I LOVE

 ©Ananda Ferlauto / onimage.co.uk

This month to celebrate all that is Love we CEN team
to write a few words beginning with I love...

..ultimate love: Black widow spiders (Genus Latrodectus) are the largest of the Cobweb Weavers (Family Therididae) and also the best known. They are venomous insects and must be respected. The venom is 15 times as toxic as of a rattlesnake but the female injects such a small dose that it rarely causes death. In areas where they are prevalent one should wear gloves as a precaution. Adult males are harmless, they have smaller bodies, longer legs and are about half the females size. Adult male Black Widows roam in search of females but do not bite. The female eats the male after mating.’
Robert Huggins, Contributor

...colours. Since pre-school, I have been asked, as the English ask about the weather, “What is your favourite colour?” I guess it’s a girl-thing. I could never give a one word answer. To this day I don’t understand how people can expect a simple, one word answer. There is something magical about bright shades of colours. They are all so beautiful in their pure state and as you add more white or black, depending on your mood, the colours change, becoming more innocent or sombre. Have you ever looked at a peacock-blue satin-silk and not thought seduction? Or a sunset-orange and feel the purity of gold? This is why I love colours. I love them for how they make us feel and what we think they stand for.
Eeshita Azad, Designer

...fast Love. When love is nothing more than another form of consumption, when it goes around giving and getting fast pleasure; when love and disaffection combines it is the right time for fast love. Fast love is like fast food and fast life. It is something quite contemporary and pretty Londonish and like fast food and fast life leaves you with brief satisfaction to be looked for again and again flipping from one fast love to another.
Paulo Gerbaudo, Contributor

...Marmalade and Jam
We kissed for hours, I remember the taste
of Guinness, which I insisted on drinking. I
spent a day washing your shirts by hand, I
wanted to get to know you better. I knew that
birthmark just above and inside the back of
your right knee. I could draw it now. You
liked red jam on your bread, without any butter. And
you talked about your cat, the marmalade tabby. I
recall music, a simple song, Elvis Costello, I’m
sure, and I couldn’t find my Catatonia
CD in that whole time. I drove so peacefully. I
couldn’t get angry. I took single strands of your hair
while you slept, and ran my fingers along the black
length of them. It was as if I had discovered meaning,
or been converted to a true religion.
Maureen McManus, Theatre Editor

...Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment; Jibananda’s poem Aat Bochhor Aage Ekdin; Lennon’s song Imagine; Raj Kapoor’s film Mera Naam Joker; Peter Handke’s play Kaspar; Steve McCurry’s photograph An Afghan Woman; reading local newspapers; reminiscing memories of past love; Greek khoriatiko Salad; and sleeping with the lights on.
Neamat Imam, Assistant Editor

...the dance floor. It’s not a physical, but a mental space. It’s a place where there ain’t no rules and there ain’t no ego. I close my eyes and am transmuted out of time and space into a sensory module of beat and rhythm. I am 3, I am 30, I am 73 ; I have no body. Time and form are misnomers. I am free. I love...the idea that one day I will live in this dance floor – I will live a life unregulated, unfettered, instinctive…
Ruth Knaggs, Contributor

...I love it when they don’t phone and they promised adamantly that they were going to, even though you weren’t that bothered. I love it when they ask you for a drink but don’t answer your texts to arrange a time. I love it when they insist on turning up at your house more than half cut and fall asleep early then you can’t shift them the next day. I love it when you see that glint in their eye when you first meet them, when you introduce them to your friends. I love it when they don’t turn up at all… and you end up chatting with that honey you’ve had your eye on for a while.
Kathryn McMann, Sales and Marketing Manager

..the dawn of a new day, the sun setting. Orange and gold today, blue and silver tomorrow, green, black, purple, red; change. The sun on my face, the wind in my hair, snow on my tongue, puddles to splash in. Corny clichés. Every single one of them. Music. My children laughing, sparking a million stars of hope every time they smile. Food. Liberty, which is too often taken for granted. Faith, although it is blind. Like Love.
Rukhsana Yasmin, Assistant Editor

