This Is This

A colleague came up to me the other day. I used to work with him a lot but we don’t see each other much these days.

Me: Hi Colleague, how are you?

Colleague: Hey, good. When are you going on holiday?

Me: I’m not. I mean, how do you know I’m going on holiday? Which one? Where am I going?

With each question I grew more defensive and he looked at me like I was slowly writing the word “TWAT” on my forehead as I spoke to him.

Colleague: You’re going to New York, aren’t you?

Me: Yes I am. I don’t remember telling you that. How do you know?

Colleague: Um, Other Colleague showed me your blog and you said you were going to New York.

Me: Oh.

The “oh” is loaded. It’s a loaded “oh” and I’m waving it around with the safety off, in a panic with a look of puzzled anxiety on my face.

Colleague: I just read a couple of posts. It’s a nice site. More of a site than a blog.

Me: It’s more of a site, yes. Thanks very much. I am going to New York, but not for ages.

He gets distracted and I walk away.

I come away from that thinking, “Fuck. I’m the blogging dork, and I’m rude.”

The words: “I don’t remember telling you that” echo around my head, like the great golden bozo that I must have seemed. In my dreaded memory, I add insolent arrogance to the sound of my voice, like it’s going through an effects pedal with the tone setting cranked up to “dickhead”.

He’s probably come away from that thinking, “So bloggers are rude and self-absorbed. And Cliff is odd.”

It was the first time someone at work who didn’t know I had a blog has come up and said something about my this site back to me and I went and got all weird about it.

I still find it strange, the whole blog/reality division.

Like when my dad calls me.

Dad: How have you been?

Me: Oh, fine. Just great yeah.

Dad (incredulous): Really?

Me: What’s up?

Dad: Well you had a cold.

Me: I did, yeah. I’m fine now. How did you know?

Dad: You wrote about it. You had time off work. It was on your blog. You said you suspected some kind of mucus cartel was at work.

Me: Oh. Yeah, I did, but I’m OK now.

I like that people are reading here, but it always feels like no one is, which is why it’s easy to open up and be so uncharacteristically forthcoming.

It’s harder that I’m a lot more open in writing that I am in person apart from to a very few people. I tend to be sincere with writing, which makes people think “Woah! What is your deal?” when actually there isn’t one. I’m quite an open person, but insecurity often makes me seem rude.

Don’t think that what gets written down here isn’t real just because I don’t pepper my speech with confessional pithy laconicisms. Who does that?

So colleague who asked about New York - I’m sorry. You’re very welcome and my eyes have adjusted to the flicker of a spark of recognition.

I always make sure there’s nothing in here I wouldn’t want everyone to know, so you’re not intruding by asking me anything you like in reference to something you have read here.

It’s very cool to think this website is a part of someone’s day, and that honesty is the shortest distance between two people.

On a separate note, I am listening to Sigur Ros which is beautiful but the lady keeps singing something that sounds like “Sam Torrence” and I have an image of the smirking moustachioed European Ryder Cup captain from 2002.

It’s like with the Portuguese samba jazz thing from earlier. I keep hearing random phonetic English words in it, sung with an Icelandic accent.

Olaf, his mum’s a man. Sam Torrence chowder like cherry custard.

Dear’s knocking bonkers. After me with frosty clues.

8. Leaving Brindisi
Map (at sea, but the map won’t accept that as a location)

I boarded the European Spirit an hour early, before the other passengers and their cars, and found a bench on the top deck at the back of the ship. I stretched out on the seat and opened my beer with my penknife.

The sun was setting over Brindisi when we set sail. I started talking to an American sitting next to me.

“So,” I said, “what did you think of Brindisi?”

“It was…-shady.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Yes. I think shady would sum up this town.”

“In a nutshell.”

“Are you talking about Brindisi?” said a lady in her mid-twenties. She wore a long flowery dress and was reminiscent of the elegant Victorian colonialists who travelled in totally unsuitable clothing. She was very attractive.

The American man smiled at her. “What a town.”

We exchanged brief explanations of our origins, where we had been, and where we were going.

 His name was John and he taught Mechanical Engineering at a Californian University. He was twenty-eight, wore his hair in a ponytail and spoke a lot like Jack Nicholson, but I think he was laying it thick her account.

He had been to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls.

“What I’ve been looking for everywhere,” he said, “is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.”

I reached into my rucksack.

(more…)

I wrote a little bit yesterday about CS Lewis and his take on the existence of a soul. He became a Christian at thirty-one, joining his friend JRR Tolkein.

Lewis became an Anglican, which disappointed the erstwhile creator of Middle Earth, himself a Catholic. While perhaps not holier than CS Lewis, he certainly possessed more initials in his name, which seemed to carry him through in hard times.

But my point is that there may be a soul, and there may not. That’s the beauty of belief - it’s up to the individual.

Beliefs are fine when they bring comfort. I believe the building I work in will not fall down today, and this reassures me. It helps me through the day to think I’ll walk out and make my way home without a scratch on me. And sure enough, that’s what happens.

I know the building I work in will fall down, because they do. I believe that as well, but I don’t think it will happen today. I hang on to that belief so that I don’t skid off into thinking about the worst case scenario which probably isn’t going to happen. Probability always plays a big part of my belief system.

I think it’s great to believe in something as long as you are prepared at any moment to abandon your beliefs and do what you think is right.

It’s important to make sure your beliefs enhance your life, rather than the other way around.

And as soon as they don’t, you still have to do what you should.

Tomorrow: Scientists discover cure for Summertime Blues. Rock and roll puritans unavailable for comment.

7. Sleazy Brindisi
Map

One rule of overnight budget train travel is that whatever the compartment smells like, that’s what your mouth is going to taste like in the morning.

It is a maddening sensation to have a paste of cheap perfume, stale cigars and southern Italian body odour lining your mouth as the first rays of sunshine filter into the carriage through the acrylic curtains.

Leaving the station with a battalion of other backpackers, Robert, Pino, the Australian and I were descended on by swarms of ticket agents, each one claiming that their shipping lines offered the best deal to Greece. We walked straight through them and headed straight for the office by the dock.

