Can't see the love for the hate

Here's a confession that'd get me expelled from any gathering of psychogeographers and academics: I can't stand London.
No, let me rephrase that. I hate London with a rage so intense it would shake the city to its foundations if I could tap its energy in seismic form.
It's not an urban thing. I love Mexico City with an equal passion; I tell my students that if you put your ear to the pavement you can hear its heart beating. The same goes for San Salvador and not just because it's where I first set eyes on the sultry shape and form of Maria Ines de la Cruz. I've spent many hours difting through the streets and suburbs of both cities, usually without aim but occasionally with a purpose, such as the evening I traversed downtown San Salvador and circuited the bohemian Colonia Centroamerica in search of the city's elusive gay nightlife - a sort of queer derive (there is, as a matter of fact, a 'strip' but you'd be hard-pressed to find it. And if you're a gay woman you're going to be very disappointed).
From the queer derive to the theological derive. Several years ago, whilst doing fieldwork for an MSc in Latin American politics, I spent the best part of a month criss-crossing San Salvador interviewing nuns and other religious leaders; a quest which took me to parts of the city rational enquiry couldn't reach. Even two bungled muggings - and they were shamefully amateur attempts - failed to douse my ardour; if anything the sense of danger they evoked only made the place more attractive.
I've been mugged in London too, as it happens; another botched job, in 1999, in Stratford, before the Olympics and urban regeneration were even a twinkle in Boris and Ken's eyes. I spent the best part of three years living in what might euphemistically be called the 'East End' but didn't really have the feel of the mythical East End. What I remember most about my time amonsgt the fun-loving criminals of what will surely, one day, be sanitised by the heritage industry then repackaged and resold as 'Kray Country', was my landlord and his partner dragging us along to Benjy's 2000 on the Mile End Road.
'Nuff said!
But the truth - perhaps the sad truth - is that whenever funds permitted I fled the city and sought refuge in the rolling hills of Dorset or the brights lights of Weymouth. I was like a woman on the run, though pursued by what I still don't know. 
As an itinerant tutor I have cause to visit London once or twice a year and, last month, on as part of journey entirely by rail (apart from the Dover-Calais ferry) from Bristol to Malaga, I crossed the city from Paddington to London Bridge in the early hours of the morning. Still the anger was there, still my mood shifted rapidly through the emotional gears until it was working at full-tilt outright hatred when I arrived at the phallic landscape of The City, just as dawn was breaking, cold and windy. I hate The Shard, I hate The Gherkin, I hate the Canary Wharf Tower - sorry 'One Canada Square', talk about unashamed, unadulterated conceit. 
From the monarchist nonsense of Buckingham Palace, the imperialist pomposity of Whitehall to the looming bulk of Thames House which is all eyes, eyes, eyes over those who pass beneath its ugly facade, all I see are the overblown relics of a failed state trying desperately to cling on to its faded glories. Does anyone still believe this hubris? London doesn't just take itself far too seriously, it demands those who visit it do so too; insists they pay homage at its shrines.
Too arrogant, too regular; too hard and angular. And too Protestant, aesthetically-speaking, at least. London, to me, lacks the curves and the kitsch of a Catholic city. It doesn't yield and I find myself stuck between a nook and a hard place.
I've probably got it all wrong, spend too much time seething and looking at the city through my own, probably gender-obsessed lens. I should just lie back and think of London, bask in its undoubted commitment to and belief in the personal and social tenets I hold dear: multiculturalism and diversity.
At about three o'clock in the morning I'm in the heart of The City, approaching Cannon Street Station (this, to me, the heart of the evil empire). I'm trying to remember the lines of The Wasteland; trying to conjure up TS Eliot's Unreal City:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

Trying, also, to roll back the years to 1999 when I spent the best part of a year working in the head office of a major, multinational investment bank to fund my postgraduate studies which were increasinglt focusing on liberation and feminist theology. 
Talk about selling your soul to the devil.
For reasons I still don't understand I was trying hard to retrace my route from Mansion House station to my former place of work and getting increasingly frustrated. Then, in the midst of all this turmoil, an angel, of sorts, appears. He is driving a red London bus, a regular service, and has pulled up at a red light. He opens the door and asks whether I'm okay, whether I'm lost; tells me to hop on board and he'll drop me off somewhere more safe and suitable at this time of night. 
HIs isn't the only act of kindness I experience during those short, madragudal hours and I hate myself for hating the city so much. And I know full well that when I get to Paris Gare du Nord in a few hours time, and take a stroll across the city to Austerlitz, I'll love each and every square metre of the French capital, and for the very same reasons I hate the English one.
London. Can someone turn my hate into love?

