Riding High

I want to give you a detailed account of my 3 days hitchhiking 700 miles down the west coast of america from Portland, Oregan, to San Fransisco. It was full of wonderful people, beautiful trees, a mountain range and at least one ride with a beautiful lady in a vintage Cadillac (the type of car that normally roars past and you think 'now that would have been a cool ride'). I really want to, but alas, in this part of the world December is harvest time for the Sacred Herb of a million momentary insights, and almost every other ride would, in the first few minutes, pipe up with 'hey man, do you get high?'
'er, well, yes, i have been known to, though be warned i get a little silly sometimes'
'no worries dude! here, i grew this myself. have a suck'. and so i would take their psychedelic-painted glassware and inhale the homegrown until the cherry dropped through the filter and the road became as Allen Ginsberg would have it- beautiful, smooth, hysterical starving naked, and as grounded and cyclical as an mbira tune.

We would have huge, succinct and groundbreaking conversations as we drove south, and occasionally our eyes would meet in the rear-view mirror and the message was clear, and then sooner or later my ride would say 'so this is where i turn off... where do you want dropping?' and i would fall out of the car, clutching my bags with a stupid grin on my face and a bead of sweat on my forehead, and within a second have forgotten all but the most basic of messages.

but those basic messages were pretty pungent.

my second ride, just after i took a photo of a burnt out house that still had that sweet-sick smell of burnt hardwood, was a man in a knackered old volvo with a greying beard, who almost immediately launched into a tirade about how he had been unemployed for 18 months and the government weren't giving him the benefits he was entitled to. he said he was only going 5 miles down the road 'but do you like a little smoke? wanna come up the hill to my friends' place and smoke a bowl?'

the house was long and perched on the side of the hill, overlooking the road we had come off, a pig farm (the biggest recycler of waste food in Oregon), and the Cascade mountain range in the distance. The inside of the house was furnished warmly, if a little threadbare, and a few late-middle-aged country folk with beards and chequed shirts smoked and sat and talked.

When I get invited back to peoples homes when hitchhiking it is nearly always- no, always- by people without much money. Perhaps they have less to fear. (Khalil Gibran- 'Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?') And there comes a moment when they look at me, after the initial storm of friendship, where they ask me basically 'so who the fuck are you anyway?'. And after i show that i am not a snob, nor a voyeur, nor some rich college kid slumming it (though maybe i am all three), the truth of them, and to a good extent the society they live in, begins to boil the lid off the pot.

these guys, like tens of thousands on the west coast of america, are long term unemployed. living with relatives or friends, losing their pride, angry, frustrated, with just enough money to fill up their gas tanks and eat. these two had been welders, and when the recession hit their boss stripped the factory clean and sailed off in his yacht to mexico with the words 'i could keep the factory open but... why bother?'. bastard. in order for them to get state benefits they need to apply for 3 jobs a week, but the only jobs going are for things they have neither skills nor desire to do. they don't qualify for free healthcare because they earn 17 dollars a month more than the threshold, so this guy can't afford his diabetes medicine and the gov't won't give it to him free because they consider it a 'non life threatening' illness.

Another guy I who picked me up said his occupation was 'dealing drugs and repossessing cars'. The first bit is self explanatory, the second astounding: basically, loan companies give unemployed people a list of other unemployed people who have defaulted on their car loans and are hiding their cars so they aren't repossessed. On a commission only basis, the former seek out the latter, chat with their neighbours, call them up and pretend to be someone else to get their credit card details, spy outside their houses, until they find the car and grass them up to the company. Poor people turned on poor people for commission.

whilst waiting at a particularly dodgy junction (hitchhiking is a legal grey area should the cops come. being caned out of your tree is multicoloured but certainly cause for problems) a man with a forrest gump accent and buck teeth said hello. turned out he was a vietnam veteran and wanted to tell me that all politicians are 'freakin' liars'.
'even obama?'
'yes'
'what did obama lie about?'
'he promised free dental treatment to all veterans. we aint got it!' .

obama made a promise, and he didn't keep it, and thus he is a liar. forget pragmatism, to people only deal in politics when a canvasser comes hassling them at election time, a promise is a promise. this guy was as jobless as all the others i had met, only he had toothache too.

