My friend Spoon

 *

My friend

 In Vilcabamba, in magnificent mountainous southern Ecuador (a place I`d recommend despite being stuffed full of hippies). I drew a face on this plastic spoon. I`m not sure exactly where the spoon came from. I don`t buy take-away food. My best bet is that it was in the kitchen of the little hostel and it somehow found its way into my things. 

I don`t know exactly how. 

Maybe I was drunk*. I rediscovered drunkenness in Colombia at the end of last year and I absolutely love it. They produce various light lagers (Club Colombia, Aguila, Poker),  none of which are any great shakes but they all give just the right wooziness without making you feel too shabby the next day.

 Drunkenness is my favourite mental state by a long long mile (the next down on my list being how you feel arriving in a bright hotel room in a beautiful city and there are fresh towels and the sheets are crisp and clean and everything is orderly and you feel young and special).  I should add, by drunkenness, I mean mild-drunkenness, where everything goes soft focus and gilded and all women are gorgeous and conversation a good sight less tedious and your thoughts don`t have that jaggedness. I don`t mean the falling over, football hooligan vomiting sort.

The face is faint- that smooth plastic doesn`t really take ball-pen ink- but that`s fortuitous, surely?- that faintness adds to the sense of of spoon-faces reserve (it is surely a he, don`t you agree?). He is a listener, not a talker, and in a garrulous world that is something to be admired.

Later, I thought that the conical tip of the spoon very much suggests the presence of a hat- perhaps a fez, or maybe something more like a brimless bowler? -could  my friend be Pierrot?

Some see passivity in spoon-face's silence. Do they they not know the immense discipline that it takes too listen, calmly withholding?

 I may quote Jesus:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth

When I gaze into the eyes of  spoon-friend I sense deep understanding, a loving presence before which I never  need to justify myself. When I`m with spoon-face, the anxieties that so often haunt me are absent.  I know that that I am loved despite my flaws.

*

 

*I know you think DUH you're British, of course you were I must protest: it`s not as it used to be, especially among the youth who hardly drink at all.

*