Notes & Queries - How do you conquer your fear of missing out?
Gather your smelling salts and ensure that you arrange any pearls that you own within clutching distance.
How do you conquer your fear of missing out?
“Do you like my ring?” enquired Esme Soley. She raised her left index finger. The changing pattern of light on the stone wall made me wince inwardly.
The ring was the first thing that I noticed after I was shown into her tiny living room. And no, I did not like it. There was something off about the cut of the gem, as if whoever had been perched behind the diamond tool had been drunk and had lost their equilibrium. It reflected the light in a manner that was unsettling.
“If you do not like it, then say,” she chided.
“Okay, I think it's appalling.”
An image of a younger Esme flashed into my head, dripping from head-to-toe in gold jewellery, inhabiting a slender peach-toned ellipse between overlapping spotlights. By comparison, our surroundings seemed black and white, as though we had regressed backwards through time into a dimly-lit era of peasant drudgery.
“It belonged to Marie Curie,” she said. “It was her wedding ring. The cut of the stone is a labyrinth that she designed to trap rare particles of subatomic matter. So far, no-one has come up with a solution for freeing what is inside.”
“How?...” I said
“Jack Sibson gave it to me,” she snapped. “You can say what you like about the man. He knew good taste.”
My first encounter with Esme was watching her dance at The Royal Festival Hall, in London. I was 8 years old. Afterwards, my parents were allowed to visit her dressing room. I lingered outside, too shy to go in.
She had been born in Spain. Her father worked in the oil industry and moved the family out to the Gulf States before she could walk. In her late teens she gained a reputation as a wedding dancer. The blank gold coins she earned were minted by the royal families who ruled over the region. It was regarded as blasphemous to pay dancers in money bearing the likeness of an incumbent king. This was the workaround. The coins were not given directly, but rather placed at the feet of the girls as they danced. They could not be spent; only melted down and turned into jewellery. The status of a dancer was determined by the quantity of gold that she wore. When a dancer died, her jewellery was cast into a statuette of her likeness, which was appropriated by a royal patron. Somewhere in the world, there must be galleries lined with these golden idols. Though Esme's image will never grace one of these treasure-filled corridors, I think she prefers it that way.
“Throughout my 20s, I moved across the globe from party to party,” she reminisced. “In all that time, I desperately wanted to leave, but I was scared. This world, that had defined almost my entire life, would carry on without me, though I would know nothing more of it. For me, it would be as if it did not exist; as if my youth had never existed.
“There was an air of coercion: You must dance here. You must not be friends with this person. You must not dance for this man, if you wish to dance for these families. It was a labyrinth, like my ring, and I could not see a way out. The weight of the gold was a physical reminder of the weight that held me down. Then a miracle happened, though it did not seem like one at the time. I had engaged an accountant whose job was to keep track of the gold coins I earned and ensure that my jewellery was of equal weight. This was to prevent the coins from being put to other uses. He stole from me. When he was caught, he accused me of orchestrating the whole thing. He went to prison. My gold was literally stripped from me, and I was cast out.
“Why Scotland?” I asked.
“I came here to dance once. One morning I looked down from the window of the house where I was staying and I fell in love with the countryside. When I returned, I worked in a cafe. I hummed tunes and tapped out slow rhythms on dirty teacups. Andrew Wolfie joined me on his fiddle. Together we created new dances."
The late-in-the-day contribution made to Scottish folk dance by Soley and Wolfie is the Reel Breaker: A slow-paced piece of music corralling the energetic reels into cycles of 3-5 performances. It is a cue for the younger dancers to clear the floor and socialise, while those who cannot cope with the rough and tumble of the reels take to the opportunity to slow waltz.
“If you love something, you must take responsibility for it, which means you must own it,” mused Esme. “These dances can never be taken from me.”
I mentioned to her the pardon. Her old life waiting to be resumed.
“To hell with their pardon,” she spat. “I have made something better.”
Along a stretch of the north-eastern coast, the slate-clad houses of Fraserburgh and Peterhead were shedding their sombre rainy demeanours, the stone drying out unevenly in streaks, creating a zebra pattern along the fishermen's terraces.
“You are a rare particle,” I offered, as I stepped out onto flat cobbles.
