The Sunday Spinster Sermons: Part 12: Love

Hello and greetings. This is the last Sunday Spinster Sermon to be penned in the UK for a while. This time next week I will be rubbing the previous night's halloween make up off whilst lay strewn on my best friends' couches cackling and drinking more wine in a flat in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. I'll be reunited with the Escapades crew, or Sexcapades as it become known. The boys I spent my first 3 years in Hong Kong living with ten years ago. There is a nice symmetry or pattern about this. I left for Hong Kong in the autumn of 2002. I do the same thing 10 years on. Much changes yet much stays the same.

Take flame haired backwoodsmen. Today, we have Chet Baker, talking about what he'd like to do with his lady friend. Back in the day, there was Howard Keel, in Seven Brides for Seven brothers discussing the very same thing.

Them a woman was sobbin', sobbin', sobbin'
Fit to be tied.
Ev'ry muscle was throbbin', throbbin'
From that riotous ride.

Good old Greek mythology - the perfect drama for exciting marble nudity

The sobbin' women come from Plutarch's tale of The Rape of the Sabine women in 750BC. Sabine ladies of ancient Rome whom Romulus and Remus types abducted to found the city. Luckily rape meant abduct then, so not as bad as it sounds. Who wouldn't enjoy a spot of abduction by a backwoodsman from time to time?

This brings us to our first reading of the day. I was incredibly lucky to stumble across a magnificent book in the library last weekend. If anyone loves myth or history or romance or excellent writing. Get on it. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. One of my favourite novelists, Donna Tartt praises it on the front cover, as does Bettany Hughes, classics professor and broadcaster, who states, 'sexy, dangerous, mystical.'

The writer, a classicist herself, took ten years to write this masterpiece. It is the retelling of Homer's Illiad. It imagines why Achilles would have been so heartbroken by the death of his friend Patroclus?

I'll jog your memory with the imagery from the 2004 Troy blockbuster.

what hollywood went with

what patroclus looked like

an altogether more greek approach to love

At night, in bed, images come. They begin as dreams, trailing caresses in my sleep from which I start, trembling. I lie awake, and still they come, the flicker of firelight on a neck, the curve of a hipbone, drawing downwards. Hands, smooth and strong, reaching to touch me. I know these hands. But even here, behind the darkness of my eyelids, I cannot name the thing I hope for. During the day, I grow restless, fidgety. But all my pacing, singing, running, does not keep them at bay. They come, and will not be stopped.

Sigh, Now I know it's Achilles fangay stuff. Oscar Wilde meets Barbara Cartland but to add love and passion and feeling into a text consumed by war and death is quite brilliant. I'm only a few chapters in... I imagine there'll be more exciting developments soon.

OK. So back to the ten year relocate to Hong Kong thing.

There will be a lot the same and a lot different.

When I moved to Hong Kong in 2002, there was no Facebook or Twitter. Phones just made phone calls. I'd sing I'm With You by Avril Lavigne after too many shandies. I was leaving in part to leave old heartache behind but mainly for adventure. To go and find stories. I was armed with my Sony Discman to board my Emirates flight where I probably watched 40 days and 40 nights on the inflight entertainment. I'd never been to Hong Kong and only knew one girl there. She was away so her boyfriend was meant to meet me at the airport. He didn't. I took a cab, with my seven bags (I hadn't really got the handle of how to pack back then). I got dropped off in Lan Kwai Fong. Agog. And walked with all of my seven bags to Wo On Lane. Smiled at the concierge who said something completely unintelligible and took a lift up. The boyfriend had got the dates wrong. It was hot. It was humid. There were lanterns everywhere. And rabbits. It was Mid-Autumn Festival. 

And life began.

I met wonderful people. Held wonderful jobs. Fell in love. Broke my heart. Fell in love again. Broke my heart. Went on adventures. Studied Eastern mysticism. Explored Asia. Explored Africa. Detoxed. Retoxed. Detoxed. And repeat. Tragedy. Comedy. Tragicomedy.

So what now. Ten years on?

More of the same, please. I think I've tooled up with a few more life skills to handle the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To find more calm within the eye of the storm. To fall in love slower. To heal my heart faster. To see more of the comedy than the tragedy. Will I still sing gay/teen pop when drunk? Very probable. Taylor Swift's new album's out on Monday...

So, a final peace be with you from England.

I wish you love and luck on your travels however near or far they may be.

Love, passion and adventures,

Alison

xxx