I shunned a first class ticket with private cabin, opted not for a second class ticket with shared bunks, not even a third class ticket with reclining chairs, but a fourth class deck ticket. This entitled me to as much floor space as I needed. I thought that unless it rained, which seemed unlikely, I would want to be on deck anyway. I would be more comfortable stretching out with my mat and sleeping bag than spending a rough night in an airline-style seat next to people even half as dirty as me.

My last shower had been in Barcelona and since then I had been drunk, stoned, sunbaked and I had spent way too long in the same clothes.

I started dreaming out loud of paying for a shower once I got on the boat, which would have been two pounds well spent, but Robert told me not to as it was easy to slip into one at odd times. “Dude, what are they going to do, check your ticket as you go in?”

The port town was best described by Robert: “Brindisi sucks”. For the rest of the boring day, the industrial town in the heel of the boot of Italy was referred to as “sleazy Brindisi”.

(more…)

I’ve been involved in Post of the Week, a cracking good idea that goes like this:

Post of the Week is ready, and open, and waiting for YOU.

THE MISSION

1. To highlight great writing on personal blogs.

2. To draw attention to blogs that you might not have heard of before.

3. To point you to one absolute guaranteed humdinger of a blog post, once a week, every week.

Finally, and almost a year after the idea was first mooted, Post of the Week is ready for public display. I bet you never thought you’d live to see the day, did you?

Absolutely everyone everywhere is heartily recommended to do any or all of the following:

1. Nominate cracking good blog posts for inclusion, via the comments box in the “Call for nominations” section.

2. Volunteer their services as a guest judge, for one weekend only.

3. Publicise the site on their own blogs. Pimp it, kids. Pimp it HARD.

Post of the Week everyone.

Oh, and I’m the Head Judge this week, so get some good posts in. Not mine, because I can’t win, but I know you read other blogs.

Come on, you think I’m stupid? I’ve seen the way you click around, all bookmarked to the nines. Of course I don’t mind, I just wished we’d talked about it first. In fact, I’m kind of into the idea. We could get one of those tabbed browsers.

I’ve crossed the line haven’t I?

Post of the Week.

I slipped into you, into your conversation, as easily as a newborn soul slips into its first skin.

I read that over the weekend and it blew me away and just now I blew someone else away with it. A guy who always reads books on the bus and is sitting next to me as I write this. If I can flatter myself with one vanity, it’s that my fellow commuters see me working on this computer every morning and they might wonder what I’m doing.

The more astute might figure that I’m not doing work, as I’m not looking up and around and thinking, or sending emails and closing and opening files. No, I’m typing - solidy and non-stop and occasionally changing the music in my ears to put a different slant on the writing. As I’ve said many times, writing is a creative process over which I have no control.

I’d like to be better at it and produce stuff that stops people in their tracks, even though the tracks we make these days are rare. But that’s what the above phrase did to me this morning. It comes from the blog of a comedian who think is great - a guy called Liam McEneany.

I typed the phrase in bold at the top of the page like I did here, to write about it, but now this post has taken a different course, because my fellow commuter glimpsed up from his book (David Crystal - The Stories of English) and read it on my screen.

Then he paused in thought, closed his book on his thumb, and has been in that pose long enough for me to type this entire post. He probably thinks I’m smarter than I am.

I know it doesn’t mean I’m stupid just because I can admire the work of my contemporaries. Henry Ford was obsessed with the achievements Thomas Edison. Tolkien was fascinated with the work of his friend CS Lewis.

Speaking of souls and him, CS Lewis said: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

This is something I don’t know anything about and I would urge you to question anyone who says they do, but you can’t deny its beauty on this cold, cloudy Monday.

I hope your week’s all right. Have a good one.

6. Robert And The Spanish Steps
Map

“I’ve got an Italian girlfriend,” said a Moroccan who started talking to me in the corridor, “all she think about is money. Money, money, nothing else. Italy is a nice country; beautiful weather and nature, but the people: they think that money is everything.”

I told him he spoke good English. We had turned inland away from the coast and were heading inland. I had been lucky with the weather so far.

“Money! Dollars, pounds, francs, deutschemarks, lire-”

“Where did you learn your English?”

“In school. I was a waiter in Livorno. Lots of American customs. And you? English?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you from?”

“England.”

He laughed. “Oh you English! Very Funny! Benny Hill!”

“Thanks, I’m from Manchester.”

“I come from Morocco, but it’s not very nice. The people. They are horrible.”

“Maybe they only want to make a living,” I said.

He shook his head out the window as if to say that I’d never know in a million years how horrible they really were.

“You see!” he said, “Money again!”

The train stopped in Milan and Pino and I leaned out the window and bought a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches each from a man wheeling a trolley along the platform. We wolfed one down then and put the other away for later.

In the half hour before we got to Rome, Jason and I began brushing up on some Italian from a phrase book he had. My Italian was a little better than my Spanish, but that wasn’t saying much.

Pino and I headed for the train door as we slowed down in the approach to Rome Termini station to change trains for Brindisi, since that’s where I was now headed. Jason was stopping of in Rome for a few days, so we said goodbye and left him in the compartment while he got his things together.

We were standing by the train doors in the standing space they have at the end of carriages between the coupling and that car’s compartments when we stopped at a small station in the Roman suburbs. The bathroom door behind us opened.

“Is this it?” said a twenty year old with disorderly blond hair. He had what that prime-time accent; a television Californian inflection.

“No, you probably want Termini,” I said.

“Rome, right?”

“Yes.”

(more…)

The week before last I was talking about posting a chapter a day for AOMR, but I wanted to have a day off.

It’s been a week and half of a week and I need some time off, so I’m going to post story entries on weekdays only.

Plus, fewer people visit this site at weekends, so it’s better to post when you’re actually here to read something. If I’ve learned anything over my blogging life, it’s that it’s more chicken than egg. Or egg. I think.

What I have done is put links to all the chapters together on a page here which you can find in the navigation sidebar. Please feel free to add it to your favourites or send it around. I’ll update that page every weekend with the latest updates from throughout the week.

Anyway, what AOMR fans might not know is that it was written seventeen years ago. I was eighteen in 1990, and vanity publishing wasn’t something technology would stretch to. Or my budget. Or my vanity.

