Holiday Day 1: Cuxton in Kent

43000 STEPS TODAY – Slightly sore feet.

Because it is my holiday, I managed to wake up early in the morning and just get out of bed after doing my reading of the newspapers in Hindi and Punjabi and after reading some Urdu poetry. I was able to get up and do meditation, chi building exercises as well as weights. I managed to have a full breakfast. I managed to do some reading.

And then my friend turned up in the car to drive us down to Cuxton in Kent.

I contacted five of my friends at work in the morning or replied to their messages. All women – most of my friends are women. That is just how it is nowadays. They were never in my life. I needed them in my life. I have them in my life now.

When we were driving there, I saw Dartford Bridge for the first time in my life. It was an amazing sight

We passed by Rochester castle which looked absolutely beautiful and imposing in the distance.

Arriving in Kent was like arriving in another world, another time. It was so green and relaxed. It was amazing. We parked in a residential area and as we walked out into Kent, I saw the most beautiful wild garden which had masses of bluebells in it. It was the sweetest introduction into the area.

I had brought my little pocket telescope with me and my friend likes bird watching so he was teaching me how to do it. We saw a kestrel, a sparrow hawk, a seagull, blackbirds, a buzzard, etc. We also heard a cuckoo and looked around for it. He has been a teacher and is good at it. But to be a good teacher, the greatest thing is patience – which he has in abundance.

I saw a tree felling site for perhaps the first time in my life and we crossed over an actual railroad crossing which I don’t think I have ever done either.

In Cobham Woods, the most amazing piece of architecture was there, Darnley Mausoleum. This is Grade I listed mausoleum built for the Darnley family in 1786. It was never used.

We went into Cobham church and had our lunch on the bench outside. I had two massive sausage rolls with a San Pelegrino soft drink. The volunteers in the shop started talking to us and one of them was wearing a knitted flower to support someone that didn’t have the money for an expensive medical drug. They were surprised to learn that we weren’t local, these two elderly women.

The church dates back from the 1200s as we found when we looked at the bodies buried inside. It had amazing stained glass windows and was really impressive when you looked at the altar. Everyone knows my personality and how my mind works. I was thinking of having Helen, Girl 3 or Potential girl with me at the altar exchanging vows. I imagined them in their white dresses and holding their hands and kissing them.

There were beautiful flowers, trees and animals everywhere on the walk. We saw a beautiful red fox, we saw a stampede of bulls flinging themselves wildly in the woods, and then lambs too.

I was telling my friend all sorts of things – why I watch children’s films and read children’s books (because they are written by adults and are just as sophisticated as adult’s fiction, because they are exciting and things and adventures happen in them). Asking for advice about Helen and how to get her. Asking for advice about how to talk to women. Asking about his family, about the next day we are planning together this week. Asking him about what he wanted to do in life, what it was like to get a bit older, what language he would like to learn, talking about films and literature and art.

We talked to an old lady in the woods in front of her house for a while, learning about the politics and the forest management in the place. She had a wonderful garden which she had lovingly tended. All the gardens there were wonderful, immaculate.

We had conversations in the cafe while I ate a chocolate brownie, outside another church which was closed to the public and then in the pub where I had a lime and tonic. My chair vibrated wonderfully in the pub for some reason – we couldn’t figure out why it did.

For dinner, we ate out at this wonderful Thai restaurant – a massive amount of food. Spring rolls with chicken satays and peanut sauce and Tom Yung soup. Then seafood grill, beef curry, noodles, yellow curry and steamed rice. It was amazing. Some of the best Thai food we have ever tasted in our life. The women there that served us were super friendly. It was a really well decorated restaurant as well, and we ate our food next to the Koi pond with the Ganesha statue.

Next Rochester town centre with all of the young women going out for the night and laughing and joking, and then Rochester Cathedral and Rochester castle seen from outside in the moonlight. Full of food and happiness with the day.

The white rose which represents my love for Helen is prospering.

A Friend’s Birthday Drinks; When the Party Finishes; Burger Delights; In the Night; Love from an Indian-English Pair; Real Happiness

28.03.2024

Yesterday, I felt pretty low. I talked to her for five seconds in the whole day. And in that five seconds she attacked me. The genuine moment of happiness was when I was going home and picking up a free treat on my loyalty card at Marks and Spencers. I was thinking about who to give it to. First I thought of my work family. Then, as I was walking past the homeless guy in front of the train station, I suddenly decided to give it to him. The smile that lit up his face was the genuine moment of happiness in the whole day. Here was someone that didn’t have anything and they were happy with just an inexpensive bag of sweets that a stranger had given them. He smiled like it had made his whole day. When I am feeling low, giving something to someone makes me feel good. Because you share something with them and you feel like you are making someone happy. Even when you are not happy yourself.

