Habits Formed

This post is comprised of the most coherent paragraphs written while feverish. I’ve been waiting to post it until my family were vaccinated, to avoid my momentary ramblings meeting morbid reality.

I also hope this tale may also prove nostalgic for anyone reading in 2023, long after the news cycle has passed on to fresh tragedies, easier to commemorate and with clearer antagonists.

Test & Trace have logged my walks and wanderings. What’s left to be recorded are the already fading memories and sensations of contracting Covid 19. What’s left to be repeated is the fascinating origin story. So, while she’s still soaking my sheets let me offer a brief re-cap of how this plucky little foreigner entered my life and who let her in.

Blame is vital. With our microscopic nemesis invisible, we’re permitted to indulge to our heart’s content in fear and anger. Elevated to the status of: victim of a banging headache, I scour my mind for the tangible to pour scorn on. All are valid targets. Not just those whose sleek dip dyed ends scream illegal backstreet barber, but also those who proudly display obedient self-chopped mullets as fresh medals, when I’ve been doing a shit job on my own hair for over ten years.

But the ode to joy of finger pointing has many verses. Before the crisis was a licence to criticize the chin masked English masses, it was a vehicle to shit on the Chinese “other”.  Mainly as the “other” had provided the opportunity for bats to shit on literally anything.

Once, lost in Kowloon, I sheltered from the rain among the stalls of a wet food market. On a blood-spattered table sat a cage the size of a bread bin, stuffed with large black toads. Some of the toads were watching the knife of a woman nearby as she, with the careful motions of a draper, parted a snake along its length.

In a place like that, perhaps, some hot mess of bat-shit and Pangolin blood begot a virus. A tiny sphere of information, not living, not dead, only replicating. It was our misfortune that this virus was well spiked with keys to fit the locks our lives. Lives that clutched sweaty pennies and shared cigarette ends before shaking hands and kissing cheeks. Lives that played out in dense urban systems of buttons and handrails, each city on earth networked to the others by the uninterruptible flow of high-value international business travellers.

Before the People’s Republic welded the doors closed the virus found herself following the money to the snowy peaks of Austria, where, in 2020’s biggest breakout cultural event, Covid spent a season dominating the après ski scene. A scene that counters digital and financial isolation by going clubbing in an outfit that communicates both a return to  nature and a sporting intent. I’ve nothing against Après, having spent my time half cut at Mooserwirt, sweaty bopping to euro-beat in puddles of regurgitated Jaeger, but it’s a petri dish. A dish where the agar has historically been able to pay its way out of consequence and the lab tech makes the year’s takings in a three-month window so must continue the experiment.

Finding herself on another plane the virus was re-assured at finding in the British Government the same systemic nonchalance and short sightedness as a cash strapped Ski Resort. Only this resort, famed for stability, could never fully close. Operating freely under the cover of the economy the virus rooted herself deeper than our Government dared dig. Encouraged by inaction the virus surged through the faults left by austerity to firmly lodge itself in the Kent Coast. It spent 8 months there, capitalising on the fact that the choice between infection and starvation is no choice at all.

There it changed itself. Learning to move faster and quieter it sprinted across the wintery Downs and over the High Weald to Sussex, where I picked it up before the daily briefing had a chance.

Then follows the sickening of everyone in the house. A growing dread of knowing I’ve been infected but am yet to show symptoms. Crying together as we learn that we’ve infected other family members by delivering presents to their door. That was the worst of it. Amplified by 10 months of watching death counts rising like a wave, the scariest bit was hearing the water myself for the first time.

Yet the fever was blessedly short. 3 nights around 39 C. Shivering in bed, desperately trying to avoid cooking my testicles with my thighs. Then it was over.

When my family could only judge the difference between the turkey and the cranberry sauce with their eyes, I could taste every herb used. My sense of smell went through the roof. Markedly better than it ever was or has been, a mixed blessing in our sweaty confines but a godsend when pacing the small back yard.

Isolation passed like lockdown has for the fortunate. A sense of shared tedium supported by crap TV and our hopes for a future of beer gardens and sandy beaches.

The sweetness of stepping out the house for the first time ten days and being limited only by a shortness of breath was the last distinct sensation I remember. Since then my predisposition towards inactivity well exacerbated by lockdown has taken two months off me like a half-day.

It has been quite difficult to write this without wanting to put a boot into the morons not bothering to run the show. Those who know how to still profit off a system without protecting the lives of the clients. It’s then I remember the times where I’ve not followed the spirit of lockdown, where I’ve skirted restrictions and considered only myself.

It’s privilege that permits me to work at home and gives me ample time to reflect on events, rather than suffer them.

What is coming for me are the long term effects of this privileged lockdown. A whole year of consuming vast swathes of media while near vegetative will be difficult to unlearn. Any future posts or lack thereof will be testament to how entrenched these habits have become.

ASDA in the time of Covid 19

This’ll be a strange one to look back on.

I’d like to write a little about the sensations and experiences of this Spring so far. The statistics, the causes and the losses will all be archived in collective memory, to likely be re-examined every time the virus returns, or perhaps whenever a once minor consequence needs to be referenced back to the pandemic it has since eclipsed. Or, even worse, it may all be passed over or trivialised in the rush to return to what we once called normal.

What will be harder to recall may be the individual experiences, not just of loss, but of the changing nature of everyday life. These are some loose memories that are already slipping.

Lying in bed in the early evening, listening to someone telling me their fears and predictions and worries until the slow onset of soft rain takes my attention. The patter builds and surrounds the house, she falters and stops as the rain is joined by shouts of defiance. Outside a woman repeatedly yells “we can do this” and I am completely lost. I want to lean out of the window but daren’t touch the curtain. Across Britain outsiders have just been banned from all households that are not their own. I feel on my chest the weight of her car on the drive as the country claps louder still for the health service.