But after blogging a while, I thought I would dust it off. It was originally stored on 5 1/2 inch floppy disks, then 3 1/2 inch floppies, then on every hard drive of every PC I’ve had since. It was printed out and the pages were stored away in a folder, then for the last two years it has dangled from my keys on a USB storage thing.

It has travelled further than the journey I took when I started writing it and it is nearly as old as I was when I took the trip, so I though why not put it online, where at least someone can read it.

I’ll go now because I’m concentrating on about about a million other things.

And I’m not writing that well. 

Short, stacatto sentences.

On the page. That you read.

I don’t write about work on here, because I don’t want to lose my job, but yesterday I dodged a bullet. Surely some day one of them will have my name on it - especially with a name like Jones.

But today’s good because I’m listening to New Sensation by INXS, which is the first song I ever played on radio. I wanted it to be an ass-kicking pop song and in 1987, pop couldn’t kick much more ass.

For self-indulgent reasons, that’s the first bit of publishing or broadcasting I ever did, so it will always mean sump’n.

Funny story actually, because we shouldn’t have been doing a radio show on account of the technicality of not having a radio licence. It seemed stupid that it was harder getting the rights to send music out of a room than it was to pull fish out of a river, but those were the times.

Anyway, it was 7 am in Surrey, we were there, me and Adam Meiklejohn, music at the ready. We had told our friends what time we were going out and when the hour came around, we hit the switch and the equipment hummed into life and the opening guitar riff stabbed out across the airwaves.

Our transmitter had been put together by a kid in the science class, who encased the whole thing in a biscuit tin because he said the metal would give it a few more bits of boost.

I still don’t know if that’s true, and I’m 35. He was 16 when he built the thing, so it shows how much I know. But then I guess the phrase “bits of boost” kind of gave that away.

When Calling All Nations ended, there was strange noise coming through our headphones.

“What the heck is that?” I said on air.

I would have said “fuck”, but you know, I am a professional.

“Vector nine, Aldershot and Hampshire. BA281 climbing 17453. 17453 climbing.”

Or something.

This carried on for a time, while with other posh voices belonging to men staring down their fourties made confident announcements about things I couldn’t understand.

I looked out the window and every time a plane flew over we would hear a pilot’s voice and broadcast the signal.

What we were doing was certainly illegal, possibly dangerous and none of our friends heard the show.

There was a very small, unsuspecting audience who caught me twittering on about daily rubbish as they made their way somewhere else.

Thank god times have changed.

5. And Eastward
Map

The train left Barcelona on time and arrived in Cerbere, just over the French border at eleven o’clock, or twenty three hundred in “train time”, which I was growing used to using. I changed to a French train which left for Nice an hour later. I thought I would drop in on my mother on the way through and grab a large meal and some fresh clothes.

I found an empty compartment but was chased out by an Italian woman who I think said she had reserved the seats for her family, so I went to the next compartment, where I heard people speaking English. I was getting tired.

“These seats taken?” I asked them, pointing to some empty seats.

“Go ahead,” said a male voice apparently belonging to a New Yorker my age.

It was pitch dark because there was no power, as the train had not started moving and the lights on the platform were off. I rolled my rucksack off my shoulder and took a seat.

“You try to reserve too?” It was a Brooklyn accent.

“Couldn’t face the line. How about you?” I said to the other dark figure.

“Yeah, waited for an hour and a half.” South African. Male, possibly early twenties.

“You English?” asked the Brooklyner.

I gave a simplified account of my origins. He told me he was from Brooklyn and he enjoyed us talking about New York for a while.

The South African was actually born in Staffordshire but had lived in Pretoria for most of his life. He had just done his military service there and told us he needed visa for a lot of European countries. He was Jason and the New Yorker was Pino.

(more…)

Have you ever listened to a really strong rhythm and really felt like you get it? Like if you were just given a percussion instrument you could totally join in?

I get that with a lot of Cuban and West and South African music. It totally fits. It’s challenging yet familiar. Maybe a bit like the winter. It feels like I’m a part of it, following the rhythm so closely that it I imagine I’m doing it to, even though I know I couldn’t.

That’s kind of what blogging is like. Follow me now. I can read along to a good blog. Because they flow and unravel and evolve over the days and weeks and other people are reading, too - you’re reading along, not just reading and that’s a good thing.

So you’re reading along and you’re a part of it, even if you’re not joining in, because the blog probably wouldn’t be there if it didn’t have an audience (no matter what the blogger tells you).

I still feel blogging is more about the format than what is written, but we’re changing that. People used to say “I spoke on the telephone last night.” Now they just tell you what they said. I have a telephone and I barely mention it.

People will say “I heard about this thing”, or “I thought of something”, or they’ll tell a joke, instead of mentioning the blog first and leading with that before telling you what the writer said.

It has already happened with the Internet, because folks don’t say “I’m going online” anymore. They just say “I’m going to order that book” or “I’m going check the scores” or “I need to get in touch with Mike”.

But with blogging things have taken a step back where the format has this significance. The play’s the thing. A singer doesn’t say: “I’m going to do some singing now”. She goes: “Here’s a song.” Or she just sings. And there it is. And the touched listener doesn’t say: “I heard some singing” or “There was this song” - they just feel it and pass it on to someone else.

So it’ll go with blogging. I’m happy for the blog to disappear, or at least for it to become so diluted that what it is doesn’t matter as much as what it does. The newspapers are seeing to that already, with their columnists blogs. And that’s cool - some of them are great writers and the newspapers are only so big.

Benjamin Frankin said “If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.”

The person who can do both has the world at their feet.

Meg wrote a great post about the creative blogging process which you can read all about on her website simply by clicking here. If you missed it that link will be repeated in just a minute. Thanks for reading today. And that link again to Meg’s post can be found here.

Reader Tom makes a good case, so I have turned the comments on under the story posts.

This is a blog for god’s sake, what the hell did I think I was doing?

So thanks for the feedback. Comments are enabled and we’re going on.

4. Now You’re Here
Map

We packed up in the morning and filled our bottles on the way to the station. The station had a border checkpoint in on it so the western side of the platform was run by the Spanish authorities and the eastern side was entirely French.

