listening to: ‘Siren 042’ by Why? and Lala Lala.
FLASH FORWARD
. Everyone is sprawled on couches, watching trashy TV projected onto a screen in Joni’s lounge room. It’s midnight, and we’re delirious. We’re all laughing at the sound of Zoe’s laugh. Who even knows what Zoe’s laughing at in the first place.
. Suddenly the world isn’t admin. This is all that’s needed, one true moment of melding with a crew. Email inboxes dissolve, as do the precarious calculations of time and money. Outside of these things is aliveness, breeze, the real rhythm.
. Skater, her boyfriend, a few of their friends and me, have spent the last 8 hours together. We gathered at a co-working cafe, with staggered arrivals. With each new person, everyone needed to squish together more, until we were a single cuddly entity of Macbook-using makers. From there, we drifted between outdoor table tennis, streets, a dinner. If a member of the group had needed something from an Apotheke, they would have guided us all there. Nobody would have minded. That supreme sense of ‘doing life together.’ Your powers, combined.
”SEE!”
. My friend Glitter has several wonderful catchphrases. One of them is to repeat the word ‘see!’ The subtext is: ‘even though you had doubts yourself, I knew things were going to turn out well, and now… see! They have!’
. ‘See!’ doesn’t carry even a whiff of patronising ‘I told you so’ energy. Only supportiveness and empathetic joy. It says ‘I had your back this whole time, trusting things would work out even when you didn’t, and I’m so glad it’s now the time where we can celebrate together. See! See!’
IN WHICH I AM A PROTAGONIST AND AN EXTRA AT SETE PADEL CLUB
. I’m not there yet, at the symbiotic table tennis evening, feeling Berlin’s delicious unforgiving city air whip my face. It’s a week earlier, now, and I’ve found myself at Sète Padel Club on the outskirts of Montpellier. I sit amongst my backpacks and bike, jotting this poem on my phone, receiving curious looks. Around me, tennis courts with thick plastic walls are full of folks in active wear playing a fast-paced tennis/squash hybrid. It looks super fun.
. A man comes and asks me to leave, this isn’t public property. I explain that I’m buying a van from across the road, but I’m quite early. There isn’t anywhere else to wait. He says I can stay if I buy a can of Coke and hide my backpacks under the table. Sure, no worries. I’m proud to have made it through this exchange in French and earned a place to sit for a while for the mere cost of a can of Coke.
. Something always tickles me about winding up in out-of-the-way places. I think of the scene in The Truman Show where Truman strays well off his intended path, to the hospital. Actors rush in, hurriedly filling the roles of doctors and nurses. Because Truman isn’t living his expected routine, the performers who make up his reality are panicked. But in their stress, an aliveness, something real. Truman peeks into a surgery room and the flummoxed ‘surgeon’ holding a scalpel panics behind his face mask, hissing: “What should I do now?”
. I find it easy to imagine I’ve wandered off the edge of the planned map and God is frantically improvising, conjuring whatever buildings and pedestrians they can think of at short notice. Just inventing a ‘Padel Club’ and its frequenters. I am well aware that in the lives of others, I am an extra, generated seemingly on a God-whim. The man who waves politely as he walks over to collect a ball is probably amused that his God decided to spice things up by placing a kooky traveller type at his weekly Saturday morning Padel session. ‘What a clichè background character.’ He might be thinking, ‘ they’re really running out of ideas!’
TWIN TRIANGLES
I am the river.
I am the boat.
I am the captain.
And amongst me sailing a me along me,
I connect
to you flying a you through the big blue
you.
OF HEROES AND JOURNEYS
. A subject in my Art Therapy course centred around the Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell envisaged up to seventeen stages, but the three key sections are ‘departure,’ ‘initiations’ and ‘return.’ One way of looking at the experience of living is that each of us is engaged in a constant cycle of Hero’s Journey. We’re always in one of the three:
. 1 - Beginning a new thread, perhaps with hope and the tingle of expectation.
. 2 - Wading through the challenges, the obstacles and the quicksand.
. 3 - Emerging, somehow, a little more shaken and stirred from the experience than expected, perhaps, but with stories, new strength and wisdom to share.
. One positive effect of this worldview is that one both expects adversity and potentially even welcomes it, as a necessary part of growth, learning, progress. In fact, extrapolating from this cyclical lens, if one were to avoid adversity for a long time it might suggest that one had become ‘stuck’ in stage 1 or stage 3.
