Monthly Archives

February 2016

Street Life written by Jamie, Manchester

On the streets I have no home,

In a doorway all alone,

At night it gets so cold,

No one for warmth to cuddle or hold,

Day after day it’s always the same,

People rushin’ past they’re in the fast lane,

Somewhere to go, somethin’ to do,

Oh why can’t I have a life like you?

Instead am sat at the bank on my pitch,

Waiting and praying to get that hit,

I have my regulars who give me change and a smile,

That makes gettin’ cold and wet worth the while,

Rush hours comin’ there’s people thick and fast,

They’re making me dizzy, how long will it last,

Sat out here it’s like Groundhog Day,

So until my break, that’s just the way…

‘Just arrived’ travel anxieties…

…and an irrational battle with the contents of the suitcase, in which there was no clear champion

Street art, Malaga, Spain
Street art. Malaga 2016.

Time to take a deep breath.

I’m many miles from where I woke up this morning. After a bout of being home in England, and feeling comfortable in my surroundings, I find myself face to face with a large mirror I’ve never seen before reflecting back a room which until a couple of hours ago, I’d never entered.

The clothes are the same. They’re flung haphazardly across an unfamiliar bed as if war broke out of the suitcase. It’s the electric plug converter’s fault. It was hiding. Then it took me so long to find the light switch I started to worry I was going mad.

What sort of room has its only light switch nowhere near the door?

Part of my grouchiness is a lack of sleep. It’s very rare I cannot sleep, but the night before I fly it’s guaranteed. I keep on waking and prodding my phone to see the clock, paranoid that I’m going to miss my flight. You would have thought with the amount of flying I’ve done recently I’d get over this.

It’s ironic that the time I came closest to missing the flight I actually arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. So much time that I treated my sister to a proper breakfast. We relaxed, started chatting about our plans and lo and behold when we finally thought to look at the screen our flight to Vienna was being boarded.

None of my many alarms failed me this morning, but it was still dark and cold outside all the same and I still awoke, worrying, many times throughout the night.

It’s hard to remember that worry is entirely internally generated and unnecessary once when there’s a multitude of different alarms on different devices all set.

Arriving in Malaga, making sure the Internet works on my phone, finding an ATM and cursing as it’s stingy about the ratio of paper to Euros was all fine.

As a side note, I listened to a podcast the other day that pointed out that just because you arrive at an airport you don’t have to rush through it, you can sit down and catch your breath for a while. You don’t have to leap right into the stream of people amassed outside the arrival hall. I consider this wise advice.

I was also fine getting the bus and even in hopping off at the right stop. A version of ‘fine’ from the newer version of the Italian Job.

John Bridger: Fine? You know what “fine” stands for, don’t you?

Charlie Croker:  Yeah, unfortunately.

JB: Freaked out…

CC: Insecure…

JB: Neurotic…

CC: And Emotional.

JB: You see those columns behind you?

CC: What about them?

JB: That’s where they used to string up thieves who felt fine.

CC: After you.

The Italian Job

A few hours later I’m in a different state of mind

The most important stuff has been extracted from the suitcase. I’ve had a cup of tea (there’s a packet of PG Tips here?) wandered outside – without following the commands of an electronic map around each corner or dragging my suitcase behind me.  I find a statue of a friendly chap playing what looks to me like a tambourine. He seems ever so jolly.

chap playing tamborine, Malaga
Tambourine man. Malaga 2016

It feels like someone caring put together this place. Someone with an eye for detail. There are random bits of coloured tiles mashed together. It is beautiful. Floral decorations accentuate balconies and I can’t help but think that Cairo could learn a lot from the brightly coloured shutters.

I like shutters. Places with sunshine have shutters. It’s a promising sign.

Big paintings on public walls draw your eye. But so do the small flourishes on signs and doorways. Minor amusements, like the clinic for bicycles amuse me. Cambridge has one of these and both the one here and the one there have half a bicycle stuck up on the wall. Spain isn’t that far away really.

Picasso was born here

I’m excited to step outside with my sketchbook and grateful for my paints. But not tonight.

I’m feeling happier by the time I’ve bought pasta. I shocked myself by understanding that the woman at the till was asking if I wanted a carrier bag ‘bolsa’, because it’s so similar to the Italian ‘borsa’, even without her pointing or holding out a bag (yes I know it’s a guessable question at the check-out, but still, you’ve got to appreciate the little achievements).

My spoken Spanish is non-existent, but how much I can read is a pleasant surprise. Context of course is everything.

I buy vegetables in the greengrocers

I stare at the courgette and the cucumber wondering which is which before making a random choice. I get back to the apartment in time to Skype my sister and tell her I’m well. I discover it is indeed a courgette as I hoped.

This span of travelling comes with a purpose. I’m in the city centre. My room is spacious, indeed is contains a substantive desk at which I now sit and a double bed where I shall sleep. I have books, my notebooks and a clear plan for writing. To find restaurants and bars, or a plaza with sculptures, benches and coffee shops takes no more than a minute or two, it’s all just outside my front door.

Malaga is a different colour to England

More tints than tones. Travel pours images and characters into my imagination, without which there would be no stories begging to be written. A woman harvesting herbs from her balcony. A child with his whole body pressed up against a glass pyramid twice his height, staring down through it into the Roman remains below the street.

What’s more, I’m not rushed. I’ve got plenty of time to explore my surroundings, and plenty of time to sit still.

Sitting still is important too

It’s easy to talk about writing without actually putting a pen to paper, or to put a pen to paper and be prolific with the word count but stingy with the produce or quality. Well-meaning isn’t enough in practice. You can be well-meaning and still wreak havoc.

