Record of a baffled spirit

'Just one more thing...' Well seven actually

2012-01-25T12:29:00.000-08:00

I have just been awarded a blog award, one which necessitates me writing seven little known things about myself. And there was me, puzzling as to what I was going to write about this week. God works in wonderful ways.

And so does: DRC

I loved the taste of uncooked liver as a child, right up to my early twenties when I discovered the possibility of flukes. I still love the memory of fresh liver, its raw tang and cold, slippery texture as you bite into it. I may be the reincarnation of a 'Rottie' or perhaps a 'Labradoodle'.

I sit in the dark for an hour at least every morning, and consume three very large mugs of strong tea. The consequence is that I have to go the toilet quite often throughout the morning, but this is a good thing because it forces me from the computer and offers something in the way of exercise.

I swim 90 lengths a week in the Leisure Centre, but only breast stroke or backstroke. My crawl is more akin to a hyper-active crab. It has always been so. As a child it may have been quite endearing. Now I’m a danger to children and old women.

As a paper boy I used to be a prodigious whistler. Old men who should have known better would congratulate me on my whistle. Said it was better than any alarm clock. This whistle has now gone, a sad case of use it or lose it.

I once chewed on a piece of cat fur at an Indian restaurant in Swansea. It may have been squirrel or dog but my stomach allowed little time to analyse the situation.

I struggle to be generous. I’m improving, slightly, with age.

My favourite ‘fast’ food is beans on toast but with two provisos. Lashings of black pepper; and the toast has to be doused liberally with extra virgin olive oil, preferably from Palestine or Greece. On the tongue it tastes of smoked fruit and earth – even better than raw liver.

And a bonus one. I don't always follow things through.

Gin and Reality

2012-01-17T03:40:00.000-08:00

As I walk down Lancaster Way into a bowl of woods and hills and patterned fields, I feel like I’m walking into a picture book enclosed in sky. Only how do people live in picture books? Imprisoned in a crisp neat page and circumscribed by plot, to our eyes colourful but flat. Sometimes I’ve stood and wondered whether I could reach out and clutch handfuls of green and sky and tear it apart; see what’s behind, and know that I am staring into the face of madness or its sister, whimsy.

Turn right at the bottom of Lancaster Way and you’re on a country lane that meanders through half forgotten names: Llanrothal, Llangattock-Vibon-Avel, Wendee Wood, St. Weonards, Orcop,Welsh Newton, Wormelow Tump, Much Birch, Little Birch, as Wales slips into Herefordshire.

It is a lane of low, afternoon suns, rich meadows and woods of translucent amber and green. When it is cloudy the ivy covering trees, embankments and slowly rotting logs resembles chainmail, cold and dark, and you appreciate the importance of light. Or should I say photons, along with gluons and quarks that pattern and bind the molecular structure of all that we know. And then I think of neutrinos.

My pace slows.

Neutrinos.

To them we are gossamer. All our fine buildings, grand armies, and wealth, a faint mist, they race through. From a neutrino’s perspective we are 99% space, vast distances separating the component parts of the pattern we define as reality.

It doesn’t solve the problem of hunger or the demands of a tyrannical boss, it doesn’t cure heart-ache, but it helps to remember the material world is not all there is or all that we see.

At this moment I :

am walking through

And even this is material – colourful symbols - thought captured on screen.

Thought.

Ephemeral products of a ‘designed’ or random construct; or an aspect of spirit that lives beyond flesh? Either way it comes from the world we don’t see.

Designed or random our material world may be a mere filament in a mass of seething particles - or emptiness - where faith and thought, even dreams, may share more than we know.

Time for a beer, I think, or better still a gin and tonic - Where dream and reality mixes nicely with ice and sometimes combines.

Confessions of an Invigilator

2012-01-13T03:14:00.000-08:00

There is geological time, and there is invigilator time and I know which I prefer. The former has no means of measuring itself. A mountain doesn’t get bored. In exam invigilation, however, there are a few tried and tested techniques to prevent terminal brain death.

There is team tag. A sedate activity.

Amidst the two hundred or more candidates seated in uniform lines in a very large hall, invigilators will drift unobtrusively. They will tread with slow but stately precision in pursuit of their victim, who, in turn, will seek to evade them whilst handing out paper.

But when a candidate puts up a hand, noses twitch, eyes swivel. We converge urgent for purpose. Does the candidate need more paper, a pen perhaps, a question only we can answer? A bonus point for the candidate who needs the toilet. The invigilator who reaches him or her first gets to accompany them, gets to leave the hall, indulge perhaps in conversation:

‘How are you finding it?’
‘Yeah.’
Oh joy.

There are other ways of passing the time. You can gaze at faces, speculating on likely careers and professions: the doctor, the dentist, lawyer, fraudster, Griffindor, Hufflepuff…Slytherin…The mind wanders.

Statistically one in four people are gay. I don’t go there. Nor have I ever been tempted by a ‘game’ practised elsewhere: standing by the ugliest candidate. It seems to me that these invigilators have already suffered terminal brain-death. Besides, with my face there would be no competition.

The technique that works for me, and one that maintains maximum concentration, is the ‘wall glide’.

You stand with your back to the wall and every few minutes slide two or three paces to the left. (The adventurous can try the right wall-glide). This technique creates an illusion of purpose. Instead of looking at a clock, you become the clock, for using this technique it takes exactly two hours to circumnavigate a hall. Sometimes, where there are empty chairs strategically placed you can create short term goals, allowing yourself to sit on them five minutes or more.

But always there are the students. I gaze at faces lost in thought, conscious of the faint but earnest noise of pen on paper, a desk scrape, the long and unaccountable sigh. An exam hall is a shrine to hope and purpose, the endless possibilities of life. You make comparisons with what you have done and what they hope to do, which leads to the stupidity of believing your own life is all but over. And that is stupid. Life ends when you die. Until then all is possibility. Even the end of an exam.

We are subject to shadows

2012-01-06T03:27:00.000-08:00

Harry Hotspur with his wife, Elizabeth Mortimer

We are subject to shadows. It has always been so.

Henry IV deposed a king. A fairly useless king who’s sole claim to fame was to introduce the handkerchief to England. Before then real men had wiped their noses on mailed sleeves. Henry IV was made of sterner stuff, but he had set a precedent. Richard II may have been a lying arrogant twerp but he was king, anointed by God and son-in-law to the King of France. To make things worse, their grandfather, Edward III, had been unusually fecund, taking a second wife in his dotage. In consequence a large tranche of the English aristocracy had some claim to the throne. Henry IV had kicked and shattered Pandora’s Box, and when Owain Glyndwr sparked a Welsh rebellion against English rule, pride and ambition threatened to tear the island apart.

In 1402 Sir Edmund Mortimer was captured by Glyndwr but Henry IV refused to ransom him. Why should he when, as yet another descendent of Edward III, Mortimer could also stake a claim to the English throne?

Understandably niggled, Mortimer negotiated an alliance with the Welsh and married Owain Glyndwr’s daughter. He acted quickly and called in favours - in particular from his powerful brother-in-law Henry Percy (Hotspur) who ruled most of Northern England as Earl of Northumberland.

Owain Glyndwr acted almost as quickly. Envoys were sent to the King of France, who, like Brussels today, saw nothing but advantage in a weak and divided Britain. An agreement was arrived at.

Under the Tripartite Indenture, Glyndwr would rule an enlarged Wales, one that would extend as far as the rivers Severn and Mersey including most of Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Mortimer would take all of southern and western England and Percy would take the North. French forces landed in Wales and the Isle of Wight. They devastated the coast of Devon and with Scottish privateers raided the English and Welsh coastline wherever vulnerable.

In history much is determined by accident and holding one’s nerve. At the battle of Shrewsbury Hotspur raised his visor in order to breathe and was immediately killed by an arrow to the mouth.

Henry IV was said to have wept, though I don’t see why. However when rumours later circulated that Hotspur still lived, Henry had him exhumed, his body salted and quartered and circulated around the kingdom. Just to hammer home the point, Hotspur’s rotting head was stuck on a pole in York.

England remained undivided, and with the death of Mortimer and the demise of Owain Glyndwr and Wales absorbed.

The story is a case of what might have been and testimony to the power of ambition and deals made in darkness. I imagine the average peasant, craftsman or merchant had little idea of the issues, of what had been agreed and why – much like today. Only today bankers, politicians and bureaucrats are unlikely to be salted and quartered should they get things wrong.

Ambitious warlords put their neck on the line but behind the heraldry a peasant whose crops were seized or destroyed would have little idea why. It is much the same today though the warlords have been replaced by global financial powers, bureaucrats and politicians.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it: A golden rule and a test of the probity of those who think otherwise. Whose interests are served by the break up of the UK, a small, already over-governed island?

The only real beneficiaries of devolution are politicians seeking more troughs. And behind them a Commission in Brussels that would like to see Britain the political equivalent to Lichtenstein or Italy before unification. But devolution didn’t carry the process far enough.

What other reason was there in John Prescott’s attempt to create another layer of government in the form of Regional Assemblies. The 2004 attempt mercifully failed when a referendum that was allowed saw a 78% majority against the idea. But don’t believe the impetus has gone.

With Wales seeking more power for itself, and in Scotland a smug grinning toad waiting his chance, you have to question the wisdom of those siren whispers calling for an English Assembly. Who gains from diluting power into the hands of even more politicians? And is democracy enhanced if we’re allowed to choose the design of a new postage stamp, the winners of Big Brother, or the X Factor, whilst more power is taken up by a European Commission that no one elects?

We are subject to shadows.

Merry Christmas, and thank you

2011-12-23T04:44:00.000-08:00

It was Maria Zannini who cajoled me into writing a blog. I thought she was mad. What to write about, and why? But she has good instincts and all these years later I'm still scribbling. And grateful. It's helped, maybe, in developing a 'voice', and, as important, created the discipline of routine. Then there're the friends I've made, along with old students who have suddenly discovered the alternative Mike Keyton

Only now the juices are drying as Christmas overwhelms in all its joy and various commitments. Not forgetting drink. So it's goodbye from me until the New Year, when the burbling will begin afresh.

Merry Christmas and thank you, Maria, and Merry Christmas to everyone misguided and/or generous enough to follow me:

Jason Hanrahan, Henry Lara, LD Masters, Sam Waters, R, Mac Wheeler, Stephen Tremps, Angela Brown, Jackie Burris, DRC, Adam M Smith, Joy Ann Ball, Misha Gericke, Laura Riley, Malin Larsson, Sue Gagg, Mark Ward, Nikki, Claudia, Vero, Susie Q, Shirley Wells, L J, Carlos, Renee, Seattle Friend, Gwen, Regan - or is that Sue - Diane, Terri, Kerri, Angela Brown, Brian Wilkinson, Marguerite Butler, Andy Bruce

Plonkers

2011-12-17T05:04:00.000-08:00

Wonderful picture from the New York Times. But oh for an Heironymus Bosch to do it full justice.

Black pudding in Aberdeen

2011-12-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

Black pudding is a visual feast. It glistens and crumbles on the fork. A single mouthful justifies the millions of years that have led to perfectly formed mouths and taste buds.

The one served at the Ardoe house hotel sat on the plate between the bacon, sausage and fried egg. It looked inoffensive. I savoured the moment before cutting into it and raising it to my lips.

It was like chewing pulped cardboard with the faintest aftertaste of manure. Must be some mistake. Nothing can go wrong with black pudding: a savoury mix of barley, pig fat and blood. I left it for a bit and attacked the egg; went back to the black pudding. Dry. Definitely something wrong. Manufactured slurry. A normal person would have left it. The world is full of black puddings.

I tried again, caught by obsession, a history of childhood rationing and just plain stupidity, until the damn thing was gone.

What was I doing at Ardoe House glooming over black pudding?

We had gone to Aberdeen for our son’s graduation and arrived at Jury’s Inn hotel just after midnight. This was after a ten hour journey by train which involved a 90 minute wait for our final connection on a freezing Edinburgh station. Arctic winds screamed through flesh and bone and precipitated hallucinations. How else could I explain the vision of a man with a Desperate Dan chin, clad only in red T shirt and knee length shorts? He stood arms folded, oblivious to the polar weather. His legs bulged in a Macdonald tartan of varicose veins, the only hint of discomfort. And then he vanished.

Eventually we stumbled into the foyer of the Jury Inn, seeking a warm bed and looking forward to breakfast. Unlike the Holy Family, we had booked our rooms weeks ago and confirmed it earlier that morning, warning them that we would be late. ‘No problem’ we were assured.

Only there was. The young male receptionist told us we didn’t have a room. His tone of voice suggested mild displeasure, as though we were somehow to blame for him being in this embarrassing situation. The mild displeasure turned to puzzlement when we didn’t turn cartwheels of joy on finding out that they had found another room for us in a hotel, which involved a ten mile taxi-ride.

Voices were raised, and then a young Irishman emerged and did brilliantly what the young receptionist should have done in the first place. He once again explained they were victims to a double-booking made by a central computer and that as a result the hotel was full and then, instead of just making the best of a bad situation, he exceeded anything we’d anticipated: The alternative hotel was superb (apart from the black-pudding, but I absolve him from blame for that) Our night there was at a discounted rate and our second night at the Jury’s Inn, for which there was a room available would be complimentary – breakfast included.

The following day a free taxi took us back to the original hotel. We were treated like VIP’s and I realised for the first time what the very rich take for granted.

The lesson is that most cock-ups can be resolved through charm – being Irish helps – and daring to be generous. I feel now like some kind of unpaid ambassador for the Jury Inn chain. Ardoe House too, though my stomach is preparing a Minority Report on the Black pudding.

Closing Doors

2011-12-02T02:56:00.000-08:00

My motto has always been to open doors; kick them if they’re stiff. But what if there are no doors? My son achieved A* at GCSE A level in subjects such as maths and physics, Latin and Greek etc. He has an Oxford degree and an MSc in Library and Information Studies. And like a million others is now on ‘Jobseekers Allowance.’ The point is not that my son is particularly hard done by but that the phenomenon is so widespread.

The New York Times tells the story of: Willie Osterweil who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell and found himself sweeping Brooklyn movie theatres for just over seven dollars an hour. Rebecca Chapman who has a master of arts in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, and the previous summer was unable even to find a non-paying job.

As galling was the lack of courtesy shown by prospective employers who couldn’t be bothered to email or otherwise inform her she hadn’t succeeded this time. My son has had similar experiences from institutions that no doubt have a shiny little logo to advertise that they are ‘Investors in People’.

But what I love about New York is its energy, along with its ability to turn problems into solutions…of a sort.

They, along with other ‘over-educated’ and unemployed graduates, meet in a pokey, book-shelved apartment on the Upper East Side. They meet under the banner of ‘The New Inquiry’ edited by Rachel Rosenfelt, and with such a diverse and multi- talented, but unemployed group, the discussion is by turns frivolous and deep. The magazine has no end of contributions – though I must confess little enthusiasm for ‘Kanye West’s effect on the proletarian meta-narrative of hip-hop’.

The novelist Jonathan Letham refers to them as ‘…the precursor of this kind of synthesis of extra-institutional intellectualism, native to the Internet, native to the city dweller.’ Sounds grand. I would call it old fashioned savvy and ‘get up and go’.

Ambitious members of ‘city’s literary underclass’ ignored by the publishing establishment have gone out on a limb, emulating the literary salons of the 1920’s.
The New Inquiry is now planning to print a quarterly edition along with an iPad version for two dollars a month – and doors are starting to open. People are taking notice.

They may have not so much found but created a door that will lead to great success. Equally it may turn out to be a short-lived dead end. But, importantly, it is keeping the spirit alive.

“This is my fantasy: a room full of books, people talking about books — it smells like books,” says Ms. Chapman, the journal’s literary editor, though she also points out that at twenty five and with a good degree from Cornell, a master’s from Columbia, its galling to be unemployed and living at home with your parents.

Similarly, Tim Barker enjoys discussing ‘…ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.’ But he too points out that his ambition had been to be a history professor – and those doors are closing fast – not just sticky, but bolted and barred.

To paraphrase Earl Grey on the eve of the Great War ‘The doors are closing all over Europe. Who knows when they will open again?’

Peter Cheyney

2011-11-26T08:12:00.000-08:00

I have always argued that to get under the skin of a past culture you have to read its pulp and dreams. All the biographies, political histories and the scholarly works derived from them will tell you the view from above, the sanitised self-exculpatory icing on a dark and fruity cake.

Within the whitened sepulchre lived those who left few written accounts, and the letters and diaries that have been unearthed are subject to the same conscious or unconscious self-censorship.

No, it is in the books they read, and later, the films they saw, that reveal with blistering accuracy the fears, fantasies and unvarnished prejudices of an age.

Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer brilliantly conjure up the paranoid fears of a Britain caught between wars; a sense of skating on dangerously thin ice in a world full of shadows.

Peter Cheyney, too, caught the zeitgeist of an age, reaching his peak in his ‘Dark Series’ that shows what a nation with its back to the wall wanted to believe: that its secret agents, though brutal and flawed were the best in the world and keeping the shadows at bay.

Peter Cheyney wrote thirty five novels and over 150 short stories in the space of fifteen years between 1936 and 1951 when he died aged fifty-five. Some writers have little or no literary merit but ride a short-lived wave. Cheyney’s books would never be accused of literary worth but his wave was more substantial and lasted longer than most. His books portray a world that has long gone, along with the dreams and prejudices of those he wrote for.

It is a world of smoky bars and clubs, stylish apartments, country houses, and more mean and squalid streets. It was also an age of austerity, during the war and in the years immediately after.

Aspiring writers, check out this link and weep

Cheyney may have been subliminally influenced by the fact that his mother lived above the corset shop she owned, or perhaps by the fact that, in 1923, he briefly became involved in a dress making company. His brother, Stanley, stuck at it and earned some success in the field of haute couture, and this is reflected in every novel Cheyney wrote.

When ever a character is introduced for the first time, for the second time and for every time after that, minute attention is paid to what they’re wearing. The action stops until we know almost down to their underwear how the character is dressed. Freud or a cynic might wonder whether Cheyney enjoyed dressing up dolls as a child, but I suspect the answer was more rational. Not only did it add to his word-count, it also pandered to the aspirations of a readership deprived of luxury. In an age before Dynasty and Dallas, big hair, and glossy lipstick, padded shoulders, his books did the trick. Murder and retail therapy.

In ‘You Can Call It A Day, (1949) Johnny Vallon:
‘He wore a dark blue, double-breasted suit that had been cut by a good tailor, a cream shirt, a blue tie.’ (It continues) .....is observing Querida Gale:

‘She had what it takes in a very big way, Vallon decided. She was wearing a navy blue suit with a skirt fitting so well it looked as if it had been painted on her. Under her coat was a blouse that came out of France – a fine hand-made georgette in a faint lemon colour with hand sewn tucks. Her shoes were hand-made and the seams of her stockings were dead straight up the back of her calf.’ Most men would be hard pressed to recall in detail what their wife is wearing but this is a hard-boiled private eye who drinks whisky before breakfast, smokes for England and who, unbelievably, even recognises the name of her perfume.

The Fashion show continues:

'Mrs Gale was standing in front of the fireplace. She wore a superbly cut black velvet dinner gown with a square cut neck; a dog collar of pearls. There were two diamond clips at her neck. Vallon looked at her with approval from the top of her well coiffured head to her four inch-heeled sequin embroidered shoes.
Vallon helped himself to a whisky and soda'

The formula often ends with Vallon, or his equivalent in other books, dampening desire with a drink.

(Evangeline Roberta Trickett ) 'was sitting at the dressing table doing things to her mouth with a lipstick. She wore black lace underclothes, with a gold wrap, worked with black Chinese dragons, over them. She wore the sheerest silk stockings and black satin pumps spangled with gold stars. Miss Trickett was a ‘looker’ and knew it. Vallon poured out a drink…'

Sometimes the ritual has purpose, is insightful and acute.

'A girl came into the bar and sat on the high stool next to him. He looked at her casually. She was pretty and had a good figure. Her coat and skirt were well cut – even if the skirt was a trifle short. Her stockings were sheer and her patent pumps had been expensive. They had been. Now, he noticed there was a slight inclination on the part of the sole of the left shoe to part company with the upper. You could only notice this when she was sitting, as she sat now, with one foot tilted on the bar-rail at an angle.'

More often it reads like a fashion magazine inhabited by murderous models:

Kiernan stood in the doorway. He wore a short leather jacket with a dark fur collar. A tweed cap was pulled over one eye. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth. He was smiling. (Dark Wanton 1948 1946)

'She stood motionless, one hand resting on the bottom of the balustrade, the other hanging by her side. She wore a long black velvet skirt with a white georgette blouse. The ruffles about her neck and the full sleeves at her wrists were caught with black velvet ribbons. One small crepe-de- Chine shod foot tapped impatiently on the floor. (Uneasy Terms 1946) As you can see, it would be quite easy to write a whole new novel from a fashion mash-up. Women could read his novels for fashion tips and, like the men who read them in bedsits or on the battle fields of France, indulge in mild eroticism.

There is so much more, but this is long enough. Too long. I’m sorry. Perhaps a posting some time on Cheyney and women.

Bottoms up

2011-11-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

Oh for an apostrophe

This set me on a search for other London street names associated with the lower half of the body

So many of our old street names were direct and to the point; they literally cut through the crap. London's Sherbourne Lane has been bowdlerised from the more accurate Shittenbourne Lane of medieval times. The lane ran alongside the River Bourne, which was an open toilet for much of London.

But if you truly want to savour old English in all its crude vitality, you can do no better than explore the origins of the very respectable sounding Grape Lane. This blog is aimed at those who appreciate the minor currents of history, rather than the prurient, never the less I have drawn the appropriate veil via the link. I suspect many historical novelists also have veils which they dare not twitch, but what really interests me is whether other languages past or present were so unashamedly explicit.

Let's end on a more uplifting note

The table remains

2011-11-12T03:21:00.000-08:00

I was appalled to read that our politicians not only wish us to fund their lavish lifestyle, but also fund their parties to peddle their lies and half-truths. All we need now is legislation to compel us to vote and we’ll inhabit the seventh circle of hell.

Give me the good old days. I want to sell my vote for a barrel of ale. I want to be cooped, gathered up from the street dead drunk and locked away until voting day. I want to belong to a small union of voters who’d sell their seat to the richest in exchange for a tangible reward. And don’t tell me that was because only a small proportion of people then enjoyed the vote. A majority today don’t vote. Why should they when the choice is between Punch and Judy, Tweedledum and Tweedledee? We have made a country ‘Safe for democracy’.