. Thus, I shall detail the advent of buying a van in Montpellier through a three-act Hero’s Journey structure, leaning into the classic narrative shape which is perhaps so satisfying because it is grounded in the core of human experience.
ACT ONE: THE DEPARTURE
. I wander from the Padel Club to the car yard over the road at 11am. Suddenly, it strikes me that I’ve made this arrangement only via a few Leboncoin messages. If nobody turns up, I can’t really be too indignant. But, before that thought sinks in too much, a friendly tattooed man is unlocking the gate and shaking my hand. I use Google translate to ask about when the bright yellow van was last serviced and when its timing belt was changed. He shows me papers with the answers and, bizarrely, uses Google translate to ask if I like the band Depeche Mode. “Sure,” I say and he says he thought so, that I looked like that kind of guy.
. I go for a test drive, then sit in a shipping container with his wife going through all the paperwork. Google translate certainly gets put through its paces. I have the uneasy sense that this is too good to be true, but am grateful. And then…
. “Alright,” the woman says, shaking my hand and holding out a phone with a less than ideal phrase translated from the French. “The van needs an inspection, so will be ready on Tuesday.” There it is. I’d foreseen a spanner in the works, but still this jolts me. Amongst the room’s stuffy air, I admire the wildness of life with all its majestic works to be aspired to, and all its conniving spanners.
. The plan was to get straight on the road to Berlin, now I need to stay put for three nights (spoiler alert: added complications mean that this ends up being four!) I’m frustrated with myself, realising that I should have checked more thoroughly whether the van was actually ready to drive away. It’s ‘delusional optimism,’ a cognitive fallacy which I’m getting better with, but which still it rears its head sometimes. Presuming things will pan out the best possible way.
. I explain my situation to the couple, exhausted and wondering where I might possibly sleep. Suddenly, the man is driving me to a motel which his friend runs. He talks to the man at the desk and arranges a heavily discounted room for four nights. In a lovely and wholly unnecessary act of generosity, he even buys me a coffee from a vending machine. I sprawl out all my bags on the floor of a tiny motel room and wash my face. Things could be much worse. But spending four nights alone in an out-of-the-way motel still has the character of a challenge.
MIRROR NEURONS
. I saw a fascinating theatre show with this title. Ever so slowly, the lights fade up to reveal a mirror. The audience sees itself. There are a few empty chairs in the higher rows, and I take in the ‘shape’ that we make together as an audience.
. Excellent sound design and some provocative audio samples of people talking about crowd behaviour. ‘What if one person raised their hand, would others copy?’ The audience makes some beautiful gestures, Mexican-wave style actions rippling through the crowd. People play, letting their bodies flail.
. You watch yourself, of course, and start feeling connected to other audience members. The confident woman in the front who is the first to stand up. The girl with a love heart earring who turns around and performatively shakes my hand. This kid right at the back who is loving the sight of adults being silly. Naturally, the man in the sharp business attire who isn’t having it and leaves halfway.
. I go to voice note The Body As Known To Move about this, but then figure I’ll just write a decent bit here and screenshot it for him. The show feels like a deep-dive into the energy and potentials of his beloved theatre exercise ‘school of fish.’
. The audio rollercoasters through topics, scientific and political implications of moving as part of a group. Flow, loneliness, trust, power, resistance, skepticism. “The chair is a traditionally an object of discipline,” the audio says, “what happens when we’re given permission to break its rules?”
. The piece went through some excellent sections, including a UV balloon dance party, and once we’d really been warmed up, a few dimly-lit minutes of most of the audience stomping hard to a Four Tet remix. A satisfyingly Berlin moment.
. The mirror turns out not just to be a mirror, but a video screen, and some trippy things occur from this. I don’t recall the last time I’ve seen a theatre show where no performer ever appeared on stage. An automatic show. Plug and play. And yet, in this case, brimming with so much humanity.