We entered the station at the French side of the platform and were waved towards a fence which divided the station, on the opposite side of which there was a Spanish flag. We walked through the doorway where a Spanish policeman checked our passports. He asked me something in Spanish. I caught the odd word from my French and said: “Barcelona”.

“Change at the next station and take the bus there to Barcelona,” I think he said.

My disappointment at not being able to finish the trans-Pyrenean train was outweighed by the scenery of the bus trip. The natural beauty was more dramatic than any I had seen in France as the wooded mountain peaks became more prominent and the rock formations looked painted.

Barcelona soon added a touch of reality to the fantastic voyage. We touched down in the stifling city at the train station and then took the rediculously luxurious air-conditioned subway train to the Placa de Catalunya and the statue of Columbus at the end of La Rambla where we had arranged to meet the girls.

By the sheer stroke of coincidence, which have always hounded me throughout my life in equal measures of blessing and curse, Tesni had met up with Yorvick and Matt, two old friends from school in England and they arrived shortly after we did. Tesni led us to the nearest bar. She was born in Almeria, down the coast to the west and she knew her way around. I ordered two beers and a large cheeseburger before I went into the toilets to change into a pair of shorts and wet my hair. The heat was personal, but the meal came to one pound fifty so I promised myself another one before I left town that afternoon.

We walked down La Rambla, Barcelona’s famous boulevard. This is a tree lined promenade that descends from the Placa to the Columbus Monument at the waterfront. It’s like the Champs Elysees in Paris, if you have ever been there, but without the cars, therefore more people. W. Somerset Maugham described the sights along the street as the most beautiful in the world. The sights, he said, are not found in the trees and rustic architecture, but in the people, the bird vendors, sidewalk artists, and street musicians.

Coming down from the beautiful mountains into a city didn’t bother me because there was still so much to see. Like the Pyrenees, Barcelona was also a feast for the senses. It felt like I was moving on, really travelling. I was saying to myself “OK, you spent last night on a mountainside with your girl and cooked macaroni and cheese, but that was yesterday. Now you’re here.”

(more…)

Today is the first day upon which snow has fallen. I know I rail against the winter, but it’s not the winter as such, it’s more my lack of dealing it. I mean I prefer the cold to the heat, because you can always make yourself warmer, but it’s just that it gets to me. It’s like a bad relationship: it’s a tolerance - good points among the misery, mundane yet familiar enough to cope with. Winter is like a bad job that pays well.

Well, today there’s money in the bank, because when I was holding my five year old daughter up to the window, I could see the reflection of excitement and wonder of her beautiful face superimposed on the blanket of snow across the gardens out the back of my house.

I kissed her goodbye and pulled on boots instead of shoes, grabbed a hat and left the house feeling good. And were there birds I’m certain they would have been singing our names.

I put on Hugh Masekela, because South African jazz is hilarious in the snow, got my bus, sat down and wrote this.

On closer inspection, my man in the Middle East (although I’m beginning to think he’s neither) writes:

Strangely, I can access Very Big Hosting Company - maybe it is just you…

Nope - sorry to undermine your paranoia, I can now access This Is This….

Of course, it could be that they saw your editorial and lifted the IP ban - instant online direct action?

hmmmm….

Ok, now i feel as though *i’m* being watched

So that’s all clear then. Maybe there is some truth in it. Maybe he got it wrong.

He’s travelling round doing his international development thing on what he describes as a “field trip”. I asked if it was the kind where they give you little cartons of juice and stickers to collect as you go round the buildings, but he has yet to reply.

Can I just say that I will not stand having my paranoia undermined. Oh, you’d love that wouldn’t you?

3. Leaving Aquitaine
Map

It was sad getting into the taxi to the station. Lindsay came with us to catch his train to Toulouse. The goodbye my friends sent us off with was as warm as the welcome, but in all honesty it felt good to be moving, which was half the intended purpose of the trip, if there were such a thing at all. I knew I would miss the boys, as it would be a long time before I saw them again in England.

The taxi driver was a fifty year old French man and like many locals was of Spanish descent. He spoke Spanish and German but all he could say in English was “I love you” and “shut the door”.

He said that the UK was more independent than France because it was an island and we agreed that the temperature was hot, but not as hot as yesterday. He said it was a good thing we weren’t going to the Var or the Alpes-Maritimes regions.

“Why’s that?”

“Fires. All over Provence,” he said, “because it’s so hot.”

“It is very hot.”

“It’s mostly arson. We used to cut their heads off, you know.”

“Who’s that?”

“The arsonists.”

“No, I mean who cut their heads off?”

“Oh, the firemen, the town hall.” He took one hand off the steering wheel and sliced it through the air. “Chop! Fires were down ninety percent for fifty years.”

(more…)

You’ll notice that I turned comments off on the chapters of All Of Monday’s Reasons. It’s not that I don’t want feedback - please send it as always.

The reason is that I’ll eventually combine all the posts into one page when I’m a little further down the line and having lots of comments dotted throughout the thing is going to break the flow when the whole story is on big page. So I thought it would be better to just turn the things off than let you have your say on now and then dump the comments when the whole thing is finished.

But drop me a mail, or leave messages in between the posts if you like.

I’m having a great time writing the thing, anyway, so thanks for reading.

Dear BBC News 24,

I was watching your channel last night at about 7pm and your weather man - sorry - meteorological forecast analyst, was predicting the unseasonably low temperatures over the next coming days.

After telling the viewers that it was going to be cold, he said, in a friendly way: “I’m not going to be the nanny and tell you what that means. You know what to do.”

I love him.

How refreshing to not have a weather forecaster tell us to pack a brolly or wrap up warm. It was a blow to the patronising attitude with which we are treated by all figures of authority.

If the traffic is bad, we don’t need to be told to set off early, we just want to know how long the delays are.

If I am driving in a school zone, I don’t also need to know they speed limit in a built up area, or to be reminded that speed kills and have additional signs depicting children walking.

If we kept being reminded of all these things, we will become the walking dead.

So hats and gloves off to the News 24 weatherman at 7pm on Monday 22 January for telling it like it is and leaving it at that.

