Travel

Oh, The Places You’ll Go.

#adventure, Life, Lifestyle, love, lyrics, mountains, nature, poetry, rhyme, Travel, verse

Picture a Place beyond your front door,

Where the world awaits you, when you are locked down no more.

Where Coronavirus is a Mexican beer-drinking game,

And social isolation a choice not a chore. Things will never be the same.

I’ve heard that one before. The plain fact is, lifetimes well lived never were,

But that little reminder is neither here nor there.

Is it high tide, or glen, or Thai bride, or fen

You seek? Petersburg or Pelion? Russian or Greek?

Then, is it painting a mural on a West Bank wall?

Or lying in wet sand doing not much at all?

Do you see yourself gladly on a deck chair in Spain?

Or puffing away on the Darjeeling train?

A bit of imagination and the possibilities seem endless. And they are.

I can testify to that. Because I’ve kept near and I’ve ventured far.

There’s really nowhere you’ll feel friendless. Whether you’re watching red cardinals from a bench in Central Park.

Or itching your head in the flea markets of Muscat.

There’s nowhere you won’t make your mark.

I myself have had visions on high,

Of following mountains way up to the sky.

And then looking down on all I survey,

A thought. A plot. I’ll come back here one day.

Or not go away,

at all.

I know. I’ll stay rooted to the spot, and dream not of what I’m missing,

but of what I’ve got.

Which is really the whole world when what’s all around

Are mountains beyond mountains. What is this I have found?

Head in the jet stream, heart on my sleeve,

Life’s best in the thrill of the chase, i believe.

Or better still, I found contentment. That’s what i meant.

There is so much to see, so far to go,

So many ways: fly, cycle, row. Hitch a ride, crawl on all fours,

It doesn’t matter how. Providing you do it outdoors.

Depart at a snail’s pace. Arrive in an instant.

Whoever said dreams had to be distant?

By saying ‘I can’t’, you never will. A mountain?

You’ll be lucky to get up a hill.

So don’t forget to recall, it’s all in the mind. If you fall,

Only you can leave yourself behind.

If you like, walk on your hands to Timbuktu,

And when you get there you’ll know what to do.

Keep on keeping on, this time on your feet,

and smile aloud at the people you meet. Everywhere along the way.

Your presence there will make someone’s day, no doubt. Maybe everyone’s.

Depends where you are, where it’s about. Greeks are not Egyptians.

Cambodians not Colombians. Angolans not Australians. Same but different,

Different but the same, a million broken pictures within a single frame.

A mosaic, you might say. A tapestry, a dot painting, a thing on a wall,

Hungarian, Haitian, Hurdy Gurdy Man, or Han. People are people. Wherever you find them. That’s all.

Wherever you roam, roam with a smile.

And if strangers invite you in for a while,

Don’t turn them down.

Turn them up, let them speak, of what they did today and what they did last week.

Who cares if you can’t follow, if it’s all mumbo-jumbo.

You’ve given them yourself, not some hollow

Man! They can see your spirit is willing, your eyes are smiling, your voice is trilling

Out birdsong, some foreign tongue, delighted to have you here among

Strangers.

No one is a stranger, not when you travel.

Except yourself maybe. Let that twist of fate unravel.

So, next time you find yourself in some forgotten land.

Soon, I trust. On an island in a warm sea scratching the sand,

Or if needs must, holidaying local. Even if that means dressing up as a yokel.

Original thinking is the key. Another experience in the bag. The making of me.

Give yourself a big pat on the back for re-learning the art of life. Such a drag, after a year stuck at home

On the edge of a blunt knife.

All things exist, but only life is for living. Tell me something I don’t know.

But have you thought of the future, of the places you’ll go?

(Inspired by Dr Suess, Oh, The Places You’ll Go)





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Weathering the Purr-fect Storm

					animals, Covid-19, dogs, ethics, humour, Life, Lifestyle, love, Travel
		
			


					

			

When Choosing Between a Kitten and Wintering in the Sun Is the Extent of Your Woes, You Know You’ve Got a First-World Problem at Hand. 