OF HEROES AND JOURNEYS 2
. I enjoyed the provocation, in my Art Therapy course, that if we accept the premise that we’re in a constant Hero’s Journey cycle, this might explain why we gravitate towards movies and books which follow this trajectory, the classic:
1. Hello 2. Uh Oh… Oh, No, Aah, REALLY UH OH!?!? 3. I Can’t Believe We Made It!
FEEL THE HANDS, PRESSING INTO YOUR BACK
. I keep being reminded lately of how supported I am, how supported we all are. How many other people are involved, in all these different ways, in keeping one person chugging along in this wild modern world. The support of those you know, sending you messages and such, and the support of those you’ll never meet, the guy who packages your favourite brand of bread. It’s absurd to think of oneself as ever being on a solo journey, to think of any life as individual, really.
. Each of us are being pushed along by so many invisible hands. It’s a nice meditation to do, to close the eyes and literally imagine the sensation of hands upon your back. Each new hand that you can feel, identifying whose it might be.
RAPID ITERATION
. Make the most basic prototype of your idea, fast. What’s the minimum that could exist to communicate the idea? Don’t be afraid if it’s amateurish. Get feedback early & frequently. Redraft, redraft. Follow what it wants to be, rather than what you want it to be. This is rapid iteration. This is the process.
. I’ve been spending time in a recording studio with a producer, creating my first ‘proper track,’ which shall wind up on Spotify. That’s been enriching. Skater and I are constructing a card game which guides players to write a poem. We’ll be debuting this game as a ‘poetry workshop’ at a music festival next weekend.
. More to share on here once both of these projects are further along, but for now it’s a time of collaboratively bouncing ideas, getting something tangible quickly, getting opinions and then developing from there. All on the table, then removing items. Rapid iteration, the flowing & flowery way to create without floundering :)
FLASH FORWARD 2
. Time and myself have been going through some interesting things lately. Thus, this edition of this blog is covering a two-week span, rather than one. Thus, the events are described in much less of a linear fashion than usual. Thus, it feels like both five minutes and five months since I last wrote an entry.
. If you’re new here, this is an email that could have been a meeting. An attempt from an Australian moving around Europe to stay connected to dear ones in other places. A wall of musings for both those who know me and don’t to get a sense of some textures. A capsule for my future self. The Sparkletter, a blog which hopes its disparate sections spark something. Perhaps you don’t make it all the way through, perhaps you’re redirected to read, write, contemplate, walk, or all of the above. My own life experiences as a jumping off point to examine the whole playground: Art and Life on the see-saw. Community pushing Best Self on the swingset. Risk going down the slide. Hope on the monkey bars. Time on the merry-go-round, whizzing around so fast that it’s gotten dizzy. And dear Friendship sprawled on the tan bark, pointing up at the stars with wide eyes.
GREENER GRASS 5
. An uncomfortable thought strikes me as I’m walking home along the bike path of my strange temporary Motel-anchored homeworld. Given the quality of the life I was living in Melbourne, it would actually be an incredible achievement to build a life that was nearly-as-good. Let alone ‘better.’ And the complexities of residence permits, banks and queueing at administrative offices all add to the jetlag of switching lives. A conclusion could be that I’m going to great pains only to construct a life that will be, best case scenario, similarly good.
. The image that accompanies the thought is a skateboarder performing this almighty act of propulsion while going up a ramp. He doesn’t just get some sweet hangtime, but miraculously flies right out of the skate park, over several suburbs. In mid-air, he signs several important documents and uses one of those tiny paperclip-like pins to switch the sim card in his phone. Then, finally, he lands into a skatepark with different ramps and graffiti, but the same atmosphere. He’s a little rattled. It’s kind of amazing. What just happened? Better keep on skating.
. I turn down the already-familiar barren street upon which Brit Motel gaily waves with its primary colours. This train of thought is another reminder that a mindset of comparison is never going to please. Even comparing to one’s own past self or future self. Comparing to a former time in one’s own life. All of it, a zero sum game. The only path to freedom is transcending comparison itself.
ACT TWO: THE INITIATION
. So this particular hero story turned out not to have a dragon battle, or the main character taking part in any games, whether Hunger, Squid or Olympic. Instead, it is endurance. No quest, no trek, just simply waiting. Time as the final boss. Or, perhaps, one's own mind, a postmodern hero's journey. However I frame it, all I need to do is chill out for days. The easiest and hardest thing in the world.
. At times, my weird little motel chapter is reminiscent of a Covid quarantine. Zoom calls, trying to construct a routine out of minimal actions like a daily walk around the block. The world shrinks. It is a little dull, oddly pleasant in its way.