Sincerely,

Cliff Jones

2. Westward
Map

It was four thirty when I woke up on the first day of the trip. Leo, my girlfriend at the time, had been on holiday with me in France, where we were staying with my mother in Valbonne, back up from the coast some way in the foothills. We ate our cornflakes in the cool morning as we watched the first rays of sunlight graze the lower Alps under the clear sky.

My mother ran through a mental and verbal check-list to make sure we had everything, but I might as well have already been hundreds of miles away.

We had planned to catch the six nineteen from Antibes to Toulouse, and my dad came to the station to see us off. It had been months since I last saw my parents together and that seemed more remarkable than what I was about to do.

The train pulled in on time and I said goodbye to my parents, almost not believing that I was finally setting out for the journey I had been looking forward to for years. I was even more quiet than usual that morning as I wondered how I would react to a month on the road. Despite the veneer of teenage arrogance, looking back now I don’t think you ever really know how you will react to things when you are eighteen.

They waved to me from the platform, I sat down, the train moved west and I sank deeper into thought. Leo brought me back to the straight up and now as the train pulled away when she pushed her shoulder against mine and said,”This is it…”

This was it, and I loved it just for the moving. It was turning light, with the sun still low.

(more…)

I have achieved one of the highest honours in the blogging world. I speak not of the Bloggies, or the Swampies, nor the like. No.

A friend of mine wrote to me today. He who works for in international development in Egyptian and travels around on business throughout the Middle East.

He emailed:

I’m in Morocco at the moment where you’ll be interested to know the government appears to have blocked your website. Probably not just you, they’ve probably blocked IP ranges for the usual blog hosters.

Now, this website is hosted by a Very Big Hosting Company who host lots of other things as well as blogs, so there is no practical way for a box full of servers to know this is a blog, especially as Very Big Hosting Company do not label this site as such.

I use Wordpress as an editorial interface, but everything sits on the web space provided by Very Big Hosting Company, which could be anything.

I explained all this to my friend, and my man in the Middle East wrote explained how web stuff work in Morocco:

All networks here flow through the Ministry of Information. They are preventing me from accessing This Is This, as I get a 404 Page Not Found error message. I can tell it’s being blocked because it works fine if I use a proxy server.

So for some reason, this site is web non grata in those parts.

You can’t read This Is This in Morocco. Fact.

“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.”
Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain

1. Oyumni

I stood on the platform, looked up and thought ahead, hoping I wouldn’t expect too much of the journey, nor it from me. I wasn’t worried about being alone and away from home. My passport had been burning a hole in my pocket all through the last of my school days and now it was packed safe and close, along with my life savings of £500 and various pieces of equipment to keep me clean, fed, sheltered and comfortable.

Equipment
Backpack, containing:
One-man tent, lightweight, about a foot and a half high
British Army surplus water bottle
Mug
Parafin cooker with two pans and fuel
Knife and fork
Sleeping bag
Foam sleeping mat
Sweatshirt, Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason tour
Pair of jeans
Two t-shirts
Brightly coloured Bermuda shorts
Swimming trunks
Flip-flops
Hiking books
Bandana
Baseball cap, New York Mets
Towel
Book -The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Book - Europe by Train (out of date)
Camera - Pentax P30 camera with zoom lens
First aid kit
Note pads
Pens
Harmonica
Sunglasses

It was July 1990 on a platform of the railway station in Antibes, in between Nice and Cannes in the south-east corner of France, where I was waiting to catch the first of many trains that would carry me over the next month. There in the days before MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS and self-heating coffee in a can, I still thought remote contols were clever, so hard were the times.

My upbringing and my life before this aren’t really of much consequence to the travels at hand, but there are some things I should tell you to let you know why I started this trip out in the first place, so indulge me for a moment and then we’ll be on our way.

I was born in the north of England in Macclesfield, near Manchester, but I don’t know the place because I moved south after two months and never went back. When I was five, I moved to Philadelphia, where I lived until I was eleven. After that I to moved Nice, in France, and when I was fourteen my parents broke up and moved to separate houses, at which juncture I returned to England, to a boarding school, which become home for the next four years.

Because I had moved so much, I didn’t feel English, French, or American. I was a stranger in the UK. It didn’t bother me, but I felt more like I was from nowhere than from lots of places, so I was happy travelling.

The Native American Sioux believe that once in every young man’s life he hears a call and feels a longing to discover his surroundings. This is known as the “oyumni”, or roaming; when that person feels they must satisfy their curiosity of what lies outside the closed community. Travel, with this in mind, is as much an exploration of the self as it is one’s surroundings.

—
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If you try and send a text to a landline here in the UK it ends up being read out by a real voice. Sometimes it’s a computer, sometimes it’s Tom Baker from Doc Who. He also does the segway voice overs on Little Britain. 

If you like your fancy tickled once in a while, you could do worse than visit http://www.thedoctorsays.co.uk/

Anyway, someone thankfully remove their hands of time long enough to provide us with this gem of a site. Highlights include Baby It’s Cold Outside, a classy duet with Professor Stephen Hawking, and lots of swearing.

Colleague: I’m not taking that from you, you skinny loser.

Me: I can’t believe you said that, you fucking racist.

Colleague: Bollocks. How is that racist?

Me: My mum was half skinny.

Colleague: I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.

Me: Don’t mention it.

Colleague: And I’m skinny anyway. So are we cool?

Me: Yeah.

Sado dish asserts amour, Walt says.

Steve Vai’s soy priviledge, fishboy.

Cirque douche tea photograph music-a-ohhh.

Tempura so young, so young, big city.

Temp curacao New York in grotty car.

Podgy in contra on fondant toupee.

(Stan Getz plays out the tenor, Astrid sings some stuff out of tune in English, and everyone’s happy.)

It seems a lot of people who write blogs these days are producing books made up of their posts.

That’s fine, but it’s not me, so instead I’ll write blog posts of book chapters. A blook. A bog.

I’ll do the regular posts here, full of the usual wiseassery and shenaniganning that you may have come to expect of this, but you’ll get a story as well.  Sound OK with you?