New boots and panties

Talk about chalk and cheese; we make an odd couple, the unerringly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I. Whilst I loiter around La Villa Ramblanista in spandex trousers and a big, baggy t-shirt looking like a cross between Nena and Joey Tempest’s twin sister, she’s preening her thick black tresses and gazing at herself in the mirror, the spitting image of ... well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So you can imagine her surprise when I announced I was about to purchase a brand new pair of boots. And not just the cheap tat I usually buy; when I said I was forking out one hundred and ten of your English pounds she very nearly fainted. Then I said they were hiking boots; if looks could kill ...

Poor María, she never will understand. She’ll never understand the unrequited love a Ramblanista has for her hiking boots; she’ll never quite comprehend why I’m so reluctant to part with my now decrepit pair of Karrimor boots – seventy quid from Great Western Camping in Dorchester – that have been laced to my feet for more than a thousand of your English miles, along the Camino de Santiago and beyond. Listen, if she had her way they’d be out with the refuse, awaiting collection by the oxymoronically-titled Somerset Waste Partnership. 

The old boots - can you feel the love?

So I never let them out of my sight, not even now I have a go-faster pair of boots, purchased from the lovely shop assistant at Wells Outdoors – get yourself a website and start tweeting, Mr Wells Outdoors!

You know what they say about the sudden manifestation of children destroying an ideal relationship? We might say the same about my new boots. It didn’t help when I joked about wearing them in bed because the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz knew perfectly well I was only half-joking. When my boots and I returned, yesterday, from our inaugural stroll together – along the thin tongue of higher ground which separates West Sedge Moor and Curry Moor – she retreated to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her shouting ‘you’d better make your mind up, Juanita – it’s the boots or me’.

She’ll calm down. Strange thing is that although she took the gin with her, I didn’t really care. I sat myself down on the sofa and spent the remainder of the evening ogling my new boots.

The new boots - if these don't get your lovejuices flowing nothing will

Our Lady of the Landscape

It’s a little-known fact – an increasingly little-known fact since the ecumenicalisation of the Catholic Church – that the month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Like many of the more ‘earthy’ and Marian Catholic celebrations it has its origins in popular belief rather than Vatican dogma which is reason enough for the excruciatingly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and me to pour ourselves a couple more girt, humungous G&Ts.

It was a subject we pondered during an exquisite, sun-baked hike that took us over the deliciously horizontal levels of Somerton Moor then up and along the Polden Hills where we followed the almost-eponymous Polden Way and reminisced about last year’s Camino. It was, observed María, a year to the day since we set out on the long journey – we took the train, then the boat, then the train to get to St Jean Pied de Port; something else to celebrate.

You don’t have to be a student of Mariology to work out the connection between May and Our Lady. Several years ago I wrote a paper entitled – with more than an eye for the controversy – Our Lady of the Libido: Towards a Marian Theology of Sexual Liberation which was published in the Journal of Feminist Theology. In it I mused that ‘a fortnight after Easter the earth was finally involved in its own delicious and sensual resurrection and in popular tradition, of course, May is the month of Mary.’

The relationship between Mary and the month of May emerged in Medieval and Tudor England and flourished throughout Europe from the eighteenth century. I can even recall celebrating May pageants at my own, fervently Catholic primary school in the mid-1970s but within a decade the custom had all but died out. The passing was only part-mourned by one parish priest who wondered if it were not wiser ‘to encourage people to have a strong devotion to Mary through imitating her in their own lives instead of focusing on statues’ (The Tablet 2001:577). Such thinking seems to permeate a strand of contemporary thought that seeks to rein in the more pagan aspects of Marian devotion – and with garland and petal strewn processions and maypole dances there can be little doubt that there exists within these May revels a strong link to fertility rites.

Dr Sarah Jane Boss of the Marian Study Centre suggests that the identification of Mary with the month of May was an attempt to rescue it from the pagan festivities that marked the beginning of summer. In her seminal – and I do mean seminal – work on the Cult of the Virgin, Alone of all her Sex, Marina Warner writes ‘all over medieval Europe on May Day, the Queen of the May was crowned and sometimes married to the Green Man, in an ancient fertility rite, that in some places, has survived all bans, Catholic and Protestant alike.’ It was, she suggests, this ‘frivolous’ aspect of Catholicism the Reformers loathed and tried to stamp out (Warner 1976:283).

And if the Reformers loathed it, you can bet your bottom Euro that the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I will love it to bits.

'Les Tres Riches Hueres du Duc de Berry: a hunting party of elegent and decorative young courtiers set out in a wood bright with new young leaf. They\wear budding branches in their broad-brimmed hats and some wear bright green surcoats too - the vert gai - the traditional leit-motif for the beginning of summer on the first of May' (Warner 1976:283).