I know we now sneer at the rotten boroughs of old England, those boroughs so small their votes could be bought. A source of corruption we say. Colonial nabobs, invariably red-faced and corrupt, buying seats like Russians buy football teams. The reality is that many of these ‘Nabobs’ self-made men, proved to be the most capable and independent-minded men in the political system.

I know we now snigger at those electors who, allowed for the first time to vote in secret, would approach their patron or lord and ask them which way they would want them to vote. Such servile deference. Not like constituencies today so enthralled by ‘culture’ and party machines that they’d vote for a pig if it wore the right colours.

In a previous age English aristocrats had pedigree - brands if you will. You knew who you were with a Salisbury, a Russell or Grey, much as you do with a Toshiba or Sony, a Pepsi, or Coke. Pedigree or long established brand; both take the long view or perish; both factor in historical and cultural accountability. Which aristocrat or indeed the next head of Microsoft or Apple want to see their brand perish?

An aristocrat was born, not voted for, but imbibed a sense of public duty along with a degree of historical and cultural accountability. Can that be said of the faceless men who rule us now? They come and go having sucked the trough dry and accountable to none. We’re ruled by leeches sensing the banquet is nearing its end.

Democracy in prosperous countries is like a finely laid table, with its creamy linen and silver tableware, its floral arrangements, decanters and gleaming tureens. Whip away the cloth and the table remains, privilege and power.

And if that power, in whatever country, faces serious challenge, the table cloth with its fables and pretence, is the first to go. In that sense we should wag the finger lightly at the Chinese, Syria, and those other regimes who cannot afford or who have not yet bought the tablecloth.

With Greece denied its referendum and, with Italy, ruled by unelected technocrats, it is clear that democracy has a set price, and in uncertain futures, the contours of power will reveal themselves in other countries across the world.

The status quo knows what it wants, knows what it doesn’t want. And protest which knows only the latter foams against it like surf against rock. Sometimes ‘great changes' occur - captured on camera and media tagged. But nothing really changes, not for long. Even when Lenin’s preconditions* for a successful revolution occur, the new status quo follows the contours of power with fractal inevitability. The table remains.

*

• A ruling class that is split or has lost its nerve
• An unreliable military
• An underclass at the end of its tether
• A disciplined, revolutionary leadership.

Life at sea

2011-11-04T03:49:00.000-07:00

This blog began as a cyber-fire around which a very large and scattered family could sit, and, to mix metaphors, dip into.

This is a heartfelt rant from my cousin, Michael McDonald, in his own words: 'currently knocking round Newfoundland on a big, rusty, metal mental asylum....'

It's long but instructive and will leave you wanting to down a can or two of strong ale. Maybe five or six...ten, twelve... Over to you, Mike.

Wellservicer Simulation

I'm frequently asked by friends and family back in Liverpool what it's like to be on this ship. So to allow them to share in the experience I have devised a little simulator. Now they, too, can have their very own offshore Wellservicer experience from the comfort of their own homes.

First of all, you need to simulate the unit, i.e. the room you'll be spending 12 hours a day in. Choose the smallest room in your house and divide it in two (a blanket or some bits of board should do the trick.) Half a typical small room is about the size of a typical unit. Remove anything remotely decorative or comfortable, and paint what’s left into this weird beige colour; throw in an off-cut from the 70's style Indian restaurant carpet knocking round the attic. Find yourself a metal desk, perhaps a filing cabinet too, and then a chair, although you first need to break the chair and attempt to fix it, just make sure you can't sit back and relax.

Set up a laptop and other random bits of electronics, install a phone that has no outside line, and give yourself an intermittent internet connection. Better still, have no internet at all. If you have intermittent internet, make sure all sites remotely interesting or useful are blocked by the company’s access policy, in fact just cut and paste the following screen as your pc screen saver screen.

The website you have attempted to access has been blocked.
This is in accordance with the Technip Internet Access policy.

After all this make sure you get fleeced good style by someone: any treats for yourself to take to your set up simulator room must come from an old cupboard; the sweets will not have seen the light of day for at least 14 months and all sweets must be unnervingly close to the sell by date. Write camp boss on a family members T shirt and get that person to sell you some sweets for seven times the price. This is important: make sure you have no other option.

Get them to also sell you a phone card that pertains to be for 2000 minutes but actually only giving 2 minutes 22 seconds. Remember this is your only possibility of contact with the outside world, but switch it off when you really , really, really need it.

keep all your important numbers on the wall, then spend 2 minutes keying in 24 numbers before dialing the one you actually want, whilst anxiously looking at the keypad hoping you inputted fast enough and correctly whilst looking at the number on the wall, then when you think you have cracked it, cut the phone dead and start again....do this several times... take more minutes off your phone card each time.

Now put a TV in the corner somewhere, so when you sit back, you can’t really see it. Hook up a video with a 5 minute recording of sky news and play over and over again , all day in fact; you must ensure the remote control does not match or control your particular TV set; open up the remote and bite the batteries so they contain teeth indents and place back, put black tape round the battery compartment to hold it together...ensure you have no other channels....pay thousands for the installation of the satellite and at yearly intervals have someone come round and dismantle the dish and put it back together. You must pay obscene amounts for this, but make sure it’s still not working. Shrug your shoulders and do not complain, just accept it.

So we have now our basic cabin and workspace, but the ambience is all wrong. Crank up the heat to an unbearable level, and install a gigantic air conditioner/fan in the room. Ensure it doesn't work. Allow it to switch on and blast air around very noisily, but make sure it isn't remotely cooling. Just outside of the room/unit, you need to create a source of noise. Perhaps 2 to 3 Hoovers might do the trick. This is mere background noise,

To accurately simulate the agonising blowing of the foghorn we regularly endure, you may need to borrow a Newfoundland seal and have it tortured at two minute intervals. Really, really hurt this seal, over and over again. In fact, put it in front of a megaphone as you do so.

You may close the door to soften the noises (a little), but if you do so, you must increase the heat greatly.

To simulate the PA system, simply turn on your radio, find a grainy piece of static, and put the volume to full blast at random intervals.

Ensure there is no intelligible content within.....get a recording of some Pole or Pilipino trying to make an announcement in broken English...make sure you can’t understand it...

If you choose to simulate dayshift, your hours are 6am to 6pm, with meals at 5.00am, 11.30am and 5.30pm: and nights opposite. Meals should consist of 9 year old steak from the back of the freezer, or anything from the pound shop that they cannot sell in Turkistan, and some mystery meats in wraps or anything hiding beneath a layer of cheese or powdered mash to cover up the poor quality. Cheese must be the processed cheap type, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous chop spam and sprinkle on top! (don't attempt to eat unless your teeth are in A1 condition.) Safest option is chips.

You are perfectly entitled to go outside at any time, but must wear luminous coveralls, a hardhat, gloves and safety glasses, given to you by a ‘safety man’. Find a member of the family to simulate him, one that has failed in every other walk of life, preferably someone that has had a few accidents, can talk down to people and disappears the first sign of trouble, and talks constant rubbish. You must ensure he is trained in the art of deflecting any responsibility or common sense, and likes the sound of his own voice! If you have such a person in your family - one who usually lives in the Far East somewhere with shady tendencies for young women.

Whilst outside listen to ugly men swear. (find a large family member that can take off a north east UK accent, preferably from the Newcastle area, and make sure they look particularly scary) All communication must be grumpy. Humour is only allowed in small and very bitter doses. Do not smile. Do not be nice. Do not talk about your emotions. Remind those around you how miserable conditions are. If you have a full blown conversation, ensure it is about mechanics, football or engineering or bits of pipe, and do not try and understand it...just nod and smile to them, they will eventually go away when the mystery meat curry is being served up in the galley.

To accurately simulate sleeping conditions, find a single bed too short to stretch out in. You may turn off some of the Hoovers, but keep the seal torture up. Remember every two minutes!

Every couple of nights, simulate the steward by having a friend open and close your door just as you’re nodding off, and sometimes turn the light on and off. Don't say much to him/her, or he will talk to you usually about sex or if in foreign waters "jiggy jiggy" Get your friend to ask you if you have any of them "decent" DVDs for him...or about if you know when the next port call is.

Here comes the key part of this simulation: it must last for weeks...no, months. In fact, when you begin, try not to even know how long it will last. Have a friend roll a dice in secret, and then have them tell you an entirely different, lower number. It is vital you begin your simulation believing it to last three weeks when in fact it will last six.

The good news: when you finish your Wellservicer ship simulation you are allowed - nay, obliged - to drink very heavily for weeks and weeks. DO NOT STOP.

And then, just when you've spent your final penny on your final bottle of Stella, crank up the Hoovers, borrow the seal, and plunge yourself into another month or two of sensory shutdown. You are now ready and primed to embrace the offshore existence aboard the Wellservicer.

London Streets

2011-10-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

A man stopped us in Shaftsbury Avenue. To be more exact, he stopped my daughter. “I must tell you,” he said, “that you are most cute. I want to shake your hand. Where are you going?” He shook my hand too, not because I am cute but presumably due to my proximity to cuteness.

I wondered on his motives. My daughter is beautiful though she would deny it with some vehemence. Suffice it to say she is more beautiful than Cleopatra, which is perhaps not saying very much since Cleo had a very big nose. (Stop digging this hole and throw away the spade. Climb out now!)

So, beautiful then. The point is that this has happened several times to her, complete strangers accosting her in the street to tell her she’s beautiful, and using much the same words like a formula learnt.

My mind went into overdrive…which means it stumbled along at four and a half miles an hour. Who were these people? White Slavers? Smooth talking pimps? And why did they insist on shaking hands - bacterial infection? I rubbed mine vigorously down the side of my trousers and scraped it for good luck on a wall. Were they angels made flesh acknowledging another beautiful spirit, or demons with motives much darker, or missionaries for some obscure cult? A troupe of Hari Krishna snaked passed us, chanting what ever it is they chant, and I shuddered, imagining my daughter in orange robe and bald head.

Who are these people? Are they active in other cities across the world? And why don’t more of them accost me, telling me how beautiful I am? One of life’s many mysteries.

A Chain of Souls

2011-10-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Me and Sheri Lamour were talking, shooting the breeze. Work was slow that week and there was little else to do. The office needed cleaning but one look at Sheri tells you everything you need to know about her. She don't do cleaning, her skills lie elsewhere, and mine mostly involve drinking and solving crime.

We don't do cleaning.

“Anything interesting?” I was talking about the book in her hand, not the small television permanently on mute. It’s a box for stumblebums grazing on fried chicken or breeding the new feral horde. Give me a book I can open or close, occasionally burn. In my experience screens are only good for regurgitating lies, else salacious tattle from broads with more silicon than brain. Jeez. I like a broad with something to hold. I just don't want to be knocked of my seat when they turn.

Sheri ignored me, her eyes on the book. I noticed she had only four pages to go and I was down to my last four fingers of bourbon. For the moment it was quiet, the way I liked it. But the fly was about to land in the ointment. When she closed that book Sheri would be wanting to talk about it, and the bourbon wouldn’t last that long.

She closed the book, a small smile on her face. “That was one damn hot book,” she said.

Did I tell you that Sheri has a voice like honey and a figure to match?

“Who’s it by?”

“A dame called Zannini. Maria Zannini.”

A shiver ran up my spine. It was that kind of name. Sheri noticed. She pouted, her lips like dark cherries holding a worm.

“What’s it called?”

"A Chain of Souls"

“Any good?” I looked at the cover. “And what’s with the pointy hat?”

Sheri shrugged helplessly as if to say what the hell do I know? You’re the detective, big guy. “I think it’s good,” she said at last. “A lot of people do. They say it’s her best yet.”

I gave her my shark's smile, the one with teeth. "What else do they say?" I've always found 'they' useful. Rumour's cheap. Informers you pay.

She took out her lipstick. When she brought that thing to her mouth the world stopped, and she stopped talking; only I wasn't finished with her. Not yet. She must have seen it in my eye; anyway she stopped, gave that secretive smile of hers that makes me go whoozy.

“The FBI rates it. Bob Mueller's bought a copy for every agent.”

“Bob Mueller, eh?” Never trust a man who sounds like a yoghurt pot, they're either Gestapo or Red, and all three amount to much the same thing. Even so I don't prejudge; it's not the American way. "It must be good – so what’s it about?”

“Two hot angels – one working for the other side – but brooding over the same broad who can’t quite make up her mind.”

Tell me a woman who can. “Hot, you say?”

“Not in your league, Clay, but hot, yes. I’d say so.”

She said it quickly, too quickly perhaps. “You think I’d like it?” Hell, I wanted to see who my competitors were.

“You like breaking hearts?” She sounded like she was going to burst into song. She sounded like Hank Williams. The thought was distressing and I closed my eyes, even as she said the killer line. “I guess you do, Clay. I guess you do.”

“Okay, pass me the goddamn book. Anyone dressed like that can’t be all bad. And what’s with the rosary beads. . . and the gloves?”

Open yum

2011-10-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the King’s Head sipping a pint of Spit-fire, a lovely beer, and a great name. Can we look forward in the future to beers named Trident or Kalashnikov? In front of me was a large TV and a beautiful lady was forecasting the weather. For the hard of hearing, which included everyone in the pub since the TV was on mute, subtitles showed us what we were missing.

So, for example, I was told that: ‘Rain followed by some scattered Samba will reach the Midlands by late Steven’. Other forecasts have been equally surreal, such as for example: ‘Snow falling on the Staffordshire Mormons’ or ‘a cluster of Sharons are moving across the Midlands.’

Welcome to the wonderful world of auto-generated subtitles.

For those not wishing to risk LSD but who enjoy the surreal, or those who simply wish to maximize the disorientating effects of strong beer, subtitles are both essential and addictive.

You sip, you muse: So ‘Howard Carter discovered Tooting Common in Egypt.’ A contemplative sip: ‘The Nazi dictator, Adult Pickler held rallies at gnomeburg’. It begins to make sense, as does the ‘hospital patient in a korma’, the ‘Toon Army that hit Japan’ I shouldered past similarly bemused viewers to the bar. Time for a refill. The world is going mad but the beer is good.

I’m back just in time.

Ah, the beautiful TV historian. I don’t need an introduction. I know who she is. But no, subtitles have their own relentless momentum. So instead of: ‘And with us now…’ We had ‘And with a snout Bethany Hughes.’ Subtitles are no respecter of persons. Barack Obama greatly excites them: ‘Back the bomber flew back from Europe’ or sometimes ‘Back the barman met with the Queen’.

Subtitles can make forceful police tactics sound like fun. In the real world the police moved in on an illegal traveler’s camp at Dale Farm using Tasers. But in the wonderful world of auto generated subtitles, I read that ‘police deployed teasers’, which is much nicer. I pondered on the gentle mockery used against those gypsies who refused to move.

Subtitles can also be subtly feminist. The extremely rich entrepreneur Theo Paphitis has no fear of women with quotes like:

"are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women… (women) get themselves bloody pregnant and ... they always argue that they'll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal". The subtitles got their revenge by referring to him as ‘The Foetus’.

There are residential homes where the TV is always on and where auto generated subtitles have become the new reality. What are elderly residents to make of Vadim Muntagirov talking of his dancing partner, Daria Kilmentova: ‘I really love dancing with Diarrhoea,’ cars called ‘Toy hauteur’ or ball room dancers attempting the ‘Pasta dough blade’?

Opium might make sense of it all, or in subtitle-speak ‘Open Yum’

Cherry picking the dead

2011-10-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

The eulogies given in memory of Steve Jobs have been complex and interesting, most of all those coming from the left or liberal side of life. Patrick Neilson Hayden is aware of the complexities:

‘Late capitalism sucks…Our futures are controlled by people who don’t give a crap for anything we care about…Steven Jobs cared about something. Without him our lives would have been different and probably worse.’

I imagine this is the same late capitalism that exploits cheap Asian labour in the manufacture of designer trainers and err…Apple products. So the issue is whose lives are we talking about?

Steven Fry, a man who has given pleasure to millions, and to my knowledge exploits no one trills like a song bird in heat when discussing the Apple product in hand:

“I would be dishonest if I did not confess to the childlike excitement, the pounding thrill, the absurd pride and the rippling pleasure I always feel on such occasions…”- an iphone, not something more intimate.

Steven Fry mocks his own reactions, showing to everyone his awareness of the irrational, but, and with total justification, refers to Jobs as ‘a great personality’, a ‘remarkable man’ and a ‘visionary’.

The ‘dark side’, from the view point of the liberal left, is acknowledged but glossed over:

"It would be vulgar to say that the proof of the correctness of Job’s vision is reflected in the gigantic capitalisation value of the Apple Corporation, the almost fantastically unbelievable margins and the eye-popping cash richness which has transformed a company that was on the brink of collapse when Jobs arrived back in 1997 into the greatest of them all.”

Vulgar or not Fry says it, but offers a further qualification.

“… abject worship is (not ) the only allowable viewpoint when it comes to the life and career of this magnificently complicated man. I am very glad that I did not work for him. I cannot claim he was a friend but over thirty year or so years I bumped into him from time to time and he was always warm, charming, funny and easy to talk to, yet I know, and the world has already been told enough times over the past few days and weeks, that he was a fearsome boss, often a tempestuous mixture of martinet, tyrant, bully and sulky child.”

But against that we have:

“His perfectionism, the absolute conviction and certainty in the rightness of his opinions… the charisma, passion, delight in detail, excitement and belief in the creation of a new future – the sheer magnetic force of the man made his many faults a forgivable and almost loveable part of his mystique and greatness...I will not be so presumptuous as to mourn the loss of Steve as a personal friend, but I will mourn his loss as a man who changed my world completely."

All well and good and generously said, but where’s the consistency? Much the same words might well be used in Margaret Thatcher’s eventual obituary, but not presumably by Stephen Fry:

And here is where the irrationality of the heart is laid bare because Stephen Jobs was Thatcherite in spirit. Job’s realistic, hard-headed approach to customers:

“You can’t just ask customers what they want then try to give that to them,” he once said. “By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

To me this reveals the same autocratic spirit as Thatcher.

His attitude to Teaching Unions:

“What is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

Is similarly straight from the Margaret Thatcher song-book.

Steve Jobs had no interest in the rainforests or the environment. He did nothing for charity, scrapping Apple’s corporate philanthropy programmes on his return to the company in 1997.

He simply wanted everyone in the world to buy his products.

Like Margaret Thatcher and, I think, Reagan, Jobs was an early admirer of Ayn Rand, his later more ‘progressive’ persona a design feature as much as anything else. As Steve Wozniak put it:

(Steve Jobs wanted) to have a successful company and he had a lot of ideas. He must’ve read some books that really were his guide in life, you know, and I think… Well, 'Atlas Shrugged' might’ve been one of them that he mentioned back then. But they were his guides in life as to how you make a difference in the world. And it starts with a company. You build products and you gotta make your profit, and that allows you to invest the profit and then make better products that make more profit. I would say, how good a company is, it’s fair to measure it by its profitability."

Changing Stephen Fry’s world was incidental to Jobs’ primary aim: all-encompassing global market domination.

And this is not an attack on Stephen Jobs, Stephen Fry, or Patrick Neilson Hayden. What Stephen Jobs achieved was brilliant and consistent with his principles. But like all great men and women, cherry-picking their virtues and vices lead to problems of consistency.

(And, in the unlikely event that Patrick Neilson Hayden ever reads this. I hope he doesn’t see it as ‘the wag of a reproving finger’ and tell me to ‘plobz the frap off’ :)

Painting Time In Oils

2011-10-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

At the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille I saw close up, one of my favourite paintings – The Concert in the Egg by Hieronymus Bosch. Yes, there are wonderful minor details such as for instance the lute player pinching the monk’s purse, another hand stealing a fish, the man at the back wearing an inspired item of millinery And I wish I knew what the birds signified.

But what held me for so long were the faces. Strip away period costume and you have peculiarly modern faces. There are no two ways about it. They’re as modern as smart phones.

I can see E.E.C. bureaucrats, former Labour cabinet ministers – I’m sure that’s Alun Michael in the pointy cap, and John Prescott reluctantly playing the harp. I’m sure any American studying the canvas would recognize Democrats, Republicans or minor executives

It’s quite similar to his, perhaps better known Ship of Fools where there’s more drinking and less singing, though the message is equally critical. In the second painting though, the faces are less finely drawn.

In the basement of Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille they have a wonderful late medieval section. The carvings are immensely powerful but one painting rang some very loud bells. Where had I seen this picture before?
Portraits of Louis de Quarre and Barbe de Cruysinck

But I was wrong. I hadn’t seen it before. Not this particular painting. I had however seen this.

The artist Grant Wood claimed his inspiration was sparked by the gothic style window in the building behind and he decided to paint it with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." A nice story, but splendid that the building is known as ‘The Dibble House’. So that's where Officer Dibble was born.*

From what I know, Louis de Quarre and Barbe de Cruysinck were reasonably happy with their portraits. The artist, Grant Wood, had problems with American Gothic. For a time at least. Iowans apparently objected to their portrayal as ‘pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible thumpers.’ One farmer’s wife threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. Way to go Van Gogh.

Grant Wood was supposedly influenced by Northern Renaissance art - ‘the highly detailed style and rigid frontal arrangement of (its)figures,’ I just wonder whether there was a more specific influence, conscious or otherwise.

* From Top Cat

The Economy of Truth

2011-09-29T13:14:00.000-07:00

The phrase ‘being economical with the truth,’ is a Godsend to politicians, banned from calling another MP a down-and-out liar during parliamentary debates. The liar thus becomes respectable, his sin venial, obscured in the phrase.

But ‘truth’ is a slippery thing, something entirely distrusted in the English language. Many phrases, usually prefacing the statement to come illustrate this:

‘I can’t lie…’ suggesting I’d damn well like to.

“I can’t tell a lie…’ again, suggesting regret

‘I can’t lie to you…’ more resonant because personal.

I particularly dislike the phrase ‘To tell you the truth…’ I mean, why would you do otherwise?

But this brandishing of ‘truth’, like a shield or a matador’s cape has many permutations:

‘Truth be told…’ here truth becomes something managed, rationed and doled out reluctantly.

‘Without a word of a lie…’ Suggesting the norm is otherwise.

‘To be honest…’ Similarly suggests that this is something different from the normal way you go about things.

‘To be quite honest…’ suggests partial honesty and grudging at that.

‘To be honest with you…’ is very similar to ‘I can’t lie to you’ but marginally more positive. Whereas the latter suggests real pain at having to forgo the lie, the former suggests that whilst he may be less than honest with others, he’s making an exception of you.

