Falling Out

A rather unfortunate situation developed this evening when we went for dinner in the packed Muslim Quarter.

Ric and I fell out, something we seem to be doing more and more recently, and we ended up unintentionally losing each other in the crowds and bright lights of the market. While Ric headed straight back to the hotel, I got totally lost, as is my way, and ended up on the opposite side of town. I finally found my way back an hour or so later; tears streaming, ice-cream dripping from my hand.

We've started niggling and taking things out on each other as well as picking up on each others' bad traits and weaknesses. I always assume everything is my fault too which doesn't always help matters as we are usually both culpable and both become grumpy, stressed and miserable. I regret that I become so defensive when Ric confronts my OCD or occasional bad eating habits. He's always so spot on. Truths I don't always want to hear.

Why is this happening to us? Is it a simple case of spending too much time alone with each other in these unfamiliar surroundings and sometimes daunting circumstances? I trust so. We both hate it when we aren't getting on and it frightens us. Maybe it's the Chinese grumpiness rubbing off on us or the fact that we haven't been sleeping too well as our bed is like a diving board and we have an Air Conditioning system that feels like a jug of cold water pouring on our heads all night.

Aside from the above, China has been a great experience so far, interesting, surprisingly easy to get by in and welcoming to tourists. I don't find it very pretty and it's certainly not clean but then I suppose that's only to be expected in these newly developed cities. I'm impressed by their big buildings, their unlikely fusion of tradition and ancient knowledge with the new, by their uptake of technology and certain facets of Westernisation, by their food, by the fact that they have managed to almost perfectly preserve or restore their ancient relics.

We've got a long train ride to Beijing ahead of us this evening and we're just praying to get bottom bunks although I think we'll have to jostle for these with all the children returning home for the weekend from boarding school!

Here are a few extracts from Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey To The End Of The Night which I like and wanted to share:

When you're young and you don't know, you mistake everything for love trouble...It's a mania with the young to put all humanity into one backside, just one, the dream of dreams, mad love.

There's nothing terrible inside us or on earth or possibly in heaven itself except what hasn't been said yet. We wont be easy in our minds until everything has been said once and for all, then we'll fall silent and we'll no longer be afraid of keeping still. That will be the day.

A time comes when you're all alone, he you've come to the end of everything that can happen to you. It's the end of the world. Even grief, your own grief, doesn't answer you any more, and you have to retrace your steps, to go back among people, it makes no difference who.

We grow old quickly and whats more irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mould, and we're never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. little by little, without realising it, you being to take your role and fate seriously and before you know it it's too late to change. You're a hundred percent restless, and it's set that way for good.