a sunday out

Kensington park near my house that I have to past to go anywhere.

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Some years ago, when the people who built skyscrapers and cathedrals finally finished what they had set out to do, that is, to build skyscrapers and cathedrals, one with lots of concrete and the other with lots of sandstone, they discovered an empty piece of land left forgotten right in the middle of the city. They couldn’t remove the land because that would simply and swiftly replace it with another empty piece of land. They didn’t want to build things on it because that would add more weight to an already heavy city. So they agreed to hide the vacant plot. They paved some footpaths and manicured the bushes and the grass that had begun to sprout from the neglected earth, and planted some trees with hard sturdy trunks that were bent at a diagonal, and whatever concrete and sandstone that were left were used to line the little kerbs, shape a fountain decorated with naked angels, and erect a memorial for the war dead, lest we forget. The land that couldn’t be removed was now hidden from view, and to celebrate this simple feat of ingenuity, they decided to call it Hyde Park.

St Mary's Cathedral at the tip of Hyde Park

Hyde Park comes alive on Sundays, as if preparing to go to church. Bordered by thick roads, the sound of traffic is never far away, like waves lapping on a nearby shore. Only perhaps less soothing; only this time the blue is up in the sky, an endless inscrutable dome with no beyond. Sometimes, the church bells toll, and would certainly toll again when the Pope descends onto the city next week, and give his blessings to believers and non-believers alike. I am not a believer – when there is too much light, I step onto a man’s shadow and await another shade. This was just what I did earlier, stepping onto other people’s shadows in the park, while skateboarders went zooming past, catching wind in their wind-ruffled hair, while a dandy in white tapered trousers and brown moccasins and a pink sweater hiding the colour of his shirt played the flaneur, looking at no one but at himself, while a lone youth sat on a corner bench reading the last few pages of a very thick novel, while lovers and pigeons cavorted on the sloping grass beside each other, separated by breadcrumbs and cheese, where a sermon of fire and brimstone was delivered from the pulpit in the cathedral, while its stained-glass windows of Mary and Child looked serenely out, to somewhere, the sound of bagpipes, and the Scottish highlands seemed nearby.

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Japanese and Aussie hiphop dancers

erm ...

F is German and he's just found salvation in the city - bread, pretzel and beer from his hometown

I had something called kassler, that had the b-e-s-t porkribs I'd ever tasted

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Who am I?

The story behind Hyde Park is of course not real. I made it up just then out of boredom. I don't know how Hyde Park came into existence, just as I don't know how I came into existence. There's probably a factual explanation, a truer truth somewhere. Often we don't bother to find out, and it doesn't really matter anyway, because even more often, excavating for the ultimate truth is a futile exercise when there is seldom such a thing as one truth, when there are only multiple truths and that they change with time and they merge into fiction. The question of Who am I always invites a tale, either as pure story or some embroidery. I'm a doctoral student in the humanities who loves literature, doesn't club and smoke and do those fancy shopping and pretty money things and am impressed and fascinated by, and inexplicably attracted to people and things that're somewhat average, quotidian and pedestrian, without affectation and artifice, and especially if accompanied, naturally, by some poetry, coffee, and a waft of cigarette smoke from outside the window, and these are fancies consequent of having spent an inordinate amount of time reading and daydreaming in cafes, buses, trains, and sometimes on planes, and whatever time is left I swim and run, and when I run out of time, I panic and start scribbling out my thesis. But this story will change in time - it might not even, like a dream, come true. But does it matter who tells stories, as long as there are stories to be told?