Then there is: ‘God’s own truth…’ Suggesting I might lie, but God doesn’t.

And whilst we’re on a religious theme we have the incipient guilt-trip: “I don’t like tea, I must confess.” Why must you confess? Were you considering hiding the fact you didn’t like tea?

Finally there are the variants of: “Ain’t that the truth…’ an Americanism, suggesting truth as bad news and accepted with due resignation.

The London version is shorter: ‘innit’ a more sullen and challenging response to ‘truth’. For example: ‘Coppers are bent, innit.’ Delivered correctly it carries aggression: ‘Yes, it is the bloody truth and I bloody well don’t like it!’

My favourite is a Welsh variant found around Swansea. There they have the habit of turning everything into a question. ‘A pint of beer, is it?' Bear in mind, it is not the bartender asking whether you want a pint of beer. It is the customer asking for one. Here truth becomes something to be questioned; a form of existentialist angst. I like to think he stares at the beer for some time before drinking it.

Schrodinger's pint.

Is this linguistic distrust of truth found in other languages?

Amusing God

2011-09-23T04:22:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the land of Oswaldtwistle, Grimshaw and Ramsbottom lies St. Joseph's Church, founded in 1884. It is the highest parish in the Liverpool Archdiocese, standing 750 feet above sea level, and within sight of Darwen Tower, Withnell Moor, Belmont Moor, Great Hill, and Winter Hill. It also had an idiosyncratic priest whose sermons every Sunday centred upon the history of Brinscall.

We dropped in twice yearly whenever we visited my brother and settled down to another instalment of Brinscall through the ages. He spoke in a soft mumble that would put a sheep to sleep and took us through the glories of Brinscall through the medieval period. I think we got as far as the Tudors before my brother moved and Brinscall was lost to us forever. I like to think he retired before he reached the twentieth century and woke up.

St Aloysius Gonzaga, more popularly known as the Oratory is an entirely different kettle of choirboys. This church is squeezed in between a hospital and a hairdressers on Oxford’s Woodstock Road. It faces a row of small houses and a Chinese restaurant.

On this occasion I attended a High Mass in Latin, a dreamy spectacle if you were in the mood, a mechanical opera if you weren’t. I was particularly struck by the caped priests and the alter servers who, on several occasions, appeared to be line-dancing to the baroque choral music descending from somewhere behind me. They walked in line, like sacerdotal chorus girls. They walked in unison and with great earnestness like a slow moving windscreen wiper across the alter steps, each swinging a censer until the alter itself faded in a dense haze of incense; and asthmatics dropped like flies all around me.

At least you could listen to and watch the event, though perhaps not pray. Still, it wasn’t boring. Neither was the small church in the Lake District whose organist must have had a summer job in a seaside resort, playing at the end of the pier. Every hymn began and ended with a twirl or a flourish so that you didn’t know whether to sing or waltz down the aisle.

Then there are the terrible priests where you want to march down the aisle with a tumbrel, but that might be another post.

Berrington Hall

2011-09-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Dedicated to Richard and Ruth Lewis and their ‘passion’ for Downton Abbey.

Do houses have their own peculiar curse? Robert Cecil, a thoroughly bad egg, invested a life of back-stabbing and ambition in Hatfield House. The building is magnificent inside and out, the Jacobean carving extraordinary in its artistry and detail. Walk inside and it takes your breath away, as it did for Cecil who died just before it was finished.

Sometimes bad luck can strike once and then it’s done. With other houses it’s a more drawn out affair.

Berrington Hall with its own melancholy history is a case in point. It was built in 1778 by Thomas Harley, a wealthy banker and government contractor. The house was designed by Henry Holland. Capability Brown landscaped its parkland; and its interior, exquisitely proportioned, was opulent and warm. Thomas Harley had no sons. You can’t have everything, but his daughter, Ann, did marry the George, the son of the more famous Admiral Lord Rodney.

This man, whupped the Spanish, French and Americans? What were their commanders like? Seriously, Gainsborough reveals a lot in that face

Lord Rodney had been a gifted naval commander who’d thrashed the Spanish, French and Americans in many naval encounters. He was also greedy, addicted to gambling and spent more than he owned – to the extent that he was forced to flee Britain in order to escape his creditors and spent some time in a French jail.

The Rodney family weren’t blessed with luck. Anne’s brother-in-law was lost at sea, and her three sons, the third, fourth and fifth Baron Rodneys died in 1842, 1843 and 1846 respectively. By the time the seventh Baron Rodney took up residence, Berrington Hall was the worst for wear and to make things worse he’d inherited the first Baron’s taste for gambling. Over the years Berrington was stripped of its farms and much of its treasures. The house was sold in 1901 to Frederick Cawley MP who’d made his wealth in the cotton industry.

For a time everything went right for them. Frederick Cawley had patented a pure black dye and when, in 1901, Queen Victoria died, a nation went into mourning and clothed itself in black crepe. And Cawley became even richer. In 1906 he was made a baronet and Berrington hall prospered under his enlightened and energetic ownership.

Then in 1914 tragedy struck. World War One. Within a few months of war their son, John Stephen, was killed in action. He was thirty four. The family were still grieving when in 1915 their second son, Harold, died at Gallipoli. The youngest son, Oswald, was killed in 1918, just three months before the war ended.

It is well worth reading the link, describing each brother’s death.

The house has a small room where pictures of the Cawley family hang. They show faces that are down to earth and decent. Good men died and the parents never recovered. On the wall is a personal, handwritten letter from Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, commiserating with their grief. The letter is intimate and sincere on first reading.

But Captain Harold Cawley’s death is not without mystery. Initially he was Aide-de-Camp to General Sir William Douglas and enjoyed relative security in Divisional Head Quarters. From there he wrote a series of uncensored letters to his parents, describing in detail the poor calibre of the recruits from the Northern towns of Lancashire. More significantly he went on to describe, in caustic detail, the short comings of General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Gould Hunter-Weston, and Major General Sir William Douglas, who he described as ‘peevish willie. The brunt of his criticism was that Generals were sacrificing men without reason but through sheer stupidity. Were their consequences?

The official line is that Captain Harold Cawley requested to be posted to the front - "I have always felt rather a brute skulking behind in comparative safety while my friends were being killed." He was granted his wish and two weeks later was killed.

A descendent, Charles Cawley, perhaps expressing a family tradition, has a different line. Harold’s letters were addressed to his father who was in the cabinet. More significantly they could be interpreted as criticism of Churchill who had masterminded the Gallipoli campaign. In Charles Cawley’s words :

“As a consequence, (Harold) left the general staff and went straight to the front line. The inevitable happened. It is more than possible that he knew exactly what he was doing and this was an act of virtual suicide.” Confronted with Churchill’s handwritten letter and the story as told by Charles Cawley, it is hard to be certain of where truth lies. But the grieving father was made a full baron, and money continued to roll in with a nation in mourning and the increased demand for black dye.

Harold Cawley

During World War II Berrington Hall was turned into a hospital but the new Lord and Lady Cawley still dressed for dinner every night and retained stiff upper lips when the Americans arrived and churned up their park in their jeeps. When Lord Cawley died in 1957 a grateful nation charged death duties of 80% and they were forced to sell up, bequeathing their house to the Treasury and ultimately the National Trust. Lady Cawley was allowed residence there until she died, though she lived longer than anyone expected – dying a centenarian in 1978.

Even then a degree of controversy lived on

Waking up slowly

2011-09-09T04:06:00.001-07:00

The morning begins slowly. Three strong mugs of tea and solitude. I don’t count the radio, murmuring the news, telling me what to think for the day and the rest of my life. Sometimes I will sit in a green gloom with curtains closed. On good days I will draw the curtains wide and stare through the conservatory at a giant damson tree, its leaves furiously break-dancing, feeding on air.

The tree is a slow measure of the seasons, a dense green throughout summer, gold and brown then ragged as autumn progresses, and finally bare, showing the hills beyond.

Today I realised I was stroking a hair just below my bottom lip.

I hadn’t shaved; my face a mess of stubble. I realised at the same time that I always fingered this particular hair. Short and stubby just below the bottom lip. This was an errant hair following no particular grain, an oak amongst hairs. I still had two cups of tea to go, so plenty of time to work this one out. My hand coursed across both cheeks and jaw line. It was like feeling sandpaper, coarse uniformity. Not one hair drew attention to itself. If I arbitrarily chose one I immediately lost it when trying to find it again.

My finger returned to its old friend, pushing it from side to side, enjoying the tense tingle to the skin around it, feeling the urge to shave it hard, knowing it would grow again and be waiting for me as perky as ever the following morning.
Reassured, I drained my final mug of tea and woke up my wife. A new day begun.

You Gotta Serve Somebody

2011-08-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

Just standing in St. Materiana’s church in Tintagel immerses you in an intense and magical peace. St. Materiana herself is most interesting because the Church has so little to say about her: "A Welsh or Cornish widow. No details of her life are extant, but some Welsh churches bear her name." Had she been martyred, no doubt the record might be more fulsome.

Scraps from myth and old Celtic records associate her with Modrun, a refugee in North Wales, a Queen of Gwent and a Cornish saint, which leads some to say she was an extremely busy lady or an amalgam of more than one Modrun. Others suggest she was a Christian invention covering over an older pagan cult (Matrona/mother goddess) which accounts for her name popping up in so many places.

Young British men, some little more than boys pop up in even more varied places. One of the melancholy joys in exploring old country churches are the wall memorials to fallen soldiers and seamen who lost their lives in forming an empire. All over England, in the most obscure hamlets, ancient churches record the deaths of ensigns, and lieutenants – some as young as seventeen – who died where they had no right to be. How in God’s name did a boy from an unknown Welsh village die in the gulf of Tonkin in 1673? What was he doing there?

Reading these memorials stirs something in the soul. They died for something greater than themselves. In our culture the individual is glorified; by sleight of hand deluded in to believing they are beholden to no one. The reality is different and the result is a growing subculture of the infantile and selfish, aspiring to riches or fame without effort.

And yes, I know a glorious con trick was played on our forbears. Many acted without choice. And ‘That something greater than themselves’ invariably enriched those who ruled them in church or state, often both. But does that demean or cheapen aspiration, sacrifice or nobility? Are the works of Michelangelo tarnished because he worked for the Medici and two corrupt Popes? The sacrifice of a warrior less so because he was there without choice? In the words of Bob Dylan everyone “Gotta Serve Somebody” And you're more likely to find yourself serving others than serving yourself.

And may St. Materiana look over you.

The mystery of strangers

2011-08-27T02:11:00.000-07:00

It is a source of deep regret that I have now reached an age that leaves me no time to sample every whisky in the world. To try would hasten my inevitable demise and I can find no way round this particular Catch 22. But there is another, deeper regret. Even in a lifetime it is impossible to know everyone that you might like to know. And this has its own ‘Catch 22’. It’s not something you’re likely to think about as a teenager. Whisky, maybe, sex yes, but not people.

I was on the train to Gerard’s Cross when an elegant, middle-aged lady sat next to me. She wore Rive Gauche and her voice was low and attractive when she asked whether the seat next to me was taken. Immediately I wanted to know more about her, and I wondered why that was.

What made her different from anyone else who might have chosen to sit next to me and who I might not have given a second thought? Okay, the perfume, the low attractive voice but it wasn’t just that.

From early on I’ve always been attracted by a person, more so than his or her body. Probably true of most people. A person can crackle with energy or exude something more subtle, glimpsed in a smile, a glint in the eye, voice, and that something hard to define so I’ll call it a life-force or soul.

A soul you intuit and you want to know more. A bee has no inhibitions nosing from flower to flower. Pollen, though indispensable, is more mundane than the soul, but nevertheless the bee devotes a life in its pursuit. We have more important things to do.

And yes, pollen is food but we are spiritual creatures. What is it that prevents us from exploring others?

Selfishness?

Inhibition?

Alcohol loosens the tongue, opens doors and closes them. Have sympathy with the overtures of drunks. For a moment in time they are wanting to know. Inhibition removed, they’re responding to the same urge that made me want to know more about that woman on the train.

A writer – okay, a nosy bugger - stares out the window at a darkening Buckinghamshire countryside and imagines who the woman is, where she is going, where she has come from. He will never know, and he will never know all he’d like to know, or drink all the whisky in the world.

Tintagel

2011-08-19T03:29:00.000-07:00

We emerged from the mist like melancholy sheep, wraiths in anoraks. This was more like it. Morose but content. The Keytons on holiday. Overlooking the sea indistinguishable from the wetness around us, we picnicked at Tintagel and ruminated on Arthur. If this was his Camelot no wonder the Knights of the Round Table came to their dismal end. Arthur must have been terminally depressed; probably threw himself on Mordred’s sword just to get away. There would be sunshine in Avalon, and he had chain mail to protect himself from midges. I understood then why Isolde had fled her husband in favour of Tristan. Mark never stood a chance. “It’s not you, dear.” And she probably meant it. Tintagel.

We chewed our cheese sandwiches and contemplated the rock, grey in mist but rearing high in the clouds. The climb looked formidable and I thought back to Canillas de Aceituno, and the expats we had met. There was a guy that could make you drunk on his breath. Flies died from alcohol poisoning. This was his solution to sunshine and loneliness; another who had imbedded himself in the Spanish community. He was opening a convalescence home for seriously ill children, and his own child attended a Spanish school. He seemed the exception.

They reminded me of Crusading knights each in their villa - tiny castles on alien hills - each with their pool, their glorious sunsets, their satellite dish, and most important of all, a fast internet connection to home. They were immensely hospitable, some cheerful and at peace with the world, others lost like ghosts in a landscape that didn’t belong to them. It reminded me of the importance of roots and that relationship with others that even plants, with their very different senses share. I chewed on my sandwich.

“What are you thinking of?” my daughter asked.

“Richard of Cornwall,” I said. “His brother Henry III gave him Cornwall as a birthday present. He built the castle – what you can see of it - in 1233.”

“Not Arthur then.”

“Not Arthur, though the site itself was important to the ancient Cornish kings.

“So he may have been here.”

“Have a cheese sandwich.”

Canillas de Aceituno

2011-08-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Fresh from the experience of 'Macbeth' in a storm – well, to be honest some years after but the memory was strong – we booked a holiday, our only criteria being somewhere hot and dry, and with a pool. We settled on Canillas de Aceituno in the mountains of Andalusia.

The patio overlooked deep valleys and a turquoise but diminishing lake. Mountains surrounded us; very Wagnerian, the mosquitoes less so, whining Valkyries that fed on the living.

I didn’t anticipate problems. Swallows dived from azure skies, and we had a pool. Even our very own fig tree.

So Canillas de Aceituno was two miles away. We could do that. We thought. What we hadn’t realized was that this two miles involved a vertical trek. The town was perched even higher than we were! 40 degrees centigrade heightened the experience.

I lost weight.

Not in the normal way.

Mosquitoes and a whole host of voracious insects took great chunks from my arms and legs and neck. My face turned volcanic, a deep Martian red. The flies followed soon after, settling on each and every itching wound. "Laying their eggs," my son said gloomily, as though considering what his reaction would be when I writhed with maggots and exploded in flies.

I didn’t expect over-much sympathy. Never do. As things stood, the whole family walked ten paces behind me, reluctant to be seen with the leper. My name became 'Belial, Lord of Flies.'

No one else in the family was touched, just me, the sacrificial goat. It was good to get back to Monmouth. No mosquitoes yet, just the pleasant charm of quiet eccentrics.

Macbeth in a storm

2011-08-05T03:15:00.000-07:00

In 2001 we saw an open air production of Macbeth in the grounds of Llancaiach FawrManor. It starred Abigail Hopkins, the daughter of the more well known Anthony. It also rained. Not just ordinary rain. Wales doesn’t do equatorial. Not often. Fate – I pictured her as a malevolent Welsh woman with a watery grin - waited for us to choose our seats, open our sandwiches and then without warning covered us with the Atlantic and some of the Pacific.

It poured down, turning cheese sandwiches into a cold fondue, and here is where a weird, British perversity kicked in. We tightened our hoods, unfurled our umbrellas and raised our feet as the ground turned to mud and pools grew into lakes. As the performance went on, our chairs slowly sank into the morass, but still we remained…and, equally weird, so did the actors in a strange, symbiotic relationship: as long as an audience remained, they would perform, and for as long as they performed we would remain. Besides, they’d probably factored in the curse of the play that must not be named.

And maybe they were enjoying skidding across a greasy stage and sometimes coming off. Abigail Hopkins surely did. As Hecate she with the other witches were perched up a metallic tree, silhouetted against a lowering sky when suddenly lightning flashed and thunder rolled. This was SFX with attitude and I’ve never seen witches so terrifying, or terrified. Alas, all good things come to an end, our applause muted in rain.

But a decision was made. Our next holiday would be taken in sunshine. Be careful what you wish for. Be very careful:)

Temptation in Herefordshire

2011-07-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was sitting between an elderly man with far-away eyes, and an even older woman with an imperial spine and watchful look. A large window to my right opened out to a sea of corn and the rolling hills of Herefordshire. And before me stretched a table laden with salads, various flans, a huge game pie, coffee and brandy cake rich with cream and so moist it oozed on a glance. There were other desserts, a massive Kiwi Pavlova; looming behind that an even larger cheeseboard.

The elderly lady, for some reason, was thinking on breakfast and ascertained that most of us didn’t eat it, or nibbled on toast. A few brave souls risked muesli with low fat milk. This greatly puzzled her. ‘I’ve spent ninety years eating a full English breakfast,’ and she proceeded to list, with some relish, the bacon and eggs, sausage, tomatoes, mushrooms and fried bread she attacked each and every morning. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her. ‘Never did much me harm,’ she concluded, her tone curious rather than an inflammatory attack on a mineral water and Statin obsessed culture.

The man to my left coughed, the far-away look replaced by a smile. ‘There have been studies.’ He wiped his lips. ‘These people who live extraordinary long lives all had high cholesterol levels.’

Well, knock me down with a feather. The table glared in a Damascene light. A Michael Crichton moment. So high cholesterol was the key to a long and healthy life! And all those years of fibre chewing; was it all part of some great, far reaching conspiracy – actuarial calculation and science - a way of dealing with aging populations and spiralling pension costs? Were we consuming aspirin and Statins, slurping tubs of cholesterol-beating, low fat spread and munching vegetables - Gaderene hypochondriacs – worried lemmings unwittingly rushing to an early grave?

I drank more wine and considered the matter. The old man could have been talking nonsense, but there was more game pie, and the coffee and brandy cake looked awfully good, and then the cheese of course.

I suspended judgement.

At worse it would provide the plot for a third-rate thriller, perhaps add a few more conspiracy theories to the net and a few more pounds to the waist.

A window cleaner's curse

2011-07-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

I had a window cleaner once. A real window cleaner who carried his own ladder and bucket, and climbed said ladder at what ever the angle or height of the house. He also whistled so you could choose not to be in, or draw the curtains hurriedly depending on circumstances. In every sense, this man was a paragon, and more - a bibliophile.

One summer’s day, squeezed between two rosebushes, he accosted me like an ancient mariner in search of an albatross:

“Tell me your favourite book of all time.”

“I don’t have a favourite book of all time.”

“Well then, tell me one you’d recommend to me – one I would like to read.”

“It depends on what kind of books you enjoy.” I was floundering, and still holding the bucket of fresh water he’d initially requested. He ignored my outstretched arm, the water dripping strategically over his shoes.

“Complex fantasy with a Victorian feel,” he said.

This was no ordinary window cleaner – but my answer was swift. ‘Gormenghast,’ I said, ‘by Mervyn Peak.’ He made me spell it, but didn’t write it down.

“Now I’ll recommend a book to you.” His finger touched me on the chest with conviction and zeal. He could have been saving my soul.

I smiled, caught in a book-trap I hadn’t seen coming.

“You must read ‘Barnaby Rudge.’” His eyes burned into mine. “You must read ‘Barnaby Rudge.’”

“Dickens, eh,” I said, as one bibliophile to another.

And the strange thing is that I did read Barnaby Rudge and lost myself in a vast, sprawling, chaotic and evocative world. The bugger was right. But I’ll leave it there in case any of you fears the ancient mariner’s curse might be infectious.

But whether he read Gormenghast or not, I never found out. I asked him once and he just tapped his nose and winked, like window cleaners do. I still live in hope that one day he might accost another householder with the same artfully designed trap and proclaim the merits of ‘Gormenghast’.

Gary Glitter

2011-07-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

Justice is beautiful, says Socrates to a poor, befuddled Polus in the Gorgias though I prefer the more ambiguous, double-edged fable that Justice is blind. And there’s the miracle because justice is both blind and selective. The sins of some become elevated to cultural taboos.

Who now will happily admit that they like Gary Glitter – not the man (Paul Francis Gadd) but the artist and music of thirty or more years ago? We’re talking high heels and glitter suits here, over the top hair and cheesy anthemic songs that evoke a time and place. Immense fun and tongue in cheek bubblegum. And yet it has somewhere been decided that to like Gary Glitter somehow suggests you also like molesting children. On this criterion one should also despise the works of Socrates, Alcibiades, Roman Polanksi, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry.

Gary Glitter’s downfall began when child porn was found on his hard-drive. Career in ruins, he was hounded out of the country and his demons pursued him, his proclivities now unchecked by the discipline of having something to hide. When you compare the two images of Glitter in his hey-day with Paul Gadd as he is now, justice is almost Shakespearean.

But the question arises as to whether a more sinister justice is at work, sinister because it is unaccountable. Quietly and without judge or jury, self appointed arbiters of what’s good for the public, have removed from British play-lists, so in effect he is being punished twice in terms of royalties and revenue from work that bears no relation to his crime. This particular punishment also effects his band.
You may decide it’s what he deserves, but it wasn’t part of the sentence passed down on him. Moreover, removing him from the playlist of the state broadcaster is reminiscent of Stalin's erasure of 'enemies of the state' from the public record. Not that I'm comparing Glitter to Trotsky.

If it were ever discovered that Bob Dylan had committed similar, heinous crimes would his oeuvre be omitted from BBC play-lists? If not, are we suggesting that Justice is dependent on the perceived value of one set of songs over another ‘Tangled up in Blue’ Vs ‘I'm the Leader of the Gang( I am)? 'Great Balls of Fire' Vs 'Rock and Roll, Parts One and Two' Polanski's 'China Town' Vs 'I Love You Love me Love'?

It’s an interesting game. Which artists do you think would transcend any crime because of their cultural significance - Phil Specktor? And who would get the Gary Glitter treatment because their music is seen as dispensable? And is this even handed justice?

