On our second evening in London I met Cigano and Pipoca for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant along Edgware Road. I got to know the two of them three years ago in Tribo Capoeira. I'm ashamed to say that whilst they are still as agile and limber as they were then, I've stopped training entirely for about two years already. Cigano, Gypsy by name and Gypsy by his musical talent, was leaving for home the following day. Pipoca, a scientist, was leaving London for a good while within a fortnight. That day our paths crossed again, if only for a day.
Tribo was like a home away from home for me, and a family like no other. We had a multinational cast practicing a Brazilian art form - Americans, Chinese, Colombians, Cypriot, French, German, Italians, Namibian, Polish, Portuguese, Malaysians, Singaporeans and British nationals of Bangladeshi, Moroccan and Pakistani descents. This was London's flavour - it gathers cultures together the world over without diluting any of them, yet all the while it has retained, albeit invented and reinvented, its very own Britishness.
We also met up with Wei Shu twice, once at Wong Kei (cheap and decent Chinese food, but I've come under fire for patronizing that restaurant in Chinatown) and the second time in Stratford. We've known each other since Cambridge days. Our friendship (and countless hilarious anecdotes) was forged upon stone and under rain, muddling along Cumbrian and Caledonian ridges, befuddling each other. Wei Shu works in London now, so it was great to be able to see him once more. How the tables have turned. When he first came to London (then for his internship) I had already been here for a year and helped arrange his accommodation for that period. Now Mary and I returned as strangers to the place, and Wei Shu helped with travel tips.
All of us never really left the Empire. Or should I say the Empire hasn't really left us? It is an empire of the mind (to borrow Michael Axworthy's history of Iran), leading us to ready identification with the River Thames, St Paul's, Big Ben, Shakespeare and even One Direction today. We speak English, and we are comfortable with it. We cheer on our favourite English football teams with vigour matching the vehemence with which we jeer their fiercest English rivals. But such parochial loyalties are today globalised.
The world is a very small place. It feels especially contained when you are looking down on it from the firmament, above the clouds, aboard a plane. The azure unknown beyond really feels like a girdle, and you are flying on the edge of an enormous blue ball. We felt like that, on board our Saudi Airlines flight, though the hours passed like centuries. I leave you with what we saw from the air, taken (I estimate) over the Alps.
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