Of course, there were exceptions. I got a ride in a old old truck with a man who looked like the guy in the opening scene of disney's aladdin (the one with one tooth) who made enough money harvesting and selling mistletoe (door to door) to pay his taxes for the year. 'they love it' he said.

Another guy used to be the saxophonist for legendary zimbabwean musician thomas mapfumo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh09mGhTQhE) . He basically told me that if I loved music enough to want to be a pro musician i should DEFINITELY NOT become a pro musician, because it sucks the joy out of music and there are so many sharks...

but back to the house on the hill. they had no TV or cable- it had been cut off- but reasoned 'it is only bad news anyway'. a car drove up and honked its horn outside. it was an old friend who had come to pick up one of the ladies who was there 'whos that?' asked my ride
'oh, thats bob'
'why doesn't he come in and say hello?'
'he just honks his horn and stays outside. thats what bob does these days'. bob, i guess, had a job. the note of resignation was rich in his voice.

i had a sack of presents- pass the parcel- that i had wrapped and was giving to people randomly on the way down. I gave one to each of my hosts in that house, and as i left realised i had left the sack inside. I went in and almost bumped square in to a lady in a dressing gown. she looked drawn, was shaking, and clearly used to be very beautiful. i said hello and goodbye and she looked past me at the biscuit tin and said 'well,', and she paused for a moment, looking for the words. 'enjoy your travels', she said. there is no way i can describe the tone that she said this in, but if i was to pick apart those 20 seconds and 3 words i would have said that she had waited in her room for me and my friends to go. that she was addicted to crystal meth (sooooo many people are here. it is a insipid, highly addictive, cheap and gnawing drug). that she hated being stuck in a random house on the side of a hill. that she saw me as some kid who had never experienced what she had experienced and that the men i was with, for whatever reason, made her skin crawl. Yeah, i have described it pretty badly there, but i guess what i am trying to say is that the recession in america is so much more stark when you get behind the numbers and headlines and bickering in the senate and realise that many, many people are having their lives destroyed by these bastard, selfish, sub-human bankers. the environment is not immune either...



the nights i spent in my sleeping bag, in my survival bag, under various trees, just warm enough and just dry enough to enjoy my surroundings and sleep well. on the last morning i poked my head out of the bag to see a huge flock of birds in V formation flying towards the rising sun.

if you want to know a place, to know its people, the solution is simple: learn the language and go hitchhike. I mean it. It is 99.9% safe (if you are a girl by herself i am not sure but it has been done plenty). I cannot overstate how much I learn from it and confirm to myself over and over again that people are more kind, wise and wonderful than we are ever given credit for. but if you want to write a blog about it, perhaps stop saying 'why not?' after a couple of bowls...

The Wonderful Sound of the CInema Organ

My friend James Grunwell, genius of the soundboard, has just finished his album on which I am sampled in a couple of tracks.

www.myspace.com/thewonderfulsound

It is certainly worth a listen...

Black Water

I have a new answer to the question, 'Why do you smoke?', when asked gently and with the slightest intonation of mock incredulity from all sorts of well meaning people.

“So I can meet ex-soldiers in airport waiting rooms” is the new answer.

And in part, it is true. Yes, I am addicted, yes it gives me a perfect excuse to have 5 minutes break from everything else that may or may not be going on at that moment and collect my thoughts (Graeme gets the same effect by going outside and eating a carrot very slowly) and yes, smoking a lazy, fat, filtered rolly after joyous sex makes one feel a peaceful joy so clear and distilled one sometimes feels like buddha himself is sitting smiling on the cherry. But perhaps best of all, when outside pubs or in coach rest stops, or, as I was the other week, in an airport transit lounge with a poky, overpriced cafe for a smoking room and no local currency, smoking is nothing less than a passport for the comradly exchange of knowledge.