...everything that’s wrong with everything that’s wrong. Because wrongness is in the eye of the beholder, lingering only momentarily, in search of what’s lacking, fuelled by the lack’s promise of it. You are, because I am not. Because perfection and symmetry is only reserved for the divine, and I can sing my praise to it with the ugliness of my flaws. Because even Sisyphus made meaning out of supreme meaninglessness. I love me, because I am Your promise.
Elest Ali, Contributor

...my friends because they are bloody excellent and I’m very lucky to have them, they’ve seen me in my worst and my best state and they still love me! Nellos our dog even though she ate my expensive shoes and left an unwelcome present in my bedroom as well as eating the neighbours chickens. My family because they make me laugh so much it makes me cry, they tow me off the dual carriageway when my sister leaves my car without any petrol and generally they’re pretty damn cool.
Becky Bazzard, Promotions Manager

...a dream of perfection, an illicit truth of something whole. Something which breathes between the black and white, which fills in gaps and wishes away silence. Something Music tries to, but cannot define and Art clambers to capture but holds in itself. Something you find in sad eyes and crooked mouths, in voices that make you feel safe and hands that hold your secrets. It is the contradiction of violence and despair, the detractor of flaws. I love all that paints the confines of the word Beauty.
Alternatively, I love Seth Cohen from The O.C. and Krispy Kremes.
Shakila Rajendra, Sub Editor

...Black music. Ever since I was a kid, once I got past my infatuation with the strange/ sublime oeuvre of the Wombles (reaching its apotheosis with the clunky funk of Superwomble), Black music has been my thing. Funk, reggae, jazz-funk, soul, blues and, latterly, hip-hop and jazz have been my aural food and drink. Although I have dined musically with Whitey on occasion, I usually find the fare to be twee or dour. That’s why I never liked The Smiths, even though they were apparently the band of my generation, the miserablist Mancunians were just not Black enough for me (would it have hurt for them to get Bootsy Collins on bass? Bootsy with Johnny Marr – what a combination that would have been) and neither are any of the current crop of new pop pretenders. But this is the thing. How can anyone describe music as ‘Black’, how does music (an abstract, subjective concept) have a racial identity? Surely music is just music? There’s no Black, no White, just sound. The ghetto-isation of contemporary music was an industry concept invented to ensure that a newly emergent Rhythm & Blues could be marketed more safely as Rock ‘n’ Roll to a White audience. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were, themselves, heavily influenced by Rhythm & Blues. Surely the divide between Black and White music is so blurred as to not constitute any kind of demarcation. Where does Keith Jarrett fit? And don’t get me started on the funk stylings of Jaco Pastorius. Anyway, who cares? I love Black music.
Santanu Bhattacharjee, Contributing Editor

...Meself
Or how much love I have for War and Peace...?
Before the day you reach your grave
Feed your minds, before your wallets...
A sallow shallow shadow,
not even a widow, would want to be shallow...
From the sand came the new renaissance...
My love for anything ephemeral, fugacious, transient; passing...
A Woman...
Where it all started....
Brotherhood, any tremendous achievment, Vanilla Ice
a man on the moon,...
The truth...thank you Mister X
Jazz man,
Your eyes, your eyes, your eyes, your beautiful eyes,...
And as I hit the bottom of my fag,....
I serendipitously slip in your ears
Those last words:
Come, Come, Come,...
Hermann Djoumessi, Contributing Editor

... my family. I am what I am because of them. I left them at the age of 16. Meeting them gives me intense good feeling. I love to be with them and have lunch and have fun ...
Belen Bueso Alberdi

...Science. Unfortunately science has no place for love. Although some branches of science deal with, probe and explain love, in general their verdict is antagonistic to the concept of love. I can’t love something which discards my sentiment. Or may be I can. Perhaps I have a tendency to love those that reject me most. You! And science.
Korak ghosh, Editor