. I'll always remember Celli, at Queen Vic market a full decade ago, telling me about a study. The researchers found that people with much stimuli and others to talk to experienced an hour passing very quickly, and yet a few months later, still recalled many details from this hour. Those who spent the hour in a white room alone with no books or TV reported that it passed very slowly, but months later could remember no specifics about what happened or what they did or thought about during the hour. I don't have a source, but the findings are easy to accept. So, perhaps there's not too much to report from what felt like forever. As I write, a week later, the motel experience has been vacuum-sealed by nostalgia to reveal not much in the bag at all. The four days now a lump of warped plastic.
. The end-of-act-two climax, of course, was a phone call from the guy who sold me the van. He was finally on his way, it was time to pack up my backpacks.
TOGETHER IN PERSON KILLS THE VIDEO CALL
. After all these years of video call technology, I still feel the amazement that I can watch the faces of Ananim and Best Hugger Award as clear as day from the other side of the world. It’s amazing that they call on a whim from a theatre in South Yarra and I receive that call at a French cafe, seconds later. It’s amazing that I can see their familiar expressions, that I can show them my surroundings.
. As we laugh, I try to focus on the truths and fictions of distance so much as to dissolve them. Maybe they are here sitting with me, maybe I am about to head out for a drink with them. People say connection can improve health, increase life expectancy. I wonder if the body knows whether the connection is long-distance or not, whether the health benefits are truncated when it’s through a screen. We hang up and I sip my cappuccino, my cup full even from a short chat.
SHIFTING ONE’S OWN GOALPOSTS
. One night in the Motel, a little deflated, it’s helpful to remember that I’m in charge of my own goalposts. Right now, presumed goals like ‘have a happy time with friends’ or ‘have fun’ or ‘enjoy a varied and interesting life’ aren’t as possible as usual. But ‘lean into a future of possibility’ or ‘recharge’ or ‘live out a humble and resilient version of myself, with integrity’ are. So I exchange the goalposts.
TIME AS AN ARTISTIC MEDIUM
. On another phone call, Slay tells me of the Tuesday hip hop night at a place in Melbourne called Shotkickers. The joy of turning up and seeing familiar faces there each week. On yet another call, Vein Of Stars and I are reflecting on our recent meditation retreat, an experience and a community we hope to return to yearly. I’m reminded of something I read once about manipulating time, both in life and art. Curating daily, weekly, monthly or yearly practices. Having a mix of these, various dials spinning on one’s dashboard. Each frequency offering its own type of grounding, its own energy and pulse to enhance one’s life. It’s the gaps between, of course, that matter. All the days leading up to the Tuesday.
. In the artistic context, it could be writing a poem which one adds a line to each night before bed, a theatre show of which an iteration is performed once a year, a painting where you need to move to a different part of the canvas each minute.
PORZINGIS
. I’ve been doing my best not to bring up my deep love of American basketball in this blog. But it would be remiss not to say that great things happen when you’re truly in flow with something. So in flow you’re not even thinking how you’re doing what you’re doing. I felt that in the Motel while creating wacky songs on Garageband. Just doing it. Not thinking. Realising afterwards that I did it.
. Kristaps Porziņģis described this after game one of the NBA Finals recently. He was coming back from injury, but came out firing with 18 points in the first half and some huge blocks. They call him the unicorn and I’m pretty glad he shall be returning to our team again next season. ”The whole game was a blur,” he said. “I had to go and rewatch it afterwards to know what happened.”
. On Garageband, I make a remix of one of Mary Magdalene Triple Threat’s songs and send it to her. She later tells me that she arrived home after her concert in Melbourne, having decided last minute not to play the one song which I chose to remix, and listened to my remix as an encore at the end of her night. Love that.
MEAN WORLD SYNDROME
. Finally, the man with the van is here and it’s time to drive. In theory. I transfer him the cost of the van, but the money doesn’t appear in his account. Act three of the story is impatiently wanting to start, and it’s sweltering on the pavement outside the Motel. I call my bank, it takes 45 minutes to get through and they can't help. I get a message from my French phone company, I translate it. That call just cost 67 Euros. I can't pay this due to 2-step verification, to side step it I'd have to call the bank again. So now my phone is disabled. Somewhere, upon the Atlantic Ocean, a boat is slowly carrying some of my favourite things back to Australia. I’m sick of the Motel, sick of the way everyone just wants to charge you money at any opportunity, sick of automated phone systems and chat bots.