The story is called All Of Monday’s Reasons and it’s based around a journey I took by myself around Europe and into Asia in 1990 when I was eighteen. It’s decent novel size, and you can skip the posts if you don’t want to commit, and it will be broken up into sections in such a way that you can dip in and out and pick up the story without too much trouble.

If I post a chapter a day, it’ll carry us through until springtime. God knows something has to.

All Of Monday’s Reasons.

Starts Monday. And that’s why.

So David Beckham is off to earn round about two million pounds a month playing football for the LA Galaxy. The cruellest twist in the deal is that his son will grow up in Beverly Hills with the name Brooklyn.

This is like growing up in Hampstead with the name Warrington.

And his mum is called Posh, as if to protest even more.

On Saturday, my one of my top two weekend days of all time, Everton (my football team of choice, not that I had one) played Reading at Goodison Park.

If you who don’t know much about football, or me, here’s a little context. I support Everton, who play in Liverpool, where my family is from. Liverpool is an industrial town in the north of England with a rich culture and heritage, but it’s a bit scruffy. It makes Manchester look posh.

So imagine my surprise when Sylvester Stallone, sorry - Hollywood’s Sylvester Stallone - took to the turf before kick off, waving an Everton scarf and wearing a cheap bomber jacket with the club badge on it.

I ran into Sly once in a small art gallery in Philadelphia (not the Musuem of Art with the steps and everything, but a smaller one out of town, and yes, everyone runs up the steps of the MoA while their friends sing the music so you can pretend you’re in the movie).

I was about 16, and Rocky walked in with some friends into the small house and stood about 10 feet away from me. My first impression was how small he was. He must be five and nothing. Anyway, me and my friends start doing the voice to each other while he’s buying his ticket. “Yo, I wanna look at da pictures. You, know, artists and paintin’s. Youze got scultchers?”

We made sure we were out of earshot, lest the Italian Stallion open one of Warhol’s famous cans to reveal that it contained not Cambell’s Soup, but in fact whoop-ass. (nice)

I saw Rocky 2 at the movies in 1979 and I was blown away. It was the first time I had been to the pictures without my parents and I went into the city with our babysitter and her boyfriend. Seeing Rocky in a cinema in Philly must be like seeing U2 in Dublin, or Monet in the Louvre. Or eating a salade nicoise in the Cours Salaya. It’s so right that to do anything else would feel wrong.

The crowd was all a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ with their “Go Rock!” and stuff and the air exploded with ovations whenever your spirit leapt. We were the heart strings with a brass section - and we were all Philadelphia.

As Rocky fought the odds, I fought back the tears, just as I would years later when I walked out on the turf at Goodison Park.

And then one day, last weekend, he did the same. And something else came full circle.

Related posts:
Walking on the turf
Picture

I have some problems with Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson’s performance in Braveheart was criticised as wooden and people thought that he couldn’t play a convincing Scotsman, but since then it has emerged that he is an abusive and racist alcoholic, so - well, you know, fair play to him.

I grew up with the Lethal Weapon movies and now I can not meet anyone with the last name “Riggs” without saying it in my head in a bad South African accent.

“Rdrdrrdrdriggzz.”

Which brings me neatly on to Apocalypto, which is like Sim City meets the Forman/Ali epic Rumble In The Jungle meets Goodfellas. Or something. I just want to point out, were pointing out needed, that I haven’t seen it.

As far as I can tell it’s a classic story of Mayan boy meets Mayan girl, they have a few laughs, think about starting a family, maybe getting a place to their own, perhaps in Tulum. You know, out of the coast.

Anyhooters, boy gets captured, boy gets even and everything’s turned upside down when the Spanish arrive.

(Scratching noise of a record needle skipping across a record that you don’t hear these days but is international for “Wait - fucking what?!?”)

Didn’t the Conquistadors arrive five hundred years after the Mayan civilisation collapsed?

That’s not just like having air strikes in westerns, we’re talking five hundred years. That’s like giving Christopher Columbus satnav and banana daiquiris.

I like the Mayans. They recorded their own history with scribes and artists and architects while we scramble for clues about our medieval rulers in the lyrics of songs written by drunken troubadours. Not that there’s anything wrong with drunken troubadours, I was one myself once.

But I have also stood atop El Castillo, the big pyramid in Chichen Itza and looked out in awe over the jungle and tried to imagine what happened to a civilisation that numbered thirteen million in its peak.

I also think they should make a version called Apocalypso with Harry Belafonte as General Patton. If we’re going to stretch the truth Mel, you might as well give them a show.

Right, that’s it. I’ve blown it.

Stop the clock.

What is it, January 14?

I am breaking a resolution. It was the one where I said consume fewer media, which I made when I looked at the sheer buttload of stuff I read, listened to and watched.

So I diligently cut back on my newspapers, blogs, tv shows, websites, podcasts and radio shows, thinking that everything would be better somehow.

And it was, but by god it was quiet. I could hear myself think until I thought of nothing. Then I had nothing to write, so for the last couple of weeks, I haven’t had anything to say. Not that I was saying all that much anyway, but people reading, so I wanted to at least say something.

Did I learn anything on my short-lived media diet? Hell yes.

I now know that if nothing’s going in, then nothing’s going to come out. The answer to good writing is influences, not blandness. You can get influences from anywhere, but you can’t get something from nowhere.

My head was made this way - who am I to argue? So bring back the podcasts, charge up the batteries, fire up the wireless and hand me the remote control.

Let’s fill up the old barrel and see what floats to the top.

By the request of my constitution, I’m happier with a head full of information and a screen full of words than the reflection of the moon in a still pool and nothing to contibute.

CS Lewis one said: “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth.”

Bring on the information.

This makes me rediculously happy.

Colleague (ripping up receipts): Fuck!

I glance up and he is looking in horror at one particular bit of paper in his hands.

Colleague: I just tore up a fiver!

I laugh probably more than I should.

Colleague: I can’t believe I just did that. Fuck.

Me: Thing is, though, that was more than five pound’s worth of fun.

I can’t tell you how much this pleases me. I like to go every few years and I must have been to New York dozens of times. I have friends there from when I was a kid and the city feels like a friend.

You know how when you love someone, little things reminds you of that person? Maybe it’s better to say that lots of things don’t let you forget them. Well, lots of things are reminding me of New York at the moment.