Coming back from a job I pass under an overpass where people are spending their daily allowance of exercise applauding the few cars and lorries still on the M6. I’d left before sunrise as all hotels are closed, hence the drives are much longer. Being a little more tired it takes until the second overpass of encores to truly witness the enthusiasm on the faces of the parents miming claps over the empty lanes as their children wave at lorries.

I’ve seen teenagers laughing as they filmed themselves sitting on the same bench as an old woman. By so small an act they could have killed her, hence the fear and I assume the hilarity. Idiots risking the lives of strangers for amusement isn’t new to this world, but the strength of public vitriol against those who defy government advice is new to me. That the country’s been bitterly divided since a referendum has seemingly given us all a chance to unite in hatred of those who travel out of London to their second homes, stretching local health and food resources and spreading the virus. Or those celebrities who dare suffer alone in large houses. Or those who stand within our clearly invisible exclusion zone at the tills. On seeing what the teenagers were doing some of the public ran up to them and the tension came to a fore with the only thing shielding the teens from a beating being the guidance on social distancing.

Yet not all is sour. Free of noise and air pollution the little garden I’m lucky enough to enjoy has been transplanted to the fields of Worcestershire, fresh with silage yet still on the hour rocked by the church bells pealing over a city that, for the first time since the war, has daily grown quieter rather than louder. I’m grateful I’m still at work, though it has slowed. But most importantly my family are yet untouched. May we all come through this with our health and our humour.

There are no planes banking high over the city of Worcester. So few cars on the ring road that those remaining raise questions. The city heads to the Severn or the canals to take the air, now free of narrow boat diesel and wood smoke, as empty trains roll over the bridges. The size and disparity of the berths we give to each other on these little promenades is as hilarious as it is acutely sobering. Old couples near scraping their faces into the walls they skirt along to keep mouths and noses pointed away from the family that treads the crumbling edge of the brick towpath. Every stranger an atoll, being only the visible part of a huge reef of unknown size. I’ve seen a cyclist not veer but fully join a lane of oncoming traffic to avoid wrecking himself on the fringes of a pedestrian walking on the pavement on his left.

Writing is difficult now. All public life and physical interaction has ceased save for the awkward solemnity of the queue at Asda. Each of us trying to display how easily we bear privation, how naturally our stoicism comes. I realise then I’m the only one in the queue unmasked. It’s so difficult to know what’s appropriate and permitted in the broad brush strokes of government advice. Yet, right or wrong, if you can pull off a branded tiger print face mask with matching gloves, bringing levity to a line of people waiting to see if we’re to remain nostalgic for eggs and fresh meat then power to you! These queues are the one place you can stand, if not among, then around strangers without having to move on. Most don’t want to look at each other, but a little talk manages to cover the distances, “you still in work?” “know anyone who’s had it?”

Somebody leaves and upon entering I unfortunately catch sight of the sign encouraging shoppers to buy every item they touch to prevent the spread of infection. My wandering hands and trailing fingers force the unnecessary purchase of six creme eggs, a six pack of creme egg flavoured yogurts and a massive bottle of Rum.

 

 

The Highlights & Horrors

Endless freight carriages of freshly cut logs roll through the station, each of the toppermost trunks covered in a thick layer of snow. Another freight train passes behind, holding layers on layers of of gleaming VW Transporters. A thousand new vans glide through the deconstructed forest and my train leaves before I see the dance end.

I’m travelling north through Austria and Germany at around 250 km/h. The past stretch of forested snow capped hills is punctuated only by bulbous red and golden spires of orthodox churches, when we enter a tunnel I have a glass of Bitburger to stare at. Though it doesn’t taste as sweet as drinking at altitude, a cold beer doesn’t half aid the sensations of travelling at pace on low resistance rails.

The heating’s on, the seats in standard are huge and Europeans leave the carriage to take calls. I’m supremely relaxed, which is convenient as I’ve still got another 6 hours left on this train before I take another for 2 hours, after already spending 4 hours on a train this morning, and then 10 hours on a train yesterday. Though I speak often to whoever has the misfortune to sit next to me, this type of holiday is fairly anti-social, being all travel and no trip. There’s no real destination save for the next train or the one after and when I finally get sick of it for the day I find myself the nearest hostel to the station of whichever city I reach and sleep until the next day’s train. I love it. I’ve got plenty of things to think about and enough experiences from the first half of my holiday to dine off and relive when the sun sets, the bar shuts or when the train windows are thick with dirt.

We stop at Linz Hauptbahnhof and the sun eventually sets behind the hills. In the huge towers of steam rising everywhere from the heavy industry it catches fire against the darkening sky.

I’m fannying about a little with the flowery descriptions, not just because my travels are nearly over so i’m soaking myself in the surroundings, but because the real highlight of my trip, aside from Hungarian cottage-cheese filled chocolate, was meeting a young woman. I’m not one to kiss and tell. The less people knowing the few banal details about my love life the better. But if I can write about my misery then I have the right to describe my joys, despite the fact i’m both painfully English and that the majority of the joys were indecent, even by European standards.

So in an attempt to remain tactful I’ll start by saying Jesus Christ could she dance, I swear to God I never imagined anybody could work a pole like that.

The party hostel was like any other in its function and manner. Cheap and dirty in equal measure with an activity every night designed to pull you artfully away from drinking in your room and instead lead you through a series of successively more expensive bars, all no doubt owned by the same family. The staff lived only to bed the guests and shift beer and the guests stayed only to drink. There was no sleeping encouraged. Heading back to the hostel through the snowy streets of Budapest after a night out, desperately trying not to let the dealers and sex workers walking in step to tempt you from finding the address printed on your wristband, you’d finally arrive back to the safety of the hostel only to find another cast of try hard party salespeople inside, eager to be labelled as degenerates or reprobates as long as you purchased a pitcher of weak beer in the downstairs bar. All and sundry were, of course, Australian.