The Time to Remedy it? Never. (Still, a solution exists, if you’ll let me explain)










The world has gone canine and feline-mad in the age of Covid. Whether you fall into the category of emotionally clinging to anything with a heartbeat, or else into that of possessing more money than sense, all you suckers out there from either category are being royally shafted for the privilege of sharing your life with four paws, a tail and a pair of irresistible eyes for company. 





If you’re not paying a king’s ransom for a King Charles’ spaniel then it’s an ingot of gold bullion for a French bulldog. As for your regal highness of the High Street and all-round deity of detached houses everywhere – the not-so-humble cat, we’ve got Bengals going for anything but a bargain, and Ragdolls for the equivalent of a small finca in Spain. Yip, puppy prices and kitten costs have doubled, tripled, quadrupled. I would go beyond quintupled but I cannot find the word. 





Breeders are having a field day while wannabe owners are prepared to part with pretty much their life savings just to snaffle whatever breed is in vogue recently. The law of Siamese supply and Dobermann demand is beginning to resemble the state of the housing market in SouthEast England where sums involved are so eye-watering you’d be forgiven for thinking the bricks are of gold. Same with our precious little quadrupeds where GBP3,000 for a KennelClub-registered fur ball is de rigueur nowadays. The nation’s housebound millions have put out an SOS for something that can bring a taste of Attenborough into their locked-down living rooms. Is there any surprise therefore that the Bengal Cat is presently so popular? They are, after all, not too many generations removed from a Asiatic Leopard Cat, normally found swiping their prickly paws at anything moving in the forests and grasslands of India. If you can’t go to India’s remaining wild places, then bring India into the comfort of one’s living room, where at this rate we’re all likely to live out our remaining days. 





I digress slightly. My blogs wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t. So, we’ve quickly established that interest in acquiring a pet has jumped since half the world was grounded by our surrogate parents in government. In Western nations such as animal-mad Britain, an existing industry has just gone decidedly up-market. Not that the quality of kitten or puppy has improved. Far from it. The costs of acquiring the animal have, however. The trend is so blatantly obvious, judging by the number of daft-as-a-brush French Bulldogs that strut past wearing made-to-measure harnesses, that the nation’s thieves have even got in on the act. Thieves are pertinent to this discussion. We can’t simply ignore them, given that their normative habits of breaking into empty houses have been adversely impacted by commuters working from home. So yes, unsurprisingly, every tea leaf in the land (as pseudo-Cockneys like to call thief) worth his prison stripes has swapped the old cat burglary routine for just the cat part. Yes, literally they have taken to burglary of cats (and dogs who fetch more). Once they were a dogged bunch. Now, the criminal element are merely a bunch intent on decamping with their victims’ beloved (and very costly) dogs. Buy your Lhasa Apso pup for two grand from the auctioneer who calls themselves a breeder before it’s stolen from under your nose. Then have the little bundle of joy ransomed back to you for another two thousand. Times are strange. 





 I myself am no different insofar as i too crave love and affection. Without it, this man has become part-machine, part-Borg. In the continuing absence of that other feline, woman, in my life I too have longed for the ineffable charms of a four-month old puppy or kitten, as well as the dignified air of an older animal. Longed to say absolutely not, this dog is not sleeping with us on the bed, only to pat the mattress when the lights go out and whisper, come on boy. H’up. Naturally, I would baulk at the prospect of paying through the nose but, then again, I would rather adopt a rescue animal over a market-savvy breeder. More than anything, I’d love fate to intervene and have the animal find me. Wow! Now that would be kind of divine intervention. But whatever the source, the intention must be the same: to guarantee that with ownership you have signed an unbreakable moral contract with yourself to care for that animal from the litter tray to the pet cemetery, relinquishing loving ownership only in extreme circumstances, such as terminal cancer or a seat on the Mars Mission. 