Kennedy’s Pimp

2011-07-08T04:00:00.000-07:00

When the new school curriculum decreed that every child should learn about the ‘Industrial Revolution,’ History Departments up and down the country had a problem: how to persuade children that history was more interesting than Richard Arkwright’s Water Frame, and Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny? And don’t get me started on ‘Turnip Townsend.’

In short, how were we to persuade the brightest and best to choose History as a GCSE option and so maximise the grades by which a Department was judged?

The process was inexorable. Child poverty and abuse, became ‘entertainment;’ the ‘Slave Trade,’ the Workhouse, children in mines, exploited again in order to provide cheap thrills for otherwise bored students; prurience and sympathy curiously mixed.

Titillation reached its peak just before students came to make their final choice of options for Years 10 and 11.

Then we moved on to the Holocaust and Kennedy’s brain. These were ‘taster’ lessons, pedagogic commercials for the joys awaiting them should they choose to do history the following year.

These two years of modern history have formed in my mind a sombre montage of Horst Wessel and wasted corpses, lynchings and burning barns, men ranting in white pointy hats, others in uniforms and surrounded by flags. And every year we dissected Kennedy’s brain in our search for who murdered him.

This was the highpoint of our coursework for over a decade, the reason why many chose to do history in the first place. Who killed President Kennedy? It had everything: a who-dun-it caught in colour and never resolved. It combined serious analysis of varied and conflicting evidence with the gravitas of Greek tragedy.

Twice a year for a decade or more, my life would be briefly dominated by endless freeze-frames of Kennedy’s head jerking back…or was it forward? Trajectories, Oswald’s marksmanship, or lack of it, Jacqueline’s undignified scramble out of the car, or was she trying to grab a piece of her husband’s head. No reverence here, the children wanted to know.

And I was part of the process, at one with Oswald lurking behind that window, or the possible second gunman behind the white picket fence on the knoll. Only every year, unlike Zapruder, I knew what would happen. I stood poised to freeze-frame what Zapruder had filmed. I had the remote, doomed to pause and repeat history year after year. Had a president died for this?

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Waq Waqs and sea slugs

2011-07-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Would a kindle look as good?

When Ruth Keppel became the first person to win £1m on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' my stock in the classroom rose, at least amongst Year Eights, for they, too, knew the answer. Eleanor of Aquitaine was the wife of Henry II, and that was the answer that won a pleasant, but previously obscure lady a million pounds. There was a point to history, then, at least one they could understand:

“We knew the answer to that, sir.”

“We could have won a £1m.” The logic was faulty, but positive at least; and positive logic has a very nice ring.

But history?

There is no real point in writing love-letters in Sumerian cuneiform, other than the fun of it, and perhaps in showing the limitations of this early form of writing.

What does it profit a man to know that though we'll never know the year Silbury Hill was built, we can be sure it was started in July sometime after three or more days of rain? Such certainty stems from the discovery of a preserved flying ant found in its base.

Who cares that the people of Madagascar, far from being ‘African’ are in fact descended from the Waq Waqs who, for reasons known only to them, sailed from Indonesia some time around the year 400 AD? Again we can’t be certain about the year, though we can, with reasonable certainty pin point the months between May to October when the equatorial trade winds blow towards Africa. Their small fleet of six man outrigger canoes would have taken a month to reach their destination, one based on hope rather than certainty.

And why should we ponder the fact that had not the ancient Chinese had an insatiable appetite for a certain species of sea-slug, their ships wouldn’t have exhausted the sea-beds of a chain of islands that led like culinary stepping stones to the continent of Australia. A small jade Buddha was found in the roots of a Banyan tree in Northern Australia, and the aborigine, though complex, never contemplated Nirvana. No. In their search for a delicacy the Chinese discovered Australia centuries before Captain Cook, but because they had no use for it, they left it there.

Thing is, you never know what may eventually prove useful as Ruth Keppel found out and Chinese Mining conglomerates are finding out now.

The Devil To Pay

2011-06-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

If I was a young twelve year old boy, I know which book I would rather be reading, but unfortunately, Maria Zannini’s excellent book was not written then and so my Year Seven class had to make do with Plato’s ‘The Gorgias’. Less stimulating in many respects but safer in terms of a long term career.

My problem was how to make a Socratic dialogue interesting and engage them in argument. This was a time when corporal punishment was still common in schools, usually in the form of a cane being thwacked on the hand, or sometimes the bottom.

The dialogue below was read through gritted teeth. None of them agreed with Socrates, and many ended up thoroughly disliking him, thinking he was just too smart for his own good. Some would have administered the hemlock much earlier than it was. Their homework assignment was to defeat Socrates in argument by giving Polus more balls.

The ending here is slightly different than that offered to the class :)

THE CANE CAN BE BEAUTIFUL

SOCRATES:
Do you think being brought to justice and being rightly punished for one’s crimes the same thing?

POLUS:
I do

SOCRATES:
Are you prepared to admit that all just acts are beautiful in proportion to their justice? Think carefully before you answer.

POLUS:
Yes, Socrates. I really do think so

SOCRATES:

Then consider this: when a man performs any act, must there be something to be operated on by the agent?

POLUS:
I believe so.

SOCRATES:
And does that something undergo what the agent performs? For example if a man performs an act of striking, something must necessarily must be hit.

POLUS:
Necessarily

SOCRATES:
And if a striker hits hard or quickly, the object struck must be hit in the same manner.

POLUS:
Yes.

SOCRATES:
So the effect on the object struck is of the same sort as the action of the agent striking.

POLUS:
Quite so.

SOCRATES:
So again when a man does the act of burning, something must be burned.

POLUS:
Naturally.

SOCRATES:
And if he burns severely, or painfully, what is burned must be burned exactly the way the burning agent burns it.

POLUS:
Quite so.

SOCRATES:
So also when a man cuts, does the same argument apply? That is, there is something which is cut?

POLUS:
Yes

SOCRATES:
And if the cutting is big or deep or painful, the cut made in the object which is being cut will be of the same sort as the cuts of the cutting agent.

POLUS:
It seems so

SOCRATES:
Well then, with these admissions made, let me ask you whether being brought to justice is to undergo something or to do it?

POLUS:
Necessarily, Socrates, it is to undergo.

SOCRATES:
Then it is at the hands of some agent or other?

POLUS:
Naturally, at the hands of the man who inflicts the punishment.

SOCRATES:
And does the man who punishes rightly punish justly?

POLUS:
Yes

SOCRATES:
Is his action just or unjust?

POLUS:
It is just

SOCRATES:
And what is just we have admitted to be beautiful

POLUS:
Quite so.

SOCRATES:
Then of this pair, one performs beautiful the other suffers beautiful acts

POLUS:
Yes

SOCRATES:
So a man who is brought to justice suffers what is good

POLUS:
It looks like it

SOCRATES:
Then he is benefited.

POLUS:
But that book you won't let me read.

SOCRATES
The Zannini woman? You know I don't approve.

POLUS
But if I made love to the woman in the picture...it will be beautiful, so will she be enjoying a beautiful act?

SOCRATES:
Steady, Polus, steady.

POLUS:
Please, Socrates, please

SOCRATES:
It will cost you, boy, but Amazon do a good deal.

POLUS:
And if she caned me, that would be an even more beautiful act.

A Neolithic moment

2011-06-17T02:30:00.000-07:00

Avebury

Before a national curriculum solidified and imprisoned us in a maze that grew progressively more dense with targets like mantraps, history had space to delight curious and open minds, and sometimes the ‘rush’ was unexpected, magical and hard to explain.

In the days before a curriculum dictated that secondary school history would start from 1066, we wrote love letters in Sumerian cuneiform, explored Ley lines and took field trips to Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill. It might sound very ‘New Age’ but St Josephs taught ‘traditional’ history, and balancing chronology and structure with fun.

We also taught family. I still remember how worried I was when my Head of Year’s eldest daughter, Clare Drewett, entered the school. Fortunately for me she was part of a gifted cohort and I still remember the exuberance of those lessons. It was summed up in one particular moment on the top of Silbury Hill.

Silbury Hill

It was a cloudless, blue sky day with Neolithic England spread out below us. And the magic of the moment hit one particular student: Paula Wilkinson. She hurtled towards me and I twirled her around and around beneath that blue sky before dropping her next to her picnic. Couldn’t do that today. Never thought of it then. It was just good to be alive in a world humming with insects and the dead all around us.

Avebury from above

West Kennett Long Barrow, a neolithic tomb.

The Duke of Buckingham's legs

2011-06-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Teaching has much in common with writing, though if you change pov in the classroom, you’re likely to get confused, and I don’t recommend speaking in third person past tense - though if the students noticed you’d know you had their attention - before they came to take you away.

However, success in both professions is based on three fundamental rules:

You have to teach or write about what interests you. If you’re bored by something why should anyone else find it interesting?

You need a strong hook to grab them in the first place.

And finally it has to have a degree of importance. This final rule has wriggle room in fiction. Are any of Dan Brown’s novels ‘important’? Perhaps that third rule applies only to ‘literature’ with a capital ‘L’. In Education 'importance' is more immediate and measured by exams, league tables and once upon a time well paid jobs. It also varies from culture to culture. In the west, increasingly, education is as much to ‘entertain’ as it is to impart hard and useful knowledge.

But down from my soapbox. Once I was young.

And in my experience, teaching often works best when you’re not aware you’re doing it. I remember entering a classroom with a hangover. We were beginning a new topic - Charles 1st - and the lesson plan made no sense.

I turned the pages of the text book we were then using and fixated on the Duke of Buckingham’s legs. They were long and slender, meant for the catwalk or perhaps to be fondled. Whatever the case they dominated the portrait and it was clear the Duke was inordinately proud of them.

My daemon spoke through me. “I would like you to draw the Duke of Buckingham’s legs.” The class looked at me as though I was mad. But it was an understanding class. They liked me; knew I probably had my reasons, and had a good idea what those reasons might be.

Discussion soon followed:

‘Was he gay, sir?”

‘Was he really the king’s friend, sir?” Surreptitious nudges followed by closer scrutiny of the offending legs.

“The king’s father was especially fond of him,” I croaked, wondering where the aspirins were when you need them.

‘Maybe he wasn’t gay – maybe he just had good legs.’ Becky was a girl who preferred the less obvious path.

“Could you be done for it then, sir?”

They were hooked and it took little prompting for them to research the man with the legs, his relationship with the king, and laws against sodomy which Becky thought were gross.

So out of the three rules it is rules one and two that are paramount, though that is not to imply I found the Duke of Buckingham’s legs of untoward interest.

Letting go

2011-06-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

I felt a cold knife to the thigh. The band was cutting me off. I was no longer good enough. 'I had other commitments, more important commitments.' Whatever the dressing the band was cutting me off, letting me go.

I’d sensed it for some time, the occasional silences. Now here, in Henry and Lol’s house, it was put into words.

Through a perceived need for ceremony, or because that was all they had in the house, Lol entered the room carrying a silver tray. It held five glasses and a green bottle of Dry Martini. A drink I’ve never had since.

Over drinks and desultory gossip nothing was said. Then Henry led me aside. “They want you to leave the band.” He said it like he didn’t.

I forget my reply.

Then he offered an olive branch, possibly more of a twig. “We want new members, more weight to the band. We want do more and bigger concerts.”

“And with my present teaching commitment…impending marriage.”

“Exactly.” His Viking features eased into an expression of remorse and relief. “You understand…You’d always be welcome to play with us in smaller venues – the occasional ceilidh.”

“You mean leave ‘Devil’s Elbow’ for ‘Devil’s Finger’”.

He laughed as though it was funny.

“No thanks,” I said.

As divorces go it was amicable, bitter-sweet. The band had their interests to pursue and I had mine.

Blogs rarely confess failure. Who wants to read it? Who wants to confess it? Never moan or complain. But Blogs should be truthful, and the truth is that rejection happens to everyone, and always it hurts.

New adventures

2011-05-27T03:06:00.000-07:00

When I walked off the plane I felt like was walking into a damp overcoat a size too small, and wondered whether I’d made a mistake in rejecting Sister Katherine Waters’ offer of a permanent job in New York. But then history would have been different.

Customs checked my hand-made octave mandola, and my 1,500 dollar Gibson mandolin, and asked when and where I’d bought them. England I said. He studied my face for honesty and let me through.

It was wonderful to see old friends again, tramp along country lanes with Bernie and Greg; good to have a decent pint…fish and chips. But already I missed the huge blue skies, the sparkling air, the sense of vast spaces that encouraged big thoughts. The dream of a child in a hospital bed had come and gone, and now I felt like a ghost in my own country. The familiar had become strange.

Even stranger was the fact that someone else was sitting in my chair, at my work desk in school. Someone with eyes that twinkled and a smile that could thaw winter. I lost a chair but gained a wife, but no more shall be said of her here. My wife and children have their own voices, their own story to tell or not tell.

And so it ends.

2011-05-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

I’ve often wondered what I would choose for my last meal if I knew I was dying later that day, either by order of the state, (Socrates was un-ambitious sticking to a drink) or by more natural means. It felt like that as we hit Washington, the last day of our tour. In this case it was a bit of a set menu, but I dutifully revisited every monument, garden and statue, and remembered that this had been my first experience of America only a year before.

I hate anti-climaxes, the neither-here-nor-there interludes between major events. If I could have done a ‘cut and paste’ job I’d have zipped back to the inevitable in the blink of an eye. Unfortunately there was another night to endure in New York.

What a strange thing to say. But it wasn’t much fun, packing, looking round Ron’s apartment for one final time, saying goodbye to Bob and Tom and everyone else who’d made me so welcome. I met up with Roland at a similar loose-end, and together we crawled the bars of Greenwich village with Carol Bezvidenhoot. I said goodbye to her with a chaste kiss and walked from the Village to Jackson Heights. New York at night is always an interesting experience.

America was a great adventure, but there was a bigger one to come.

One Adventure ends, another begins. I hope this has proved interesting to my beautiful daughter

Nearing the end

2011-05-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

I’m finding it harder to write as this particular phase in my life comes to an end. It’s like a man approaching death, and before you say, ‘Michael, you are far too young to be thinking of such things,’ (I hope you all do) I’ve had a morbid mind since the nuns were unleashed upon me in Primary school.

But America was coming to an end, for me at least; you guys still have some way to go. Our next stop was Williamsburg and very beautiful it was too. I remember the long walk from the Information Centre to the ‘Village’, a walk that allowed you to muse on the information imparted by a very professional orientation film shown at our arrival.

Three and a half hours, the time allotted to us, wasn’t nearly long enough, The William and Mary College alone was worth an hour or two. Now it’s a visual snippet lodged in the brain: America’s oldest educational foundation, Christopher Wren inspired architecture, and the alumni of both Washington and Jefferson.

Speaking of Washington

Next we were whisked off to Mount Vernon - Washington of the wooden false teeth fame – his old place. And there I emotionally and physically collapsed. Emotional, not in a blubbering sense, but the realization that I’d become emotionally drained. I couldn’t take any more.

I have no objection to any sober or orderly person's gratifying their curiosity in viewing the buildings, Gardens, &ca. about Mount Vernon.’ Washington wrote in a letter* which was very nice of him.

I was sober and orderly but curiosity was gone. If I saw one more costume, one further piece of bone china, even Washington’s reputed false teeth I’d have hugged my sides and screamed. I’d seen too much…and the curry was having its effects too.
I went to where I always go in periods of great angst, a bar. And afterwards slept on the grass.

Tomorrow, Washington, New York and then the plane home.

*letter to William Pearce (November 23, 1794

Jack Daniel's or Jim Beam? A sober reflection

2011-05-08T07:06:00.000-07:00

Friday 13th proved uneventful, though Kim was still not speaking to me. Having just passed through Tennessee and Kentucky, Roland and myself debated the merits of their respective bourbons and decided there was only one real way to find out. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a bottle of Jim Beam, were duly purchased, and we spent much of the afternoon beneath a shady tree.

First we examined the colour. Jim Beam in sunlight looks like piss, the kind that would earn an approving nod from an urologist but not perhaps from a drinker. Jack Daniels is darker, only slightly so, but sufficient to give that same urologist a degree of concern.

The smell we found difficult to differentiate and we spent several precious minutes sniffing and swirling before finally agreeing that although both shared a similar sweet and sour aroma, Jim Beam’s had the sharper edge. Was that a good or a bad thing? Did sharp mean thin? Further discussion ensued but with no definite conclusion.

Preliminaries satisfied it was time to exercise palate and tongue, teeth relegated to filtering as we sucked and swilled and nodded our heads.

Roland suggested a spit bucket as though we were testing fine wines. He was getting above himself and I reminded him gravely that instead of tasting eight or nine separate and distinct wines, ours was the less onerous chore of sampling just two bourbons. A spit bucket would not be called for though if Roland wanted to spit his out on the grass – away from me – well that was his democratic right.

The afternoon passed quietly other than the occasional clink of bottle on glass, the considered slurp, and every so often an appreciative ‘ummmm’. We drank slowly, sound judgement being the ultimate arbiter.

Hours passed, as we irrigated mouth and throat, savoured that slow, final trickle from oesophagus to stomach until a decision was at at last reached. It was unanimous. Jack Daniel’s was sweeter. And there the discussion continued. Did sweeter mean fuller? Which was the superior drink?

If either distillery would like to sponsor a rematch, this could be arranged, though we draw the line at a Pepsi Vs Coke challenge.

That evening I made curry for the group, with unfortunate consequences.

The beer was strong and Kim was upset when I poured a jug of it over her head

2011-04-30T02:58:00.000-07:00

Thursday 12th

We spent the day driving to Chesapeake Bay where we took the ferry across. I tried to interest those around me in the exploits of British troops who having sailed up the Chesapeake in the war of 1812, went on to burn the Capitol and large parts of Washington. They were polite but were clearly more interested in oysters and the promise of strong beer, and I don’t say I blame them.

We spent the evening in a ‘Colonial Tavern’ and here my diary goes awry. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the tavern, and though I retain a very vivid picture of it in my mind, I can’t for love or money find it on Google. The mind is a wonderful and complex thing but it cannot, as yet, transfer an image through cyberspace. So you’ll have to imagine us sitting at trestles on the Tavern’s green, drinking strong ale and being entertained by jugglers, wigs and fine dresses, and jaunty Colonial airs.

I’m told there are asteroids that pursue long and peculiar trajectories through space, appearing once every ten thousand years or more and then disappearing again. Neurons are pretty much the same. That evening a random neuron ripped through my brain and caused me to do something I still puzzle over all these years later. I poured a jug of beer over Kim Haslinger’s head.

It wasn’t in malice or anger. I think I must have thought it funny at the time. Kim was more puzzled than angry and I sat there, not drunk, but bemused. My only defence was that such behaviour was par for the course on that long, long journey across America, where shaving foam-fights were a nightly routine. And perhaps I was sad…at the burning of Washington…at the fact that my journey across America was coming to an end. It was like the worst ‘frat-pack’ movie gone wrong, and I didn’t have Owen Wilson’s charming smile to make everything right. Worse, it was a waste of good beer. I think Kim and I remained friends…but I haven’t seen her since.

The neuron has yet to make a comeback but I’m afraid it’s probably long over due.

A hat at last in Cherokee

2011-04-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Wed 11 August

Cherokee is nestled deep within a thickly wooded valley and sadly seemed little more than a tourist centre replete with tack. We walked through a Snake Zoo. . . and wondered why. But Cherokee had one trick up its sleeve. Lurking in the shadows, and waiting for the one who was about to release it was a hat.

Throughout my entire time in America, I’d tried Baseball Caps, Panamas, Stetsons, even a Fedora, but none fitted my strangely shaped head; somehow or other beneath a hat my face resembled an ambiguous after-thought.

And then, in a Cherokee store, I found it: - a 70’s Black Pimp’s brown suede cap; all baggy and malleable. A sheep, even an orangutan would have looked good in this hat. I tried it on and posed; an extra from Shaft. I fell in love - with the hat.

I took it to the counter, hat and wallet in hand. The owner of the shop, a Cherokee Indian, stared at me and then at the hat. He shook his head. Who did he think he was – my style counsellor? I opened my wallet:

‘How much?’

His face remained stoic, impassive, not even a blink. He shook his head again and then pointed at the hat.

‘Mine,’ he said.

‘But it was at the very bottom of a big pile of hats.’

‘Lost,’ he said, ‘until now.’

I stared at him with all the resolution of a nineteenth century land-grabber. He stared back with the resolution of one who played poker. We haggled, me oscillating in uncertainty: was I being obsessively greedy in wresting ‘his hat’ from him – or was he taking me for a fool? We haggled some more, his face barely twitching a muscle, until my want and his price eventually approximated.

It’s a fine hat, but my wife refuses to let me wear it.

South African Roland (as opposed to Austrian cocktail champion, Roland) joined me in a seven mile walk back to the camp. Kim, less nature-loving but more astute, hitched a lift. Perhaps in ecstasy at having at last found the perfect hat I seriously over-partied that night, and in consequence was unable to enjoy a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains the following day.

Meat pies and Bluegrass, the Knoxville World Fair

2011-04-11T02:05:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 10th

In the Simpsons, ‘Bart on the Road’ Bart drives to Knoxville Tennessee to see the 1982. World Fair. Unfortunately the guide book in their rental car is fourteen years out of date and the only operating attraction remaining is a wig store based in the iconic Sun Tower. When we were there it was busier, but that’s about all. Sunshine, and walking, coke, hot-dogs, and weird cultural artefacts designed to sum up complex civilizations for those with short attention spans. The Australian pavilion was the worst offender, leaning too heavily on out-dated images – cork-dangling hats and didgeridoos. The meat pies were good, the Foster’s lager less so. But hey, you don’t set up a pavilion in ‘World Fair’ to sell meat pies.

The theme of the exhibition was ‘Energy Turns The World’ and it drew in eleven million visitors. I saw touch-screen displays, and Cherry flavoured coke, boxed milk, and, in the Hungarian Pavilion a giant, automated Rubik’s cube with rotating squares. To me it seemed a great waste of energy – apart from the Bluegrass, which was brilliant. Meat pies and bluegrass. It was almost worthwhile.

Mind, worse was to come. We spent the night in a 'Drive in Movie.' For me this was iconic USA, conjuring up Fifties America, Doris Day and rocking cars. Perhaps an unfortunate juxtaposition. The reality was different from imagined nostalgia: a Cheech and Chong movie on a small screen too far-away, and heard through scratchy headphones. And it was cold. Maybe the 1950’s weren’t that good after all.

That night we drove to Cherokee.