The hostel was however uniquely shabby chic in true Budapest style. Open to the elements and held together by graffiti, crumbling concrete and a lone pole on a stage. It was likely abandoned during a pogrom and left to fend for itself during the Uprising. Other buildings on the street have window and door frames pockmarked with small arms fire, a retained memory of suffering and strength throughout the fabric of a city crushed by twice by the Red Army. A memory they’ve chosen to leave between the banks and supermarkets of today.

During a fairly calm evening a holy-shit she’s gorgeous blonde woman walked through this ruined courtyard, up to our group and introduced herself. Loathe to stereotype as I am, she was painfully, awkwardly, incredibly American. God’s gift to confidence, all life and energy. Now there are some assumptions that can be made about people based off where they come from. There are exceptions of course, but if you ever come to an injury you can waste time considering our similarities, or you can find a German because if they use a plaster in a first aid kit they’ll damn well replace said plaster, it is simply “natürlich“.

Now in first steps of introduction, the very first, i’m an eternal coward. I knew she was staying in the dorm next to mine and I also knew i’d need just a touch more courage to get over myself and so headed up to the dorm for one of the few remaining Belgians I kept under the bed. All for the honest and open approach I then waited outside my door, helplessly tapping the fob against the wrong part of the lock until she walked past and offered to help. The real surprise came when after helping she waltzed right into the room, through the gaze of the other drinkers and helped herself to my last beer, all the while staring right at me. She puts on my shirt and it just got so much better from there that I need a breather just writing it out and I’m writing this bit out a month after the event.

The train slows as it pulls towards our first German stop. Passau at night is dominated by the three minaret-like domed spires of it’s vast cathedral, reflected in the still waters of the river Inn on one side and what might be the Danube on the other. It’s 6pm and i’m not sure if i’ll sleep in Cologne or Frankfurt this evening.

The grace and beauty of human strength and shared desire after so many days admiring architecture, locomotives and beer absolutely floors me. The night quickly turns scandalous. To avoid the cringing awkwardness of retelling the better left unwritten I’ll give but a few choice glimpses. Someone, thankfully not myself, has a stiletto heel forced through the back of their boxers, the waistband of which is nearly pulled around his throat. Fruit brandy is mixed with fruit shisha and in the busiest part of another ruined nightclub she takes my belt off and puts it round her neck. My laughter feels hysterical and understandably we’re ejected from the club. Sharing a scooter back to the hostel she takes Pest’s most cobbled streets at pace. The cobbles turn to cat’s eyes and the windows roll down, somehow we’re both in England, trying not to drift across three lanes of the M40 as she keeps me company in the car.

Back in February it’s another day and another 11 glorious hours of train travel. The conductor announces that pickpockets have entered the train at Frankfurt and the carriage feels for its wallet as one. Another announcement an hour later elicits laughter as the train slows to a stop outside Cologne. As the memo’s only in German I ask my neighbour the reason of delay. “English Bombs” is the response with a smile. I’m unsure quite what to say. The British killed 20,000 civilians in this city with no discernible strategy and for no real purpose. But Europe is for me, this time, a plaything. My local fairground of trains and beer. I don’t have the stomach for the history and thus some of the culture. I have to leave the Topography of Terror in Berlin because I i’m tired of being sad, I’m feeling things too deeply. Remembering the dearth of past in Australasia I so wanted in this trip to fully appreciate my continent and its rich, continuously inhabited testament to Humanity. But i’m happier still, having contributed to my own and to her histories with a memory impossible to forget and intoxicating to remember.

And Europe and the culture therein will always be accessible right? I mean 2020’s my year of travel!

Hike 002 – Catacombs

To get my excuses in early, it’s fairly difficult to write seriously when travelling. The short time between thermal baths and meals out is spent moving to the next country. It’s a hard life at the moment for young Joe.

So I write on my phone, between work emails and disgusting trigonometric diploma revision on long train journeys, the countryside between Leipzig and Vienna providing a constant diorama of frosty pine forested hills and squat gold steepled churches under endless turbines. The not so gentle rocking of both the old local and high speed trains, and the fact I don’t have autocorrect leaves the text ramshackle. Interruptions from the armed polizie when the train crosses a border stalls the flow and with every sentence I’m left with less battery to find the tramstops and hostels of each evening. So please forgive repeated words.

It’s also difficult to talk openly and honestly about my trip when this blog’s for family and the hike is illegal.

Pack weight: none
Distance: 15km through the night (after a 25km day)
Depth: between 10 and 30 meters

We begin with five young men, talking in English and French as they smoke and drink coffee in a small densely furnished garret in the 15th Arrondissement of Paris. It’s a weekday and the sun sets behind the white stone townhouses as we consider what lies ahead of us. The Catacombs.

There are always large risks present when going underground. Some are known and can be managed with preparation, the water is sometimes crotch deep so heavy boots are a no. The more interesting risks are those that are unknown and cannot be managed or the most interesting of course cannot even be imagined.

My main concerns are that; I’ve just met the only member of our party who knows the catacombs, I’ve only a few hours to establish if I trust him to lead me in the darkness. I’ve also already hit 25km today tramping around Brussells so I’m worried I’ll be slowing these boys down if we’re walking hard for more than an hour. I’m also more than concerned about the underground special Gendarmarie, not for any fines or cautions but for the sure terror of tearing, for even a minute, through tunnels half full of water, eagerly pursued by unseen shouts, torchlight and truncheon.