I gave my tour which I wrote on request to an Indian man with a white woman and their child. They were so pleased with my tour that they kept on thanking me afterwards and they wrote some really lovely words on the feedback form. But what I think made them the happiest, although they wouldn’t say it, was that I told them that I was Indian as well and I talked about one of the posters which features Indian women.

I went to a friend’s birthday drinks. I told him yesterday that I would go but because I was upset yesterday I felt tired today. So I had to make myself go. Life is passing me by. I can feel it. Nothing is happening. No one loves me. I can’t meet someone that I like that likes me back.

But you know what, these people are my friends. I get on with them so well, especially the one whose birthday it was and another person there. I forgot about how tired I was around them. We learnt more about each other and we had a good time. I left the earliest though because there is a certain point in any of that kind of social gathering that I start missing the woman that is not there with me. You feel the ache of emptiness. You are going to have to walk home alone. You are going to have to sleep in your bed alone. There is no one there that you can call your special own. So I got up and left. And I rushed off so fast to get away from everyone that I left some stuff there.

The Tiger hunts alone. The world has denied Tiger the one thing that he wanted the most in his life. Love. So, Tiger is hungry and wounded. But without hunger, there is no Tiger. Without the wound, there is no aspiration to a cure. This is the fate of Tiger.

It was my friend’s birthday. It was an occasion. One of my best friends in museums and art galleries. So I treated myself with burgers at Burger King for a change after the drinks. They are the best. They are the ones that I have enjoyed the most since I was a kid. And, since it has been so long since I have eaten them, they were breathtakingly good. I really enjoyed myself. When you are sad and you don’t have a woman in your life, food is a substitute for a lot. You can’t hold her hand. But you can eat food. You can’t kiss her. But you can eat food. You can’t talk to her in your bed. But you can eat food. You can’t learn about her in an intimate setting with candlelight and music. But you can eat food. You can’t stroke her hair. But you can eat food. You can’t run your fingers down her arm and tickle her. But you can eat food. Food is something you will always have in this country, unless there is a major disaster. And it comforts you. Thank mother nature for chocolate and junk food.

Today’s highlight was the birthday party obviously. But also sharing some of my fancy chocolate biscuits I keep in my cupboard with some of the other friends I have in the museum. Even better than eating it yourself is to make someone happy with it for a moment. Sharing things. Sharing happiness.

In the night, I think of Helen. She is the one I have pillow talk with in this diary. Like a couple that talks about their day in the night in the bedroom. It was a busy day. Sometimes, you don’t think of her much the whole day. You feel like you are finally beginning to escape from her hold on you. But when the night comes and you are alone, that is when you miss her the most. Just looking at her once in the day makes your whole day, even if you think about how she has disappointed you. And when you don’t see her, your day isn’t really complete. But then, at night, you keep on remembering how she looked while she was talking to you. You replay the conversations in your head. The first one where I actually noticed her, when she was talking about the potential outbreak of a war in her country. Asking her about the watch that she wore which made me think that she was so stylish. Her reaction when I asked her how busy she was when she didn’t even have a boyfriend and didn’t live with her family. When she told me about an issue she was having with a sibling, which was the first time I thought that she trusts me with her personal stuff. The beautiful scene with the notebook when she jumped up and down for joy and clasped that book to her chest. When she ambushed me and her eyes burned with brown fire. When she was angry at me. When she talked to me in a different place and what she was wearing, those beautiful clothes. What is your life without your memories? Even if you think of them sadly?

I have forgiven my frenemy for how she treated me. I always forgive her. It is not her fault. She is sensitive and she is also young. She doesn’t know the problems I have had and I can’t write it here. She doesn’t know what she is doing. I’m just going to leave it and not say anything. Whatever she does, I think of her as my friend and I like her. Even more than a friend. As everyone says to me, I am soft when it comes to women. Too soft.

A Good Day; Mates Over Dates; Fast Food Choices

09.02.2024

I am really curious to know who it is that seems to be obsessed with my blog at at the moment and keeps on clicking on it all the time. Enemy? Friend? Secret admirer? The bored? Idle curiosity? It is one of those things that I will never know. In life, you never know who is thinking about you and what they are thinking about you. Sometimes it surprises me the kinds of requests I suddenly get in my email at work and I wonder how these colleagues have thought of me first for that kind of stuff. It surprises me when old university friends look me up on LinkedIn that I would never have expected to remember me from all that time ago. The thing is, I have always had a big personality. Some people hate me. Some people like me. But I am always memorable to people.