Atlanta, home of Decatura

2011-04-08T04:56:00.000-07:00

August 9th

‘Drove all the way to Atlanta, a truly boring city:’ So said the diary entry. Bald and to the point. It’s accuracy has to be weighed against the fact that we’d been travelling four weeks or more over-land, and had covered thousands of miles. We’d seen parts of America I’d previously only dreamt about, seen countless faces, talked and listened to just about every variant of the American accent, and experienced the subtle differences in every state. It was, in short, the geographic and cultural equivalent of Petronius’s ‘Satyricon’ as filmed by Fellini. In terms of sensory overload it felt like that, and so by the East coast we were jaded, our judgement impaired. Hmm…is that the royal ‘we’ or have I just off-loaded my prejudices on the entire group?

We were taken to a very tatty ‘Gone with the Wind’ museum. No doubt fascinating for those interested in Southern belle dresses and old movie posters. Apparently those new to the phenomenon are termed Neophytes. Fans of the book and film are called ‘Windies’ – though I can think of a riper name. The souvenir says it all..

Officially Clark Gable, though it puts me in mind of Carlos Cortes

Later I joined Carol and Laura at a dreadful ‘English’ pub called Reggie’s. So many things wrong with it: potted palms, and pictures of Churchill and the Queen. Yup, can’t move for potted plants and portraits of Churchill and the Queen in pubs all over Britain. I read one fan of the pub extolling its virtues online: the sum total being it sold Whitbread Bitter. Dearie me. What made things worse was that Laura grossly over-tipped with money from the common kitty, which offended my Capricornian sensibilities.

But to make amends for a possibly sour judgement I did my research, refreshed and over a pint of beer. Not Whitbreads.

The city and surrounding area was built upon land purchased from the Cherokee and Creek in 1822, the first white settlement being ‘Decatur’ named in honour of Stephen Decatur – a naval commander, and the first American celebrated as a national military hero who had not played a role in the American Revolution.

He’d made his name from fighting Barbary pirates and thus I discovered the origin of those lines American marines will sing at the drop of a hat: ‘from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli...’ That had always puzzled me. Mind, the Halls of Montezuma still does.

I wish we’d visited Decatur. I like how in the 1830’s it rejected the Western and Atlantic Railroad’s plans to make Decatur the southernmost stop on its railroad. Decatur had no taste for the noise and pollution, the hubbub being such a major terminus would involve. As a result the railroad founded a new city to the west and southwest of Decatur ie Atlanta.

It’s hard to feel too much for the travails of Scarlett O’Hara and the burning of Atlanta. Thirty years before that Atlanta’s founding fathers had been responsible for the forcible deportation of the Cherokee which killed 4000 Native Americans. Decatur, being the base camp for Sherman, presumably escaped the worst of the fire.
I think the last word should go to the eccentric suburb of Decatur:

Shallowford Road, which led to the Shallow Ford, has been renamed Clairmont Avenue, probably because it does not go to, from or past any place called Clairmont. Covington Road is now Sycamore Street, probably because it leads to Covington and has no Sycamores on it. Nelson's Ferry Road, named after the local family which ran the ferry at the Chattahoochee end of the road, has been named Ponce de Leon after a family prominent, before Castro, in Havana, Cuba.— Mitchell, Stephens, "A Tentative Reconstruction of the Decatur Town Map of 1823", Atlanta Historical Bulletin, No.30, p.8, 1965.

Sunday August 8th.

2011-03-31T01:46:00.000-07:00

'May you live in interesting times' is traditionally interpreted as a curse. Sunday 8th of August then was blessed. But boring. Nothing happened.

And yet boring is grossly under-estimated. Every child should be bored - should endure long tracts of it - so that their imaginations can be kick-started, rather than merely consuming the imagination of others. Books are excluded from this fine theory because in fiction, two imaginations are necessarily involved. I endured huge tracts of boredom as a child – long, wet Sundays in Liverpool and two years on my back in hospital. Boredom is an undiscovered continent, a cerebral jump-lead.

But I wasn’t pontificating along these lines on Sunday the 8th of August. The morning was spent somewhere close to a toilet, the rest of the day we read, sun-bathed and swam. Some would call this a perfect holiday.

Things picked up in the evening. Reports came in that a major hurricane was heading our way. Earnest discussions ensued; should we take refuge in flight, or put down our tents and seek refuge in more substantial buildings. To my relief the latter course was chosen. I’d never seen a hurricane.

But this was Sunday 8th of August, and so nothing happened – other that a squall of heavy rain as commonly experienced on Blackpool Pier. Someone came on to me quite strong, but it was Sunday 8th August for her too. I spent the night watching an evangelical preacher on TV. He was good value, strutting the stage and bellowing damnation. It wasn’t convincing. It was Sunday the 8th of August.

Trauma in Florida

2011-03-25T04:21:00.000-07:00

August 7

It was time to say goodbye to New Orleans, and be kind to our livers. We spent a leisurely morning at the Café De Monde in Jackson Square, sipping coffee, writing postcards and taking the occasional picture. Having nurtured our livers for a good two hours we headed for Pat O’Brians for a farewell Hurricane - and Mint Juleps I wish I’d discovered earlier. I tried to make up, but time was against me.

It’s interesting how memory plays tricks; from the vantage point of time tedious journeys are telescoped into warp factor nine. On the map it seems a reasonable distance but looking back we were one moment sipping Mint Juleps in a tropical garden, and the next building a bonfire on a Florida beach.

I’ve often read in books, dense, atmospheric paragraphs where the author has struggled to convince that the air could be a soft, viscous pink, the sea milky blue and both equally smooth on the skin. I experienced it that evening and watched as the ocean darkened beneath an orange and grey sunset. There was a solitary chair on the beach that remained unclaimed. The more I looked at it, the more I wondered who had been sitting there, and where he was now.

It made a good marker for my clothes and I stripped and swam, as solitary as that chair, in Florida water. I dreamt of Spanish galleons, pirates. . . and sharks. From nowhere the Jaws theme tune began its soft but remorseless beat, and I imagined my legs, dangling temptingly like sushi for a giant killer white.

The stars had come out but I was glaring at the beach, which now seemed unaccountably distant; and I realised at last the fate of the poor bastard who’d sat in that chair. I kicked and I clawed my way out in raw but self-induced panic, and staggered across the surf-line like a beached pig.

Kim found me and told me the sausages were ready, and my spirits rose. Partying on a Florida Beach at midnight beats anything, though perhaps not the dysentery that shortly afterwards followed. A dodgy sausage or post-shark-trauma. It was bad enough for both.

Steamboats and Transvestites

2011-03-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

Friday 6th

I was dead. And they dropped us off at the right place: a New Orleans cemetery full of ornate and gothic looking tombs. Had there been one opened, I might have just stepped in and gone for a very long sleep. Instead I slept on the grass surrounded by props from an Anna Rice novel.

Later, but only partly recovered, I joined Laura, Evelyn, Dorita and Bret. Together we wandered over to the Confederate Museum: the un-dead in T shirts and shorts. Enroute we passed soup kitchens less than a mile away from the Tourist area. It’s good to be reminded that real life is less pleasant beyond the febrile tourist bubble.

The Confederate Museum was dark and evocative and reeked of romance and despair. Or maybe that was me, still badly hung-over. What was interesting was a beautifully made ‘crown of thorns’ given by Pope Pius VIX to Jefferson Davis. With it came a note, comparing his burden to that of Christ himself – though resurrection has yet to come for the Confederacy. The note was interesting though.

With no sense of direction, and no pigeon to follow, we took the wrong tram back, and in consequence, had to change trams somewhere in the business quarter. Unexpected moments can prove to be golden. The sky turned a sudden, biblical grey and the heavens opened. The downpour was immense, too much for the drains. A New Orleans flash flood - and businessmen, their trousers rolled up to their knees, paddling down streets with briefcases covering their heads.

We were running too. We had an appointment to keep. We ran through water – Evelyn struggling to keep up - our minds fixed upon Pier Six and a Mississippi Steamboat. Just then we could have done with one.

The boat was magnificent. All it needed was Bart Maverick on board and an animatron of Mark Twain. Sunshine would have been nice. Instead we had grey skies and rain, but hey I was on the Mississippi, trying to imagine those early French explorers in their flimsy canoes.

Hangovers don’t last for ever and by early evening I was hungry. We ate at Seaport, a restaurant serving the obligatory Creole Gumbo and Jambalaya. I remember having two servings.

That evening me and Laura hit the French Quarter again. We went to a place called the Bouree and saw a fine Cajun band – the melodeon player using the stage like a young Elvis Presley.

We also went to a Transvestite Bar, and that was an eye-opener. The only thing that has ever made me uneasy about transvestites or those who’ve gone a stage further is that so few of them look quite right. They may have achieved perfect peace in side of themselves, but often you look at them twice in a street, out of curiousity, and then look away again out of politeness. It’s a shallow response, but not judgemental, at least in a moral sense. For me, it’s a matter of sexual aesthetics.

But the ‘women’ in this club were beautiful. There’s no other way of putting it - as the actress said to the bishop. And there was none of the boredom shown by the ‘real’ women in the strip club of the night before. They were sharp and thoroughly enjoying themselves.

In the club were a bunch of young rednecks who felt obliged to heckle just in case anyone thought…..

And so another night in New Orleans came to an end

A night in New Orleans

2011-03-10T11:43:00.000-08:00

Thursday August 6

Today we drove over the longest bridge in the world. It may be true. It seemed like it. A 24 miles bridge just to get there: New Orleans. It had to be good.

And that night we ended up in the French Quarter, strolling from bar to bar. In Pat O’Brian’s we drank ‘Hurricanes,’ ominously named - and nicer than the real thing. Then I moved on to something called ‘The Climax’ which isn’t nicer than the real thing, but strong. I can’t remember what it tasted like or how many I had.

In several bars we were ripped off but ‘climaxed’ out of our minds it was hard to argue. So we accepted our change and soldiered on.

In one place, Jazz musicians played standing on the bar and you bought your drinks between their dancing feet. It called for concentration which might have been lost had they been women. We stayed there for some time, syncopating drinks and dollar bills between flailing limbs and carelessly aimed trombones.

What I found interesting was a Stripper’s bar. I’d never been to one before and wondered what facial expression to employ. I needn’t have bothered. I couldn’t believe how bored the women looked and in consequence how tedious the event. Woman after woman walked on stage, stripped, twirled and walked off again. It was a conveyor belt operation. They must have had a small army of them backstage, either that or they re-dressed behind the curtains and walked on again. I don’t think we’d have noticed, but disappointing, yes. You want a little more from Sodom and Gomorrah.

In the early hours of the morning, I returned to camp for a beer or two. Evelyn and Laura joined me. They may have been instrumental in persuading the Superintendent to re-open the bar and joining us. There was plenty to think about as the beer slipped down… the world’s longest bridge, bored strippers and grinning bar-tenders who played strange tricks with change.

Mezcal

2011-03-04T04:10:00.000-08:00

Once, a long time ago, I read an article about the Stones. It may have been about their tour of America in 1976. They were into Tequila. Everyone was into Tequila…except me, living in a bed-sit in Newport.

I went to my local, The Hand-post, and asked for Tequila. They had none. I asked for gin instead and a small packet of Smith’s Crisps. In those days each packet came with a tiny blue bag of salt, which you sprinkled as you wanted on the crisps.

I sat in the shadows of a wooden booth, regarded my gin and tonic, its garnish of lemon, and tried to remember how it was done. I’m easily embarrassed, but fortunately the pub was half empty. Just as well. It didn’t make a pretty sight: sucking a lemon, licking a small mound of salt and downing neat gin in a gulp. It didn’t taste very nice either.

But infinitely preferable to what was to come.

Somewhere around the Great Salt Desert, I bought a large bottle of Mezcal, its tiny cactus worm curled and defiant floating at the bottom.

Yes, like all those tired, sad drinkers everywhere, I’d heard about the hallucinogenic worm, and had no qualms in chewing it. Suck it and see, as they say, and I figured I’d earned my dues with that miserable gin and salt concoction all those years before.

The first taste of Mescal was…interesting, before my mouth seized up. I’d never tasted alcoholic diesel until then. I tried it again, and admitted defeat. There was no way I was going to drink this, and the worm knew it and glowered in triumph.

‘Mix it,’ Roland said, and a sense of purpose returned. This guy had come second in an Austrian cocktail championship. ‘You can disguise anything in a good cocktail.’

We tried it with orange, and lime; we tried it with gin, vodka, lemonade; we tried it with everything we had on board, and made emergency stops at out of the way off-licenses, but to no avail. Every time we thought: this it, success, evolution Vs the worm - a taste like smoked petrol seeped through tongue, mouth and oesophagus. We could, of course, have taken it half-a-teaspoon at a time, but life was too short.

And yes, we could have simply tipped the entire contents of the bottle into the earth – our little bit for the Texan oil industry. But that went against the grain of all I hold holy. We either drank it or we didn’t and the worm went free.

Just outside New Orleans, the worm went free, probably now part of a voodoo gris-gris, one of immense power and malevolence.

A hot day in Texas

2011-02-25T03:43:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 4th

Houston was hot, hot, hot! We toured NASA and to my shame, I couldn’t have cared less. I was poaching in my own juices, basting in sweat. I was hung-over and jaded. Apollo’s could have been launching in rapid succession, like a flight of expensive darts, John Glenn could have been dancing Bojangles, and I’d have exchanged it all for a beer and a cold shower.

The whole complex gleamed white in the sun; it was beautifully landscaped and so monotonous. All I can really remember are three primary colours, white, blue and green geometrically aligned. But I walked, even kept up, and noted all there was to see.

To illustrate the full effects of a dehydrated brain, that evening I passed the chance to go to Gilley’s ‘The World’s Biggest Bar’ as it was then.* Shows you the state I was in. Dehydration clouds judgement. Another interpretation might be my Guardian Angel was concerned for my health. The bar had mechanical bulls that guaranteed a ‘Rodeo Experience’. I can’t think of anything worse, six or seven pints down and riding one of those things: vomit and broken bones, maybe both. But one thing for sure, I’d have been daft enough to give it a go.

Instead I stayed at the camp with Daphne and Laura.

And my Guardian Angel came up trumps again.

A travelling blues man set up in camp and made everything worthwhile. His caravan opened out down one entire side, and revealed an ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ interior. His name was Abner Jay, and it was only much later I discovered how privileged I was to have seen him. He was brilliant. The night was brilliant, sitting under Texan stars in an audience of the largely unemployed, the so called ‘white trash’ you read about in glossy magazines. They were friendly and generous to strangers. We drank beer and sang with Abner Jay, and the night went by.

Someone called Matt chatted up Daphne and Laura – as though having trouble which one he liked best. I could have advised him but instead went to bed.

(The second link best illustrated Abner Jay's style. He does, eventually break into song.' Don't mess with me, baby'. Imagine it with a cold beer on a Texan campsite)

*Austin Chronicle

In its prime, however, way before John Travolta uttered "up ya nose witta rubba hose," Gilley's had a reputation as the mother of all Texas honky-tonks. The Gilley's logo adorned everything from cans of beer (brewed by the same Spoetzl brewery that brings us Shiner Bock) and belt buckles to women's silk panties. Texans and tourists alike would cram in by the thousands to see top country music stars like Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, and George Jones, while a hardy, colorful crew of regulars (known locally as "Gilleyrats") showed up every night to drink, dance, fight, flirt, make out, bullshit, shoot pool, and see who got their nuts cracked on El Toro, the club's famed mechanical bull.

The Jitterbug in San Antonio, and one angry moment

2011-02-18T07:23:00.000-08:00

Wednesday August 4th.

That evening we went to a club alongside the river that runs through the city. Enflamed by drink and unaccountable recklessness, I unleashed my dancing daemon. Well, actually Kim unleashed it. She persuaded me to jitter-bug. It seemed simple enough. She persuaded me it was. Luckily there was plenty of space.

Soon I was jitting and bugging with the best of them: Kim’s hand sometimes attached to mine, my other arm around her waist, occasionally in the air pulling imaginary bows. I pulled her from this side to that, once or twice between my legs. I imagined I had rhythm: hips swaying, knees bending, fingers trembling, tickling the spirits gathered around us. I was in heaven.

It was over too soon – or perhaps not soon enough for those close to us.

Later, back in the camp, another Aventours coach pulled up. At first I thought it was on fire. The door opened and more smoke came out, and I heard military style music, anthemic. You could sing to it; march, but not jitterbug. From the smoke emerged the first of the Israelis.

They proved an unpleasant bunch, intolerant and racist, and just so bloody certain they were right. And yes, they were young and might now be benevolence itself. But I had only the one Israeli in our group to go by, Doritaa. She was young too, but generous and absent minded and easy-going.

I listened to them talk and thought of Einstein, Maimonides, and had I known about him then, the wonderful Howard Jacobson. Okay so all these are high falutin exceptions. I thought of Dr Rosenthal who brought me into the world, who pressed my head into shape and was the touchstone of all that was good in Walton Vale, his partner Dr Young who brought be Beatrix Potter books when I was hospitalised with rheumatic fever.

In fact the only time I ever doubted a Jew could be fun was when I was forced to watch a BBC production of St Paul of Tarsus as a child. A Sunday treat. On a small black and white TV. I watched men haranguing each other in small rooms, men with long beards, furrowed brows and long stripy robes; earnest coves the lot of them. But then my mum explained they were the Christians.

These Israelis didn’t wear long stripy robes but they knew how to harangue. They harangued me. One of them had made a series of racist remarks about Arabs and I went to walk away. They must have seen my face. Two of them followed me. Like Mormons but fiercer.

And then something in me snapped. I don’t like to be badgered and bossed or harangued. I told them that they should know better than to force people into ghettoes. They argued back, one of them referred to Arabs as animals, and I became angrier still. Blame it on the Boogie…the whisky… the jitterbug. People gathered round and we were eased gently apart.

Muttering continued over the campfire, but I was in my tent. Early next day their coach pulled away, blue smoke spilling from its windows.

Me and Kim in recovery mode.

Remember the Alamo - but don't push your luck

2011-02-09T07:48:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 3rd

On Tuesday, August 3rd, I walked to the Alamo with two Australians, Mark and Bret. We were 140 years late, but I was still excited to be there, having been brought up on tales of Davy Crockett and gone cat hunting as a kid because Liverpool had no raccoons.

The over-heated patriotism I found a little disturbing - like the Women’s Institute in Britain recounting Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to tourists; a tale where British pluck and German villainy remained pickled in aspic. It would be bizarre when you consider The Battle of Britain was over seventy years ago – even more bizarre considering The Alamo took place over 140 years before we got there.

Almost as bizarre as John Wayne playing Davy Crockett. I found that a bitter pill to swallow.

We were shown round by a white-haired woman with a face like rawhide and a voice to match. Her scorn could wither at ten paces, and much of it she reserved for Moses Roses, a much maligned Frenchman. A very much maligned Frenchman when you consider his ‘cowardice’ was still being invoked during the recent Iraq war. He was the original ‘cheese-eating surrender monkey’.

As the story goes, Jim Bowie offered everyone in the doomed fort a chance to escape before they were completely surrounded. No one availed themselves of the offer except one man: Moses Roses. He took one look at the forces arrayed against them and made an instant decision.

My heart went out to him. Moses Roses was the most experienced soldier there. He was a veteran of Napoleon’s Grand Armée that had conquered most of Europe and a good chunk of Russia before things went terribly wrong.

This man had survived the Battle of Borodino – the largest and bloodiest single day of action in the Napoleonic wars. 250,000 men died in that one battle, and then there were the 70,000 casualties. Moses Roses must have thought himself a very lucky man as September 12 1812 drew to a close.

He would also have counted himself lucky to have survived the retreat from Moscow when almost half a million French soldiers perished along with 200,000 horses.

What a sensible decision it must have seemed: retirement in the American sun-belt, away from the blood and glamour of European wars.

God has a wonderful sense of humour, and why Moses Roses decided to enlist in the Texas militia, God only knows. But one thing for sure, Roses knew bad odds when he saw them, knew that even his luck couldn’t hold out on this one: fewer than 300 men against over 2,000 Mexicans? He mightn’t have been big on Thermopylae, but no way was he going to be one of those 300 Spartans.

I’m glad I didn’t know all this at the time. That Texan woman looked the kind that could detect dissent. She’d have fixed me with her squinty eyes, bull-whipped me with her rawhide tongue.

In the Museum, I discovered a fair number of English and Irish had died in the battle; also one Welshman: Lewis Johnson – but like Welsh consonants, things are not always what they seem. He was in fact Virginian. The Welsh hero was a pretender, an inaccuracy.

On the way to the museum we saw a battalion of Twirlers – earnest seven year olds practising their twirls beneath a baking sun. Santa Anna would have minced them. Time for a drink. To night we were hitting the night life of San Antonio.

Ciudad Acuna

2011-02-03T07:55:00.000-08:00

Monday 2nd August

The night before we’d camped at Lake Amistad on the border between Texas and Mexico. We dove from low cliffs into deep blue water, paddled about and played pirates on air-beds. In the evening we partied on Lone Star beer and other stuff. Tomorrow we’d be in Mexico – only a day – but Mexico.

Walking across the International Bridge – about a mile long – felt like walking through a furnace. Below the Rio Grande looked narrow, shallow and completely unimpressive. I noticed it cost only a dime to walk into Mexico and there was no passport check. No hassle then – except when you hit the streets of Acuna. There the shopkeepers accosted you in the streets and within minutes I was the proud owner of three puppets and an inscrutable Aztec mask.

There was only one answer to this. A bar. There I drank an ice cold beer and then felt guilty. I had to see more of Mexico. I walked about for another half hour and when suitably baked returned to the Toltec Bar. What a name. There, an equally hot engineer from Madrid was slowly cooling down after being out for much the same time. We compared notes. Ramon from Madrid said he was used to the heat.

Everything changes. Acuna has become a little more dangerous since.

Coming back into the US we were subject to stringent examination by border officals. My inscrutable Aztec mask stared back at them blankly, and then it was off to San Antonio and bliss in a cold camp pool. Later we played some strange game that involved hitting a bag of sweets from a tree whilst blindfolded, either that or we’d been drinking too much beer.

Roy Bean

2011-01-25T03:41:00.000-08:00

Sunday August 1st

We reached Langtry, Del Rio, home of the famous Judge Roy Bean. There we learnt about unrequited love. An Old West legend had a thing for Lily Langtry - star of English Music Hall.

Some spoil sports suggest that Langtry was named after an obscure railway engineer, but why spoilt a good story? What is true is that the saloon from where he operated his own peculiar form of justice was named in her honour, ‘The Jersey Lily.’