At this point I was not over-confident but aware of some of the rest of the known risks. I’d experienced meeting gangs of chaps out of their minds on spice in the flint mines underneath Norwich. I’ve spent weeks descending the rope ladders into the stale air and small gaps of the Andamooka opal fields. In those weeks I came to love lying on my back, submerged in absolute silence and darkness, feeling the weight of the world above me.

We leave the flat and traipse downstairs and into the lamplit streets of Paris, bemusing the couples sitting outside the cafes as we try to look inconspicous in waders, shorts and headtorches. I have to be more than a little vague regarding our entrance and exits to protect the magic. Needless to say our intentions became even more clear when we entered a large public square, lined with bars and thronged with people watchers, and begun to heavily wrestle with the manhole covers sunk into the ground.

For 15 painful minutes we were the evening’s entertainment. Without crowbar the lids would give but an inch before smashing back into the street with a deep bong that bounced around the square. Passers by slowed to watch, offering no words of indignation, nor reaching for their phones, simply smiling at the sight of people climbing down into the bowels of their capital to spend the night beneath them.

My cousin’s friend at last hefted the lid off the rim. Warm air surged up through the shaft and past our faces as we stared down at the rungs. I was struck by the memory of myself, peering into a dusty red shaft in the Outback, trying not to imagine the sensation of being on a rope ladder as it gives way or the the distant sound of a cave-in that would spell a lonely death. Permitting no time for this we hustled into the shaft, closed the lid and dissapeared from Paris. We wouldn’t see surface again for 7 hours.

The world we entered was the word of the cataflic and cataphile. An underground network of quarries and tunnels at different levels, all comprising 170 miles of madness. The tunnels are solid white limestone, though not overly familiar with the mechanisms of collapse I took reassurance from the fact the network was without massive cracks or large piles of debris on the floor. The dimensions were fair and when the floor was dry and the music was on you could make good pace, stooping for overhangs as “sur la tèt” was called out and threading past the pipes and utilities that pushed down through the earth from the tenements above. We marched for half an hour without pause to the first room, a large cavern with table and benches to sit ten, rust brown spoons everywhere protruding from the walls and ceiling. Uneeded layers are removed and we explore the bumps on our heads as we drink and smoke, myself too smug to wonder how far the tunnels will pull the smells and sounds of our presense to the others waiting down here. The talk is understandably if incomprehensibly French so I have a little wonder away from pool of candlelight, along the cut offs and forks in the paths around us. The walls are cold and wet to the touch, they don’t crumble or leave much plaster on the fingers. I’m caught by the beauty of the signs underground that denote the streets above, the work taken to guide other explorers around this dark maze. For a minute it’s like the camber on my train rapidly changes, i’m so dumb and happy I forget my balance. Pushing my hands against the walls I start passing through them. I’m sober here, there’s just some places where you can find yourself under the earth’s very skin and really get know your spinning rock. Even above surface the stones have a power that sings. Hold the pillars at Stonehenge on a solstice and you hug the earth itself, tension rolling between your fingers like guitar string. I would’ve liked to get a little more caught up with the local geology, tried to dissasociate a little further, not to be born again or imagine myself a rock mind, just to relax into the walls free from external stimulation, but my friends were calling and we had many miles to walk before dinner.

We step in time. Staying close to each other and led by our resident expert, unknown to me but a friend of my cousin, we go deeper and deeper into the network, taking hairpins faster, climbing deeper into the ossuary. We pass a few strange things, some beautiful works hastily defaced to deter tourists, a throne of human bones where all the skulls have had their faces removed, leaving the cover around once loving brains as so many dusty brown kippah.

We slow only to take water and wade through it. It’s cold at the ankle and fucking awful mid thigh. Muddied by the first in the party, thick calcinated soup hides well the boulders and crevasses in the path. At one point it’s thigh high only at the very edges of the path, deepening to a watery gorge in the middle that would at the very least instantly end the adventure with one missed step.

The water channels into a separate river and we pass a couple with a cheery “salut” and then shortly later we overtake an old man listening haunting strains of French accordion music, lantern hanging from a staff in his hand. I’m still high and dripping off the cold water adrenalin and relatively immune to unease concerning strangers underground. I’ve worked and continue to work underground with some of the hardest people you could find on surface. It’s my experience that at 50 or 250 metres down, the rough, the introverted and the isolated can’t help but feel the weight of the earth above compounding their human responsibilities to each other. It’s a dark haven of gentlemen. Unfortunately the Catacombs proved a slight exception to the rule. On stopping for water in a 2 storey cavern papered with flags we were confronted by our first Cataphile. He also carried a staff tightly with small paper white hands. The rest of the group fell silent as the newcomer hit our leader with rapid questions in French, I was told later that his knowledge of the network was being tested, and our route onwards was being identified. I’m fairly sure from the tone and atmosphere that other questions were probably asked. Questions like “Is the English as tired as he looks, will he run or fight?” or perhaps “Would the English be deterred from re-visiting my special place if me and my skinny paper friends dressed as police and chased him into the river maze with lanterns blazing?“

After presumably getting the information needed he made to leave the chamber, stopping at the entrance to glare at me he said “you have no bag“. Then he was gone before I could explain that my only bag was larger than my body, or that the new cut throughs between old networks we’d been forcing ourselves through were often no taller than 50 or 60cm, or that I was the English guest and he could do with some sun.

We bumped into a fair few people after that, all heralded by the drum of techno and smell of smoke. We passed a group of men sat around a teenage looking boy as he danced in the middle of them, long dark hair swaying over his milky topless body. The atmosphere changed after that, we were more conscious of smoke bombs and fishing line and I was acting less myself and more as hard as I could (which isn’t very) whenever we encountered groups of the pale tunnel dwellers, wondering if they were bothered enough to cut us off at a narrow pass.