There’s no leeway for flaky types when it comes to adopting a fur-baby. Alas, they exist. In droves, I expect, though the majority of dependable types are incensed by these soi-disant owners who sell marvellous, sentient household animals as quickly and conscience-free as the day they bought them. Me, I detest this commodification (treating something as unique as a Siberian cat or a English Pointer a mere commodity) of pets in the strange age of Covid. To have one would be to retain it under all circumstances. No exceptions other than the two mentioned above. That’s the honourable thing. Getting a kitten or a pup is no small matter. It takes responsibility and devotion, as we know. So what does a guy do when he’s faced with the dilemma of desiring that wonderful feeling of bringing an animal into his life, his home, and 15-year plans, while also holding fast to that love for far flung, foreign travel? Twenty years with a Birman cat or a solitary winter travelling around Burma? The whole year round with a Russian Blue or that little getaway to the Russian hinterland you’ve always dreamed of but never had the freedom to? Full-time carer-in-chief for that lovely black Labrador, or a summer jaunt around the coast of Labrador in Canada? 





The sickening thing is, it’s one or the other. The two – 1) extended bouts of travel and 2) pet – are mutually exclusive. I could have that kitten to cuddle up to a night, to watch with delight at how she starts becoming an existential part of the home and me, or I could spend eight months of the year lavishing affection on the dogs that pass by the boat, each evening poorer for not having a cat or dog to wile the hours away with in front of the fire. For what? For the escape? For the elan and incomparable adventure of travel? I need both but, wearing this crown of moral responsibility, i can have but one or the other. 





Much of the world lives hand to mouth on a dollar a day. They are faced with dilemmas like having to leave their home and families for years on end to find work overseas. As for mine. When your biggest dilemma is to chose between raising a fur-baby or wintering each year in a sunny, mountainous Shangri-La, man you know your problem is quintessentially first-world. 





Bearing in mind, there is solution for the uncompromising in me. Go and live in a sunny, mountainous place, taking the dog and the cat with me. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. 








		
	
					

			
	
			
	


			
				



			

						
							
					

	
	

		
The Five Corners of Love

					#adventure, #romance, America, California, Life, love, San Francisco, Travel
		
			


					

			

Part VII





Love is a Gambler










Muggy Hong Kong nights had by now turned to weeks yet her visage held fast in my mind’s eye. She was the high front that hung in the air, which felt like salvation when the actual skies over Hong Kong are notoriously leaden during summer. Hers was a face that brought belief to a notorious non-believer. In spite of having the novelty of a new idol to light nightly votive candles to, that didn’t change the awkward fact that I found myself 6,000 miles away, and that big old ocean wasn’t getting any narrower. 





It was probably here in this neutron star of a city-state – still under benign British rule – that my life tag of misfit really became me. I didn’t fit into colonial life. I struggled to get a foothold on the whirligig. All of Britain’s far-flung colonies it was Hong Kong that came closest to ant colony. Standing tall amidst a crowd or peering out of a tenth-floor window the world at street level was a restless mass. Throngs of black-haired people assumed the awesome choreography of a super-organism. They all seemed to follow a pheromone trail to and from the work shift, which apparently never really knew a time for clocking in and clocking out. The gaps between shoulders were scarcely broad enough to slot a sheet of paper in between. You stole your breath then plunged into the streets there. You didn’t amble along the pavement; rather you were swept away by a human current, one stirred into eddies and froth by seven million deadlines and seven million appointments all simultaneously happening. The streets of Kowloon were tributaries of a larger river of humanity, but that river was not the type to empty lazily into the sea. It was frenetic. It was breathless. But it wasn’t me. Nor for me. Frankly, I couldn’t stand the place. All it served to do was remind me of how attractive the San Francisco lifestyle was by comparison. 