Stupidly I didn't notice his 'Blackwater' cap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqM4tKPDlR8), just that he had a friendly face and there were no empty tables so I would have to break into the thoughts of one of these single men staring into space. The etiquette of striking up a conversation with sound people during smoke time can be complex. With less wise people (as a rule), they will either talk and talk if given the simplest prompt, or be too shy or suspicious to say anything at all. However, the most interesting people are neither verbose nor lack confidence, but may well be locked in their own thoughts that you have no right to disturb. One must, therefore, probe gently and thoughtfully, leaving enough silence for them to take the initiative if they want, and not asking the same boring questions, beyond the classic opener 'where are you headed?'

Middle to Aging men are the most difficult to crack. I guess they have seen too many egotistical young men ramming about like they are the first generation every to break free of their home town and ready to tell everyone about how extreme their lives are, or ask personal questions without cultivating a fertile bed of trust for them to be answered fully. The first salvo of politeness told that he was living in the Phillipines and on his way to Singapore for a few days. His accent was British, and he dressed like a man who dislikes airs and graces. To me this, and his greying hair but fit body, meant he either worked in the oil industry or used to be in the army.

Silence as we both sucked on our cigarettes and tried not to catch each others' eye, even though we were sat directly across a tiny table as though we were on a date. 'You working down in the Philippines then?'. This, on balance, was unlikely. 'No, I work away.' I hesitate. 'Doing what?' 'Security'. 'Ah, one of them'. I look at him as if I have met men like him before, which I have. Security, in this context, almost certainly means working for a private security company in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, or another place where western companies are enforcing things down the barrel of a gun, with enough money to bring ex-military men out of retirement.

We sit in silence a while longer. My cigarette is finished and I get up to go, not wanting to show that I was there for anything more than a polite chat whilst doing the necessary business of smoking, but as I leave the smoking cafe I realise that I was so strained at being polite and wandering how to get the bottom of this man I didn't even enjoy the cigarette, and it would be a long time before my next one. So I went back inside and sat down again. It was as if he was waiting for me. 'Want a beer?' he asks.

3 beers and some chain smoking later we have established our bed of trust, first through rugby, then me by laughing at his vaguely xenophobic jokes and using what I know of the army to ask the right and respectful questions, him by implicitly showing he was well aware of the shitty state of the world and who was to blame, namely the capitalist system. He grew up in south shields (Near newcastle, about 150 miles from where I grew up) and had no choice but to go into the army (well, the other choice was to stay in a town slowly but surely collapsing in on itself as the docks and mines closed one after another). He was good at what he did and became a Marine (and justifiably proud of it). When he left the army there was nothing left for him in his home town except his mum; his friends had all left. He could settle somewhere else in England but where? Kent? We both laugh. So he moved to where the living was cheap and easy- south east asia. First Thailand and then, when he married a Philippine lady, the Philippines. He spends 8 months of the year working and his child is in Chinese school because it has 'good discipline'. Does he want his son to join the army? He would hate it if he did- it is a meaningless and hard life he says, being shouted at from when you wake up to when you go to bed by people you consider idiots, and lots of the time just sitting around scratching your arse. And unspoken is the bit about having to kill people you don't know and having them try to kill you. He wants his son to have a profession. Does he want to go back to england? No chance.

Here is a man that I can relate to just as well as a fellow activist, a fellow lefty musician or really anyone. I can respect him more than I do a well-meaning and intelligent woolly liberal, a regimented socialist or even some of the people I spend time with in London. Yet in terms of my world views and my lifestyle we couldn't be more different. Racism, prostitution and killing people- and risking your own life- on behalf of a western government or corporation I cannot condone and never would participate in. I had to laugh at jokes that weren't funny and say things that were only just truthful to keep the his confidence in me and the conversation alive. I wanted him to like me. A lot. In contrast, a lot of people I encounter, likely the majority, I couldn't give a floating shit what they think of me, not because they aren't nice people but because there is no reason to care, they can take me or leave me; I don't need them to validate me.