. I want a hug. I want to disappear. I want to drive away.
. The phrase ‘mean world syndrome’ comes into my mind and I make a note to investigate it. I can’t quite remember what it means but I think I want to make a series of paintings about it. I’m picturing paintings of people carrying large items out of a shopping mall, like cardboard boxes with flat screen TVs inside, while folks begging for money outside the malls’ automatic doors watch on.
THE HORSE AND THE RIDER
. Investigating ‘Mean World Syndrome’ takes me down a rabbit hole of researching unhelpful types of thinking. I come across familiar ones, such as ‘Catastrophising,’ the specific negativity bias of imagining slightly bad situations to be devastating. And the Sunk Cost fallacy, that because you’ve invested time or money already, you must continue doing so. The overarching notion is that our brains are not always accurate and reliable, such a hard one to grasp. It goes against the core human experience we have, conceptualising our brain as our ‘self.’ What does it mean for our ‘self’ to be wrong, prone to errors in judgement? Perhaps seeing our own brain as an easily misled jockey riding a smart horse is the answer. The horse always knows what’s up. The rider thinks it always does.
. A cognitive distortion I learn about which I haven’t read of before is named Declinism, a tendency to view the past with rose-coloured glasses, and to also predict the future will suck, thus envisaging one’s own life on a downward trend. I’m glad not to suffer that particular fallacy. I know people who do, for sure.
ACT THREE: THE RETURN
. Finally, the money goes through and I even manage to get my phone online again. These problems are always so simple once they’re solved. I drive into the exhilarating freedom of Europe in a yellow van that I’ve named The Light, after a Jens Lekman song. In theory, I could go to Morocco right now, to Scotland, the top of Sweden. Technically, I could make it to Beijing. All of this seems quite miraculous to someone from an island continent. I set course for Berlin.
. It’s 20 hours away, a little further than I thought, a fitting challenge for the final act. I’m so hyped that I’m not sure I’ll sleep much. The sun sets and the moon is huge and yellow, guiding me. I stop at a service station and put my headphones on, taking my time to convert the back of the van into a makeshift little home. As I do this, a group of men park nearby and lay down towels on the asphalt. They kneel upon these and pray, going through what looks like a well-practiced ritual. Occasionally they or I glance over, respectfully curious about what the other is up to. It strikes me that I am also, in my own way, in a ritual of prayer.
. Mostly, the drive is lovely. I become quickly familiar with the left lane of the highway having no speed limit. Folks whizz along there, sometimes at 200km/h, and if you’re not overtaking or going extremely fast, you better get outta this lane!
. My phone says there’s still 13 hours to go, and then I’m buying a coffee amongst a crowded service station of schoolkids on an excursion. Then there’s 8 hours to go, and I voice record myself trying to list every single moment that’s ever occurred in my life. Then it’s 4 hours to go and I guess I have an absurd 4-hour self-reflective voice recording that I’ll listen back to on some rainy day.
. As I cross into the outskirts of Berlin, I turn the radio on. Skater had said that she might not be home when I arrived as she was performing some music gig, and then as I’m channel surfing on the radio, I hear her name announced. I drive along familiar streets listening to her sing two songs about her hometown of Berlin, a ridiculously perfect arrival soundtrack. I love the way that, when you travel, a person can become synonymous with a city. For me, Skater and her friends and family have become my gateway into experiencing Berlin. I’m able to turn Google maps off when I get close, I know the drive to my Berlin home from here. I park the van in the backyard which looks onto the lake. Made it.
THE FOUR QUESTIONS
. Skater’s mum tells me about four questions to answer each morning, without really thinking about it. They are: ‘who am I?’ ‘What am I grateful for?’ ‘What do i really want from my life?’ and ‘What is my purpose?’ We’re at the huge wooden table and sunlight streams onto the giant pot of purple flowers hanging in the window. The difference between questions three and four really intrigues me. Where do those two intersect, and how are they distinct? What might it be that I consider to be my purpose, but which wouldn’t feel quite right as a response to ‘what I really want from my life?’
