Finding Jersey girl helped me confront a lot of my character flaws but there was one major flaw that, thankfully, I’d managed to deal with before we met. By the time she came along, I was a better man for having faced and bested one particularly destructive personal demon. I’m eternally grateful for this fact.
For almost my entire life, I had been dogged by a very singular fear. Due to abandonment issues dating from early childhood, I carried at all times a terrible fear of being alone. If there was no one in my life to love me, I felt very like a space walker who’d lost his tether; adrift in a cold dark void.
As you can imagine, this led me to make some very poor relationship choices. It’s not putting too fine a point on it to say, back then, I was literally willing to be with any woman who would have me. I never questioned if I was compatible with them or they with me, my only requirement was that they love me and want me in their lives.
The demise of all these relationships came built in. In even the worst situations, some people can fool themselves that everything is fine no matter what but most begin, at some point, to realise they are living in a false paradigm and eventually have to get out. This is inevitably what always happened with me. And as each of these never should have been relationships reached their ugly ends, my response was to jump as quickly as possible to the next.
Yes, I am entirely aware of how messed up that is.
Several years before I met Jersey, a relationship (which had lasted eleven years) ended under such absurd circumstances that it disrupted the circuit on my usual behaviours. I have no intention of going into what those circumstances were but, needless to say, they were life (and attitude) altering. I found myself alone, flat broke, and weary of the constant cycle of beginnings and endings. By this time I was in my mid-forties and simply couldn’t stomach the idea of doing it all again.
For the first time in my life, the prospect of being alone seemed less disturbing than the thought of embarking on yet another doomed relationship. And a strange thing started to happen. I began to grow comfortable with myself; feel like less of an imposter in my own skin. For the first time in my life, I could see that I was alright on my own, I could survive.
So, of course, that was when the love of my life came along. Oh, it didn’t happen immediately. I lived for several years as a happily single man. And that’s why I was in the perfect position to receive her. I had proven to myself that I could be on my own. This wasn’t me jumping at the first interested woman who came along. This was me, clear-headed and self-aware, finding the one thing I’d never had.
True love knocked on my door that day and I was in the perfect place to recognise it. Because, when you’re no longer being held hostage by desperation, you are far more able to recognise something good when it comes your way. I doubt, had Jersey girl found her way to me even five years earlier than she did, she’d have felt the same way about me as she now does because the person I was then was nothing like the man she fell for.
Take me to church I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death Good God, let me give you my life
In recent times I’ve had the opportunity to visit two cathedrals, St Patrick’s in New York (opened 1878) and St Patrick’s in Melbourne (opened 1897). Though these two magnificent buildings share a name they are remarkably different in many ways.
I was struck by how light the cathedral in New York is – it actually looks like it might float away – as compared to its namesake in Melbourne. St Patrick’s here is a dark edifice built like some medieval fortress. The local bluestone from which most of the cathedral is constructed lends it a very dark and forbidding aspect quite unlike its American sister.
To me, Melbourne’s St Patrick’s is very male and New York’s very female. Of the two, I must admit I prefer the latter.
It’s been a while since I did a photography post so I thought I’d point out something I noticed while perusing my NY shots. I’m no great student of architecture but I’m guessing there’s some Grand Theory behind this.
The locations in order are Grand Central Station, The New York Public Library and the Bethesda Terrace Arcade in Central Park.
Do you believe in coincidence? I never really have. I’ll concede one may experience the odd small coincidence now or then but the big ones, the ones that shake you and have you asking, what does it mean? Those, I believe, are something other.
Call it fate, divine intervention or Jung’s synchronicity; they defy explanation more often than not.
I’d like to illustrate this with several incidents from my own life but first I’ll start with something that occurred long ago which involved two of my family members.
Back in the mid 60’s, my grandmother was living in Sydney and her daughter (my aunt) in London. One evening my grandmother was travelling in a taxi when it was suddenly involved in a collision with another car. She was injured badly enough to be hospitalized. In London, meanwhile, my aunt was in a stairwell in the building in which she worked when a force – as if someone behind had given her an almighty shove – sent her hurtling down a flight of stairs.
It was only much later that we worked out that both incidents had happened at the same moment. I’m no statistician but I have quite a bit of trouble believing that the odds of that happening by accident are not astronomically huge.
I myself have had several events occur in my life which had me questioning the supposed randomness of the universe.
My first serious girlfriend had two great passions, British comedy (particularly the Peter Sellers/ John Cleese/ Monty Python end of the spectrum) and the rock band, Queen. A favourite show of ours was John Cleese’s classic series Fawlty Towers; more on that in a moment.
When I was nineteen, I decided to relocate from Australia to the UK. By this time my relationship with said girlfriend had pretty much ended but we were still on reasonably friendly terms. On the day before I flew out, I went around to her place to say my goodbyes and the last thing she said as we parted was, “if you see any members of Queen over there, make sure you get their autographs.”
