Keeping a promise

Well this may be the last blog post I make before I get back from China, as connections are not simple over there, but it is an appropriate post. 

One of the reasons I am going to China now, rather than waiting for later trips, is that I want to keep my part of a promise that Cro and I made to each other in 2007 (God, nearly 19 years ago!). There is a post somewhere else on this blog about the way that I enjoy making my own rituals to celebrate, remember, note, whatever the purpose. Cro felt just the same way. 

So when I did get down on one knee to her (I did, honest, right by that sitting-room fireplace) we agreed that the best place to plight our troth was somewhere over in China, where we were heading to for about the third time in the Summer of 2007. We did a little bit of planning - but always never too much - because we bought a padlock in a hardware shop in Hackney where we were staying at my sister's before we flew out. That is what is in the photo at the top. 

We had been learning Chinese for a couple of years by then, but it's a slow progress and therefore the characters that we scratched onto the padlock were a bit dodgy, but they are intended to represent the first four characters of the poem which we did eventually read out at our wedding in 2010. And then we scratched our initials on the back of it. And set off to China.

The idea was that we would eventually find an appropriate place to tie the padlock for all eternity (or more realistically, until that particular site was next redeveloped and all the padlocks were sold for scrap), so we kept our eyes open as we travelled through China. And had no luck for the first week or so. 

Then we arrived in Chongqing, the 20-million-population mega-city that most Westerners have never heard of (and most Chinese people have no desire to visit, because of its heat and humidity). But we both took a shine to Chongqing and liked its bullish distinctiveness. And it also has in the centre of it what we first heard the hostel receptionist call 'The cornflakes of the Yangtze'. That didn't quite make sense and we eventually worked out that she was referring to the 'Confluence of the Yangtze', which makes much more sense, as the topographic location of the city is where the mighty Lijiang river merges with the much mightier Yangtze. The Yangtze is nearly 1000 miles from the sea here, but it still navigable by 10,000 ton freighters. At the end of the high and solid promontory on which Chongqing developed you can see the two rivers merge, because they are different colours. From memory, the Yangtze is yellow with silt and the Lijiang is much more blue-ish. 

We realised that the confluence would be a visually appropriate place to merge our lives forever so we set about looking for a good padlock site. Eventually, at the end of a long hot day we found a perfect pagoda on a mountain near BeiBei, not far from Chongqing, and there we shackled our Hackney padlock, made our vows, and then went down to the confluence and ceremonially tossed the keys into the water. It felt good. 

We of course also realised that this is where some of our ashes would also have to go, though I suppose we did not quite let ourselves think that in all likelihood one of us would be doing this before the other. And of course if we had died together in some dramatic comedy bike crash, someone else would have had to do the whole thing. 

But here I am, with some of Cro's ashes, and the feeling that it is good to complete a circle and good to keep a promise.