!" screamed Hilda, and she threw herself across the table to knock the fork from her brother's hand.

The tomato slice flew off the fork and landed in the sink where it instantly exploded, blasting chips of crockery and dirty dishwater all over the kitchen.

The family turned and looked at Hilda with wide, disbelieving eyes.
It dawned on her sister that her beloved cat was actually, really, in all likelihood, in smithereens, and she ran into the garden screaming "BINKY!!!! NOOOOO!"

Her father rang up Morrison's and told them about the tomatoes. Then he made a few calls to the NHS and the Police and the BBC, and within a few hours most of the country knew not to eat tomatoes because it was on the TV and everything.

Hilda felt slightly smug because she'd always known that tomatoes were horrible. For years to come, she would tell anybody who would listen about the explosive tomatoes which exploded her cat, and how she helped avert a national crisis, and she would always finish her story with, "And that is how I saved the world."

On Being Dead

Once I asked an old man if he was afraid of dying. He said no. Because once I'm dead I won't know anything about it, he said. I said, isn't that the part people are afraid of? And he said, yes, but it doesn't mean they're right. What do you mean, I asked. I mean, he replied, that they should stop wasting time being afraid of dying and spend more time being afraid of not living. For all they know, it's the only life they've got. They should stop sitting quivering like frightened rabbits and just live the best lives they can live. Do something great. And I said, yes, I see.

 But then I said, so, what have you done with your life?

He paused, and I was worried I'd offended him. Then he said, I lived it. And I said, well, so did everyone else. And he said, well, I lived it well enough for me. Maybe I didn't do anything great, he said, but all those men who did - and women, I said - and women, he said - all those men who did, where are they now? 

They're dead, I said.

Exactly, he said.

Brown and White Cat

Walking home from The Bounty we saw a brown and white cat sitting on the railway tracks. So we stroked it, and picked it up, and then it climbed onto our shoulders and walked around on them precariously, like a monkey, or a pirate's parrot. It rubbed its head against our cheeks. It didn't scratch us at all. I walked down the moonlit road with it climbing on my shoulders, being careful that it didn't fall.At the end of the road we put it down and it ran away as some headlights came around the corner. When it was gone I could still feel its soft weight on my shoulders and I missed it. Brown-and-white-parrot-cat.