After those few encounters we made real progress to another network. I’d probably hit 30km for the day at this point and was slipping in the water and catching my head on the overhanging rock of the tunnel ceiling. I couldn’t have been in better company for as soon as I started stalling it was decided it was time for dinner. Not only were we being let into a huge secret, at possible cost to the reputation of our friend, we were hiking as a team, keeping momentum while caring and supporting each member, and unfortunately that’s not always the case in a group hike. And Christ what support. I like writing but forgive me for fucking up and stumbling here.

Nothing and no-one will ever take the joy and grace of that dinner from me. I will carry the simple splendour of an underground raclette deep within me until I die. Just know that it was the best meal I’d eaten in my life, without question. The care that the French take with cuisine is beautiful and when we sat together, cheese melting in a pot over a burning jam lid full of white spirit, potatoes steaming under blankets of ham, I understood why. The soul was nourished, the body was fuelled. I can’t say any more than that. Really I can’t even move on, just sit beside me in the chamber and let’s watch the steam rise over the melted cheese before it’s carried into the tunnels, out the vents, wells and railways, and back into Paris.

Light shines brighter in darkness. Small moments can have larger impacts when underground and we could sit and talk openly without any thought of the stresses or strains of surface. I understand how the ability to totally remove yourself from life and reinvent yourself can be compelling. How safe it can feel sleeping in a catacomb when your life above has turned to shit or you simply find the world in 2020 overstimulating. If I wasn’t a whore to the sun this could well be a strange life to be bounced into after a relationship breakdown.

Keep walking. Thinner gaps, deeper water. Every monument we pass a testament to the struggle of getting to the location. Immense carvings of faces, 3 meters high. A whole sea side town carved into the cliffs of a flooded passage, so you enter the harbour wading among the limestone boats like a wet god. With each intensely beautiful mural we feel the weight of carrying 10 different paint pots 6km underground, and pushing them individually through each of the tiny passage holes.

We figure we’ve marched about 12ish km for 6 hours, there’s water left but it’s time to try the first exit, another manhole next to a ring road about an hour walk from our original entrance.  We stop for a smoke then journey through the tunnels to series of ladders reaching up through 3 floors to the surface. We climb and struggle with the manhole from underneath, knowing that the 50kg of metal would fall down the shaft like a mass possesed. On seeing the lid lift exhaustion overtakes me. I enter Paris and stand among commuters waiting to cross the road. I’m soaked and wracked with aches, covered in white chalky mud, watching the sky begin to lighten as the city heads to work.

We head back to the garret and sleep from sunrise til sunset. All we can talk about on waking is what we’ve just experienced.

Just as a brief end note I’d like to thank my unamed cousin for bringing me. It was pure happy chance I happened to be free and in Europe when he had a chance to go underground. But it’s pure respect to him that he allowed me to join.

Not to be recommended, I wont be passing on any details.

Merci

The first breath

It’d be lovely when travelling to write in sequence, of trains taken and beers drunk in the order they were enjoyed.

But the best travel comes in waves, with few breaks between to catch a breath. This particular quiet is a one hour delay in the high speed line between Bruxelles and Paris. The announcement came first in French, then German and English last, but by that time the gallic swears and sighs had given me a small reckoning of the length and manner of delay.

A good pause to reflect. It’s the 10th day of the new decade and a full moon hangs over the fields East of Arras. I’ve been travelling for 3 days and my new found love is a Belgian Brunette by the name of Kasteel Donker and she’s surprisingly light for 11%.

Before the delay, before even the heavy beers of Belgium I was at the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras waiting for my train to be cancelled. The Gréve, (accent is guessed) has resulted in major disruption across European train networks as the French operators strike to keep their pensionable age at a place they can enjoy it, probably 37. The day of my outbound it’d resulted in 4 of the 5 services on the board to be cancelled. The Paris connections were understandingly mort, the direct journey to Belgium however was a surprising casualty, leaving only the Amsterdam express, happily stopping at Brussels.

This was the first time i’d travelled on the Eurostar and St Pancras was silent. Those in the cancelled trains didn’t pass through security, so the atmosphere at Departures was serene, watched over lovingly by the French Police, each passenger waiting in hope to leave the island, until at last the doors to the platform opened and we boarded the lone train.

There’s sadly little to say about the experience of travelling in the Chunnel, that I enjoyed the one seat without a window made little difference. It’s an engineering marvel no doubt, but a marvellous tunnel is a tunnel still. Arriving at Brussels from London sooner than I’d have arrived at Worcester changes perspectives. The pace and ease of cross channel travel is a poor aid to the romance of travel to the continent, even with the dramatic beauty of St Pancras.

There was certainely a different sense of arrival on reaching Brussels Midi. Few statues or ornate facades and the welcome to Belgium came from a delegation of two small girls, tugging my sleeves, begging for food.

I’m sure if I’d spent enough time travelling my own country with open eyes I could find some fairly heart wrenching deprivation, I won’t forget Newquay. But I didn’t expect to meet it so soon and so very young on the continent.

Shortly I was picked up by my cousin and we headed through the back streets of the capitol, threading through trams and cyclists at pace whilst giving and getting the lowdown on the past few years since we’d last met. Long terraces of tall three storey townhouses passed over us, each of different material and colour and each with balconied windows at slightly different heights. French and Flemish signs vying for attention as the dealers on the street jostle with each other for custom whenever a car stops in the middle of the road with window dropped.

The tense changes yet again. It’s the other side of a strong Belgian beer and i’m at a gathering with my Cousin’s girlfriend near the palace. Each of the 7 people in the room are from a different nation and none Belgian. They have everything to talk about and even better they happily do it in English. Leaning out of the balcony, a small green bottle in my hand, I close my eyes and find myself at the European parliament, trying to focus on a video explaining the standardisation of rail signalling between borders. Farage grins from the screen and I close my eyes again.