It is a very small saloon, dusty and hot and smelling of past times. Strange, the past has a smell and the future doesn’t. Scope for an entrepreneurial perfumer perhaps.

There seemed little to Langtry. One dirt road led to a ruined house, then desert and sage brush. Little seemed changed since 1880. Time to wander about and find out more.

What can you tell from a face? The photo stared back at me, equally puzzled. What memories lay hidden beneath behind those eyes?

Like all tourists I grasped and retained the bizarre and most interesting: How he used to sell milk and increased his profit margins by diluting it with creek water. A nice scam until customers started complaining about the minnows swimming in it, an even nicer reaction from Roy Bean who pretended equal surprise. ‘By Gobs, I’ll have to stop them cows from drinking in the creek.’

What fired my imagination the most was that his life exemplified everything I’d ever dreamt about as a child in a hospital bed. He was born in Kentucky – so almost a neighbour of Davy Crocket - around about 1825.

When only fifteen he followed his two older brothers west, seeking adventure. He joined a wagon train into New Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and set up a trading post in Chihuahua, Mexico. There he killed a man and fled just in time to California, where he stayed with a future mayor of San Diego (In fact the first mayor of San Diego) his brother Josh.

Josh believed in family. He appointed Roy a lieutenant in the state militia, and bartender of his Headquarters the family saloon. There, Roy lived the Wild West life. He drank and bragged, gambled on cockfights, and in 1852 was arrested for wounding a man in a duel.

Never mind, Roy had another brother – Sam – and so Roy fled again and took refuge in Sam’s saloon where he smuggled guns from Mexico through the Union Blockade. The only moment of domesticity he seems to have enjoyed (for a time at least) was when he married a Mexican teenager and settled in San Antonio, where, in quick succession he propagated five little Beans.

When the railroad came to Texas he seized his chance, deserting his family and in 1882 settled in Vinegaroon.* The railway was to link San Antonio with El Paso and crossed 530 miles of scorching desert. There, Roy Bean served railroad workers whisky and shade from his tent, and was often as drunk and disorderly as those he served.

Which says something about the Texan Rangers.

In 1882 they appointed him Justice of the Peace for Pecos because in their opinion he ‘had what it would take’ to bring law ‘West of the Pecos’.

With the nearest courtroom a week's ride away, the Rangers might have been more pragmatic than wise, and Roy Bean ‘just crazy, or drunk enough to accept.’

Bean was no Solomon. His justice, like those who’d appointed him was pragmatic, brutal, and sometimes eccentric. When an Irishman was brought to him, accused of murdering a Chinese worker, Bean was surrounded by an angry mob of workers demanding the accused be acquitted. Others threatened to burn down his saloon if he didn't.

Bean scanned through the one law book he possessed and delivered his ruling: 'Gentlemen, I find the law very explicit on murdering our fellow man, but there’s nothing here about killing a Chinaman. Case dismissed.'

Bean enjoyed the reputation of ‘the hanging judge’ though he hanged few if any, and made little use of the penitentiary. He preferred instead to find ‘work’ for them in the locality, and when there was none, staked them out for a time in the sun.

His kindness he kept hidden. Many of the fines he gave to the poor and destitute but never advertised the fact. Even some of the profits from the Jersey Lily bought medicine for the sick and poor in the locality. His rationale was prosaic and real. ‘Well…I haven’t been any gol-dang angel myself and there might be a lot charged up to me on Judgment Day, and I figure what good I can do -the Lord will give me credit when the time comes’. The rationale of a Norman warlord.

This photo was made, about 1900, and shows Judge Bean holding court, trying a horse-thief. Left of the picture is the stolen horse. On horses, guarded by officers are the two other horse thieves, supposed partners of the one on trial.

Roy Bean died on March 19th 1903 following a heavy drinking spree in Del Rio. He returned home at 10 a.m. and died that night at 10.03. It is said that he’d simply lost the will to live, that he felt out of place in a West he no longer recognized.

What precipitated that final binge was the construction of a power plant on the Pecos River. He claimed more than once that times were changing, and he was being left behind.

Bicycles are bad enough but a goddamned power plant!

If only he’d held on that little bit longer. Roy Bean and Lily Langtry never met despite his many letters to her. She is supposed to have written back, even sending him two pistols which he treasured like the Old West romantic he was.

Ten months after his death the train stopped at Langtry and Miss Lily herself stepped out. Enroute to San Francisco, she’d decided to take up the old Judge on his invitation to visit him. Unfortunately her most ardent admirer was dead. Instead she visited the saloon named in her honor and listened to the stories. ‘It was a short visit, but an unforgettable one’ she wrote in her diary. Tactful, but no doubt true.

Hmm, a mighty fine decolletage

*Apparently named after the scorpions that infested the place. When stepped on they emitted a vinagary smell. Almost a ready-made snack food.

My Doggies have been wailing since I sang my latest song

2011-01-21T04:24:00.000-08:00

I've included this picture because it's the only good thing about this post. It's a derelict building just across the road from the saloon of Judge Roy Bean. I loved the C18th 'feel' to it, and its isolation. Far more interesting than Roy Bean's saloon, authentic though it's supposed to be. Whether the cottage still stands, I don't know.

The context to this song is very simple, much like the lyrics. A multinational group, with unlimited beer set themselves the challenge of writing the ultimate cliched country and western song - each of us had to contribute a line - some discarded - and then as the beer flowed the verses were refined and sung with gusto. I still remember the flames of the fire, golden sparks and the immensity of desert and sky as we howled to the moon.

My Doggies have been wailing since I sang my latest song

I was a lonely orphan down yonder by the old corn patch.
My tobbaccy’s wet and mouldy, and I ain’t got no match.
Sammy Jo milked the cow while her skirt was swaying.
Mama and the preacher man were inside busy praying.
But the preacher man was playing hard to catch.

Chorus

Mama loved too well, too long and got me for a song
Me and my guitar have been so lonesome since you’ve been gone
My honey rolled the dice and lied
She said she loved me as she rolled the dice and smiled
She’s the only one I need
Yippee Yay Tumbleweed.

My cow she was in labour while old Doris did the washing
My heart was torn between the cow and watching Doris washing
Well honey kiss my grits and howdy do
For my cow has had a calf called Betty Lou
But calf love don’t fire a cowboy’s passion.

Chorus etc

I left the farm and broke my heart to ride them country roads
Sammy Jo, the cow and Ma reckoned up the rent I owed
The preacher-man then gave these parting words:
‘You can be a cowboy, son without ever wearing spurs.
So off I went to the land of the long horned toad.

Chorus

Sitting high in the saddle whilst the sun sets sweet and low
I moseyed on down to Calico to meet my future beau
Biscuits and gravy make my heart go boom
Saloon girls, liquor – but not a single room
A girl named Maria saved me from the snow.

Chorus

Maria was like a desert rose blooming once a year
Don’t shoot me with that gun she cried so I drowned her in my beer
Oh Baby you went and let me down
I like blue eyes but yours were truly brown
Virginia sat on a cactus and got the prick of her life…oh dear.

Chorus

One empty bottle, one broken heart, time for a brand new start
I left Maria for my pardner’s wife and the ire of one-eyed Bart.
Oh, I don’t care that I’m still single
Cos I’ve got spurts that jingle jangle jingle
And I’m with my pardner’s wife behind the cart.

Chorus

But I keep thinking about my babe, way home on the mountain range
Doris, Virginia and Ma can go hang, cos I’m going back to my cow again
It’s been so lonesome out here on the prairie
And I can’t stop thinking about a cow called Mary
Wimen and cows they aint just built the same.

The last line of the sixth verse was when it all began to go wrong - if it was ever right. I think that was the Australian contribution :)

No mermaids in Carlsbad

2011-01-14T08:05:00.000-08:00

At Carlsbad we crashed out and slept till midday. In the afternoon we explored the Caverns

During the last ice age this desert was covered with dense pine forest.

This is the Chihuahuan Desert in Southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. We walked gingerly having been told that immediately below the surface were more than 300 known caves of gigantic size. It was the unknown caves we were worried about.

It was hard to believe that a mere 250 million years ago this had been an inland sea dominated by a 400 mile long reef bursting with sponges, algae and seashells. Maybe, too, mermaids with Raquel Welch figures…and tails

Only scientists tend to get excited over more prosaic marine fossils, ammonites, crinoids, snails, nautiloids, bivalves, brachiopods and the occasional trilobite. I say they haven’t looked hard enough!

But the tour guide wasn’t interested in my theories. He wanted to tell me about the passing of the Permian age, when the reef was covered by thousands of feet of newer sediments, burying it for tens of millions of years. Stresses in the earth’s crust, especially over the past 20 million years, uplifted these reef sediments almost ten thousand feet. Wind, rain, snow and time eroded away the overlying younger sediments and now the ancient reef is exposed once again as the Guadalupe mountains and deep caves below the desert floor.

We explored.

Duly impressed

And afterwards went back to camp and drank beer. There, a most unusual event occurred. Beneath the stars, and influenced by good beer, we wrote a song – essentially Eurovision Country and Western. The idea was to utilize every Country and Western cliché as seen through French, German, British, Australian, Dutch and Spanish eyes. Everyone there contributed a line or two. There was a tune there too, of sorts…and a mouth organ.

The song was called:

My Doggies have been wailing since I sang my latest song, but the lyrics will have to wait for a subsequent post.

Checking my toes in Santa Fe

2011-01-07T02:58:00.000-08:00

Friday 30th

Santa Fe is a beautiful little town. One thing that did strike me were the Indians selling costume jewellery. They were so impassive they might have been a sleep, or dead.

What struck me was how different they were from their Moroccan counterparts. In Morocco the whole business of selling was operatic, the haggling and bartering both subtle and vivacious: a moment of wheedling, followed by mock offence at a more than reasonable offer and then gathering excitement as more and more offers are included in the mix. Eyes, hands, shoulders and flashing teeth - all come into play - and just to sell a rug.

These poor buggers looked asleep, past caring. Temperament? A different history. Or maybe they’d just sussed us out as unlikely to spend much.

Because I have a head that doesn’t suit a hat I spent a lot of time searching for one in every state I passed through. So far to no effect. In Santa Fe I tried again, in a shop with that fine western name ‘Babushka’s.’ Failure was compensated by a lone walk to the Mexican suburbs, and a drink in a really nice bar.

Then it was off to the Coronado State Monument – where I learnt more about the history, and where I took a picture of a rattlesnake. Only afterwards was I told these snakes can leap their own length and I’d gotten far too close. Its rattle warned me to make a tactical retreat.

The Pueblo ruins were evocative, the story bleak. After one rebellion Spanish
Conquistadors had chopped off the right foot of every male in the village; a medieval punishment reminiscent of the Twelfth Century, or Sharia law. The mind recoils. Drought and harsh requisitions made by Coronado’s expedition to Kansas saw the final extinction of the village.

Their descendents now sell beads with little enthusiasm.

Later, back in camp, a travelling theatre group put on a really crude anti-Russian – pro-Polish play about Madame Curie. Poland might have been an unwilling member of the Tsarist Empire, but for the most part they retained both their left and right feet.

That night there was disagreement in the camp. Most wanted to stay on site – money was running low and had to be conserved, but our tour leader believed that her enjoyment of disco was universal. Disagreement was futile because she'd arranged the bus to leave from where the disco was held. So, with considerable disgruntlement we went. I drank, watched wall to wall rock-video, every so often checked my feet.
There followed an all night drive to Carlsbad

The Petrified Spirit

2010-12-31T08:51:00.000-08:00

Thursday 29th

What’s worse, the dead mind or the jaded spirit? I all but found out on the 29th of July. We’d set off for Albuquerque where, enroute, we saw a petrified forest, followed by a ‘painted desert’…and I was bored.

Did Roman emperors ever reach this unhappy state? Here was I, still surfeit after the Grand Canyon, now presented with fresh wonders and no emetic to make room for them.

Given the chance I would have enjoyed camping the night there, wandering around, perhaps toying with the possibility of ‘getting lost’. Instead, other than a very short stop we drove on by, and staring out through the window, I might as well have been watching TV. Grumble over. I had no reason or excuse to be bored. A character flaw.

As we approached Albuquerque we saw a few balloons – maybe practising for the festival later in the year. Albuquerque however I can’t really remember. Serves it right for not being one hundred percent sure of who or what it is named after.

Was it named after a past provincial governor Francisco Fernandez de la Cueva who also held the title of Duke of Alburquerque – a small Spanish town? But then where did Alburquerque come from? It’s enough to drive a man mad. Some argue it is rooted in Arabic for ‘land of the cork’ - ‘Abu al-Qurq’ (but don’t let the Taliban in on the secret).

Others hold the conviction that it is based on the latin for ‘white oak’ or ‘Alba querqus’ because the wood of the cork oak is white after the bark has been stripped. These scholars flaunt the seal of the original Spanish village which is that of a white oak, framed by a shield, and topped by a crown. Conclusive you might say – Oh God yes – please say yes.

But no. Etymologists are a perverse bunch. Some go back to the blessed Arabs again, suggesting the word is derived from the Arabic for ‘plum’ ie ‘Al-Barquq’ and its derivative ‘Albaricoque’ which is Galician for Apricot. They don’t have a seal to prove it, just a nice story: The settlement of La Ciudad de Albaricoque was established near an apricot tree. Frontiersmen, unable to speak Spanish with any degree of fluency, pronounced it as Albuquerque. As I said it’s enough to drive a man mad, which is probably better than being bored.

Yogi Bear and the Grand Canyon

2010-12-17T04:45:00.000-08:00

These three pictures show the sun rising over the Grand Canyon and then the Grand Canyon itself.

Wednesday 28th

Roland and I woke at 4.30 am and staggered along the path, just in time to catch the sun rising over the canyon. Then it was back to the bus for the journey to the start of Angel Trail. We took our first steps into the canyon at 6 am.

It was deceptively easy walking down – like a gigantic and never ending sand-stone staircase, spiralling ever deeper in time. . . the old, old west, and then earlier still. The canyon, I believe, is a mile deep, but the spiralling path is something in the region of ten miles. It wasn’t exactly a broad highway to Hell, but the thought crossed my mind later in the day, when it was time to climb out the damn place.

Walking down was magical, a little like bouncing along the yellow brick road, only here we were surrounded by vibrant ochre, intense heat and silence, the vegetation a strange, bluish green.

It took just under three hours to reach the bottom, where we paddled in a very green Colorado river. The temperature was rising fast, and it wasn’t even midday. Time to get out. I remember craning my neck, looking up at a distant rim, the thread of a path winding its way up the now glowing rock.

I started off alone with a water bottle, (I realised the hard way) was far too small. Mind you, one fool in group had no water-bottle at all and was in a very bad way – re-hydrating barely in time at each of the three water-stops.

The first water stop was at Indian Gardens, five miles up. It was lakin to being trapped in a red, radio-active oven – a 100 degrees and rising. The sparse vegetation was chuckling, though I may have been hallucinating. I was dehydrating fast, sweating dropping off me in a small monsoon.

The worst thing about sweating is not the smell, but the loss of something you never really think about - minerals. I was aware of my joints seizing up, like an engine losing its lubricant.

Then just before mid-day, I reached Indian Gardens and drank, and drank, and drank. Just five miles to go and two more water stops to look forward to.

About a mile from the top I witnessed a ‘Yogi Bear’ moment. Bear in mind, I’d never seen real ‘park rangers’ before and this one looked just like Park Ranger Smith in Yogi Bear, right down to the hat he was wearing. Only instead of Yogi Bear he was addressing a very fat woman in a bright, floral dress. She was wearing high heels and was slumped over a very large boulder.

Immobile,

Inert,

despite some very urgent prodding from Park Ranger Smith. “You can do it, ma’am. It really isn’t far.” Every so often he looked upwards, as though the crest of the canyon might be lowered by a mustard grain of faith. She wasn’t persuaded and I left them there where they remain forever in my memory.

A little further up, two other members of our party emerged like lizards from the shade of a rock. Sharon and Dorita who, with a better sense of their capabilities than the woman in her floral dress, had walked until they felt hot, and then slept in the shade, waiting for it to cool again before beginning their ascent - little over half a mile.

Gary, our driver, and the rest of the group staggered out around 6pm. Gary was in pretty bad shape but incredibly cheerful having achieved what he wanted. As I remember, Laura, having taken the New York advice to heart, never went down.

The day began quietly. It ended with a bang. We ate dinner in a storm.

This picture is the same as the first one above but turned upside down, because I'm a simple soul, and to me it resembles an alien landscape

The Hoover Dam, not without its warts

2010-12-11T06:55:00.000-08:00

Tuesday 27th

We set off early for the Hoover Dam, about 25 miles from Vegas. I didn’t know what to expect, and to be frank, was looking forward more to our ultimate destination, the Grand Canyon.

In the scraps that constituted what I optimistically called a diary, I apparently ‘learned’ that the dam, far from being a public works scheme, was largely built by convict labour.

Who told me that, and where he got his information from remains a puzzle. But all the records seem to suggest otherwise. Mind you, in terms of wages, work conditions and the total lack of concern for worker's safety, they might as well have been convicts. Other than explosions and similar mishaps, tunnels were often filled with carbon monoxide from vehicle exhaust. Truck drivers came down with CO poisoning and many died. The contractors, however, paid off the doctors to attribute death to other causes in order to avoid compensation...a salutary thought as you stare at the gleaming white concrete and magical, turquoise water.

That morning I was bombarded with figures and facts:

Its reserve of water, Lake Mead is the largest man made lake in the world and the Arizona Nevada border runs across it. The dam blocks the Colorado River in Black Canyon and it remains the largest dam in the western hemisphere:
660 ft thick base, and 45 ft crest, it stretches 1244 ft across the canyon. The water stored in Lake Mead irrigates three quarters of a million acres across the USA and half a million acres in Mexico.

And to this day I wonder why I bothered to write them all down. I mean, who cares? It’s hardly likely to set fire to a party; hardly likely to set fire to this blog.

But there is, perhaps, a darker side to the dam.

As the name suggests, the project was conceived and began under Hoover’s presidency, though Roosevelt largely gets the credit for it.* And whilst there, we accepted its visual and statistical triumphalism. The dam is, without doubt, a wonderful piece of engineering. What none of us knew then was its environmental cost.

The Colorado River no longer runs to the sea, but Las Vegas* exists, and against the whole grain of the surrounding ecology, a desert has been temporarily transformed into a tropical paradise – if Real Estate brochures are to be believed.

But for how long? Lake Mead’s level is falling fast as Vegas and other conurbations feed from its water, and all those various needs from competing interests that have arisen ever since the dam was built can only lead to future ‘water-wars’. Already, after a ten year drought, another $700 million has been spent on installing an additional pipeline lower into the diminishing lake, but what happens after that?

I like this picture. I remember falling asleep immediately after. The Hoover ones are 'borrowed' until my slides have been converted into scan-able prints.

We lunched on the outskirts of Klingman, Arizona- a garage, diner and motel in the wilderness. (Which makes us sound like omnivorous monsters.) It was dry and hot, with no sign of life. And then, much later, we reached the Grand Canyon and went to bed early, ready for the descent the following day.

Two things delayed sleep: the arrival of a bunch of irritating New Yorkers who earnestly assured us that only the supremely fit should consider walking down to its base, and that we were fool-hardy to try; and, even more irritating, Laura nodding her head and agreeing with them.

* In May 1931 the then Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes tried to modify history in a thoroughly Stalinist measure, by renaming the Hoover dam - ‘Boulder dam’ a queasily partisan attempt to erase anything that might suggest that it wasn’t only Roosevelt who appreciated the merit of public works.

*Vegas extracts 90% of its water from Lake Meade

From Calico to Vegas

2010-12-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

Monday 26th

Destination – Vegas! The desert was bleak and evocative. We stopped at an old mining town called Calico. It was desolate, breathtakingly primitive, its huts made from rocks or protruding from caves. The land was a dull orange and grey, the sky washed in cloud and rain. An hour or two later a flash-flood swept across the great Nevada desert, a land where our tour guide solemnly told us it ‘it never rained’.

From one ghost town to another. In Vegas we stayed in a fairly plush hotel with a Jacuzzi, and a pool where we played blind man’s bluff. It was a good way to prepare ourselves for the evening to come

We walked to the centre of Vegas and there exhorted to take pictures - the selling point being that the lights were so vivid and intense we wouldn’t need flash. I took my obligatory pictures of virulent greens and pinks and blues. It didn’t take long, and then we were off to our first casino. I thought Reno was the Devil’s Playground. It was merely his porch. This place redefined hedonism.

And we had a whole night.

In one casino – The Lucky Wagon – a fountain gushed out champagne that you drank from paper cups. It wasn’t first class champagne but it was profligate and free and never-ending. Have you ever seen those women near chocolate fountains, they lurk, suck strawberries, fake conversation all the time pouncing with the remorseless rhythm of the metronome. Trapped by chocolate. With me it was champagne. I couldn’t believe it. Maybe hell wasn’t so bad after all.

And then at 1a.m it trickled to a stop

As one we sighed, those brave few topers who’d stayed.

And then the devil had mercy. At 1.15 it gushed forth once more – this time Bloody Marys. It didn’t go with champagne, but we persevered.

At two am I was feeling peckish and located a casino that offered thirty course dinners for three dollars. By this time the pattern was clear. Casinos didn’t really want their customers to go anywhere else or notice the transition from night to day. No Casino we saw had windows, but many had crèches for kiddies so father and mother could gamble with blithe conscience. These crèches also offered unlimited food, along with small toddler-sized fruit machines to start them off young.
In short there was never any trouble in getting into a casino, the problem was mustering the will to get out.

Daphne and I were walking the sidewalk when suddenly she glided from me, caught on an escalator that was easing her off to fresh temptation: Caesars Palace. I followed, bemused by marbled Roman dignitaries, staring at all and sundry in blank disapproval. Behind them gardens glowed in green and pink. And then we were inside, a vast and gaudy space, surprisingly empty.

Even more interesting inside. We had nothing like this in Wales

Every motel has an ‘admag’ advertising call-girls in graphic and colourful detail, price, appearance and ‘what they do’ are all included. It made for good reading which in itself made for safe sex, I suppose, but where were these creatures of the night?

It was Dana who found out. Walking back from the casino and losing her way she was mistaken for a call girl, not by a punter but by those already in situ. She was rounded on and vigorously warned off from ‘occupied territory’. I don’t know what mortified her most, the ‘verbal’ or being mistaken for significant competition.

