As the weather turns colder I always feel drawn to rereading John Berger. I was first introduced to Berger by the owner of an independent bookstore in Malaysia called Gerak Budaya Bookshop in Penang who had met the great man.

Berger needs little introduction other than to say his sense of his surroundings both immediate and globally was without equal. His books made me question my own outlook and interpretations of people, places and events and to attempt to observe more closely what was being said to me. I have long thought that as good a writer as Berger was he was an even better listener and that, unquestionably, made him the writer he was.

Here is Where We Meet was published in 2005, it is a wonderful book which helped me enormously in reappraising my outlook on death and the loss of loved ones.

The book begins with a man (John) talking to his mother on a park bench in Lisbon. She has been dead for fifteen years but here now is the conversation he needed to have and her persona is young, carefree and heartwarming.

The way Berger describes the simplicity around his late Father’s favourite fish dish, the way his mother casually remarks how that has changed since his death gives the reader a sense of hope in an afterlife and how freeing life is once they have passed in this life. And it ends on a somber note; After the death of mothers, time often doubles or accelerates its speed

The book is worth it for that story alone, but there is plenty more in this collection of stories taking the reader across Europe, from a visit to the grave of Borges with his daughter Katya to meeting Ken, his childhood passeur in a market in Krakow forty years after their last encounter.

There is a study of fruit; cherries, peach, melon, greengages and quetsch-the ‘fruit of song’, a brief study of the aura a wedding dress should have, the addition of a handful of sorrel to a soup. The topics flit across the page as well as the globe and the beauty of these pieces is Berger’s depth of view into the seemingly most trivial. He sees beauty, emotion and nuance in the most unlikely of places and objects, gently persuading us to think more or think again. We should all be a bit more Berger.

See also: John Berger’s Self Portrait 1914-18 and Survival and Resistance and Death of Jean Mohr for more on John Berger.