Lynley Edmeades
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme. — John Keats
It’s not every day you get an email saying that a friend of yours has died. I’ve only ever had one. I’d moved from Wellington to Belfast three or four months before, and I hadn’t spoken to Nick, the sender of the email, for a good few months. I was excited to see his name come up in my inbox and, if I remember rightly, I was a little tipsy at the time. I’d been drinking wine with Sean, the Californian, who I’d brought home from a bar a few nights before, and who hadn’t left.
Taking a shower is a personal affair, the bathroom a place of privacy. However, there have been occasions where I’ve willingly shared the intimacy of cubicle, warm water, soaping and sudsing with a carefully chosen companion, modesty overwhelmed by steaminess. It may not save much water but it does have a softening effect. Recently, after body-disfiguring surgery, I was invited to take a shower with someone I had known for only a few hours. No preamble or compliments. No time for coffee and a chat. No opportunity to take in a movie or a show, or to go for a slow, moonlit ramble along the banks of the Leith. Nor was there any suggestion of a long-term relationship. Just a towel over her arm and a seductive smile that glowed inside the boundary of bed curtains.
When you think of hunger, chances are you do not summon up an image of a clothed, housed and employed individual. Yet in New Zealand there are accounts of children arriving for their morning classes without having eaten breakfast at home, and people working two jobs but still having to queue for food handouts. The food insecure within this country are not necessarily destitute individuals. They are also those on benefits, the under- or hidden employed, and the underpaid or working poor. In a country that is prosperous, free of conflict and agriculturally self-sustaining, a high level of food security is assumed, but that does not mean that the small pockets of those who remain food insecure should be any less disregarded, especially when the reason behind their insecurity is systemic.
