Soul musing

For the duration of the EURO, I was staying, with a few trips home, at a budget chain hotel near Kew Bridge in London. It was a half hour walk to work, along the Thames, across the bridge and then through some rather lovely houses.

On my first walk, the houseboats were all grounded; on the way back, they were afloat. I hadn’t realised the ride would make so much difference here. On the shores at low tide, Canada geese and their goslings gathered near the bridge, looking up somewhat hopefully. Ducks of different species, swans and coots swam across the river, under the squarks of parakeets. I thought that the blackbirds were singing at a higher frequency – cars and the Heathrow flight path. Robins too, while the blue tits seemed to have simplified their song. In the evening, I heard corvids, so low and gruff that I thought they were ravens, but surely not here?

That’s what I thought, but it turns out that ravens are now regularly seen at Richmond Park, which is just a raven’s hop from where I am. How incredible… And here no damn gamekeepers to shoot them.

On that first walk, I passed a common where local teams were playing cricket and a green by a church so quintessentially English that I experienced nostalgia for the place I was in.

Plane trees predominate, but there are sweet chestnuts, horse chestnuts, sycamores, surprisingly resolute-looking ash trees, some unidentified conifers and a pair of oaks.

Some of the gardens emit scents of jasmine and other delicious flowers I don’t recognise.

I have seen many dogs and a few cats. No other mammals except humans.

Kew Gardens is so close that there must be squirrels and foxes. Rabbits, perhaps. Rats and mice too, whom I may not see.

The grassy places have wildflowers and, on this alley, which led me in the wrong direction, wild strawberries were fruiting and I thought of how adaptive and resilient other beings can be.

Talking of wild, graffiti has a certain wildness about it, but this image struck me not for wild vivacity but for its soulfulness.

I walked back toward the hotel and went to a small park on the side of the river where I did yoga. People were walking, running, playing basketball. I wondered what they might think, but didn’t really care. There is a limit to how much time a person can spend in an office and a hotel room. There, I was in contact with grass and clover and daisies, watched over by a pair of crows in a skeleton tree on the other side of the Thames.

Back in my room, where there was no wifi without paying, I began to watch a film I had downloaded, Cold Souls. Paul Giametti plays an actor (called Paul Giametti) who has become too soulful through acting in a Chekhov drama. His agent points him toward a company that can extract and store your soul, and so leave you “lighter”. Paul’s soul is, essentially, a chickpea.

What would my soul be like, or yours? How would we feel without them? Would we uncurl from foetus-like self-protection and wildly bloom?