I’m now leaving Belgium with 3 locals. The first bottle is heavy going, the second much smoother and I share the third with a young Flemish Engineer sat next to me on the train, which, eventually, pulls in to Gare Du Nord in Paris, where i’m somehow sat outside, enjoying the pairing of Reisling and Marlboro until a white BMW pulls up and I jump in, my oily hands stuffed full of olives from the bar. We head to the 15th Arrondisment for an adventure that deserves a much better structure than this. An adventure in the true sense of the word.

It’s 7 pm around 5 days later. Passing through Hungarian villages the few mysterious shapes in the darkness twinkle with frost. I haven’t visited Bratislava today and I won’t have time to stretch in Vienna. I may not even catch the night sleeper to Berlin in a few hours time.

Because though it looks very much like i’m sitting on an old Russian train, typing on my phone as I head back West, I’m very much still in the ruins of a bar in Budapest, lying in an empty bath while she sits on my chest, blowing orange shisha smoke into my hair.

Maidenhead Voyage

Sometimes the closer I get to something I desperately want, the more hilarious it is when the whistle blows and it slowly pulls away from me.

Please permit me to force the metaphor. Picture this:

Over the next 3 weeks I’ll be catching trains across Europe. The planning has been late and fairly hectic, a few times I’ve thought about putting it off til Spring. But, it’s my last month as an EU citizen, I desperately need a break and the cost of the pass exactly matched the amount of money I got for Christmas and money as a gift is never for… thrift?

At 13:18 my first train was set to leave Worcester, stopping at Birmingham, Budapest, Berlin and, if I have time, Baden-baden, so good they named it twice. I arrive at Foregate station at 13:00, I have my phone, my passport, 18 minutes and I’m absolutely buzzing.

Foregate is comprised of 2 long platforms facing each other with low wooden roofs, elevated above the city on a long series of bridges and banks, so at 13:10 my vocal realisation i’m at the wrong station bounces merrily between the 20 people on one side and the 20 on the other.

I’d checked the station on the ticket many times of course, but some small mental mechanism determined that as this was quite an important advance single, i’d be much better off walking to the other. 8 minutes until my train leaves from Shrub Hill station. Running through town in boots with a pack on it’ll take me about 7 and a half. However, as i’m reminded every 2 minutes for the next hour, train doors close 30 seconds prior to departure. Unable to stall my momentum I fly through Shrub Hill station and fall against the outside of the train door as the whistle blows, coating my few sweaty clothes for the next month in a thick layer of dirt.

One of the platform staff said it was the closest one he’d seen, which was some consolation. For the hour until the next train I can choose to act calmly, inwardly simmering at myself until the same thing happens again, at Maidstone rather than Maidenhead (nearly), or more likely at some obscure station on the Rhine, Frieburg bad Tuenen when I really should be at Tieburg bad Fruenen.

Or, I can realise that I haven’t missed my train at all, the poor train’s missed me. Another one will try it’s luck and come hissing and clicking before me, and should I fail to catch it, or choose to miss it, i’ll still be myself, sitting on the platform drinking Saver’s own Sparkling Perry from a little green bottle.

I do board the next of course, there’s somebody i’m looking forward to seeing in Maids. The big Brummy train guard leans down to fix me in the eye when I ask if I can get on the train with the wrong ticket. The great diesel engine rumbles impatiently and he asks

“Are you christian… do you love your mother?”

Hike 001 – The Severn Wade

I intend this, my first “get over yourself” hike, to be the first of many, hence the triple digit counter. It also means I have to think a little harder about the form of this writing. It’s less about my heart, hopefully, and more about the external experienced during the hike. It’s a little too much of I did this and then I did this, that’s linear time for you. But first, before even the cold hard quantitative details, we need a motive.

 

I’ve got to stay busy to keep happy. This sucks. It constantly sucks. I hope to God himself that it doesn’t suck for the duration of half the relationship, as that’d be 4 wild years of frantic motion; of spotless kitchens, award winning wood whittling and scale models of English Market Towns made solely out of guitar picks and instant mash. I must keep occupied. If I sit, or lie in bed, alone without distraction, my foolish little mind can’t but help turning to the many glaring clues missed, the deep rooted personal failings and the horrible injustice of it all. This royally fucks my day up.

But the brain is a fickle organ, or mine at least. I can be wracked with guilt and anger, in an endless cycle of blame and doubt, receive one sensation and the chain is fair snapped. And, as there are few wounds unhealed by time, there a few thoughts that I can’t silence by throwing myself full tilt into something challenging and rich in sensation. This, tempered with restraint, is my momentary superpower. I woke on Christmas consumed, remembering and mis-remembering the way she’d act around the people she’d cheated on me with, the manner in which she boasted to her friends about pulling my heart apart, yet, the English Channel didn’t care for my bitterness. If you plunge into the sea on the 25th there’s no room for moping, for self serving misery. Only salt and sand, nipples like bullets and deep down the sound of the primordial genes singing as they returned to the icy water. And the death of over-thought isn’t limited to the single sensation, it’s pushed out before by anticipation of the cold shock, there’s little room for it to cling after as the fans spin overtime to reheat the muscles after and the misery that remains has to shout hard over the endorphins to be heard.

It’s cold showers from here on in. But nothing fuses a good cold drizzle with lasting satisfaction like a Hike in the Great British outdoors.

Pack Weight: 16kg

Any hiker will stop reading there as it’s clearly amateur hour at Joe’s hike distribution centre. The pack should be no more than 20% of my weight which would be 14kg, and I’d much rather have it down to 12kg for a 2 day. Blame comes later.