I watched Annie Hall last night and all the jokes and scenes and the way Woody Allen looks like a New Yorker when he’s hanging out at Paul Simon’s character’s house in LA. As if Woody Allen could hang out.

There’s an office building in New York, and you might know it, where there’s a statue right outside the door, metal and lifesize, of a guy in a suit, holding a breifcase, hailing a cab. It’s realistic, like the one of Roosevelt and Churchill on the bench in Bond Street in London, if you know that one.

Anyway, the taxi guy’s arm is out and he’s frozen in a hurried step towards the street, suit labels hanging in a timesless gust of wind and he’s shouting like Han Solo at the beginning of Empire Strikes back. You know, right before he gets defrosted? “Someone who loves you“? Wait. Come back.

I was across the street from that building in New York one day, watching the people going to work, just seeing the city do its thing, and this office worker rushes up to the building and as he passes the statue he walks by every morning, he pats the guy’s metal face without breaking his stride and goes into the building.

I like the way it’s familiar. Watching Annie Hall, which was made in the mid-seventies, you could see New York and it’s the same feeling then that it has now. Watch a film set in London in the 1970’s and it’s completely different. London in the past is like a cartoon.

I like the way New York changes but stays the same. I like the way it’s an island, so it’s always going to be the same size with roughly the same streets. I like the book stores, camera shops and the breakfasts.

And I like how the days are made up of moments.

Like the time my dad was in Grand Central Station with his wife and he walked up to the ticket office and said, with typical English non-intrusion: “Philadelphia?”

And the guy behind the grilled till says: “What about it?”

It’s so familiar but with enchantments. And that’s what magic is - when you expect one thing and get something better.

There was a lady on the bus next to me two days who was fidgety just this side of sanity.

Any more and I would have been sympathetic, any less and I would have been cool about it. Sometimes you get restless people whose movement bothers them and then they settle down, but with this lady, nothing was right. She would get settled and then something would be wrong. The seatbelt. the thing in her pocket, the light, the seatbelt again. Christ - how many adjustments can you make to you surrounding on a bus seat. Then the air conditioning vent again, for fuck’s sake.

Why is it that people behave in ways that make themselves uncomfortable and unhappy? Surely the answer is easy. The answer is easy to me. Maybe I’m being arrogant.

It just takes a little perspective.

The air conditioning is broken? Look at it as a short ride home - don’t let it worry you.

The thing in your pocket is annoying you? Look at it as a long ride home, so don’t let it worry you.

The seat’s not comfortable? You’re going home. Everything there can be just the way you like it.

For a while. And then it will change.

Sit still.

Is anyone else behaving the way you are?

Would anyone be better off if they were?

Sit still.

All this said, I am a restless person, but in the active, productive sense rather than a fidget. But it’s the things that we like least in ourselves that most annoy us about other people.

I finished a book last yesterday - The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, one of my favourite authors since I started reading books.

Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn the first American novel. Papa said a lot about Huck Finn - he said that all American literature came from that one book, and that “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” 

This reminds me of John Lennon’s declaration that “before Elvis, there was nothing”. Both slightly bold statements from talented pompous gits, but they had a point.

Mark Twain, though. He’s funny, tender, rugged, warm, insightful, vivid and take a phrase and turn it over in such a way that you can’t help but wonder if certain words hadn’t been invented on some inspired afternoon in the hope that one day someone might use them that way.

I love his writing so much that it almost makes me regret the impermanence of language because it will detract from the enjoyment future readers will have. But again, there’s something for you in that.

Truth told, if Mark Twain wrote the phone book, I would probably be among the first to read it.

I had never heard of The Mysterious Stranger, and as I read it, I realised that one of my favourite books, Illusions by Richard Bach, was so similar that I am pretty sure that he copied it. And then the end, the final point was exactly the same.

Illusions gets a little pizzicato on the heartstrings. It’s like The Mysterious Stranger with cheese. It’s a story McTwain. I did a google search and no one else makes this comparison, which makes me either misguided or unique. The only time they both come up is in inspirational quote sites, which is understandable because they are both great books about coming of age and bittersweet tales of discovery.

Illusions has the slight edge because it is set in the American Midwest and is about hayride pilots instead and TMS is set in Austria in the middle ages with schoolkids.

But then The Mysterious Stranger was written by Mark Twain.

Now I’m no stranger to blogging and readers here are no stranger to me. So a lot of folks know that:

I had a brief but hugely rewarding friendship with Dizzy Gillespie
I played the saxophone on the Gerry Raferty hit song Baker Street
I was in an emergency landing in a plane in the desert
I can not see the difference between red and green*

…among other things that I have shared that, just like everyone else, make me different.

But I still have a few doozies up my sleeve for blogging droughts. Or at least I did, until I was tagged by Anna.

1. When I was a kid, our family used to get Christmas cards -
from Kurt Waldheim
It’s a long story, but the Secretary General of the UN used to greet our seasons. At the time I was more impressed that he used to be an actual stormtrooper. But then I found it wasn’t the kind of stormtrooper I thought. These aren’t the cards you’re looking for.

2. My fingers all curve into the middle
So if you look at my left hand from the top, the pinky curves right and the index finger curves left. Only the middle one is straight. My right hand is the exact opposite.

3. I hate cucumber
It tastes of chewy water with a twist of something like nothing else on earth, thank god. And it stinks.

4. I can blow out air indefinitely
Non-stop that is. Someone once bet me I couldn’t hold a note on the saxophone for a whole minute. I took the challenge and held it for fourty five. At the time I wish I had known about spread betting. It’s called circular breathing and it doesn’t come in handy at all.

5. I very nearly joined the Army
I went to Sandhurst military academy for tests when I was 16, I came first in physical training out of a group of fifty candidates and I was all set. I changed my mind almost literally at the last minute, on the day of the medical and I didn’t become a soldier.

I am tagging Sam, Writer’s Moll, *, Salvadore Vincent and Sooz.

*
Wouldn’t it be interesting if all of these facts could be connected in one story?
They can’t, by the way.

Stop the clock.

I’ve done it. After two years and a bit of writing this blog, I have finally boiled down the very essence of most of what you’ll ever read here.