After a month or so, I received a reply to my card, a greetings card which i addressed, for want of any other address, to the Traveller’s Hostel, Market Street, San Francisco. That opening gambit – the picture card scribbled with a bit of frivolity underlain with real intent – was a crucial one, because naturally you don’t know how a person who was wrapped around you koala-fashion not six weeks before might react now that time zones have intervened. People are funny in that regard. Playing it cool, of course, I merely threw out a suggestion that I, well you know, come back for a long overdue, erm, reunion. Her reply was a bit scattergun. In it she sounded the warning bells. In fact, reading it, I thought her one-page letter so frantically paced that you’d think she was writing it while on the lam with the cops breathing down her neck. In reality, that’s exactly what was happening in her mind. She was spooked that the feds were homing in on the ‘plantation’ she was tending up in that Jerusalem for monotheistic growers: Humboldt County, Northern California. It was ’94 and Reagan’s War on Drugs in this era was not a Philadelphia-based music band, but a real Dr Strangelove effort to rid America of its fave dessert: narcotics. Federal agencies were in balls deep infiltrating growers in the Northern part of the Golden State where a superabundance of conifers (and even the odd redwood) proved the perfect camouflage for a field of glistening kind bud. Helicopters carrying DEA enforcers swooped low over fields, aggravating freedom-loving planters who responded in kind firing off peppershot from pump-action shotguns. This covert war on America by America was deadly serious and, it would appear, she was in the thick of it. Or, if not a kingpin, then certainly on the fringes clipping top-quality bud and housesitting a motormouth of an African Grey parrot right there in a woodland warzone. As for the letter she sent, I couldn’t make head nor tail of its true intentions, so I left it suspended while I went back to work on Hong Kong Island, clearing half-empty beer glasses from tables full of pantomime characters all of whom had recently rolled into town in fine fettle only to end up rolling out of our madhouse of a cocktail bar the worse for wear. 





I think I wrote again toward the end of summer. I was still determined. Undeterred I pressed ahead with my plans to finish up in Hong Kong early November and from there spend a month backpacking around Sumatra before catching the long hau back east across the North Pacific. I must have heard from her one more time as I distinctly recall her saying she was checking out on a one-way ticket in the second week of December. Her dalliance with the USA was coming to an end before she could succumb to more mischief in the pines of Northern California. I had a wafer-thin window in which to act. So I booked Sumatra from the 4th November to the 4th December before catching an onward flight via Seoul on the 6th December, arriving in San Francisco on the same day. She had not a clue of my flight path, but hey ho! the best reunions are often through disbelieving eyes. And anyway, I couldn’t face a Dear John from across the ocean. I hate being dissuaded from acting on impulse by a sensible girl who is emotionally-engineered to dampen the wanton ardour that burns in the male of the species. Sometimes you gotta go out on a limb for the things worth grabbing. 





It was cold when I arrived on America’s West Coast. The sky was its cobalt self, but the air was dry and the chill wind sucked from the snowcaps of the Sierras off to the East. All those months in the sub-tropics had ill-equipped both wardrobe and bones to take the brunt of the chill far less a rebuttal from a girl whose affections I must’ve craved. 





In a rerun of a film I featured in not six months ago, I stepped back into that Hostel foyer to be greeted by the same barefooted lady who ran the show back in summer. ‘I remember you’, she said. ‘Is xxxxx staying here?’ I enquired. This she affirmed, adding that that i had come a very long way to see someone who was hours away from a one-way ticket home. 





I asked where my girl might be at this hour. ‘Probably next door at the bar,’ the barefooted lady answered. 





That she was still on this continent, in this town, camped under this roof, was good enough for me. I dumped my bags in my dorm and headed for the bar, for what I’d hoped would be a pleasant shock, a reunion worthy of a Hollywood ending. I was only partly right. 





She was there, unlike any other just as I remembered her, like the lady at the desk said she would be. Her recognition of me was slightly more delayed. But when the penny finally did drop, it was as if a ghost had sashayed into the bar, sat down next to her, and said in a recognisable voice, ‘Yeah, I know I look off-colour. I don’t need reminding. So, remember the you of six months ago? I do. In fact I liked the taste so much I came back for seconds. So, remember the feeling we, um, shared? Well I’ve ghosted in here, gatecrashed your life, if you like, to invite you back into that moment.





Well, what d’ya say? ‘





She kept probing me, asking me: ‘Did you really fly 6,000 miles after all this time, on the off-chance that you would find me? Did you really fly all that way just for me?’ Yes, and yes. It all sounded promising. And then the tingle of broken glass. Kshhhh! ‘I didn’t think you would come back.’ 





