Synocracy
Life can be very strange with a kind of synocracy around certain dates and places, and also people.
I find I keep returning to certain places, for instance, also certain people, and certain dates are significant.
Take Hastings, a charming town which I really love. It has been my home-from-home for the past 40 years, but sadly the two friends who shared their home with me and my life-partner, inviting us for weekends, Christmas and New Year many times, have now passed on, their flat lying empty till the landord finds a new tenant. The antiques and wonderful paintings by an uncle dispersed around the world in auctions. All I have are memories, a few photos and a 7 page inventory of these valuable antiques and paintings which amount to 48 auction lots (some lots containing more than one item.)
However I still have links with Hastings as 4 separate households I know, including a cousin and her daughter, live in Hastings/St Leonards, only one of whom was connected to the couple who died.
Wood Green is another place I keep returning to. This is the area where I spent most of my childhood and went to school. This was in the 10 years 1951-1961 . In the 1970s I found myself returning there weekly for various rock’n'roll clubs. Now I go there every week to meet up with a friend of mine who lives in the area.
The London Borough of Camden is another place I keep returning to. This was the area (West Hampstead) I lived in until I was 6 and where I first went to school, 1945-1951. Then in 1968 I found myself quite by accident living there again (Camden Town) due to moving in with my first live-in partner who had a place on Camden High Road. I stayed in the area until 1973, but found I still had to keep returning. My mother continued to live in the borough till 1989, and my father till he returned to his native Cyprus in the late 1970s or early 1980s. I also visited Camden regularly for Hampstead Heath, a place I love and where I go swimming in the Summer (Hampstead Mixed Pond). I still go there every Summer. It just happens that a pub and a music venue, as well as some of the best natural water swimming ponds in London, are all in the borough of Camden, a place which has far more significance for me that Battersea, where I’ve now lived more than half my life.
As to people, a guy named David keeps cropping up in my life. As a teenager he lived not far from me in Welwyn Garden City where I lived for 7 years in the 1960s. He used to encourage me to go on Committee of 100 sit-down demonstrations. He has popped up in my life on various occasions since, running into him in the most unlikely places, including on a train with my partner on our way to Australia (via the airport of course). More recently he turned up regularly manning a bookstall at music gigs run by friends and acquaintances.
Dates are also significant. September 29th being the birthday of my favorite singer, also of a cousin, and a friend of myself and my mother in the past, also the day my life-partner passed on. March 20th is yet another significant date: my birthday, the day my grandmother died, and the day my best friend at school died. A pet cat also had an operation on that day, and died soon after. Is it any wonder I rather dread dates like these two in case anyone else close to me passes away?
Of course there are places, people and dates which are significant in my life by choice or for rational reasons. Places I like to visit, people I keep in touch with, dates I remember because they are somehow significant. But the above cases listed occurred by pure chance – or did they? Is there some kind of synocracy which dictates certain places, people and dates will keep cropping up unexpectedly?
Leave a reply