Come together!

When I first heard that Beatles classic, I was not aware that it had ramifications that were not as straightforward as I could make myself believe. Not then. Now I know, having had it pointed out to me by various people that life is not as clear and clean as I thought it was, that smut and innuendo is just part of the everyday game. Any which way, I choose to ignore almost all the seaminess and focus on what I want to see, rather than what there is to see. And at some stage, whenever, however soon or late in the game, it all comes together in one coherent image, making a statement of fact rather than imagination.

I was thinking these rather philosophical thoughts in the kitchen this morning, as I washed up the mugs used for morning coffee – or green tea, in my case. Call it kitchen philosophy or idle musing, I was getting deeper into the morass of my own creation when suddenly there was this enormous BURP from the pan of milk I had on the stove to boil. Startled out of my reverie, I looked stovewards and found to my horror that the milk, instead of being at a peaceful simmer, was seething, roiling, bursting into violent upheavals of white froth and iridescent bubbles, splashing over on to the counter and across it to the edge of my outstretched palm. Why I reached towards it I do not know, since I could hardly have imagined myself to be a modern-day feminine version of Canute trying to stop the tide…in vain, of course. But it was perhaps the first time ever that I had watched the process of milk curdling as it boiled, the solids causing the noise and fury of the whole event. Turned off, the pan and its contents were silent, peaceful, nothing to show that there was a Loch Ness-ian monster unleashed by science in my small kitchen.

In the way that the milk solids came together to form cottage cheese in its most basic form, life tends to go through violent upheavals and boils to finally settle into a semblance of delicious serenity. It is, for that moment, a feeling of completion that floods the being, as if the insomniac’s system had been invaded by chemicals that, finally, produced a gentle, undisturbed and restful sleep. My life has certainly been that way at regular intervals. From the most recent disturbance of being diagnosed with certain health problems to these being carefully treated to produce a new balance, from the violent upset of emotions and sensibilities brought up by death to the peace that follows its acceptance, from feeling bereft and alone to re-finding people you believed were important and necessary in your life even if they did not want to be part of it. It all is a process of churning, recreating, almost distilling, that leaves behind only what you want and need, not all the detritus that human relationships tends to throw up over time.

Kitchen philosophy, indeed!