Back Home in London, continued now that I'm back home in BC.

I stopped writing my blog last October. There were several reasons for this. Being back in England and especially in London and Cambridge revived a lot of painful memories from the time I left, and I couldn't think about much else for a while. I wanted to share what was happening - in fact not able to think of much else to say, but (a) sharing would be unprofessional (for sure) and (b) felt risky and unguarded. So my choice was to describe my Cambridge experience as a kind of academic travelogue, which was such an inaccurate portrait of my time there. In reality, every day brought back an unbearable sense of loss for what I deliberately left behind, but never truly let go of, when I flew out of England in 1975.

Going back to visit our old house in Fulham was a physical blow to the heart. The last time I saw it was on January 3rd 1975. My brother Keith was driving me away to Heathrow at dawn to catch my Air Iraq flight to Delhi. My last ludicrous sight through the car's back window was Paul, still wearing his black Palestinian abayeh as a dressing gown, leaning far out of the 3rd-floor bedroom window, waving goodbye and staring soulfully after our receding car as he got smaller and smaller until we turned the corner and he disappeared.

I've uploaded a photograph of our house, with that bedroom window circled.

So that was the end of my decade in London. But on the way to our house, walking down the King's Road, I recognised the facade of Chelsea Registry Office. We got married there in 1967. I don't believe I had ever noticed passing it previously, not since our wedding.

Registry Office weddings are a British institution. You can't find anything like this in British Columbia. If you don't want a church wedding, you can book a wedding at a public registry office building. Inside are large rooms with rows of seats separated by an aisle fit for a bridal procession to the Registrar's desk. You have a best man and bridesmaids if you want, and can be given away by some some older male if you want, and the preordained text of the ceremony is solemn and quite poetic. It is a civil ceremony with gravitas and meaning. If you prefer a civil wedding, you don't have to be married in a forest, on a beach, or in your living room. The Registry Office is a civil substitute for a religious ceremony with the ceremonial ethos of a church wedding and no reference to any deity.

See the pretty floral arch erected over the imposing entrance is to this municipal building. The arch was not there in 1967, but it was still a day of magic and, more importantly, my first truly validating experience, beyond anything I could have hoped for:

So what is the story, beginning with that happy exit through the doors of Chelsea Registry Office out onto the King's Road, leading to a vanishing goodbye wave through a bedroom window in Kempson Road...................?