It was a good day today. I got up early in the morning. I had a shave and a shower – I haven’t been able to do those two things for quite a while. I managed to have breakfast. It was a good day at work. I was able to give tours of the art gallery and it was a varied and interesting day.

I was going to have beef burgers for dinner at MacDonalds. I don’t buy them because they are bad for the planet. I really love eating them like so many other things which I have had to give up – bacon, sausages, Italian food with beef in it, Chinese ribs and special fried rice, doner kebabs, pizzas, cheese, etc. Even though it has been absolutely ages since I have had those beef burgers, I couldn’t bring myself to buy them. I can’t think of myself eating my mother, mother earth for my greed. Self-control, restraint, denial – these are the building blocks of our culture, the culture of the poor and the oppressed. Without them, there would be nothing. I ended up with grilled chicken wraps instead. Maybe I will try and get the beef burgers again next week. Some people eat them every other day. Because they don’t care about anything and anyone and they don’t read. They can’t put the future first like people from my community do.

Instead of going to one of those events, I took a break. I just messaged my friend and we met up in the local pub back home instead. You can’t be chasing women all the time, especially when they are strangers and not even interesting to you. I don’t need to be thinking about that stuff all the time. My friend makes me feel good and enjoys my company and I really enjoy his. You can trust him and he won’t disappoint. He doesn’t play games that you don’t understand. He accepts you for what you are without question, even if he doesn’t agree with the things you say. Actually, we even argue quite a lot. But good naturedly. We have a good time together. We ended up in a Punjabi dessert place and he had a New York cheesecake and a hot chocolate. I think the servers at the place thought we were gay because I was wearing a pink suit, so they gave us two spoons with the dessert.

Just as I finished writing this diary post, the last paragraph, I got a match on the dating app with some woman who is quite attractive. It goes to show you that even when you are not thinking about that stuff, there is stuff happening in the background. She looks nice and she looks real but that is the only information to go on.

Decisive Dinners and Chow Choices

Food is simple, right? But consider. A predictable predicament. Friends, family, work, any social situation. One person wants to eat Chinese. Another one wants Mexican. A third Italian, a fourth American fast food. One is vegetarian. One is vegan. One is pescatarian. One is an environmentalist. One is a health fanatic. How to choose?

When I was a simple and trusting child, the idea of choosing what to eat in any meal I had never entered my mind. I would simply just eat whatever my mother gave me. Even if I didn’t like what was made, I had to eat it. Rebellion or the imagination of something different wasn’t even present as a remote possibility. We had a rule that we could only get up from the table if we finished the food that was in front of us. It was only when I was a teenager that I started eating what I wanted and chose to eat, and, even then, my mother still largely dictated what was on the table.

Fast forward to the present moment for most people, the ones that haven’t stubbornly (ignorantly?) remained the child I was. The food landscape has completely changed. There is more choice, a bewildering number of cosmopolitan world food choices. Authoritative discourses around food abound. There are scientific demands for a five a day and various health and ‘brain foods’. Add to this all the potential negatives surrounding the idea of food nowadays: the nagging thought of impending environmental crisis and the adult awareness of global systems of inequality and unfairness in terms of food production. Not to mention the atrocious conditions of suffering of animals led to the slaughter. Food choices are not so simple any more. Moreover, they are heavily and unavoidably politicised and tied to feelings of guilt and moral reprehensibility. Is the meal I’m going to eat going to result in the disinheritance of the children to come, the taking away of the good things of the world? Has this chocolate bar been produced by modern day slaves?

The amount of thinking time given to decision-making around food choices has exponentially increased since I was a child, in the span of thirty years or so. What has changed? When I was a child, I could simply trust the older generation and eat what they gave me. Now the scenario has changed. We cannot trust the older generation any more. New knowledge has usurped the system of deference and obedience. There has been a veritable explosion of words around the idea of food. We are faced with the existential crisis of knowing, of being forced into independence and moral responsibility. Our food choices have become difficult ethical choices that cry out for education and knowing. We have to research everything that we eat before we put it into our mouths. It is no longer a question simply of what tastes good, what is traditional.

Is this emphasis on decision and choice, the time it takes, such a burden? There are some positives. In many ways, the current burden of decision over food choices takes us back to the primordial past of humanity. Then, when the human race was exploring what was edible and what was not, there was a massive risk. What one ate could have made one sick, even fatally so. But ultimately, the courage and hardihood required to chew on anything and everything led to the knowledge of what could be eaten and what was useful and productive to eat. Like then, the current situation of hard food choices and risks promises to lead to a better tomorrow and more sustainable and healthier food, as well as a fairer food community. For those that have not remained the child I once was.