. I particularly enjoy tackling these massive questions each day with the flippant energy of one who has just awoken. I stare past the purple flowers to the lake called Weissensee. ‘I am a body of water’ I write. What am I grateful for? ‘beautiful scenery.’ My answers are a little too informed by the present moment, perhaps. Yet, when I look back at even one week of consistently doing this practice, some clear patterns emerge. I’ve often written the same phrases without realising that I was doing this. Some mornings Anna and I ask each other the questions, it feels like a fun game. “So, who are you today?” She gives answers like ‘I am the home that is my body.’ I write this poem about all this.
MEAN WORLD SYNDROME 2
. At a service station during my huge drive, a Scottish guy is relieved to find someone who speaks English. He’s just been robbed. His wife and child sit inside the car as he points out the car boot, which is a little crumpled. “They must have used a metal bar,” he says, “our passports, cash, wallets, everything.”
. I notice that while he seems like a lovely and heartbroken guy, whose dream of taking his young son to Disneyland has been dashed, it’s still hard to fully trust. I walk to the ATM with him, a little worried that this is some weird scam. After all of my own administrative challenges of late, though, I’m determined to try and help someone else. In the end, he transfers me money from his bank account, which I withdraw in cash. He’s been asking people for hours to do this for him, to no avail. Now he’ll use this cash to get his family home, as the ferry back to the UK doesn’t take card. He’s very thankful, and I’m glad to restore his faith in humanity a little. It only takes a couple of negative experiences, I note, to be pushed into this guarded frame of mind where the world is evil, out to get you.
OVERHAUL
. I listened to the audiobook of The New Rules by Chris Cheers last year. His voice was soothing. It mixed well somehow with the Australian bush outside the train windows, as I commuted to my regional work. What struck most was the suggestion that a literal life change is sometimes what one needs for happiness. To quit the job. To move city. To end the relationship. To start ballet. Contemporary psychology and various spiritual practices often stress the opposite. Given the right inner resourcefulness and attitude, they might say, you could be happy in most circumstances. Develop your inner peace enough and it becomes irrelevant whether you have hobbies or not, a partner.
. While you don't want to quit a job every time an afternoon meeting drags, it's refreshing to feel the permission in Cheers' sentiment. That if a voice inside you repeatedly identifies a life segment to overhaul, it's okay to listen. In fact, some stay in an unpleasant house for years, telling themselves it'll be fine once they build just a smidge more inner strength, doing all their therapy homework. Perhaps it's not them, it is just the house.
. I am reminded of all this now, seemingly out of the blue, looking out the train window to Sonnenallee station. I'm on my way to a blind friend date which Joy Puppeteer has organised. I don't know anything about the person I am going to meet. Literally no information, age, gender, interests, anything. I don't have a contact number or any info about their appearance, so if I can't find them I guess I'll call Joy Puppeteer. I feel open-minded, curious to meet a new person.
. Off the train at uber-hip Neukolln now, and down the escalator, I'm still thinking about this spectrum of 'focus on regulating oneself to enjoy the situation' all the way to 'focus on modifying the situation to enjoy oneself.'
. I've stopped in the concourse of the station to type this, feeling enlivened by the concentration required to articulate these sentences into my phone notes. Out of the corner of my eye, a queue of people buy doner from a stall called Hakiki. I should look at the maps, see where I'm going. My final thought about this is that surely one should at least be able to say of their work, house, relationship, etc, “in this environment, it's possible to be a version of myself that I like.”
FLASH FORWARD 3
. I pause typing up this week’s blog post when Papillion sends a 6 minute experimental music video. I sit back from the computer and watch the whole thing. It feels like an incredible amount of discipline, just to stay with the sounds and the images. To quieten my mind and inhale only, not exhale. Six whole minutes. I think about her and about our connection as I watch. The whole video is as strange and fascinating as the love that she and I share.
. So much happens in a week, so much happens in two weeks. Perhaps it’s less like one hero’s journey cycle and more like a newfangled watch with many different cogs turning at once. Many simultaneous circles and spirals occurring, parts of life resetting and others blooming. I’m grateful to be more sturdy, logistically, than I was earlier. To be balanced, giving the past and future equal weight so that my present self doesn’t topple. In the next episode of this blog slash my life, I shall teach some poetry workshops at a German festival, using a new poetry writing card game which Skater and I are developing. Already keen to share about that experience, thinking fondly of the various ‘you’s who may have managed to read all the way til the end. Sending love and lightning, HH.