I dislike the hyphen. There it sits in the middle of those names that are double-barrelled (itself a hyphenated word): the Bowler-Tomkinsons, the Sun-Tans.

What does a hyphen represent, if not the failure to make a decision? The see-saws, the mid-ways, the tit-for-tats, the so-sos, the knick-knacks of life? It speaks of a necessary enjoining, a compromise, the shaking of hands, the forced bringing together of differences, the making of amends. For every peace-making there is a war-mongering, and vice versa.

Still, when the time comes, I find myself acting as cowardly as everyone else -  hastily hatchet-burying, bridge-building, fence-mending.

Variation

November 8, 2009

This morning I listened to the Goldberg Variations and wondered at the many variations of it – the slow, the rapid, the majestic, the magisterial, the joyous, the eccentric, the poetic, the pedestrian – in the hands of different musicians.

And I remembered all the places I had been when listening to various Variations – in a tiny room, on a battered sofa, in a concert hall, looking out a window, peeping through a door. Most changeable of all was my heart, loving an artist’s Variation one day, shunning it the next.

And it seemed to me that variety is the spice of life, even if it's about the same thing.

Tale

November 4, 2009

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, there lived a King and Queen. One day, the royal couple decreed that there would be no more fairy tales in the kingdom, for the tales had cast a terrible spell over the people.

And so they ordered that there would be no more poisoned apples, or wicked stepmothers, or fairy godmothers, or Sleeping Beauties, or Princes Charming. Nor would there be dark forests, magic mirrors, donkey skins, dying mermaids or frozen matchstick girls. And so they created a land in which not one dwarf could live, let alone seven, and in which no one was granted even a single wish, let alone three.

It is not certain if they lived happily ever after.

Bracket

October 31, 2009

There once was a family of words who lived in a bracket, and they never knew what happened in the outside, bracketless world, until one day one of the naughtier words in the family ventured)

out

(and then came back, full of stories of the wonderful, worrying world of families without brackets, and of even more wonderful stories of fancy families who {lived in curly brackets}, until the entire family was quite overcome and could not function properly for days. So if you ever come across this family of words living in a bracket, you must not disturb them, but walk on quietly by, so they can live in peace.)

Osmosis

October 30, 2009

Sometimes I run my fingers along the spines of all the books on my shelf, so many of which I haven’t read, and I take down one of these unread books and hold it in my hands.

I touch the cover, touch the edges and the corners, feel the weight, start turning the pages, look at the type, study the font, examine the page numbers, flip the paper back and forth so it shudders like a Slinky, and run my index finger across the text as though it were Braille for the sighted. ‘I understand you,’ I think. ‘I don’t have to read a word of what you say; I understand you already, or at least, I understand you enough.”

I return the book to its shelf, still unread.