Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it … Rumi
Me: It had been, to use a technical term, a shit of a day. No use working through lunch time, no use drafting, sending (and mis-spelling) a reply-all email while distractedly on the phone to someone else, no use escaping from meetings the minute they ended: the work, and the boss, kept coming at me. It seemed a miracle when I finally jumped off the crowded tram, left behind its load of cross and cranky passengers and aimlessly entered the local shopping mall. Now Barkly Square…
Interjector: Barkly Square? Isn’t that in Brunswick?
Me: It is, though there is another Berkeley Square, in London I believe, spelt differently though sounding the same, where a nightingale sang, a few years back. Michael Bublé had a shot at it too. The Barkly Square in Brunswick is also called Sparkly Bear…
IJ: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Me: You will. To resume… Barkly Square can be many things, phantasmagoric shopping mecca, favourite parade ground of hipsters with craft beers, brainless but enthralling retail paradise, but who would have thought it could be the setting for my greatest love affair? And I’ve had a few…
IJ: Oh?
Me: Another time… After I passed a kebab shop (or was it two?), the greengrocer with the permanently krapped-off staff, and a place that sold a wide range of possibly the world’s largest muffins, I found myself drifting into P Mart, a vast emporium of household goods. They didn’t have the plastic trowel I was vaguely searching for, and so I began to wander along the Home Entertainment aisle.
