Normal Beauty Struggles to be Reborn

It’s not normal that we were both on the Earlham Road in Norwich (coincidentally) within a week of each other. Coincidence brings me up short; I want to make it mean something more – perhaps an implication of underlying meaning and order in a chaotic universe. The café you longed (?) to cross the road to . . . was it by any chance the Workshop? Because that is where Leah and I had a drink on Friday afternoon and in the evening returned to share one of their delicious pizzas. But there’s more: during the afternoon visit, as I drank my coffee, I suddenly realised that it was a Grateful Dead

song from the American Beauty album that I was hearing. The sort of time compression made famous by M. Proust. Next morning I noticed in the kitchen of the house where I was staying a boxed set of Grateful Dead CDs – a present, I later learned, from her to him. Somewhere over the years I parted company with my Dead albums and so I was offered CD copies. Memories force their way in.

Connections, which I believed to be terminally broken, are suddenly joined up once more.

I glance out of the window and across the road and read the headline hoarding outside a newsagents for the Western Morning News: EU RULES COULD CLOSE REGIONS’S BEACHES. No wonder we lurch from one paranoid crisis to the next with such populist sentiments being churned out by the press trying to make news out of nothing. The EU remains a useful standby: faceless Brussels bureaucrats interfering (again!) with our birthright. With a bit of luck that old Turk, St George, will ride forth from wherever he’s hiding and kill the wretched dragon and we will be saved, to breathe easy in freedom.

It’s normal that things never quite work out as we hoped. Yes, beware our wishes. But then as I set out back down the High Street I noticed a book on a shelf outside a shop I’ve never bothered to look in before.  A Memoir by Simone Veil. A hardback; I picked it up to see how much it was but the price was smudged though it rather looked like it was being sold for £1. At that moment a man came out who I judged to be the owner of the shop.

‘Do you own this shop?’

‘Yes . . . ‘

‘How much is this?’

Yes, indeed it is being sold for a pound. And he goes into a long explanation of why it’s being sold so cheaply and on and on so that I began to fear that I would be held there indefinitely because there was no break in his spiel. But summoning a little extra will power I forced myself away from this ancient mariner’s clinging words.