Part Three: Your Passport, opens with a tribute to the narrator's well-travelled father, and has him visiting northern Uganda and his father's home village and his grave. It’s a special team. The club I play for, the Unicorns, is set up with a specific charter of being anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-sexist. The players are selected on being good at football, but also on being good people. We would have trials and then go for a drink at the pub with all the trialists to see what they’re like. Sometimes brilliant footballers would come to trial but wouldn’t be invited to the squad because they aren’t gentle people. The moment that haunts the early part of the book is the one he knows is coming steadily closer, when he passes his father’s age at his death: There are several stylistic choices that make this book stand out of a crowd. It isn’t a novel, though it does pursue a single character’s development to trace, in some measure, an arc of coming-to-terms. Its episodic structure, offering vignettes of the narrator’s experiences that sometimes build on and refer to each other but are never corralled into a linear narrative, both make for an initially choppy reading experience, and emulate the brief-encounter mode of living that seems to be so characteristic of the narrator’s life in Berlin. Sometimes this left me longing for the connective tissue between the episodes; sometimes it seemed this was perhaps precisely what the narrator was longing for – each episode somehow as lonely an island as he.

In the End, It Was All About Love by Musa Okwonga review

The book is divided into small vignette style pieces, all focusing on a different section of the author’s life in Berlin and his past actions in London and Uganda. These range from the importance of therapy, racism, the different types of cakes one finds in Berlin to the minimalist architecture. At times it’s gently humorous, sometimes it poignant. Musa Okwonga is also a poet and there are some poets which also express the author’s feelings about Berlin. Ha-nee reads the book “Love is Nonexistent” and ponders over the claims that it is fake and the implied truth that Dae-o abandoned Ae-jeong and her child. She speaks to her mother and tells her that everyone online is saying the novel is fake and that she knows the woman is based on her. Of course, Ms Song is the orchestrator of all of this. This is one last throw of the dice to stop Ae-jeong and Dae-o from concluding their relationship but it’s obvious it isn’t going to work. Episode 16 is going through the motions. It’s true Maybe it’s time to admit that for a significant number of people romantic love is no longer the ultimate goal, that Valentine’s Day is a commercial invention that has run its course and that we need to embrace all the opportunities for love in our lives to fully experience what it is to be human. It’s time for an inclusive celebration of love rather than an exclusive one. Time for a rebrand. In part, writing my book was driven by a desire, born of a decade of research, to get us to re-engage with and celebrate the different types of love in our lives. All forms of love carry the same joys and benefits as romantic love. In some cases, such as with our best friends, the love we have for them can be more emotionally intimate and less stress inducing than any we have with a lover.My idea was to start off with very universal experiences, like arriving in Berlin – anyone can do that, white, straight, whatever – and you’re reading it, you’re into it, so by the time something happens that is not specific to your experience, you’re already emotionally invested. I wanted to put the reader in a place where they would actually walk a mile in my shoes. Okwonga was best known to me as a (lyrical) writer on football, notably A Cultured Left Foot: The Eleven Elements Of Footballing Greatness, and he uses football to illustrate the challenges of Berlin's winters, casual racial stereotyping and the offsetting camaradarie of his companions in a piece called 'Running Through the Snow with Unicorns', the Unicorns the name of the local team for which he plays:

Love? episode 16 recap and breakdown - the finale Was It Love? episode 16 recap and breakdown - the finale

Ha-nee and Dae-o meet. They both ask each other how they are feeling. Ha-nee asks Dae-o to take care of her mother first. This is the scene that confirms that she trusts Dae-o. Dae-o admits that he hated Ae-jeong for a very long time over misunderstandings. Ha-nee says she’s always been happy due to her mother and grandma but that it’s time for Dae-o and her mother to be happy. The level of maturity from this kid is incredible. If this was my child, I’d offer them half of my salary just to maintain this outstanding behavior. Sacrificing the film The power of the romantic narrative to drive dating behaviour and commerce is clear but it may also have darker consequences. In 2017 the testimony of 15 women regarding intimate partner violence (IPV) was published. It was clear that one of the issues with IPV was the stories these women had heard about what love was. Love overcomes all obstacles and must be maintained at all costs (even when you’re being abused). Love is about losing control, being swept off your feet, having no say in who you fall for (even if they are violent). Lovers protect each other, fight for each other to the end (even against the authorities who are trying to protect you). It is interesting to contemplate the power of our words. We speak without thinking but the stories we tell our children have consequences. Demographic data shows that the downgrading of romantic love is, to some extent, already happening. Figures from the Office for National Statistics and Relate show that by 2039, one in seven people in the UK will be living alone and today only one in six people believe in “the one”.Okwonga is actually a highly regarded author in a variety of genres, but part of what he’s interested in here is how little that can seem to count for, spiritually as well as financially. Even so, when the protagonist points out how poorly he was paid for his most successful articles (“not necessarily those which were most widely shared”, he clarifies, “but those which contributed to the national or even global conversation”), it’s hard not to detect at least a batsqueak of humblebrag. There is a specific time and date you have been fearing for much of your adult life. When that moment passes, you will be precisely one second older than your father was when he died, and you will have precisely no idea what to do next. The narrator arrives in Berlin, a place famed for its hedonism, to find peace and maybe love, only to discover that the problems which have long haunted him have arrived there too, and are more present than ever. As he approaches his fortieth birthday, nearing the age where his father was killed in a brutal revolution, he drifts through this endlessly addictive and sometimes mystical city, through its slow days and bottomless nights, wondering whether he will ever escape the damage left by his father’s death. With the world as a whole more uncertain, as both the far-right and global temperatures rise at frightening speed, he finds himself fighting a fierce inner battle against his turbulent past, for a future free of his fear of failure, of persecution, and of intimacy. A heartfelt and intimate account of what it is to be human, especially right now.