And this is kind of funny, though I was a bit too drunk to think about it properly on the long flight to vancouver. The SOAS crowd is wonderful, stimulating, loving and I feel superbly lucky to be a part of it, but sometimes when the real love ins happen, when the woolly jumpers are out and the food is delicious and the hugs last minutes and the love is being proclaimed in song and dance, something inside me curdles and a voice in me is shouting 'but what about all the people who can't have this? Who are being beaten down by the system every day and have been numbed and frustrated by a stupyfying mass media and the chasing dog of poverty? Doesn't this all feel a bit …. missing the point?'

And here again is a great moment to go outside and smoke a fag, but the question remains. When I go back to scarborough no-one wants to hear about what I am doing in London. Why would they? I know for sure lots of these guys would think what we do for fun in London is a bit lame and hippyish, whilst I know my friends in London would be uncomfortable, not to mention bored, getting hugely wasted, watching TV and causing trouble in Scarborough.

This has been proven more than once. A friend came down to London around the time of the climate camp in trafalgar square and was going to stay at my house. He is a totally amazing guy with proper northern working class values, one of them being that he speaks honestly and bluntly, and another is that once he starts drinking he likes to get very drunk. He had made it, with his girlfriend, to the 'wave' climate demo, but lost his girlfriend (who showed up at my house the next morning at 4am) and wandered to my house the next afternoon, having spend the night walking the streets of london in the pissing rain and eventually crashing out in one of the spare climate camp tents in traf square.

Nevertheless, it was great to see him, I showed him my Hackney locale and, as I was invited to a 'dinner party' at a friend from SOAS's house I brought him and his girlfriend along, a little nervous that they might not feel quite at home. At first my fears were proved totally wrong, as he talked and talked and people laughed at his jokes and everyone noted how delicious the food was and my other friends, whilst I think a little unsure of what to make of him, were well trained enough in the middle class art of politeness to keep everything running smoothly.

How about this for a way to define the class system in england in 2010 (fuck the 'how many sugars you put in your tea' business): when working class people have alcohol, they all chip in on a given night and then keep drinking it until it is finished. Middle class people, on the other hand, keep alcohol in their house 'in case' it should be drunk and I guess it is the done thing for the host of a dinner party to have more alcohol, and choices of alcohol, than she expects to get drunk.

As my friend, and his girlfriend, and me (partly in solidarity, partly because I began to feel I might need it) drank and drank and finished the wine and moved on to the whisky, an imperceptible change came over the party, a slight tension in the polite voices. He was dominating the conversation, I guess expecting that if someone had something to say they would interrupt him and that would be fine, but no one did, and his stories started to only attract silence to them, rather than laughter. It was time for some external stimulation, and I suggested we take the whisky and go to the canal.

We take the whisky and go to the canal, and now the canal air freshens our senses but keeps our intention. He asks 'Now, I wonder if anyone can tell me, we have just had a delicious meal in a beautiful house that, I am speaking honestly, I am jealous of, yet you guys decided to sleep last night in a shitty tent in the middle of trafalgar square, and for what? Can anyone explain this to me?' He meant it as a question, perhaps a goad to a debate, perhaps to air a feeling that everyone sensed he was feeling anyway, but no one answered him. I wish I had had a diplomatic word or two but the whisky was on me like a carebear and all I could do was giggle at the situation. There was a silence that he I think interpreted as everyone (about 5 others, apart from me, he and his girlfriend) turning against him. I giggled a bit more. “Well,” liam said, “now I feel like I want to talk about whats been on telly recently, but I bet none of you even have TVs do you?”. None of us did. It was time to go, and we did.

