An Englishman in Copenhagen
Every now and then a story emerges from back in England which makes me question that country’s social fabric.
When your society creates people who are prepared to lock an epileptic man in a shed and then proceed to systematically torture him to death over a four-month period, it begs the question – what in the fuck is going on?
Love lives in memory, I think, personal and collective.
Once, a long time ago, I was reading a magazine and I came across an article with extracts of the letters of a young Cambodian couple forcefully separated by the Khmer Rouge. It was the saddest thing I have ever read.
I can no longer remember the exact circumstances of their separation. Either way, they never saw one another again. We learned at the end of the piece that the man was executed in some squalid Khmer Rouge detention camp, no doubt on the flimsiest of political pretexts.
But the tenderness and beauty of those letters, the depth of feeling of one human for another, has stayed with me.
However fleeting the love of that couple, it lives in those letters, and in me.
‘A cricket ground is a flat piece of earth with some buildings around it.’ Richie Benaud
I love the reductionist logic of that statement. An infinitely complex sport, cricket is ultimately little more than a group of individuals hitting and pursuing a ball around that flat piece of earth, before repairing to said buildings to eat cucumber sandwiches.
I have spent the last three days watching the first Test match of the summer. The time has passed imperceptibly. Yesterday I was barely away of what day it was.
Cricket carries me into a state of being which is – paradoxically – both deeply contemplative and utterly thoughtless.
Tranquility reigns.
I wrote an awful poem once about how the sight of a dog asleep beneath the boughs of a lemon tree helped me realise that peace of mind might not be as far away as I thought.
Cricket has the same effect. The gentle acts of repetition, the pleasing hum of a crowd come to worship at the same church as me, and the obscure, archaic rituals dotting the day’s play like daisies in a field in June.
Life is full enough of hard, difficult things; cricket is my soft landing.
I bought this lamp yesterday. It only cost me 30kr (about £3).
The girl I bought it from at the flea market didn’t know if it worked but I had a good feeling about it.
Now it sits on the bookcase I bought last year at the second-hand shop near where I used to live. And which itself is slowly being filled with the books I buy here in Copenhagen.
I left everything behind when I came here and the only thing I miss is my books.
But books are just books, I guess. I’d read most of them anyway.
Possessions are only as valuable as the stories they bring with them. I used to be able to look at my books and remember instantly which second-hand bookshop or charity shop I had bought them at, and even who I was with.
In that way the inhuman acts of material acquisition we carry out unthinkingly everyday become somehow more human.
Always buy used. That’s my advice.
I’ve written before about friendship but never about the best friend I ever had.
He’s so far away now and all we have is email and occasional SMSs.
But it’s enough. Love endures, like comfy shoes, the t-shirts you can never throw away, and the books that you can never forget.
He always did like the Magnetic Fields so there’s a song over in the Box just for him.
Have a nice Sunday.
Tonight I feel a little like I did more than 15 years ago when I found myself curled up in the boot of my grandparents’ car, staring up at the stars as my grandad drove around, looking for his missing grandson.
I had hidden there an hour after ‘running’ away from home. My parents had informed me that we were emigrating to New Zealand and I hadn’t taken the news well.
I remember that night as if it were yesterday.
I lay there for several hours, occasionally hearing my grandad’s voice as he stopped to talk with other relatives. A search party had been assembled.
I don’t know what I thought would happen. Deep down I must have known I would be found and perhaps I was just seeking attention.
The stars, and the regularity of the streetlights flitting past above had a hypnotic effect. I fell asleep for a while; a restless half-sleep of planes, suitcases and girls I’d only just started to see in a certain way.
Tonight, a similar rhythm seems to have taken hold. A pulse, a faint beacon – something in the distance I can’t discern.
Today I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Jensen for the first time.
He biked over to Bang and Jensen (that’s as far as I could stumble with my hangover) with his Mac and helped me start migrating my blog over to my own domain.
I say helped, he basically did it and I sat there drinking coffee and pretending I knew what he was doing. 
You can see the result here.
We’ve got a bit of work to do but the end product is going to be a much more customizable site which I hope you lot continue to patronise.
Enjoy the sun!
A lot of posts on here recently have probably been a bit introspective.
I’m sorry. I never wanted this blog to be yet another online confessional. I’ll stop it now.
Keep reading, there’s going to be a few changes soon.
Cheers everyone.
Love your friends, seek out the sun, cycle, dispense with your tv, read, say yes mostly . . but know when to say no, exfoliate, moisturise, wear clean underwear, clean behind your ears, clip your toenails, think positively . . even about your negative thoughts, try to travel, take a different route home sometimes, don’t listen to the same tracks on new albums all the time, learn to handwash. . sew. . change fuses, eat icecream in the sun, take walks to places you haven’t been before, don’t think badly about your friends if they don’t contact you for a while, believe in yourself, change your bedlinen regularly, make coffee for your housemate when she is hungover, eat fruit, cook, live as sustainably as you can, visit the dentist regularly, don’t ignore random pains in your ears, don’t smoke but don’t judge those who do, give old clothes to charity and don’t attach too much importance to labels, trust your instincts, look forwards but learn from your past, don’t bear grudges, accept change, eschew the glib advice of those who give it too freely. Trust in yourself.