We left the motel early evening. The transition from lurid to desert was dramatic. The sun was setting behind distant mountains that fringed the desert. The effect was holographic, the mountains a radio-active pink and almost transparent.

Sodom, Gomorrah and Vegas. Great for two days, maybe three; just don’t be there when retribution strikes. It was horrible and glamorous, and a little unreal. One day it would be like Calico

debris from vegas

Bored in Los Angeles

2010-11-26T03:33:00.000-08:00

Sunday 25th

On that day we toured L.A – a dirty and tedious city. It was accompanied by a verbose and lack-lustre commentary. A proud and civic minded los Angelino might take exception, much as I would by anyone who had the temerity to malign Liverpool, but then we each interpret what we see, and what I saw was Universal Studios and downtown LA.

At Universal studios I had a shark jump out at me, saw stuntmen re-enacting Wild West gun-fights, observed Dracula haunting his castle and then it was over.

Angel Pavement left me similarly under-whelmed. I checked out Roy Rogers, and saw the star of ‘Lefty Frizzell' – who I’d never heard of. I think it should be somewhere in the contract that only people known to Mike Keyton should have their star and hand-prints imprinted in concrete. To be honest, it seemed a sad little honour. Is that all life has to offer, a hand-print in concrete in a sleazy street?
Guess so.

Credit & Copyright: Dave Jurasevich who kindly gave permission to show another side of Los Angeles. Earth or sky, the choice is yours

In the evening we went up to Mount Wilson Observatory and looked down on the lights of L.A. The soulless streets had been transformed - a master-class in illusion trumping reality. Then we politely queued to look at the moon through a telescope.

Even now I remember the tedium of that day. It was the first time ever, in America, I’d been bored.

The Disney smile

2010-11-19T05:06:00.000-08:00

Saturday 24th

Despite the Popov vodka, Saturday meant an early start. We had to get out money’s worth from Disney. I began the day jogging, and nearly tripped over Kim’s head. It was sticking out from her tent. ‘I wanted an early call,’ she explained.
Disney land called for discipline and determination, more so because of the omnipresent subliminal message to just slow down and enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself? Were they mad? We had:

Space Mountain
Inner Space
Matterhorn
Thunder Mountain
Rockets
America Sings
Bear Jamboree
Kon Tiki
A canoe ride with Davy Crocket (be still my beating heart)
Ghost House
Pirates of the Caribean,
Jungle Cruise
Mission to Mars
The People Mover -

- To get through. Never mind the automaton of Abraham Lincoln that was spookily real. I’d have voted for him. Maybe the Republicans should drag him out for the next election – despite what he said, you might not fool ‘all the people’ but you can probably fool enough people to win an election today. An automaton of Abe Lincoln making home movies in Alaska and staring at Russia should do the trick.

Against this urge to sample everything – some things twice – was the psychic trip-wire of the dreaded Disney muzak. There were hidden speakers everywhere pumping out acoustic syrup and the frightening thing was – it worked. The Nazis wouldn’t have invaded Poland if Disney had been in charge of the music. They’d still be ambling in Bavaria with happy smiles under impossibly blue skies.

I found myself ambling, unaccountably content. It was weird, unsettling – there were still rides to get through.

Eventually it was time for lunch – a late lunch – somewhere around 5 pm; and I joined Gary, Caroline, Kim, Sharon, Roland and Pam in a hired car. We went to a Pizza parlour, ate and bought a box of beer. We were back in time to see the fire-works – but then something frightening happened in the car-park.

Fear with a smile, so to speak.

The Disney ‘police’ emerged from nowhere. I mean from nowhere – even before we had time to take our ‘illegal’ beer from the car. How did they know? Had that bloody automaton followed us or could these guys just smell beer? Are they working on the Mexican frontier even now?

All these questions however were academic against the over-whelming smile. It’s hard to disobey a smile. Put it back in the car they said. And we did.

Just as well probably. We enjoyed the very last ride on Space Mountain which went three times faster than normal. It was a case of clinging on for dear life. A few beers down and we’d have been doing more than gasping. It would have quite ruined the Disney Parade, or at least added more colour.

Intelligent Design

2010-11-12T03:30:00.001-08:00

Friday 23rd

We set off for Santa Barbara and saw the old Spanish Mission and some beautiful suburban houses. I walked with Laura, an attractive, strong-minded Canadian, but with some irritating mannerisms. I know they were irritating. It says so in the scraps of paper that made up my diary, but it doesn’t say in what way and I can’t remember how. Samuel Pepys, I wasn't.

We wandered about, her with those irritating mannerisms, me with my scraps of paper, and looked at some Mandolins – none of which I could afford. So instead I bought a pulp novel called ‘Aztec’ in readiness for New Mexico.

Later we settled on a beach in Santa Monica, and drank more free wine from a nearby winery. Afterwards I practised the mouth organ beneath a palm tree and, in need of some activity, played with Gary’s kite in a cloudless blue sky. (Though not at the same time)

As you can see it was an action packed, purposeful kind of day. But things were about to hot up!

In the late afternoon we drove to Little Venice, a famous Californian beach that reeked of body oil and pagan hedonism. We spent some time outside a compound. Inside the compound body-builders posed and worked out, watched by groupies of both sexes and some I couldn’t make out, who watched and drooled, and spoke in intense whispers. Here the body is worshipped – and I was out of place.

The pagan theme was reinforced by a spectacular Grecian sunset, and I understood what a ‘wine-dark’ sea meant at last.

The day ended with a barbecue and Dana got drunk as a skunk. We drank what was left of the home made grog, the surplus rum, and back in the Disney campsite I was persuaded to drink the remains of Kim’s Popov Vodka.

The Disney campsite verged on the unreal – and I’m only talking about the grass. It was so green and dense and lush. It was designer grass, each blade graded within an inch of its life and trimmed by Vidal Sassoon. Elton John would have paid a fortune for a transplant like it, and he could probably carry off – Green.

The site was about one and half miles from Disney-land. It was packed, like the grass, and like the grass, very well-ordered. Two Australians, Brett, and Mark Binks, joined us later that night, their plane having been delayed. Unable to sleep, I drifted on the moon-lit grass and stared at stars that shone with Disney magic. I wondered if the Franchise had designed them too, like the grass.

It was probably the Popov Vodka.

Monterey Bay

2010-11-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

Thursday 22nd

The Tudor Hotel

Getting up wasn’t easy. We left San Francisco at 8am. There were more farewells, more group hugs in the street outside the Tudor Hotel, and then we were off.

On the bus I considered the ‘group hug’. From a culture where a handshake is measured and infrequently given I found the concept alien. But something was happening to me. I was slowly morphing into a ‘hugger’ and I wasn’t sure that I liked it, nor whether I’d continue to give great roaring hugs back in England. Bonding-bubbles are weird things, I decided. And now there was more bonding to come as those we had left were replaced by others who were taking the trip from San Francisco.

The new ‘Tour leader’ was blonde, repetitious and unconsciously patronising. The replacement cook ‘Sandy’ seemed earnest and a little unsure of herself. In retrospect this was just arrogance on my part and, as a teacher, I should have known better. Our new tour leader was trying to ‘establish’ herself in an ‘established group’ but it was a bit tiresome having to play ‘word-games’ with the relatively few ‘new-comers’ when we could have just talked. When the word-games ended, we passed around the beer.

Around Mid-day we stopped at a winery in Monterey where a guy told me, with evident enjoyment, that the wine they sold to English supermarkets -‘Paul Masson’- was basically ‘plonk’ and that their best wines went elsewhere. He did himself a disservice. I’ve never bought Californian wine since.

Then however, I drank a lot. It was free. We ate lunch on the cliffs of Monterey, and later I paddled and pissed in the sea. Not my finest hour, nor so fine a moment as when Balboa marched into that same Pacific ocean and claimed it for Spain. But then he hadn’t drank the wines of Monterey.

Really, I was taking revenge for Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo.

Staring across the bay I’d just affronted I thought of this man, born in the late medieval period of very poor parents. As a conquistador he rose to fame and fortune on the fringes of a strange new world, and still this wasn’t good enough. Like everyone of his generation he was after a short-cut to the east and thought he’d find it by exploring America’s Pacific coast to where he thought it joined Asia, not so very far away.

Struggling against storms and bad weather he sheltered in Monterey bay before sailing to Santa Catalina Island to winter. Faced with attack on shore, Cabrillo organized a relief party and rowed to rescue his men. In the records: “As he began to jump out the boat, one foot struck a rocky ledge, and he splintered a shinbone.”

I cringe as I read this. Cringe even more when I calculate how long it took him to die. He splintered it in November 1542 but under the ministrations of his surgeon it became gangrenous, and he died on January 3rd 1543.

He left no settlements, had found no passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific, had discovered no new route to China. He never even got a sniff of the fabled seven cities of Cibola and failed to sight San Francisco Bay which remained undiscovered until 1769.

Interesting how life turns out. I toasted his memory.

Maps like these that showed Asia and America joined, and not too far away, lured many explorers who always thought that just beyond the next wave they might find it.

A strange dream in San Francisco

2010-10-30T07:29:00.000-07:00

That night I had a strange dream. A tall Canadian woman stared at me from a snowy wilderness. “My name is Renee Miller,” she said.

I tried to drag myself away, wondering whether it was a dodgy Dim Sum, or an excess of beer.

“And you’re tagged.” She laughed, causing a small avalanche.

Was that the same as ‘branded’? “What do you mean, tagged?” I said, struggling to wake and finding I couldn’t.

Her voice was remorseless. “But in exchange……You will be granted an award…”

Dollar Bills, lots of them, flashed before my eyes.

“…The kickass, awesome, most impressive, shiny, blog award.”

"I don’t have a blog,” I said it like I knew what one was.

“But you will.” Her voice was becoming impatient and the thought of what this Canadian Amazon might do if made angry, alarmed me greatly.

“Okay,” I said, admitting defeat. “What do you want from me?”

Her voice at once became soothing. “Just answer ten questions, Mike, and you’ll never see me again.”

“And I get this ‘Kickass, awesome, most impressive, shiny, blog award?'"

“You have my word.”

The questions came from nowhere and a voice other than mine answered:

1. If you blog anonymously are you happy doing it that way; if you are not anonymous do you wish you had started out anonymously so you could be anonymous now?

I can’t blog anonymously. The whole point of Record of a Baffled Spirit is in creating a family and historical record. Even if I changed the family surname to Anon such a timid foray into cyberspace would be a little strange.

2. Describe one incident that shows your inner stubborn side:
Doing my O levels and A levels (essential university entrance exams) in two years rather than the normal four years – because I realised I could.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?

Strange eyebrows

4. What is your favourite summer cold drink?

Beer, cold white wine, grapefruit juice chilled. But in very hot weather – water, lots of it.

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

Write, read, swim, walk, listen to radio, drink unobserved in country pubs

6. Is there something you still want to accomplish in your life? What is it?

Success as a writer, and a hopeful death

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?

Undoubtedly shy. Behind a hardened carapace the fear of others is still there, muttering blindly to itself…Shut up; are you mad? Get away from there. Don’t say anything. These people are dangerous!

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment of your life what would you see?

My parents’ death. You don’t miss them till they’re gone

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?

No, I’m happy with myself. Not smug but accepting what I am and what I’m not

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

Read. I hate talking on phones.

"My calling card," she said, before disappearing. A white card fluttered on to the pillow. It looked like snow and melted as I read:

http://reneeamiller.blogspot.com/

It didn't make sense and I slept, determined on pondering these things in the morning.

Dim sums and beer

2010-10-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

Wednesday July 21st

The following day we wasted much of the morning haunting the lobby and indulging in small talk, saying goodbyes. I went for a drink with a deflated Doug who was lamenting the fact that for him the adventure was over. Then it was off to the bus-station to see off Daghmar Baron and Kay. Daghmar was homesick and was cutting her holiday short to see her boy-friend back home. That was beyond me. I’m not that romantic and have never been homesick. It’s always there, sometime or other. But Daghmar was beautiful and the boy friend was immensely lucky – unless she took another look at him and realised what she had just given up.

After they’d gone we decided to clear our heads from the night before and walk the Golden Gate Bridge. The sky was a soft blue, the air crisp and we hiked twelve miles along the coastline checking out the mansions.

It was thirsty work and we fantasised on our big farewell meal later that evening - down to the very last noodle. China town was going to be good.

But, as John Lennon said, ‘Life is what happens to you while your busy making other plans.” When I got back to the hotel there was a note from my cousin Kathy. She and the family were driving down from Seattle for another, perhaps final re-union.

It was an immensely generous thing for her to do, but also, for me, a Frasier moment, when two sacred moments over-lapped. Much neurotic pacing followed as I worked out the options:

Not seeing Kathy and family – unthinkable.

Not attending the final farewell dinner – almost unthinkable.

I watched the group leave the hotel en-route to China-town and the Far East Café. I'd come up with a plan. The two celebrations could converge and an extra table was booked.

Life is what happens etc. Kathy was unavoidably late. Worse than that they’d already eaten and had no room for anything more. Their ‘can do’ attitude resulted in them finding a table in the adjoining bar whilst I went to the other end of the room to booths reserved for the Aventours trip.

The evening was spent with me flitting from one emotional centre to the other – my cousins who likely I wouldn’t see again - and the group I’d travelled halfway across America with. It meant twice the drinking as the tears, farewells and toasts became more intense in the booths, and the beers continued to pile up on Kathy and Rick’s table. Between Dim Sum and beer I didn’t know whether I was coming or going or what I said or did or how I got home. At last the evening ended and, nursed by a hundred angels, I eventually found my bed

Problem solving in San Francisco

2010-10-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 20th

Some days later I was attempting ‘House of the Rising Sun’ on a mouth-organ, bought in San Francisco. It had been driving the coach mad, and I’d been relegated to a palm tree in Santa Barbara to practice one final time.

It had started off so innocently on our second day in San Francisco. Veronique, Marjian, Roland and myself had just finished breakfast at a neighbouring diner. There were things to do that day, not many but enough to fill a hot blue morning. I had to locate a tax office to sort out my departure papers. Roland accompanied me because he had the vague idea he wanted to buy a bag, and en-route, I was suddenly struck with a burning desire to buy a mouth-organ – two mouth-organs in A and D.

I found San Francisco an easy city to navigate and we were helped by the shopkeeper who showed us a short-cut, which involved a detour down Turk Street. It was a street of beautiful houses but I was feeling more irritable than aesthetically attuned. Roland was beginning to wear me down, his tendency to take charge whenever he could. This was probably imaginary, resentment fuelled by being one of too many people cooped up on a bus for a little too long. Bonding has its downsides – which is why alcohol has its uses.

An American attitude is ‘if there’s a problem – solve it.’ The British attitude veers more to ‘if there’s a problem live with it’. My attitude then was ‘if there’s a problem drink it away’. All three attitudes have their merits. Not all problems can be solved and alcohol makes the second option more bearable. Roland was of a like mind and so we went looking for a bar – in this case an’ English Pub’ called The Rosebud.

The problem here was that it was too English to be authentic. Every conceivable variant of the pastiche was crammed into its walls. Still, it sold Guinness, and the problem evaporated in an agreeable blur.

Suitably refreshed and friends once more we walked to the Hyatt Regency which looked like something from Babylon…well, after a Guinness or six. Its interior was a sensory feast and made us feel like two camel herders come straight from the desert.
The evening ended in another party in Gary’s room, one even wilder because too many of us didn’t want the party to end.

Note. No blog for short time. Computer in for repair.

Hearts left in San Francisco

2010-10-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

Monday July 19th

Golden Gate refers to Golden Gate Strait—a name that originated around 1846.
The actual Bridge was completed after more than four years of construction at a cost of $35 million. It was opened on May 28, 1937 at twelve o'clock noon when President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House announcing the event. I guess it was part of Roosevelt's huge job creation schemes that helped get America out of the depression. Perhaps they thought bolder in those days.

San Francisco was where many of us were going to say our goodbyes. It was the halfway mark of the tour. I and a few others were carrying on for the second leg, and periodically I pinched myself unable to believe my good fortune.

We left Yosemite late because some serious stocktaking had to be done, and then, at last, the bus rolled off. I might offend many who live in the area but as we approached San Francisco, I found the scenery pleasant but bland: rolling yellow grass hills, a soft blue sky. It reminded me a little of a children’s picture book. Unthreatening. Uninteresting. Hmm…what does that say about me? I find the threatening, interesting? I blame it on my childhood.

The Golden Gate Bridge (The reddish brown gate bridge doesn’t really cut it I guess) came into view, and as we watched it evaporated in mist. In the distance we saw the Hyatt Regency hotel, which resembled something from Babylon or Krypton.

The ‘Team’ treated us all to pizza and beer in an over the top Pizza Parlour and now I’m searching my mind.

What exactly did that mean ‘over the top’? Note to self. Be specific in diaries. You see, somewhere on this trip we went to a place that had ‘One Million Years BC toilets. As you peed, pterodactyls would swoop over you; dinosaurs lower an avuncular head to see whether what you were holding was worth their interest. It was most distracting; certainly enough to inhibit a reasonable flow. But worse, much worse than that - we were essentially doing our business in a tourist attraction. It was the devil’s own job to pretend not to notice crocodile lines of mixed sex tours walking by…and pausing.

But though the memory is clear, my diaries don’t record where it was. Maybe someone out there can help me.

At four pm we hit our hotel, an interesting place, just on the right side of seediness. At six pm we met in the lobby and took a cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf to eat king crab. The mood was sombre, for the crabs especially so. There were people leaving soon that we would never see again. An intense bonding was falling apart. There was only one answer. The obvious one: A drinks party in Gary’s room that over-spilled into the corridor outside. So many group hugs, so little time.

They are killers

2010-10-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

Sunday 18th July

Yosemite is breathtaking, its history less so. The valley was named by L H Bunnell of the Mariposa Battalion in 1851. He named it in honor of the tribe they were about to dispossess and remove.

“I could not see any necessity for going to a foreign country for a name for
American scenery—the grandest that had ever yet been looked upon. That it would be better to give it an Indian name than to import a strange and inexpressive one; that the name of the tribe who had occupied it, would be more appropriate than any I had heard suggested.” I then proposed “that we give the valley the name of Yo-sem-i-ty, as it was suggestive, euphonious, and certainly American; that by so doing, the name of the tribe of Indians which we met leaving their homes in this valley, perhaps never to return, would be perpetuated.” . . . .

I love the distancing in that last sentence, as if somehow this tribe was leaving paradise from their own free will.

Officialdom says that the Ahwahneechee of Yosemite became extinct in the C19th. The awkward fact remains that since 1851 the Federal Government has evicted Yosemite tribes from the park in 1906, 1929, and 1969. Never mind. There is a reconstructed ‘Indian Village’ now located behind the Yosemite Museum, inhabited by tourists.

Yosemite is full of irony, even its name. When L H Bunnell named it, he got it wrong. Bunnell thought Yosemite meant ‘Grizzly Bear’ which it doesn’t. The confusion arose from the Miwok word ïsümat.i, which does mean “grizzly bear.” However the tribe that lived in the valley of Yosemite were the Ahwahneechee. Their neighbours though, had a different name for them. The Southern Miwok referred to them as the ‘yohhemeti’ and the Central Miwok called them the Yossemeti. Both words mean the same – ‘They are killers’. Nice.

Now it is just a very clean park with a free bus service taking you wherever you wanted to go in a designated ‘wilderness’. It is a small fragment of paradise and as such, private cars are discouraged as indeed are ‘down-and-outs’ from San Francisco. I was told that they were a bigger menace than adventurous bears, lured by the promise of the 5 cent deposits on any cans and bottles they collect. I didn’t get the logic of the criticism implied.

Mirror Lake
Note bottom left hand corner, a bare-bottom, nose or thumb

That afternoon we swam and cavorted in Mirror Lake, which, we were told, would end up as a water-meadow in twenty years time through a build up of silt. (I wonder if it ever did). Then however it was crystal clear and reflected a Disney blue sky.
We saw the designated Sequoia and duly posed. These are truly wonderful time-machines standing patiently for over 3,500 years just so Keyton could one day bounce in a cavity, his arms extended in triumph. In line with the triviality of the moment, we had Chicken Italienne for dinner, followed by Schnapps in the adjoining bar and later a disco.

A tree

Keyton in a tree, stern

Keyton in a tree bouncing.

In this valley of ‘They who kill’ we spent the night drenching a blindfolded Gary, Greg, and Barbara in spaghetti, shaving foam, and buckets of water. It was one way of thanking them. Then again we may have simply been possessed by the spirit of the Ahwahneechee, in which case things could have been worse.

And now a bed time story. The Ahwahneechee people of Yosemite Valley called the waterfall "Cholock" and believed that the plunge pool at its base was inhabited by the spirits of several witches, called the Poloti. An Ahwaneechee folktale describes a woman going to fetch a pail of water from the pool, and drawing it out full of snakes. Later that night, after the woman had trespassed into their territory, the spirits caused the woman's house to be sucked into the pool by a powerful wind, taking the woman and her newborn baby with her.

Crossing the Sierras

2010-09-24T03:48:00.000-07:00

We drove over the Sierras to Yosemite: A very bald statement and rightly so. The Sierras are beyond my descriptive powers. Some say man’s brain is reaching the point beyond which science can go no further. Our mammalian brain, evolved from millennia on the African plains, will no longer be able to conceive the questions to be asked as our limits approach. And without questions there'll be answers beyond us. Across the Sierras my mammalian brain was reduced to a trancelike state absorbing image after image, each more powerful than the rest and none of it remembered.

We rendezvoused with another Aventours group at Lake Mono. Their tour guide was a friend of Gregs. It was also his birthday, so buckets of water and shaving foam seemed almost obligatory. This was what our mammalian brains, evolved from millennia on the African plains, were designed for, and we went for it like a bunch of chimps on speed.

Walking round Lake Mono

Afterwards I had one of those leisurely talks with Karen and Sheri Roberts – the kind that signify nothing and evaporate in the brain. It was a very hot day.

We reached Yosemite at night and had to put up our tents in the dark. No problem. We were a well oiled machine. Later that night I talked to Candy, a vibrant, bustling secretary, originally from Yorkshire but working in Stockholm. I was intrigued. No one’s called Candy in Yorkshire. Maybe that’s why she went to Stockholm.

Later still I spent a happy fifteen dollars on whiskey sours, talking men’s talk with Ron Tillet, a cheerful Australian. He’d tried to lure Kim and Sharon out for a drink with us, but with no success, and as the evening progressed he became increasingly annoyed over his non relationship with Kim. Such is life in a small enclosed bubble with too much to drink and too many hours to think, and Kim Haslinger was beautiful.