This is what I am talking about. And if I am really going to analyse it and be honest with myself, I would acknowledge that am in the fortunate (mostly) position of having experienced both a middle class life and a working class life in my formative years. My grandparents lived in a real nice semi-detached house that I lived in 0-5, and then 11-18 I got a scholarship to study at the local private school. The family of my mum are well educated, intelligent and mostly teachers or similar (and lovely). so I knew how to behave like one of that type of person (I hesitate, perhaps too late, to call this middle class). On the other hand, after my grandmas place I lived in a really shitty flat, the rest of which were rented to families who had either just come off the streets, out of drug treatment centres or prison, and it was not an uncommon site for me to come home from school to see fire engines outside the flats, or find used needles and condoms in the garden where I played football, etc. My mum worked 3 jobs, we holidayed in youth hostels not hotels and I learnt the value of money early, working in a chinese takeaway as soon as it was legal for me to do so and learning to deal with racist pissheads who wanted a chicken curry with none of your weird chinese shit. I also played on the streets from a young age and spending time in the houses of these friends was always just like another home (if you have no idea what I mean, think of the feeling that JK Rowling is trying to portray in the Weasleys' house).

An on and on. So from a young age I could see the comfort, contradictions, false politenessess and blindspots of the middle class way of existing, but at the same time knew the the kind of future that many of my 'working class' friends were likely to end up doing- working in a factory, being a waitor or a middle manager, joining the army. This was to me stultifying and meant I would be working my balls off for the man and releasing my frustrations in chemicals and mind numbing media, as some of my friends who are equally as gifted as me are now doing, and anyway it was expected at my school that everyone would go to university. And so I went to university, paid off my overdraft with that glorious job at SOAS, and in a way I have no doubt became co-opted into the middle class way of existing. Indeed, that is openly what the tories had in mind when they created the scholarship, the 'assisted place', that got me to go to private school. Much, in fact, like the Chinese did with their system of civil servant tests (ever wondered where the slang 'Mandarin' for high ranking civil servant comes from?).

So now, sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I don't really belong in either place. Not in a dramatic 'lets have a walk in the rain and think about it' way, just like sometimes I have too much of one and need some of the other. And certain things in each depress me. And the most depressing thing about it, demonstrated in the story of liam above but something that has happened to me more than a few times, in America as well as England, is that people of the same age, from the same place, who take the same drugs and listen to the same music, cannot communicate with each other in meaningful ways. There is distrust, a feeling of inferiority on both sides and no way to get things started. With exceptions of course, but not enough to mean that we don't go into the next decade with the class system as rigidly in place as it has ever been, except almost self-enforced through culture.

So, and here I write amazed I can bring this ramble to anything approaching a coherent conclusion, that is why it feels so good for me to travel about like this, to have the ability to choose who I talk to, to make the most of the conversation and to understand that a wise man is a wise man, no matter whether he works for blackwater or not, and it is up to me to find a means to bring him on board with the struggle (though, frankly, I wouldn't know where to start).

And yes, I know smoking may kill me, but it is less likely to kill me than going to Afghanistan as a mercenary which, I found out when we were really looking each other in the eye, was where may friend in the Blackwater cap was going. And I only know that because I smoke.

What can i say about china?

What can I say about China? Maybe that it has taught me that trying to be objective is pretty futile.

First of all it must be said that I arrived in China with some history- or rather I didn't as my first encounter with china was its border police, who searched my bag and confiscated my 'penguin history of modern china' for reasons that i will explain in another post, along with my totally 'legitimate' version of a national geographic map of china. 'legitmate' in the sense that it does not show any borders seperating china from tibet, taiwan or East Turkistan (also known as china's Xinjiang province). , and so actually in my opinion quite illegitimate, but when in rome one should not piss on hadrians' wall.