If you can’t read what I write, it doesn’t count

My routine is broken. I’m here, free, and that means there can be no excuses and no complaints. I’ve got pages and pages of draft material that deserves a second look. My job here is to refine it and learn something from it. There’s space in my mind. Everything slows down to accommodate this shift of pace and I stare around me with wonder.

The slower pace suits my writing.

The to-do list doesn’t matter.

Magic stars, climate change and primary school teachers

If there was ever a day where I woke up knowing I did not want to become a teacher, it was today.

This is not to say it was something I was considering yesterday. I wasn’t. I just merely spent a few hours learning about the challenges of becoming a teacher with a dear friend and her housemate. Two lovely ladies with hearts of gold and whose bookshelves suggest an average (median I suppose) reading age of 6.

Now, the last time I listened to a conversation between trainee teachers was on a late night train in the North-West of England, and the drunken conversation I followed was enough to put any woman off ever ever ever having children. Like ever.

(Guess the CD in the car.)

Last night’s conversation was also in the North-West of England, and certainly demonstrated that there was hope as well and horror in primary education.

After dinner, I collapsed in the corner of the sofa in a flat so clean you could take photos for a magazine shoot. I clutched a cup of tea, munched through my home-made Jaffa Cake bun and watched as packed lunches were made, flowers were propped up in water and presents were diligently wrapped. No hesitation. No procrastination. No moaning about having to do the washing-up.

Thirty packets of magic stars, ordered over the Internet because you can’t get the big bags at the local supermarket, tumbled into a gift bag.

“The kids are all my magic stars.”

I read a book about cow farts and global warming. The illustrations were gorgeous. Disappointingly though, climate change isn’t on the curriculum for the children in these ladies’ classes. Physics next term is stars. They’re all going to dress up as astronauts. I think they should study droughts, floods and hurricanes.

Shouldn’t stars come second to the Earth?

The cuddly elephant interrupted with a song and a chorus erupted around me.

They’re insane, I concluded. They’ve taken on the characters of the children they teach.

But they really do care. And that’s rather reassuring.

“Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”

I’m reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s a book about creativity and it’s unscientific to say the least.

It’s the self-help book like Eat, Pray, Love isn’t.

As a quick detour, it’s probably worth mentioning Gilbert’s crazy success. I’m always uncertain how to speak about Eat, Pray, Love. It’s a book that’s easy to label, and easy to complain about. It’s also brilliant marketing. It’s divisive. Some people resonate with it as a story of a woman coming to terms with herself after a divorce. With others it’s the courage to chase a dream. Others it’s a portrayal of privilege and self-absorption.

For me it’s a story about decision making.

Whether you see it as a curse or a delight, Eat, Pray, Love’s spell changes how you see Elizabeth Gilbert’s other works. I gave a sceptic my copy of The Signature of All Things to read as a dare and to make a point. My friend admitted surprise. Big Magic however, where some of the ideas are about as believable as fairy dust, is unapologetically not serious literature.

It’s a self-help book with a pink cover and no references in the back.

It talks about belief.

So I wrote it off. I’m a serious person, and thoroughly educated in the art of scientific thinking.

Then I was recommended and then lent it, by a physicist.

So I started reading, and reached the section called ‘enchantment’ which is a little too fanciful for my tastes, but the writing was pretty, at times funny and immensely easy to absorb, so I persisted. The book felt like a guilty pleasure. Something I was aware that people more intelligent than me might roll their eyes at, which would feel like they were mocking me for my reading choices and make me question my taste.

Insecurities abound. I neither need permission nor validation. Which is exactly what the book is actually about. It’s the story of owning the freedom to make what you want to make and loving it regardless. It’s a simple message and maybe it’s easy to mock the simplicity or naivety of it.

What’s more, I can’t help but link it in my mind to Murakami’s What I Think About When I Think About Running. Both are books about belief and perseverance and a pure and healthy love of writing.

Turns out I was surprised after all.

What books have you judged by the cover and been pleasantly surprised by?

Flying home

[Written on my phone on the plane home from Cairo.]

Flying home Dendara Egypt Ceiling

This evening will be my first in England this year.

Home.

We each have a different resting point between curiosity and comfort. Certainly my equilibrium sits further on the curiosity side than many people I know. It’s a position of balance only I can recognise, and yet it’s also just a theory, based on too many assumptions.

Free of friction.

I sit aboard a plane, falling to the ground. Although, as it’s controlled and predicted, we prefer to describe it as landing.

My stomach churns. It seems to rise and fall inside of me carried by the planes momentum. Yet this sensation, twisting and tumbling, can be falsified with the power of my mind.

It’s not a simple balance between curiosity and comfort. There are many forms of curiosity – that which you experience yourself by watching, that you discover by doing and that of reaching for the encyclopedia. There are similarly many forms of comfort. Luxurious surroundings make you feel physically comfortable. A deep mattress and warmth. Family and friends give another type of comfort, one of belonging and security of place within a heavily populated world. Religion and traditions give comfort, in the same way as habits – like taking the same route to work.

Sometimes curiosity leads to danger and exhaustion. Sometimes its allure commands attention that should be allocated to responsibilities.

But too much comfort too can be damaging. Stagnation, obesity, taking our privileges for granted.

Why travel? Why seek the world?

Why return to a place called home and the arms of those with love for you?

It’s a tumbling feeling. Freewheeling through life, trying to find a grip.

I wake in Cairo. I fly, and I tumble. Searching to satisfy this curiosity, desperate for the comfort of belonging. For a fleeting moment I land.

And then, when I’ve taken that deep breath and regained my composure, I’ll be off again. Chasing a dream.

Photos: Taken at Hathor’s Temple, Dendara.