Length and Time: 25 miles/50km, one and a half days 

Let’s not bother breaking it into per hour as it gets boring. But rest assured these are days of 7 hours, the first full day comprising rain without end, so I’m nothing but chuffed with my first outing in months.

Detail

The blame of the heavy pack lies in my own uncertainty. I wasn’t sure of the weather, the path to take or how many days I’d be away from home. I just wanted to walk. So I brought enough food for 3 days, enough water for 2 and clothes of every season. 50/50 I’d either stop at the end of the road and catch the bus back or keep strolling til the soles fell out and I found myself at the sea.

So, early doors, packed with waterproofs, light tops and scarf, with machete for the negligibly managed Severn Way River path and map of the County I headed South out of the house, into driving rain and darkness.

I knew there’d be difficulty of the underwater variety nearest my house, as December had been fairly wet and in the city the path dips to only a metre above the river, with no bank to hold the course. Yet south the walk is well shielded by earth and the fields hold rain better than the car parks and roads of Worcester. I took the high road which led me up to Ketch Lookout on the cities edge. Though the drizzle cut back visibility, it was enough. I started giving the sort of giggles let out by immigration officers when a sudden, irretrievable data loss permanently wipes out all migration records for the last 7 years.

Essentially there was no South Worcestershire. At the Western horizon lay the Malverns, the lights on the hillside fading as the sun rose and uncovered what appeared to be an inland sea a mile wide, broken only by the tops of trees, it stretched from the far hills to the ridge I was on. The way was fucked.

In my defence I hadn’t seen the Severn in flood before, the fenlander in me not realising quite how much of the landscape a full river could engulf. The county of Worcester lay as no more than lines of ridges and hills, separated by endless, countless streams and rivers fed by the water sheeting off them. The scene was missing only the sound of Chinooks and screams of the un-drowned. Yet the cars kept coming, the weather alert remained yellow and life continued above the valley, so I kept walking.

Stuck between the two impassable voids of the Severn and the M5 I headed south along the puddles at the edge of the A38 til I found myself, hilariously wet, north of Tewkesbury on the otherside of the day, one hour before Sunset. An hour is a fairly long time to prep, especially since the next day was to be the solstice, but in rough weather an hour choosing campsite saves four hours of sleepless misery before having to find another site. This we will never forget. Yet was it still tight finding a safe place to bed. No copse without trees knee high in water, the highest corners of the fields were but the mouth of rivers carrying the endless rain off the saturated soil and down at pace over the tops of hedgerows into rivers. After 40 minutes of searching I found the spot, a small wooded hill or Hurst, somewhere near the M50. At this point I’d headed well into Gloucestershire and my map was useless, the sleeping bag was a little wet and my back unused to the ground. But the stars were bright, the rain had passed and too tired to start a fire I simply slept, long and deep without concern of heartbreak.

I woke as the sun entered my tent. The ground was less soft, the rivers in the fields around me had dissipated, leaving muddy ruts. I packed my camp away and headed South again through Tewkesbury and another 9 miles down to Cheltenham.  When I arrived for lunch I only had slightly sore shoulders and a few blisters on one foot to complain of, though sleeping in a slightly damp bag robbed a little of my joy at entering the town. So, though I’d never really visited before, I had the first hot chocolate I could find and headed straight home on the train.

That’s all there was to this walk and hopefully to my recovery. Just putting one foot in front of another until I find myself in a better place. Today is a full 2 minutes longer than the day I finished walking, tomorrow I’ll have another 52 seconds on top of that. Every day will get longer at an increasing rate until all my days are full of sunshine and I can rest and do nothing with a happy heart, at least til I pick the next wrong un.

 

But Which Bad Decision?

Me? The thirteenth Duke of Billingborough? Alone? In the West Midlands?… Did I not consider the consequences?

Now I do understand that quite a few people are fairly used to this living alone lark, more and more every year. But it’s been quite awhile since I’ve woken up without someone being there to take the edge off life. I find it hard, truthfully told. Thankfully, I’ve gone the whole hog and properly thrown myself in; my nearest friends are two and a half hours away, my nearest family about the same and I work completely alone! In any case, i’ll either truly get to know myself again, or, like Far North Queensland,  I’ll end up scrawling my number on cubicle walls, taking off my watch then accosting strangers for the time and standing over the little yellow line just so the bus driver can tell me to move back.

What I want is to put as much experience between myself and the past as I can manage, until I can surrender to the company of family at Christmas and friends at New Year. After then? I hope I can relish the fact that I’m at the start of a decade where finding new experiences and socialising with people that share my interests will probably become even easier. Though making real connections will be down to myself and may even be made harder due to new cultures and depths of digital isolation.

I’ve had a fair few suggestions about the type of distance or the strength of experience needed to get over a loved one. Too many. The gentlemen miners I visit underground heartily commended the benefits of the Knocking Shops of Whitby and Middlesbrough. I’ve been told, honestly, 200 metres underground, that nothing enables an objective appraisal of your life quite like a little bit of spit… Charming I know.

As I struggled writing that, I recognise that it’s probably not a path that would lead to anything other than my utter misery. And in any case that’d looking at it from the wrong perspective. If I’m going to rebound into full sin I’d rather be a tenner up than a tenner down. I mean seriously, I have off street parking, I’m new on the market so my skin’s soft and the my shower pressure’s fantastic.

Likewise the idea of creating some chemical barrier between myself and my past is also not my cup of Xanax and Dr Pepper. I’m wary of putting a touch of Baileys in my coffee in case the thin end of the wedge begins with cream, cocoa and Irish whisky and ends in the front page of the Worcester News. It might also be nice to create something for myself that’s not at the entirely at the expense of either Romanians girls in a Yorkshire bedsit or Colombians refining Coca leaves at gun point.