Incase you don't know, tibet was, until the 1950s, largely cut off from the rest of the world, mostly because it was surrounded by the himilayas. Through a mixture of threats of force, actual force, twisted ideology and a knack for convulted logic that would impress even henry kissinger, china moved its troops in and forced the dalai llama to escape to India. Since then it has been systematically destroing tibetans' language, religion, environment and way of life in a search for what Hitler would have called 'lebensraum', as well as timber, gold, water and numerous other resources (all the gold, silver and bronze for the 2008 beijing olympics came from tibet.).

They justified it by asserting that the Dalai Llama was at the head of a feudal and oppressive regime and the people of tibet, with the help of the great peoples' republic, must be liberated (hence why those of you at soas still see the Spartacist League's mad posters denouncing the dalai llama in support of china). As the process for finding the new Llamas involves being in tibet, yet the Dalai Llama is in India and the Panchen Llama is either in Chinese custody or dead, tibetan buddhism as it is has been for centuries will die along with the current incarnation of the Dalai Llama.

Taiwan is a less well known victim of the 'one china' policy. The people that Mao's red army beat to control chinafrom 1949 were the nationalists, under the bloody tyrant Chiang Kai Shek. When he realised the game was up he moved what was left of his government and army to Taiwan, where they were safe and had the backing of America, and had a good shot at massacring a few thousand native taiwanese in the process, in what is a largely unknown episode of history in the west.

At first , in the context of the cold war, many western nations and the UN refused to recognise the new rulers of china, and remained (with stunning blindness to actual facts) with diplomatic ties with Chiang's KMT. When, from the 50s-70s, countries and the UN began to recognise the CCP's china, taiwan was conviniently bundled in with the new china, even though it has its own government, borders, army and language. only 23 countries now have official diplomatic ties with taiwan and the US is not one of them, even though they are about to sell 66 fighter jets to a country that they doesn't officially exist. but we always knew that capitalism is bigger than god. in the current asian games being held in china (in the city I am now in infact, guangzhou) the taiwanese team has been renamed 'chinese taipei', and there is fuck all the taiwanese can do about it.

so i knew about these things before i came. i knew china did not have free press, that its super economic growth was really ruining the environemnt on a massive scale. I also knew from various brief encounters with chinese people in the UK (at my secondary school, letters from my chinese cousin, working in a chinese takeaway for 8 years, ) that chinese young people seemed totally apolitical with strong consumerist tendancies and a strange addiction to kitchy toys, cartoons and boy bands. I also knew, however, that half my blood was chinese, that china is one of the oldest and most culture rich societies in the world and that chinese people, whatever else they are, are determined, strong and hard working.

so what i am basically saying is that i am in no way claiming to be objective here, but at first i really did try. Confucious, whose teachings later became confucianism, was around in a time of huge upheavel, destrution and bad governance in china. He advocated, as far as i can explain, harmony and respect within the family unit and the self, which then lead to harmony and respect in wider society. he emphasised five specific relationships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism#Relationships -

father/son, husband/wife, friend/friend and so on, with each, with the exception of friend/friend, there was a heirachical relationship but one with mutual respect. so, for example, a good confucious son had a duty to do whatever his father told him to, but the father in turn must be wise in what he told his son to do. when this is reflected on wider sioceity, it means that people should unquestionably follow their rulers, and the rulers should be benevolent and just. he also advocated a kind of non-interference in things, letting events take a harmonious path whether they seemed right or not.

when the CCCP first came to power they wanted to get rid of all religions, confuncionism included (even though it isn't strickty a religion, more of a philosophy), but in the last 20 years or so the government have realised that a kind of pseudo confuncionism, twisted neatly to fit in the CCCP's shifting ideology, could infact be useful in pacifying its people with a vague nod to philosophy and shared chinese cultural identity whilst also using the word harmony in such a way to mean 'not rocking the boat'. hence the key message at the beijing olympics was 'harmony', and talking about tibet or whatever was definitiely not harmonious, and therefore against chinese wisdom.

