just entwined

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

Found this unbelievable stationery store. It is vast and old-fashioned, everything neatly arranged. They had blocks of yellow writing paper, stacked in rows, some with no margin, some with a narrow margin, some with an extra-wide margin for some specialized purpose. They had gleaming jars of bulldog clips, silver ones, brass ones: pretty. They had all different kinds of string: hemp twine, sturdy and wrapped in a round ball the size of a baby’s head; and mean-looking black-and-white flecks, thin and strong; and a dreamy colourful cotton twine which came on a long tall spool and which I held in my hand for five minutes, warming it. Like an egg. They had a whole shelf of little cardboard boxes, the kind pastels and charcoal come in, held together on the corners by neatly folded staples. They had Moleskines designed by people who use Moleskines: the covers printed with one guy’s harbourside sketch of Hong Kong in pen and ink, another woman’s purling abstract with falling petals. They had slabs of plywood for balancing your painting on your easel and aisles thinly populated with drifters, holding up articles and musing on them, some of them wearing a kind of half-smile or fierce frown of concentration that seemed to me to indicate they were dreaming up what they would make with all these products.

This was in Copenhagen, which I visited at the age of 10 and again two months ago, and where if it didn’t cost twenty Kroner every second just to breathe, I would move tomorrow, and learn to play better piano and be a better jazz composer. In the teetering, cobbled old town I found five jazz clubs within a square kilometre; most of them filled to the gills; and the audiences ranged from age 20 to 70. What a lovely town. Cold and windy. But beautiful. And peaceful in the water.