If you’d like to try your own This Is This posts at home, what you need to do is prepare some writing about music, add a splash of geek and throw in some wordplay. You can stir in a pinch of funny if you have any, but this is optional.

Make sure to garnish with a bit of self-centeredness by writing about your post before serving it up like this:

Bands And Musicians Whose Names Sound Like Locations In Star Wars

Tattoo-ine

Megadeathstar

Bespin Doctors

Barney Kessel Run

Mos Eisley Brothers

David Lee Hoth

Of course they did.

The Aghan national sport is something called buzkashi, which involves riding a horse into a herd of determined men intent on picking a dead sheep’s carcass of the floor and carrying it away. Still, better the sheep than you, right?

Whatever (the fuck) made us think we could beat them in a war?

Oh, and this made me laugh.

…and when we say bunkers…

Wendy got in touch with the offices here at This Is This when she found a post in the archives (wow, people do read them).

Anyway, I thought I’d add a few more.

INXS-Express
Sultry pop with a hard house backing track

Blink 182 Unlimited
Whiney power pop with no limits

Eminem People
Stanbag

Aimee Manfred Mann
Postmodern indie mixed with 60’s bollocks

Huey Lewis and the Muse
West coast pop candy with a dark centre

Earth, Wind and Fire. And Air.
A heady mix of disc(/tech)no with Gallic flair

Thelonius Punk
Dark, brooding jazz given a French techno twist

Nat King Queen
A royal flush of camped up standards. We will shock you.

The Crazy World of Jackson Brown
Folksy protest songs with a 70’s glam feel

Abba Ranks
The irony of flawlessly-crafted, perfect pop songs with homophobic overtones

Want some more do you?
Here’s the full list

It’s the bloggies coming up, and if you want to, you can nominate me for a category.

Bloggies 2007

Which category?

I don’t know.

I’m not political, this isn’t a site about music, it gets funny sometimes in a laughing at/with way, this hasn’t got the best writing and is sometimes topical (but rarely accurate) and what it lacks in design it makes up for in - erm - no, you got me.

Well, you read this stuff so something must load your modem or you wouldn’t be here right now.

So anyway, there it is.

I put it out there.

You feel free to throw it right back, or this can just be our little secret.

I love you, by the way. Really.

I should, er - I should probably go.

I’m a nice guy. Polite, mild mannered - you know, renaissance, man. But dickheads who think they own the world, me or my personal space see none of this, and why should they?

So it’s with no shame that I tell you when I got onto the bus that I launched a one man jihad on the back on someone’s headrest. Because if your beliefs are that you should recline your seat into my personal space, then my personal space becomes personal.

There are many little signs you can give people who are reclining too much.

One is to ruffle the paper over the top of their head. I did this once so obviously that the paper touched the guy’s forehead before he adjusted his seat.

The other is to lean forward and talk into your phone. One is to talk to him, but being English, you give the seat a nudge and then blame the fixtures.

BUMP! “These chairs, really.” RUFFLE. “Telegraph, sorry.”

But not me, not him and not this morning. I was trying to get my bag into the small space where I could sit behind Reclining Man and was trying to thread it in after me, until I thought, “No. Fuck it, and fuck him and fuck the seat and the bag.”

And I pulled in so that it hit the seat he was in.

Then I got out the laptop and hit the back of the headrest as I did so, first with the computer, then with my elbow. OK, there is no excuse for the elbow. I just threw that in for good measure.

After the second hit, he moved his seat up. What did I do?

“Thank you,” I said.

Sincerely.

Did I feel like a twat? No. But I hope he did. I may have done something bad, but my intentions were right. I think that’s better blind ignorance.

Consume less media
It’s probably not a surprise to blog readers and internet users that we consume a lot of media, but to others, but it might seem strange when there are people making the exact opposite resolution. I have about 30 podcasts unlistened to, I’m checking football scores on my mobile every 15 minutes during matches, I track about 20 different blogs a day, I have 6, maybe 8 websites that I check throughout the day and I write this. My job means I operate on a daily basis and mostly over again the next day. So I figure if I can go a week without something, I probably don’t need it.

I also definitely don’t need to read different news reports of the same thing in four different newspapers and three websites. I need events and facts, not opinions and interpretations which keep me from the real world. Put it another way: be less informed, be more aware.

Health
That includes food and exercise, body and mind, getting some quality rest.

Be a better pal
I need to spend time with people. I made a friend at work recently. When I say made, it’s someone I have worked with for about 6 years, but never really spoke to, apart from conversations like: “Can we do that? For Tuesday, this is. Ok, Wednesday. But Tuesday would be better. Wednesday, then.” Friends should remind me that getting to know people is not only ok, it’s probably all there really is.

Iron
On Sunday. Not when I come home every evening.

Related posts:
New Year Resolutions 2005
Here’s how I did

I have never before in my life baked bread, so I tried this to do something new for the new year. I think there’s something in this. I could meet all my resolutions before I’ve actually written them. Kind of like those annual appraisals you do in the office.

This is rye bread which I really like. The bottle is there for scale rather than for show.

Woah, reader, woah. I seem to have opened a can of worms with the Nigella thing. Worm remoulade with a rasberry coulis and orange zest, but a can of worms none the less. Vers en boite, perhaps.

Two things I love about this site.

First, you never know what’s going to get people talking. Whether it’s hairy sexbomb but irritating chefs or socks in the cat bowl.

Second, it’s always great to get comments, challenging or otherwise.

I have to concede that maybe her recipes do work. When you can do something, it’s easy to say, “give it a slosh of this”. I am rubbish at explaining the things I can do well. Strangely, I can get people up to my scratch at the things at which I am not so great.

Happy New Year, too. My New Year’s Eve was great. Friends, champagne, beer, Laphroaig and friends, then amazing coffee and baclava for breakfast and a beautiful drive home on a crisp winter morning before the rest of the world emerged. Even the Thames, steaming and lapping the top of its banks, seemed to be swelling with possibility.

Resolutions - I’m a big fan of them - will be posted tomorrow, and yes I see the irony in that.

But they will follow, and hopefully so will I. Cheers all.