I didn’t think you would come back? As in you weren’t meant to come back? Who in their right mind does that? To the outsider a phrase like that reverberates the sound of ‘you went away and so (by the laws of average) I met someone else.





‘I met someone else during summer,’ she shrugged. ‘I mean, people say things in the heat of the moment, don’t they? When you said let’s meet again I didn’t take it literally.’ 





Well, me for one. I was keen. I had vowed to see her again. It was a covenant I made with myself, and I tried hard not to break covenants, least of all with self. Sitting next to her you could almost hear this internal dialogue she was having. It could have been a convocation of voices all furiously debating in her mind how to respond to a disruptive, if by no means unpleasant, element suddenly busting in on a settled plan of existence. My reappearance on the scene was evidently provoking something deep in her psyche. She was about to close this chapter when who should turn up but the plot twist. 





Past is future and future past. You can get a fleeting mention in one chapter, a more fleshed out role in later ones. You can trump all odds and win the girl. Or you can end up a lousy loser in love. 





‘I have a boyfriend,’ she said. ‘He’s in the Israeli army.’





‘Oh, I see.’ lousy loser it is then. I’ll get my coat, shall I? 





‘He’s downstairs at the moment. Thing is, he doesn’t like the British.’





‘We’ll get along then.’





Pinned onto the horns of a dilemma, that’s where she was. I offered to leave, disguising well my impending heartache. Sang-froid can protect a man whose blood runs too hot for too long for the wrong girl. I told her it was worth the 10,000 mile detour just to share a drink with her. She stopped me. Don’t leave! I need to work this through in my mind. 





The following day was her last after years in California. We spent some down time together during the day, but the evening was not ours to get all entwined about. She said she owed it to him to spend a final night together. I didn’t overreact. And anyway, she said, this is my final night with him, and you’ll be seeing more of me in future. 





I sat outside my room in the corridor that evening. Diagonally down the hall was her dorm. I could hear them from behind the door. He couldn’t have been savvy about this interloper who had re-entered her life. I felt disconsolate. Many months and thousands and thousands of miles for this: to have her tantalisingly within my grasp only to be separated by this fucking dingy corridor, his blissful ignorance of my existence, and her doing the honourable thing. But what was this olive branch she extended, saying tonight would be the last night he would ever spend with her?





I must have sat in that corridor all night alone eavesdropping on the laughter and mirth going on behind her door. My head sagged; a tear or two shed. Solitude is the handmaiden of self-pity, I’ll tell you. My instinct was that love was a gamble and my gamble had not paid off. I don’t know why anyone would compound their state of unrequited love by doing a Romeo and cowering under the proverbial balcony while just above Juliet gets jiggy with another fella. Then again, she had said she needed that time with him as it would be her farewell to him (and I don’t mean Juliet) . Was my presence a trigger for that? I couldn’t begin to second guess a woman of such complexity as this one. At that age without much prior experience, I probably couldn’t second guess a woman with straw between her ears far less a smart one. 





The following morning as she was readying to leave on journey that would signify the end of her American period, she knocked on my door. My reaction to seeing her was stilted. I still felt bruised that she had chosen to burn the candle with him the night before while I languished in the corridor alone, my mind imagining what they were up to. She said that she was leaving, but that she had made a choice. What choice? I wondered. 





‘I choose you..’





Me? 





She was going to write to him and tell him it would never have worked between them. Once that was over, we would once again be free to continue where we had started off in that summer of ’94. 





‘I’m going back to Argentina now. But there will be a next time for us. I’ll meet you in England in the summertime.’





And lo! She did. Six months later I pulled up outside York railway station and there she was rested up against her blue backpack, book in hand. Six months of pure South American sunlight had coppered her skin. Hair dark as night and fringed and nothing like the English girls whose hair was all too mousy brown. It had been a year since that first encounter, and there would be many more to savour in the coming years. Having myself left on my big trip from practically there one year before, seeing her there outside York Railway Station completed a beautiful circle made of endless corners.