A ¡Fiesta! on a Friday throws out my Day Reckoning, and I begin to believe that I am living in a succession of Sundays.
‘Sunday’ is my default setting if something seems slightly ‘off’ about the day: if the light is not right, or it’s too quiet, or the smell is different, or I feel odd. The answer for all of those is, ‘It’s Sunday!’
Sometimes I get a feeling that I used to have on Sundays in College – a sort of spacious loneliness because things were off-kilter and the routine of the week had been broken, with nothing as filling to take its place. The strangeness of the feeling was all the more odd because I could feel it when I quite patently was not alone.
A typical Sunday would start with breakfast in the hall canteen, which was always taken before 8.30 am (or you got nothing) followed by a Communion Service for Anglicans (as I was then) in one of the meeting rooms. This was a quite cosy affair as there were not so many of us, and we were able to disport ourselves in chairs a lot more comfortable than hard wooden pews. And the Chaplin always ensured that the communion wine was “decent” even though as a well-trained churchman, I never let the liquid do more than touch my lips. Though even with that brushing acquaintance you could tell quality. That experience did mean that in future non-University communion services I always felt that taking the wine was another symbol of self-abnegation rather than celebration given the vinous horror that some vicars deemed acceptable for the faithful!
Lunch was not included in the catering for those of us in hall, we survived on breakfast and an evening meal, but Sundays were different and we had a sort of tea-meal to keep us going.
The afternoons on a Sunday were sometimes taken up by concerts in the Arts Hall which were free, and sometimes excruciatingly boring, but improving and worth the experience even if it meant that you crossed off another composer from your general listening list. And then the evenings were free, to prepare for the following week of academic work. As if.
But there was an emptiness about the day that went beyond the lack of the normal to and fro of a working day and, like Proust’s madeleine, the feelings come back to me in the strangest of circumstances where, for a moment, even in a crowd, I’d feel a certain sort of aloneness.
It’s not even as if these feelings are negative, they are just other, and at odds with how I usually feel. As an only child I have been used to being by myself, and I am happy to relate that I find myself jolly good company. Usually.
I value friendship and enjoy companionship. I look forward to meeting people and talking is surely one of the great joys of being human! I also appreciate space of my own and solitude.
Space to think, and to write. Hence this!