Dating, and the kind of socialising that men hope will lead to dating, are also off the menu, at least until I’m fully whole. Even if I could manage the network of apps required in the 8 years since I’ve last been on the market, I don’t have the photos or the slightest inclination until I’m happy when sober and alone in my own company.

No. I know the answer is distance. Actual distance, in Kilometres if possible as they’re a little easier to put away. As soon as all this shit kicked off I wanted to walk, to physically march, stopping only for bread and cheese. Walking is it’s own reward regardless of confidence or self sufficiency and nothing but nothing makes me happier than cooking with gas after a long day in heavy boots.

Or happiness of a sort. What I really need to forget about the past is not a jolly stroll to the Canal Basin, nor a stretch inland to the merry Malverns. What I need, believe it or not, is fresh trauma, or as close as I can get without actually dying in some Scottish crevasse.

It’s something I’ve done before, and though instantly regrettable, a good spicy multi-day march with only yourself to depend on burns away all historical neglects and slights, all replaced by the single question, why the fuck didn’t I wait til March at least?

To negate any worry: I’ve done this walk before. I’m heading south, off road all the way. I have an understanding of the risks and I feel I’m well prepared. The machete is sharp, the cheese is Boursin and the map is waterproof.

To keep the thrill: It’s the Severn Way, hilariously overgrown and hopefully twice as spicy when the Severn’s in flood. As it is now. With freezing fog…. Also, last time I did this walk I had fifteen and a half glorious hours of sun each day, tomorrow I have seven hours forty two minutes, of visible rain clouds, at best.

It’s a little winter solstice gambol!

To Begin Again

I haven’t written in a long time now. After a few years away penning only quotes or invoices the words don’t come naturally. It’s difficult to choose the best phrase or structure to express how I currently feel and not just because I’ve forgotten the craft, but that I’ve lost much of the understanding of my own self that comes directly from writing about my feelings. So I’m having real difficulty weighing my words… Apologies as well for this is just internal, self absorbed and probably contains little in the way of expose, but it’s necessary.

I have of late been pin-balling between the bumpers of misery and rage. Neither of which are good aids to clear, thoughtful writing, though they’d doubtless produce a delightfully in-cohesive rant with a fair few decent zingers. But reading other people’s pain is strange, often awkward and it’d be a struggle to fully articulate myself in any case.

I need writing at the moment. Writing, when alone and far from home, or when particularly low, bailing snow out the tent, is really good company. When left alone my internal monologue drives me spare, but somehow the process of reforming those thoughts into something others can read, maybe even enjoy, and then pushing them into the online void orders my mind and passes the time more than enjoyably. As I’m alone, in an empty house on a cold Monday evening in December, in a county where I know literally nobody, talking to myself in this manner is one of the easiest ways I can come to terms with this world and the many strange people in it.

The relationship I’ve been in for 8 years has just broken down in a fairly horrible manner, leaving me isolated and insecure to put it mildly. That it imploded due to wholly unforeseen issues concerning her desire and her loyalty has fairly fucked my self-esteem… Though not crippled it. Unfortunately for the people of Worcester I do still take the bins out in a too-small yet so-comfy kimono I nicked from a hotel in Japan.

I could blather and mope about waves of loss and the pain of memory, that I find her in the Polaroids slipped between pages of the books, or in the blog where I’m writing. I could lecture about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Which is embarrassingly apt as the genesis of this relationship was during another, in which I probably inflicted the same pain that that I’m currently enjoying… There’s some neat phrase for this no doubt, to do with things ill borne or conceived in deceit… But that the wheel comes full circle is little comfort when it’s resting on your back after you’ve been dragged along the road.

But.

I’m not, I repeat NOT, going to let my life become an actual car crash. A bitter and self obsessed car crash, where my failure to smell a rat when it was lying to my face comes to define me car crash. A pulled over by the police for doing 10mph on the A47 while having a coke induced panic attack that the defence will insist was due to the relationship breakdown while noting my previous exemplary good character kinda car crash. That’s not for me. Nor is it for me to continue to be critical of somebody whom I realise I never really knew.

So, as the decade ends, I’m left only with new opportunities for the next. There are friends in this city as yet unknown, old connections I’ve neglected and new adventures to occupy my mind and ease my spirit. It’s high time I focused on myself and re-learnt the strengths, not lost, but forgotten through long term reliance on others.

Not this coming year, but this very week just begun, I’m beginning the journey that will lead to my best shot at the health, wealth and happiness I deserve. I’m putting all thoughts of retaliation or reconciliation aside, accepting the past and starting the difficult job of moving on.

To new beginnings.

A return to form

My girlfriend is beautiful, I couldn’t start a post about us travelling any other way.

I entered Auckland this morning expecting to be refreshed by a crisp, modern, urban Polynesia. Yet, beside her, the sky tower looks awkwardly down at its own foundations and pretends to examine the concrete mildew beneath. And while the famed white sails that fill the harbour flutter and hang loose, the yacht owners stand on deck, taut with envy. For the Pacific wind has a new ensign to play with, and Angahard’s soft brown hair lifts gently as the air unfurls in welcome around her.

Unconstrained by mast or foundations she is free to roam, to hold court with the forests and the beaches of her choosing. Yet, within the dark clouds forming above the city lie a group of Taniwha, great iridescent guardian lizards who now gaze down upon the hostel where she sleeps.

“Who knows she has come?” One of them hisses.

The oldest Lizard responds slowly,  “They all do. The wind boasted to the ocean, the ocean told it to the streams and the streams fed into the hills.”

The other lizards stir, tails twitching. “But do the.. Did the hills tell..?”

The older lizard nods and looking south says, “The hills told them; the fight for her affection has already begun.”

All the Taniwha look towards the now glowing corner of the sky as the volcanoes rise, Tongariro screaming fire.