True Believers

2010-09-16T06:16:00.000-07:00

That night I had a dream. It was Pink Lady again, brandishing a book. True Believers.

"What the hell is this?" I snarled.

"Right back at yer, pal," she snarled back. Her ruby lips parted baring bright and feral teeth. “I’m just telling you this is probably the best goddamned book you’re gonna read this side of the great divide. Me and my friends all like it, pal, so you better read it, see.” She stomped a stiletto on my chest just to emphasise the point, and then disappeared.

I glanced at the cover. The book looked hot but wouldn’t be out until 2010. I still had time

The Devil's Playground

2010-09-16T03:19:00.000-07:00

July 15th-18th

Would you believe it? There was war in the camp: hostility over dishwashing. I took refuge in the swimming pool, skirted the continuing arguments to eat four barbequed ribs, and, as tensions settled, played pool. Other than the great dish-washing war and possibly because of it, I missed – according to Roland – the definitive western sunset. Compensation was sought and found in a giant tub of banana daiquiri made by Roland whilst, presumably watching the sunset. Another large tub sat alongside, in reserve. There would be little sleep in the hours to come.

At ten pm we set off, travelling through Nevada by night, drinking and Casino-hopping until dawn. We stopped off at five casinos in all and the night became progressively more wild. Not only did we have an almost endless supply of Daiquiri, each casino we visited gave us a small book of five vouchers allowing us two free drinks and three vouchers to use on a small city of fruit machines.

The whole thing demanded constitutions of iron, but somebody had to do it. By dawn exhaustion over-took us all and I collapsed in blissful sleep across two seats belonging to a Elisabeth and her friend. These were two beautiful medical students from Paris. I liked Elisabeth. She called me ‘Fuzzy-face’ because of my unshaven appearance. I imagine she called me other names that night.

We breakfasted in Reno at a Casino called the Circus. It offered thirty six course breakfasts and as much as you could eat for less than two dollars. On each table were bingo cards so you could gamble whilst you ate, and, placed discreetly between the condiments, was another message reminding you that there were starving people in the world, and exhorting you to eat sensibly.

Wonderful.

I was dining in the devil’s playground.

I left feeling exhausted, bloated and morally confused. Much like a reader of Petronius’s ‘Satyricon’, I trudged back to the coach, resolute on staying in camp that night, go no where, and eat no more food. Ever.

Camp was in a pine forest on the shores of Lake Tahoe. We swam, slept and sunbathed, allowing our bodies to recover, our minds to catch up. Greg, our tour guide tried to organise a group dinner in Reno that night, but my stomach rebelled. Instead I stayed in camp, took photo’s of the lake and observed how friendly the woodpeckers and chipmunks were, before going to sleep. Fuzzy-face had left the building.

Gambling with Death

2010-09-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

Thursday July 15th

At eight am we were on the road again, destination – the Great Salt Lake. We were told that this lake was second only to the Dead Sea in terms of its salt content. Things like this are good to know when confronted with such an unimpressive sight. It was a grubby, dismal, barren place and the water smelt. I paddled a good half mile into the lake – Keyton's ever-hopeful gene – but the water failed to reach much higher than my knees. Maybe I should be grateful. Much higher and I could have walked out, my cojones dried and salted. I took one final look before boarding the bus. The shoreline swarmed with millions of tiny sand-flies, souls captured by Mormons in their great genealogical quest.

Then on to The Great Salt Desert where we lunched. I hate to use the phrase coming up now. My crit partners would shoot me dead on the spot. But this was awesome, and it was here I momentarily gambled with death. I just wanted to experience utter loneliness, to see what it might be like to get totally and irrevocably lost.

I walked out into the desert.

I walked a good mile, every so often looking back to see the bus, a rapidly diminishing speck. I walked on and on until that speck could barely be seen. And then finally the point was reached where the bus couldn’t be seen at all. Here I kicked a large arrow into the ground, pointing the way back and walked a few paces farther on. Then I spun round like some demented hippy, a dervish on speed, and as suddenly stopped. I looked round, scanning sky, the blistering whiteness and savoured the silence. I stayed until I felt the first trickle of fear and then set about locating my arrow. For a minute or two I panicked, walking faster and faster, wondering where the hell the bus was: And then the welcoming speck, and the promise of bourbon. I’d lived a western dream.

Back on the bus we played cards – Sweaty Betty if I remember – with a slug of bourbon for stakes. We were heading into gambling country.

On crossing the state line into Nevada we were all given a book of vouchers entitling us to free drinks and games in a nearby casino. A most gorgeous, raven haired woman controlled the Black Jack table. She operated without expression like a beautifully efficient automaton. I’d have married her on the spot. Instead I lost dollars on a crap game I never understood. It didn’t matter. It was enough just to watch her face and that little stick of hers moving chips across a long green board.

Wells Campsite was beautiful and lush. Greg, Gary, Roland and myself drove off-site to the nearby town of Wells to buy alcohol for our nightly punch.

Wells is a crossroads in the desert, the gateway to so much endeavour and tragedy in the old west. Times change. Now there was a whole coach-load of Jewish folk in the liquor store – all from New York. Provisions bought we whiled away an hour in a small casino bar where I drank and Greg, with more experience, gambled.

Bear Lake and Salt Lake City

2010-09-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesday July 14

Salt Lake City

I hate early starts but with Aventours and a country the size of America you had little choice. Today we had breakfast at seven and to compound the misery I was on dishwashing duty with Sharon and Kim. We had great fun but I wasn’t looking forward to eating from those plates later in the day. We were not great dish-washers.
After packing we were on the road once more, heading for Bear Lake in Utah followed by Salt Lake City.

Bear Lake was a magical lunch spot, and mercifully we didn’t need plates. I was beginning to worry about the reaction when we eventually did.

The lake itself was a beautiful turquoise and according to legend a lake monster lurked in its depths. The story originated from a compendium of sightings compiled by Joseph C Rich a leading C19th Mormon who later admitted the stories were false. An untruthful Mormon. Be still my beating heart. Still the story had traction. Other sightings followed, some describing it as a large walrus, others as a prehistoric lizard, and a few describing it as a larger than average carp. We saw nothing – though the last reported sighting was in 2004.

I think we’d have been quite happy spending the entire day at Bear Lake, swimming, diving from rocks, just messing around, but Salt Lake City beckoned.

There we toured the Temple grounds, saw a film on their founding prophet, and were invited to stroke marble-effect pillars made purely from wood. There were better ways to spend an afternoon, but there wasn’t a bar in sight.

Walking around, I felt like an extra in Stepford City – only no one had given me the diazepam. It had to be Valium. It had to be. I couldn’t figure it out. Sunshine and Valium. Everyone seemed so goddamned content with those smug little smiles that told us they knew something we didn’t. Maybe they did. I bought a Mormon bible for a dollar, but was later ripped off 11 dollars buying a T Shirt from a fresh-faced boy - with the smile.

Beneath a late afternoon sun I consumed two milk-shakes and too many ice creams watching people walk by, searching for a break in the wall of contentment.
Tourists may see that in Monmouth today, an alternative Paradise. I love it. But that Wednesday, July 14th I saw it as alien, artificial, and it gave me the creeps.

That night some of the group went bowling but having consumed too many milk products, I stayed in camp and spent the time talking to Evelyn, Daghmar, Sharon and Kim; drank bourbon, swatted mosquitoes. The only other highlight of this day was noting that Ron Tillet didn’t sleep in his tent that night. Can you imagine that? I’d become a canvas-flap-twitcher. I must have been really bored that day. I blame it on the milk.

Dirty talk in Jackson Hole

2010-08-28T02:25:00.000-07:00

Tuesday July 13

Jackson Hole seen from above

Me and the pink lady were walking side by side, she still licking the ice-cream she’d bought in Yellowstone Park. Somehow she managed to talk between licks. “You know,” she said, “we’re walking on history.” I nodded, barely able to talk. My head was hurting from too much grog and the pink lady spoke in a high, dry monotone that cut through me like a knife.

“Mountain men crossed and re-crossed Jackson Hole between 1810 and 1840 catching beaver. The valley was supposedly named after the fur trapper David E. “Davey” Jackson in 1829, perhaps earlier.” She paused. Another lick. “The fur trade declined around 1840 and we don't hear about Jackson Hole again until after 1860.” Then, mercifully she disappeared, ice cream and all, and two other figures stepped into view: Roland and Veronique.

Together we walked around Jackson Lake and caught the boat back from the other side. From the boat I was able to take several dramatic shots of the Tetons.

“You know how they got their name,” she whispered. I span round. The lady wasn’t in sight, but her voice was all around and I caught the whiff of vanilla and chocolate. I shook my head, wondering whether Roland and Veronique were privy to the same conversation. They seemed pretty quiet.

The pink lady continued. “les Trois Tetons” Then because my French is pretty poor, she translated. “The three breasts!” Well, I’d always heard French women were different. I squinted, trying to make sense of what she’d just said; wondered how long those poor bastards had been out there alone and what else they did to beaver, but then the dirty talk ended and she became all factual.

“The Shoshone however called the mountains Teewinot,” (It sounded like dog food) “meaning many pinnacles.” Well, at least they could count. Three breasts, indeed. Then she whispered something else that made my blood run cold. “The Tetons are the youngest of all the mountain ranges in the Rocky Mountain chain. Most other mountains in the region are at least 50 million years old but the Tetons are less than 10 million and are still rising. Jackson Hole is of the same age… and is still sinking.”

Never mind. We’d be somewhere else tomorrow.

Later that afternoon, instead of going to the Hot Tubs with the rest of the group, I went to get my picture taken as a Cowboy, then celebrated with a lemonade at the Mountain High Pizza Pie with Evelyn.

I remember the pizzas were good.

That evening we all went to a barbecue at a ranch-house. It was a large sombre barn. I was one of seven hundred people being fed beef, beans, potato and coffee very, very quickly. Industrial farming feeds beef much the same way. American efficiency is wonderful. That night we had fresh grog.

Jackson Hole

2010-08-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

Monday July 12

I hear it’s great in Jackson Hole

Yup, mighty pretty.

Okay, whose big idea was this?

The town square has arches on each entrance; each arch is made from elk antlers that have been naturally shed. Or so I've been told.

We had, for us, a late breakfast at 7 am and decamped to Snake River for a day of white-water rafting. It was fast and exhilarating, and then there were the quiet moments, drifting down river past immense sandstone cliffs. It was easy to dream of Shoshone and Blackfeet, easy to dream of making this a more permanent way of life. Our time on earth is finite. What better way could there be to spend it like this? Only John Lennon was right. Life is what happens when you're busy making plans. What chance dreams?

The Pink Garter Theatre

Back in camp we soaked up the sun and lined up for the laundry. In the evening some of us went to the Rodeo but I went with Kay to the Pink Garter theatre to see ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ My God, it was funny. Or maybe the sun had got to me

It took several drinks in the bar afterwards to settle me down, and a few more at the Ranch inn just to make sure and get those damn tunes out of my head. It didn’t prevent several erotic dreams of Nancy Twinkle, but that was alright.

Rome does things differently :) Made from the bones of 4000 Capuchin monks, all naturally shed but perhaps more macabre than Jackson Hole's bone-gate. (In response to Maria's comments below.)

A pink lady in Yellowstone

2010-08-12T04:05:00.000-07:00

Sunday July 11th.
We woke up early this day, keen to see Yellowstone and check the fidelity of ‘Old Faithful’. The geyser was undoubtedly the star of the show, and resembled nothing so much as an ancient pagan ritual, its power drawing a silent and respectful horde, poised in photographic worship. On the moment a thousand cameras clicked, followed by a moment of silence.

No doubt people were contemplating that they were standing in the middle of a gigantic caldera, its last great volcanic eruption a mere 640,000 years ago. A woman in a pink dress stood nearby; she had an ice-cream and was taking long and contemplative licks, no doubt assessing the odds. Just five miles below us roiled a vast reservoir of magma thirty miles long, twenty miles wide, and six miles deep. Our eyes met in silent understanding. This baby could blow at any time…geologically speaking.

I tried to reassure her, to reassure myself, all without saying a word. Given its geological history the likelihood of a super-volcanic eruption occurring before she’d finished her ice-cream was 1 in 730,000 or 0.00014%

She riposted with a look. And what are the odds of winning the European lottery?

I walked away, the ground trembling beneath my feet. This woman was spooky. There was no European lottery but she knew one day I would play it. What else did she know? She watched me walk, barely hiding her contempt.

And you know what? Her face twisted into Munch-like scream, and she finished her ice-cream in a lick: catastrophic geologic events are neither regular nor predictable. They just happen.

Gloomy thoughts. Much of North America obliterated by a tourist attraction.

The problem is you never know what a geyser’s thinking. Was it brooding on past indignities? It has been used as a laundry, garments placed in the crater between eruptions - timing here being everything. With each eruption clothes shot up in the air, thoroughly washed and no doubt steam-cleaned. In an early experiment in temperature control it was found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds

Me and Doug, an Australian, walked across the steaming mudflats. It was eerie - like a nature walk on the moon, unexpectedly alien. It was also frustrating because human nature being what it is, you wanted to wander where you were not allowed to – for your own safety.

Never mind Yellowstone, nor the need for some fresh steam-cleaned underwear of our own; the bus exploded in silliness on our way to Jackson Hole, our next port of call. Alcohol, boredom and shaving foam make a deadly combination. I was still thinking of the lady in the pink dress, wondering whether the fumes clouding the mud flats, were hallucinogenic, whether they could be bottled – when Veronique attacked with a can of foaming beer.

We arrived in Jackson Hole late, and set up our tents in the dark. After dinner we made our way across to a Trek-America campfire party. We’d been told about it but rumour was our only guide. The night was pitch-black and we had only one torch, which Veronique hi-jacked because she’d heard the party was near a river. Dutch logic.

Dutch triumph.

The party was found.

My diary records how I talked to four Australians and drank their beer feeling immense guilt because I had none of my own. This is a cardinal sin but no doubt I consoled myself that the world as we knew it was due to end within 25,000 years. Perhaps sooner. The pink lady had spoken.

A storm in Wyoming

2010-08-06T06:36:00.000-07:00

Saturday July 10th

We travelled through Wyoming to Cody, the town built by Buffalo Bill, and which now terms itself as 'the small western town with the big city attitude'. It may be true, but it’s some boast. The Wyoming plains and sky were overwhelming and we felt very small.

I am proud of these photos : )

That night we camped on the prairie, the sky gathering into a storm as we were putting up our tents. As usual I was slower than anyone else, knots and pegs mutinous in unpractised fingers. I was inside the barely erect tent when the storm broke. It was like being in the Devil’s mouth as the tent whirled and jerked with me, grasping on to the barely erect pole for all I was worth.

After the storm - a road turned river

The storm ended as suddenly as it had begun and I glugged a quick whisky, celebrating the fact that both I and the tent remained standing. When I peeked outside, I took another celebratory drink. Sometimes slowness pays. The rest of the group, more efficien than me, had their tents up before the storm broke, and had taken refuge in the dry of the bus. As a result their tents were scattered across the prairie and the evening was spent in retrieving and drying them out.

Later some of us spent the evening drinking cheap Californian wine in a nearby laundrette. It stood where buffalo once roamed but W. F Cody saw to that and made the land safe for washing machines. My diary records that I somehow upset Sharon Lehman, a large and bouncy New Yorker with a smile like sunshine, but it doesn’t record how, or why. That’s the trouble with diaries. They can bring back memories of how I saved a tent, but not something as important as that.

Chief Crazy Horse

2010-07-31T02:27:00.000-07:00

The British empire ruled over relatively few people. For the most part it governed Nig-Nogs, Chinks, Fuzzy Wuzzies; and, closer to home, Paddies and Jocks, Taffies; even the English soldiery didn’t escape such labelling, referred to as scum by many of their commanders. Today we have Chavs.

Labels disguise or sweeten unpalatable truths and they allow one race or nation to more easily fight and steal from another. It’s easier to kill a Hun than a German father or boy.

So Americans napalmed ‘gooks’, Germans gassed ‘Yids’ or ‘Kikes’ and justified their eastern expansion by referring to Poles as Dungvolken, the Slavs as subhuman. In 1982, in a speech to the Knesset, Prime Minister Menachem Begin said, “The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs.” A year later, Raphael Eitan, then-Israeli army chief of staff told the New York Times, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

In the C19th the tribes and nations of America were designated savages. In the C20th broken and sectioned in reservations, these same savages became Chugs.

At least they had souls. That was established in 1537 in response to Spanish colonists who wanted the ultimate excuse to treat them as beasts. The Church in its wisdom ruled otherwise, the Papal Bull Sublimus Deus establishing that depriving anyone of their humanity was the work of Satan.

Theft however was permissible. Satan won that one long ago.

They made many promises
More than I can remember –
They never kept but one:
They promised to take our land,
And they took it Chief Red Cloud

We travelled eight miles from Rushmore to the Crazy Horse monument and I stared in awe, both at what had been achieved and at the grand concept behind it. Crazy Horse himself was killed in 1877 under a flag of truce. Some time before his death he was asked in scorn: Where are your lands now? His reply was: Where my people are buried. And one day both his reply and his monument will dominate a landscape.

In 1939, Ziolkowski received a letter from Chief Henry Standing Bear, which stated in part "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes, too."

Ziolkowski acted on this invitation. In 1948 and refusing government grants, he began the project largely single handed. He died in 1982, but his work goes on. I think he was an exceptional man.

Truth is though, you cannot please everyone. In a 2001 interview, the American Indian activist and actor, Russell Means, stated his objections to the memorial: "Imagine going to the holy land in Israel, whether you're a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim, and start carving up the mountain of Zion. It's an insult to our entire being." It must be nice to speak for everyone. Indeed to speak for the dead: "The whole idea of making a beautiful wild mountain into a statue of him is a pollution of the landscape. It is against the spirit of Crazy Horse” Lame Deer, a Lakota Medicine Man.

Opinion is man’s curse and greatest gift. See, how easy it is to make the grand generalisation. This however I find genuinely funny. "In Mexico one points with the chin, whereas American Indians and certain other people point with the lips.” So, to be genuine to the spirit of Crazy Horse, the pointing finger should be replaced by a pout.

The monument in 2004. Still someway to go.

Mount Rushmore

2010-07-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

On Friday July 9th we made a late start to Mount Rushmore, but I couldn’t get Wall out from my mind. There were times I thought I was hallucinating: The Cowboy Orchestra and the Chuck wagon Quartet, life sized animated dummies hollered and winked as I dreamed along with a jumble of other artefacts Wall had to offer.

In fact I wondered whether it was worth the journey to Mount Rushmore. I mean, Wall already had a large facsimile of it, along with a bucking horse, a mounted buffalo, a covered wagon and a giant Jackalope; it had life sized carvings of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made from a 187 year old Cedar tree, and who, mercifully, remained mute. It also had a Wild West Historical Wax work museum, which was an advance on the Worlds Largest Crucifixion In Wax offered to honeymooners at Niagara.

Staring out the window put things into perspective. I was looking at the remains of a vast inland sea extending from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Plains its sea-bed, the Badlands its finest creation. Sandstone eroded over millennia into castles, turrets, finely sculpted walls, profiles of great historical figures.

Only men with an agenda and less patience noted the absence of four Presidents and set about to put this right.

Gutzon Borglum, an active member of the Ku Klux Klan chose four presidents involved in the acquisition of Indian lands (though admittedly every President during this period could be accused of the same) The mountain he chose was known to the Sioux as ‘Six Grandfathers’ but was renamed in 1885 after a prominent New York Lawyer Charles E Rushmore - because as one of those with him said: ‘Hell, that mountain has no name; it may as well be named after you.’

That evening we went to see Mount Rushmore illuminated and were regaled by a brilliant actor taking on the part of Teddy Roosevelt. We sat enthralled listening to his western drawl beneath honey coloured rock blurred in drizzle. He was explaining why he was up there, but interest gradually waned as drizzle turned into heavy rain. We returned to our coach with a collection of soggy leaflets and a jumble of facts:

Each President's head is as tall as a six-story building.

Over 800 million pounds of stone was removed from Mount Rushmore during the construction.

Workers had to climb 506 steps every day before they could start work.

The president's noses are 20 feet long, their mouths 18 feet wide, and their eyes are 11 feet across.

At least they weren’t waxworks.

Wall Drug store: dinosaurs and hungry bears

2010-07-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

July 8th.

Our eventual destination was Custer National Park in South Dakota. Stomach full of home made salad sandwiches – such are the travails of the modern explorer – I sat back as though on a stage-coach and let the scenery slip by. I thought back on the incredible heat of the Badlands, the tiny red flowers that somehow pushed up from grey baked clay, the razor edged labyrinth of wind sculpted rock where I almost got lost. That wasn’t my only scare, though I hesitate to admit it now; I mean, who else on God’s earth would mistake crickets for the sound of a rattler and jump ten feet high?

In the words of Milton Berle: ‘If opportunity doesn’t knock build yourself a door.’*

In December 1931, Dorothy and Ted Hustead did just that. They bought the only drugstore in Wall, essentially the capital of nowhere, and showed that even in the throes of Depression, money can be made from nothing. They offered free iced water to early travellers passing through the Badlands. Later in a burst of philanthropic madness they threw in coffee at 5 cents.

Thing is people stopped and bought all manner of junk also on offer – because there isn’t much else to do in Wall. Then they realised a marketing gem: the ‘cult of signs’ and so Wall became famous. I hadn’t realised how famous, I mean there're no signs in Newport, but there is one in Antarctica for penguins with money.

In South Dakota, there are signs all over the place, not so much subliminal advertising as pounding you into submission. Free ice-water yeah, got to have it – five cents coffee – you know it makes sense. Just as much sense as the giant dinosaur that tells you you’re almost there.

Eventually we reached our destination - Custer National Park - where we saw prairie dogs being fed by squealing girls, bears chasing food thrown from the back of a land rover, and bear cubs, pushing for space in food troughs provided. The wilderness themed.

Maria from Madrid made paella for us later and in return I washed dishes, some clothes and watched three half-hearted Indians dance. They were middle-aged, and one of them wore glasses. The hat went round but little was collected. A little boy’s dream struggled to make sense of it. Red Cloud wouldn’t have danced for tourists.

But worse was to come. Pam’s ‘Sing-along’. We huddled around the camp-fire and sang ‘Row, row, row the boat…’ Not enough gin in the world to make that one work; but then you can’t have everything.

* (Thanks to Diane J for that one :))

And this one's for Greg. Happy Birthday. She still asks after you.