I probably smirked as I agreed to do so. I mean, what were the odds I’d bump into any mega famous rock stars in the circles I’d be moving in? Anyway, after a long flight that had me seriously questioning the wisdom of my decision to emigrate, I duly arrived at Heathrow, passed through the wall of bastards (otherwise known as customs and immigration), and made my way to the baggage carousel. I’d been in the country maybe forty minutes at this point.
So there I am, bleary-eyed and travel grimed, swaying on my feet with exhaustion when I happen to look to my right at the guy standing beside me.
It probably took me a full twenty seconds to process the visual information my brain was receiving from my tired eyes urgently telling it that the ‘guy’ was, in fact, Freddie Mercury.
I. Shit. You. Not.
I was stunned into near immobility but, with my friend’s parting request still ringing in my ears, I realised I was just going to have to approach the clearly leery rock god in question.
I’m not proud of how the next thirty seconds went. I turned to face Mr Mercury (who visibly flinched at what he obviously knew was coming) and spoke the immortal words, “if I had a pen (I didn’t by the way) would you give me your autograph?”
Now there are as yet undiscovered tribes in the deepest Amazon who knew what was coming next and I guess I did too. Barely meeting my gaze, Freddie uttered a one-word response and returned his attention to the circling baggage. The word was “no” in case you were having trouble discerning the inference.
I later read that it was Mercury’s policy never to give autographs. Ah well, I tried.
Again, what are the odds that just a day or two after Queen’s name had been invoked under very specific circumstances, I would find myself standing on foreign soil not two feet from the band’s notorious frontman? Not good I’m guessing.
So where does John Cleese fit into all this, you ask? I’ll tell you.
A short while later I found myself living in a small village just outside London called Wooburn Green. I was out for a stroll one afternoon, familiarizing myself with my new neighbourhood when I came upon a sign which read Fawlty Towers Restaurant with an arrow pointing up a side road.
My American readers may not be familiar with the BBC comedy of that title. It ran in the UK and the Commonwealth countries in the mid to late 70’s and starred Mr Cleese as an unbearably obnoxious hotel manager named Basil Fawlty. My girlfriend just adored it.
Curious as to what this sign might mean, I headed in the direction of the arrow. When I got to the place the sign indicated, I was amazed to see that it was indeed the very building my girlfriend and I had so often seen on our TV screens. It was meant to be a hotel in Torquay in the show but was in actual fact the Wooburn Grange Country Club.
Sans the sign, this is exactly what it looked like.
What are the chances that I should come to live in a tiny village in Buckinghamshire and discover, not five minutes’ walk from my house, the very location used in one of my most beloved TV shows? Slim, I’d posit. Needless to say, I had quite a time convincing my friend of all this when I next spoke to her on the telling bone. I didn’t own a camera at the time and the mobile phone was still about a decade off (the internet too for that matter) so I had nothing to back up my story.
Years later, the Grange made the news back home in Australia when it burned down.
I feel like this post is getting to be a tad longer than most people are willing to read, so I’ll save some of the other ‘coincidences’ of my life for another day. I’d be interested to hear your opinions on the stuff I’ve covered here and your thoughts on the nature of coincidences in general.
Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake The last to die for a mistake Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break Who’ll be the last to die, for a mistake
There is so much to be grateful for. It would be easy to spend my days feeling sorry for myself but, despite the fact that we have been forced to live so long apart, the simple fact remains; I have her, she exists. And my life is so much the better for it.
I lived in a world that held no sign of her for so many years and now she fills every corner of it. She is everywhere; my heart, my mind, my soul. She even lives in my body, having almost as much control over my physical reactions as I do myself.
She’s a shaft of sunlight through a frosty window, drops of rain falling on spring grass, the silvery moon breaking through the clouds on the deepest of dark nights. She is all of these things to me but, mostly, she is a very veridical, very human woman, full of flaws and insecurities, anxieties and darkness; as are we all.
I wasn’t looking for a fantasy, was less than interested in some fairytale princess. I was looking for the place where life gets real, where I knew I could no longer pretend. And that’s what I have found with her. Here I must love fully, unguardedly, or else slink home like a dog with its tail between its legs.
She keeps me honest, won’t let me compromise on matters of the heart. There is a kind of grace in that because when you are given no other choice but to be who you truly are – and are therefore forced to own your faults – you cannot avoid evolving; it just happens. That’s the opportunity soul love offers, a shot at becoming the best version of yourself.
This is why I am grateful. Before she came I was running out of time, at serious risk of getting through my entire life living as somebody else. What a tragedy it would have been for me to die without ever knowing who I truly was.
Runaway American Dream 