Open Writing

Turn a corner in the small closed world of a supermarket, and there's a lady offering samples of cheese, chocolate or chutney. It could be fat-free milk, frozen food or face-cream. They set up their little stands at the end of an aisle. Sometimes they have little pans in which they warm up their miniature offerings. Or their whatever-it-is might be is freshly scooped from a refrigerated container.

All very nice, except for one thing. If you're a male, these nice ladies rarely see you. They are under the impression that men don't buy things to cook, eat, drink, or rub on their skin. That's why it is so pleasant to be greeted and offered a sample.
Today's lady proffered a tiny portion of a very nice cheese. Now cheese in all its forms is a delight. Stilton is Heaven on Earth. Alas, some of us have to confine ourselves to low-fat cheese, and go to Heaven on a wedge of Stilton only once a year, at Christmas. I declined her offer but we somehow got into conversation, the way you do.

Her accent intrigued me. When I felt that we were friends, I said, 'You sound Italian, but you aren't from Italy'. I did something like that once before, when chatting to a white-haired gent on a bench in the Melbourne Water parkland. He might have been Greek. He revealed his origin — he came from Cairo. We had a long chat about the 2,000-year-old Egyptian Coptic Church and the pope. That's Pope Shenouda, not the gentleman in Rome.

The lady replied, 'I come from Egypt'. Another Egyptian, good gracious me! However, she isn't a Coptic Christian. She belongs to the Orthodox Church of Antioch. She is one of more than a million Antiochenes worldwide. A new word for my vocabulary, too.

During the past week I've had chance encounters with visiting birds in the small world of little lakes behind my back fence. While I was waddling along, I espied a white bird cruising peacefully on the water. Closer inspection through binoculars seemed to indicate that it was quite graceful and fairly large. It's always a thrill to discover a new birdie visitor.
Back home to the bird books. It turned out that all I'd seen was a silver gull. In common parlance, a seagull. A very common pestilential seagull. Hordes of them spend their lives making a nuisance of themselves at the local shopping centre, rivalled only by the ravens.

Another white bird was on the scene yesterday. I stepped through the rickety gate in my back fence and there it stood — white, very tall, and diligent. At the risk of exaggerating, I'd also say magnificent. This was no ordinary bird. It was a spoonbill. Again using binoculars, I watched it for ages. If I go on like this, I'll become a genuine twitcher.

There are chance encounters with strangers and visitors on the Internet, too. Some of us send entries to a caption competition on a Christian website. There isn't any rivalry, and we don't vie to win. We simply enjoy taking part.

In a recent competition, I was sending daft and obscure captions which alluded to all kinds of possibilities — literary, political, social and nonsensical as well as theological. An unknown contributor registered his (or her) objection to the number of captions I was sending, and announced that I should 'get a life'.

Perhaps the best thing to do with spotty youths who spit is to ignore them and hope they'll go away. At the same time, it's sad to know that there are folk who exist in their own small worlds and can't handle satire, parody, wordplay, social comment, or difference. Life is made of difference.

There's always someone new to meet in the supermarket or at the pavement café. When you've lived and worked in four countries with four different cultures, you relish chance encounters with people from Egypt, Italy, Cambodia, Greece, India, Romania, Vietnam, Sudan, Russia, Mauritius... the list goes on. When you've kept an eye on birds for sixty years, you realise that the kilometre of fauna and flora behind your fence is a gateway to a world that matters. You have a life.

© Copyright Brian Barratt 2006