Miss Logic

More snapshots of my London today. Walking across the bridge from the gym to the office, in daylight at least, one can see: St Paul's, the Gherkin, Canary Wharf, Tower Bridge (often mistaken as London Bridge - lads, the towers on it are kind of a giveaway), the London Eye, the Oxo building, the Tate and, most importantly, peaking out from between two much bigger buildings, Shakespeare's Globe. Oh, and the Thames, of course. It's quite, quite something.

All of this looks completely different, but equally spectacular, by night. At night, of course, I'm going to the gym, and have to walk off Southwark Bridge, down some snuck-away stone stairs and onto the bankside walkway. There's building going on on the stairs, so there's looming scaffolding and a light that flickers off more than on. It's all very Sin City, if you've seen Sin City. A work colleague takes the long way round to avoid these stairs and the bankside walkway, where homeless guys sometimes sleep in the niches of a private sailing club. He mentioned last week a TV programme about urban behaviour that said the way one walks has a lot to do with whether one gets attacked or not. He is small, slight and nervous. I stroll on through regardless, safe in the knowledge that sleeping homeless people are too tired, weak, cold and maybe drunk, to be a danger to anyone but themselves (insert cliche about poverty and wealth accumulating together in their extremes).

A friend said something similar today, that I had "a way of stalking around city streets at night with an air of one in his natural habitat". Just call me Patrick Bateman. Or Batman. Christian Bale will do. Anyway, today I'm going to tell you about this friend of mine, Miss Logic (I love blog-christening my friends. Dangerous though; it might reveal to them what I actually think of them).

Miss Logic is a fellow blogger - detectives will find it themselves - and we have a sort of mutual blog appreciation group of two. She, similarly, is a Corkonian in a foreign country. Unlike me, she's been a student for 20 years solid (Masters, or Doctorate or Ruler of the Universe in philosophy at the moment), and is, well, not religious in the conventional sense, but has a strong faith: believe me, I've tried shaking it. Anyway, aside from this, and the fact that she can't open a carton of orange juice for herself, Miss Logic is one of the most right-minded, and like-minded, people I know. I was going to say practically-minded, but this might give the wrong idea. She barely lives in this world, but in the world she does live in, she is firm. And she can drink a bottle of tequila standing.

We're similar in a number of ways besides the strident belief that we are always right (although she is a little kinder than I am). While we can both be gregarious, lifeandsouloftheparty.etc, there is something kept back about both of us, as if always observing, and conscious of the invisible, but artificial, almost insincere, role of the observer. And, I think, because we're both aware of this, both in ourselves and in each other, we have an unspoken 'nod': "I see you, you see me, let's leave it at that." There comes a great fondness from recognising, in having an unspoken. Of course, we didn't hang out as much as Doney Casanova, the Scholar, and, latterly, the Snowman, did; she doesn't know football or poker, I don't know clothes, the OC, etc. Funnily, our gang often divides along gender lines.

I don't have, want or need many friends and none of my friendships, whether with Miss Logic, Doney Casanova, the Scholar, even with the Special One, have very conventional origins, such as school, local sports teams, family, etc. In fact, I came into contact with all four in one very special place - Freakscene, which has been a constant, welcome fixture, a beacon, an ivory tower even, on Cork's nightlife for more than a decade now. Miss Logic, the Scholar and I were all members of Freakscene's once-vibrant talkpage community, and, after a year or so of rattling sabers, burying hatchets and throwing ourselves on our swords online, it was decided that the whole online community meet up. Friendships were made, cliques formed, old enmities either resolved or renewed. You get the picture.

The advantage of this method is that you can choose your friends on criteria other than old, out-grown acquaintances and shared childhood experience. In a way, it's more pure, especially for adults. (In case you're wondering, Doney Casanova was a tag-along friend of the Scholar. The Special One came on the scene a few years later, as the result of a bet...)

Anyway, back to Miss Logic. In a recent blog, she said she was just recently finding happiness, that, for 10 years she'd been little more than a shell. Obviously this doesn't mean that she's been on the brink, in the depths, for all that time; she and I have shared plenty of times of delirious happiness and enjoyment. But then, I guess, everyone's underlying happiness, their lodestone if you will, is up to them. Miss Logic is currently reading Plotinus, a Greek philosopher and father of neoplatonism, which is a western philosophy (rather than some half-baked eastern 'philosophy' or proslytising western religion) that, basically, suggests the existence of god, which might have something to do with it; alternatively, she might have realised that choosing to be happy is a big part of being happy.

That's always been my attitude - well, after I stopped being a shitty teenager - as handed down from my old man. Or, for Miss Logic's benefit, a muscular, non-ascetic epicureanism, mixed with the 'those who can, should' and the indifference to passion of stoicism.