An off-kilter pane of Esme's ring winked back obliquely as she shut the door. For a moment I thought that I saw the spark of something trapped inside.
I hope this is of help.
“Do you like my ring?” enquired Esme Soley. She raised her left index finger. The changing pattern of light on the stone wall made me wince inwardly.
The ring was the first thing that I noticed after I was shown into her tiny living room. And no, I did not like it. There was something off about the cut of the gem, as if whoever had been perched behind the diamond tool had been drunk and had lost their equilibrium. It reflected the light in a manner that was unsettling.
“If you do not like it, then say,” she chided.
“Okay, I think it's appalling.”
An image of a younger Esme flashed into my head, dripping from head-to-toe in gold jewellery, inhabiting a slender peach-toned ellipse between overlapping spotlights. By comparison, our surroundings seemed black and white, as though we had regressed backwards through time into a dimly-lit era of peasant drudgery.
“It belonged to Marie Curie,” she said. “It was her wedding ring. The cut of the stone is a labyrinth that she designed to trap rare particles of subatomic matter. So far, no-one has come up with a solution for freeing what is inside.”
“How?...” I said
“Jack Sibson gave it to me,” she snapped. “You can say what you like about the man. He knew good taste.”
My first encounter with Esme was watching her dance at The Royal Festival Hall, in London. I was 8 years old. Afterwards, my parents were allowed to visit her dressing room. I lingered outside, too shy to go in.
She had been born in Spain. Her father worked in the oil industry and moved the family out to the Gulf States before she could walk. In her late teens she gained a reputation as a wedding dancer. The blank gold coins she earned were minted by the royal families who ruled over the region. It was regarded as blasphemous to pay dancers in money bearing the likeness of an incumbent king. This was the workaround. The coins were not given directly, but rather placed at the feet of the girls as they danced. They could not be spent; only melted down and turned into jewellery. The status of a dancer was determined by the quantity of gold that she wore. When a dancer died, her jewellery was cast into a statuette of her likeness, which was appropriated by a royal patron. Somewhere in the world, there must be galleries lined with these golden idols. Though Esme's image will never grace one of these treasure-filled corridors, I think she prefers it that way.
“Throughout my 20s, I moved across the globe from party to party,” she reminisced. “In all that time, I desperately wanted to leave, but I was scared. This world, that had defined almost my entire life, would carry on without me, though I would know nothing more of it. For me, it would be as if it did not exist; as if my youth had never existed.
“There was an air of coercion: You must dance here. You must not be friends with this person. You must not dance for this man, if you wish to dance for these families. It was a labyrinth, like my ring, and I could not see a way out. The weight of the gold was a physical reminder of the weight that held me down. Then a miracle happened, though it did not seem like one at the time. I had engaged an accountant whose job was to keep track of the gold coins I earned and ensure that my jewellery was of equal weight. This was to prevent the coins from being put to other uses. He stole from me. When he was caught, he accused me of orchestrating the whole thing. He went to prison. My gold was literally stripped from me, and I was cast out.
“Why Scotland?” I asked.
“I came here to dance once. One morning I looked down from the window of the house where I was staying and I fell in love with the countryside. When I returned, I worked in a cafe. I hummed tunes and tapped out slow rhythms on dirty teacups. Andrew Wolfie joined me on his fiddle. Together we created new dances."
The late-in-the-day contribution made to Scottish folk dance by Soley and Wolfie is the Reel Breaker: A slow-paced piece of music corralling the energetic reels into cycles of 3-5 performances. It is a cue for the younger dancers to clear the floor and socialise, while those who cannot cope with the rough and tumble of the reels take to the opportunity to slow waltz.
“If you love something, you must take responsibility for it, which means you must own it,” mused Esme. “These dances can never be taken from me.”
I mentioned to her the pardon. Her old life waiting to be resumed.
“To hell with their pardon,” she spat. “I have made something better.”
Along a stretch of the north-eastern coast, the slate-clad houses of Fraserburgh and Peterhead were shedding their sombre rainy demeanours, the stone drying out unevenly in streaks, creating a zebra pattern along the fishermen's terraces.
“You are a rare particle,” I offered, as I stepped out onto flat cobbles.
An off-kilter pane of Esme's ring winked back obliquely as she shut the door. For a moment I thought that I saw the spark of something trapped inside.
I hope this is of help.
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