It is Easter, the most important and holiest of Christian holidays, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the central moment at the heart of the Christian religion, celebrated each day a service is held. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again, in all his glory to judge the living and the dead.
If I were in Hudson, I would be at Christ Church Episcopal, celebrating Easter with that little community, listening to my friend Lionel sing his Easter solo. There would be coffee and cakes and community afterwards and then, probably, I would have cooked an Easter dinner or a group of us would have gone out for Easter dinner.
As it is, I am some 30,000 plus feet in the air, in the final hours of the long flight from Delhi to London, where I will spend a few hours and then head on to New York and to home.
The flight has been uneventful, which is always what one wants a flight to be.
A very young lady from India has been very unhappy and has spent most of the flight screaming at regular intervals, a series of wails that soared through the cabin. She has now, I believe, exhausted herself and slipped into sleep; she lasted six and a half hours.
While I napped, I never completely fell asleep as I could hear her in the background. It reminded me of a time when I had teeth pulled. I was asleep but was going around a wheel with a candle at the bottom and every time I went round, the candle burned me.
When I boarded, I was handed a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail from London, a paper short on news and long on gossip.
It did report the depth of unhappiness Prime Minister Netanyahu holds about the potential Iranian nuclear deal and a great deal about Nicola Sturgeon, who heads Scotland’s SNP. She may be the power broker in the general elections in Britain in May. Seems she did a right fine job of outdebating her English rivals. She’s being hailed “Queen of Scots” today. If her party wins a predicted 40 or more seats, she could align with Labour and form a government. That wouldn’t have happened since 1924.
There was also a huge exegesis of the fashion turnaround of the last ten years by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and wife of Charles, Prince of Wales.
Several juicy stories about politicians in sexual peccadillos followed.
All fascinating.
And here I am, having awakened in Delhi and, if all things go as planned, will fall asleep in New York, half a world away from where I have been living the last two weeks.
One of the things I was thinking about this morning as I was closing my suitcases was the light in India. Everything in India seemed bathed in a softer light than New York, as if light came through a filter, even when it was at its hottest and brightest. I remember thinking that in other trips to India; how different the light was. It may be the dust and the pollution or some other factor.
Indulging myself, I have been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, great fun for long flights and travel. I have several of them on my Kindle.
Sitting here in my seat, I have a sense of traveling away from somewhere; a sense of movement, which I am sure, would have been intensified a century ago when the only way to India was by long sea voyage.
Today we are catapulted from one world to another, with just hours to adjust. I think I would like to have that time at sea to contemplate what I had seen, heard, felt and experienced.
Now I am rushing to make sense of things. It is the way of the world in which we live, a rush of things, a rush of information, a rush between places and a rush to assimilate the information we are receiving.
Yes, right now I would like to be on a deck chair on a steamer slowly making its way back to London so I could pause and gather my thoughts, feel my way internally through my experiences.
Tags: Camilla, Christ Church, Delhi, Dorothy Sayers, Duchess of Cornwall, Easter, Hudson, London, Lord Peter Wimsey, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Netanyahu, Nicola Sturgeon, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, SNP
This entry was posted on April 5, 2015 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Social Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Letter from the Vineyard
Letter From New York 04 05 15 On the way from Delhi…
It is Easter, the most important and holiest of Christian holidays, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the central moment at the heart of the Christian religion, celebrated each day a service is held. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again, in all his glory to judge the living and the dead.
If I were in Hudson, I would be at Christ Church Episcopal, celebrating Easter with that little community, listening to my friend Lionel sing his Easter solo. There would be coffee and cakes and community afterwards and then, probably, I would have cooked an Easter dinner or a group of us would have gone out for Easter dinner.
As it is, I am some 30,000 plus feet in the air, in the final hours of the long flight from Delhi to London, where I will spend a few hours and then head on to New York and to home.
The flight has been uneventful, which is always what one wants a flight to be.
A very young lady from India has been very unhappy and has spent most of the flight screaming at regular intervals, a series of wails that soared through the cabin. She has now, I believe, exhausted herself and slipped into sleep; she lasted six and a half hours.
While I napped, I never completely fell asleep as I could hear her in the background. It reminded me of a time when I had teeth pulled. I was asleep but was going around a wheel with a candle at the bottom and every time I went round, the candle burned me.
When I boarded, I was handed a copy of yesterday’s Daily Mail from London, a paper short on news and long on gossip.
It did report the depth of unhappiness Prime Minister Netanyahu holds about the potential Iranian nuclear deal and a great deal about Nicola Sturgeon, who heads Scotland’s SNP. She may be the power broker in the general elections in Britain in May. Seems she did a right fine job of outdebating her English rivals. She’s being hailed “Queen of Scots” today. If her party wins a predicted 40 or more seats, she could align with Labour and form a government. That wouldn’t have happened since 1924.
There was also a huge exegesis of the fashion turnaround of the last ten years by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and wife of Charles, Prince of Wales.
Several juicy stories about politicians in sexual peccadillos followed.
All fascinating.
And here I am, having awakened in Delhi and, if all things go as planned, will fall asleep in New York, half a world away from where I have been living the last two weeks.
One of the things I was thinking about this morning as I was closing my suitcases was the light in India. Everything in India seemed bathed in a softer light than New York, as if light came through a filter, even when it was at its hottest and brightest. I remember thinking that in other trips to India; how different the light was. It may be the dust and the pollution or some other factor.
Indulging myself, I have been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, great fun for long flights and travel. I have several of them on my Kindle.
Sitting here in my seat, I have a sense of traveling away from somewhere; a sense of movement, which I am sure, would have been intensified a century ago when the only way to India was by long sea voyage.
Today we are catapulted from one world to another, with just hours to adjust. I think I would like to have that time at sea to contemplate what I had seen, heard, felt and experienced.
Now I am rushing to make sense of things. It is the way of the world in which we live, a rush of things, a rush of information, a rush between places and a rush to assimilate the information we are receiving.
Yes, right now I would like to be on a deck chair on a steamer slowly making its way back to London so I could pause and gather my thoughts, feel my way internally through my experiences.
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Tags: Camilla, Christ Church, Delhi, Dorothy Sayers, Duchess of Cornwall, Easter, Hudson, London, Lord Peter Wimsey, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Netanyahu, Nicola Sturgeon, Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, SNP
This entry was posted on April 5, 2015 at 5:42 pm and is filed under Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Social Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.