In Our Lady of the Libido I argued that the discontinuation of these syncretistic practices has been to the detriment of a feminist Mariology as they represented an intimate communal celebration of the fecundity of nature: fecundity and desire, Our Lady of the Landscape, imbued with a sensual, erotic magic.

But before I come over all Glastonbury-ish, an important caveat from Ms Warner: ‘The fact that the cult of the Virgin was capable of assimilating so much classical fertility worship reveals that much thinking on the connection between mother Goddesses and matriarchs is erroneous: it is conventional wisdom among some mythographers and feminists to invoke a golden age when the social power and position of women were recognised and reflected in mythology and worship’. There is, insists Ms Warner, ‘no logical equivalence in any society between exalted female objects of worship and a high position of women’ (Warner 1976:283).

   Sadly, both Maria and I feel compelled to agree. No Golden Age, not yet, anyway. And as Ms Warner admits, ‘a goddess is no better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman’s club to which ladies are only admitted on special days’ (Warner 1976:338).  

Bibliography

Sarah Jane Boss – Empress and Handmaid: On Nature and the Gender of the Virgin Mary – Cassell (2000)

Marina Warner – Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary – Vintage (1976)

My own Private Ida

There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier

Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.

The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,

Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,

And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand

The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down

Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars

The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine

In cataract after cataract to the sea.

Behind the valley topmost Gargarus

Stands up and takes the morning: but in front

The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal

Troas and Ilion's column'd citadel,

The crown of Troas.

 Tennyson, Oenone

The Greeks might have their Mount Ida, the Japanese Mount Fuji, the hippies over in Glastonbury have their knobbly Tor but yesterday the unfeasibly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I came across our own little paradise. Our very own Pico Bonito; a part of South Somerset that will be forever northern Honduras.

It’s fair to say that during our prolonged hibernation beneath the duvets in La Villa Ramblanista our thoughts have wandered to warmer climes; it was all I could do to tear María from the laptop where she was searching for a cheap flight back home to El Salvador. ‘You’ll be lucky,’ I told her, ‘we haven’t even got enough money for a cheap day return to Weymouth.’

So for the first time this year we flexed our pale limbs under the warm, West Country sun – well, my limbs are pale, hers are, as ever, a deep golden brown – our thoughts were still very much on the exotic. After nibbling on a pasty in the sublime surroundings of Wells Market Place we drifted out to and along the old railway line that, once upon a time, connected the ecclesiastical with the agricultural: Wells to Shepton Mallet It was there that Maria noticed the shapely outline of Dulcote Hill. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked. I nodded, images of the beautiful Pico Bonito flashed before our eyes like cartoon pound signs.

Dulcote Hill, Somerset

Pico Bonito, Honduras

It’s difficult to find any accurate information on Pico Bonito. It’s now the focus of a national park, in the Nombre de Dios mountains not far from the Caribbean port of La Ceiba and the Moskita coast. We’ve been there before, of course, but we’ve never got much further than the crystal-clear Rio Zacate. Apparently the first successful ascent didn’t take place until the 1950s and since then only a handful of attempts have been made.  The expedition takes a good ten days at best up vertiginous slopes with dense vegetation.

The ascent of Dulcote Hill, in contrast, doesn’t take more than a good ten minutes scrambling through thicket and scrub and in the absence of poisonous snakes such as the fer-de-lance the only threat to our safety came from slipping through the rusting fence designed to keep the likes of us out of the quarry. I’ll tell you something for nothing; there’s nothing like a ‘Private: Keep Out’ sign to prompt a Ramblanista sortie into the forbidden.

If the north, south and west slopes of Dulcote Hill are precipitous, its west face is a vertical wall of rusty-grey rock because it is, of course, a disused quarry. Just as well our summit celebrations weren’t over-effusive; one false move and either of us could have toppled over the edge. It was a languid afternoon so María and I lay under the sun enjoying the sublime view of England’s most exquisite Cathedral City.

In a couple of years’ time both María and I will be celebrating an important birthday; as we hopped and skipped our way back down to the picture-book literary village that is Queen’s Sturge, an unspoken we discussed what we might do by way of a party. You didn’t have to be a psychic to know what we were both thinking. That evening, sipping on out gin and tonics back in La Villa Ramblanista, the intolerably handsome María Inés de la Cruz fired up the laptop.

‘Shall I?’ she asked, her voice hoarse with anticipation. I nodded. ‘Cheapest flight from London to La Ceiba won’t be any less than eight hundred quid - call that a grand come 2013.’

‘We’d better start saving then ...’