Imagine this pervading philosophy in today's china, added to the fact that the generation who hold the most social and financial power, say 35-55 year olds, went to school at the time of the cultural revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_revolution#1966

and if they were taught anything at that time, it was to do as the party said on fear of death.

And now the party is telling them to MAKE MONEY and BUY THINGS with beautifully subtle propoganda, so that the engine of the massive chinese economy can keep growing, eating everything in its path.

What does this manifest into as i travelled about china? Huge new infrastructure projects (there are many many new train lines and toll-motorways being built, all elevated about 2o metres off the ground, and the huge concrete pillars are everywhere), thick layers of smog over cities big and small (in Hangzhou it seemed a perpetual dusk), advertising in every nook and cranny, strange recorded voices coming out of loud speakers in tourist areas saying things like 'please be civilised for the benefit of everyone' and 'one small thought leads to a great leap forward for society'.

On the other hand of course part of what i am saying is inevitably coming from a western set of ethics that can't really know what it is like to be hungry for years and years and how one would react when there is suddenly an opportunity to change. I know this but i also have seen what this brand of capitalism looks like 20 years down the line, and, crucially, whether it makes people happy.

But of course when talking to anyone, like almost anywhere in the world, you learn and the person is lovely and everything is fine, but as a nation, well, can't say i have pride to be from china.

The home of my grandfather

i have fastforwarded a month and a few thousand miles as writing retrospectively seemed a bit retrospeculative and so 'here' now means hong kong and 'now' is the here and...

things were going dead steady here and i didn't have much to write about but then we have had a right time of it in the last 10 days or so, visiting the city in which my biological grandma grew up and then the village in which my grandfathers first wife lives, and then in the last few days a little jaunt to the excellent nation that calls itself taiwan (and china calls 'chinese taipei'- bastards)

here no-one really tells me what is about to happen, where we are going or who we are due to meet until things present themselves, which totally confuddled me at first but now i quite enjoy. my dad will say we are 'going for a walk' and then we will end up in the flat of some friend or relation and 20 members of their extended family, a loud TV, a few old people amiably shuffling about in their pyjamas and various carcasses that we are presented with and which we eat whilst everyone watches and comments in cantonese on my chopstick technique (which now i have got DOWN). This happened in my grandmas city, when we stumbled into a bustling flat full of 4 generations of cooing family, the space full to the brim of love and laughter and an electric mahjong table. it was so very nice in contrast to all the garish commercialism and fake nokias on the streets outside and the matriach of the evening's initial gambit was 'your cousin ate 7 crabs. here are 7 crabs'.

The TV in the background showed the opening to the Guangdong (city in southern china and centre of the chinese shoe industry, and hence full of loads of duct-tape holding african importers) Asian games 2010. Like the Beijing olympics and the shanghai expo, the ceremony was an orgy of syncronised dances, huge structures and computer enhanced fireworks. this is the china that its government wants the world, and perhaps even more so its own citizens, to see. it took its place among reports of the development of the 'prestige project' of super fast railway building, chinas purported dominance of the Seoul G20 and the odd man run over by a steamroller that constitutes domestic 'news' coverage. but let me hold my critique of china for another moment and get on with it...

The next day we visited the graves of my grandmother's parents, set in sparse grassland an hour out of the city. they were in seperate locations, each one marked with a large circular double ring of concrete (in a figure of 8 shape- the size of the circles denotes the prestige of the family) with a small, tightly engraved tombstone at the head of each, as well as a little plinth to burn offerings (anything burnt, including cash, goes directly to the deceased in the afterlife), all conforming to feng shui principles. My great grandfathers' grave showed his first and last names, his home town, and a few apparently untranslatable sentiments. My grandma's, on the other hand, does not have her own name but only those of her children and her married name, as is/was the custom. Indeed the character for 'woman' in chinese can be seperated into two constituent parts 'son' and 'good'. hooray for the wisdom of confunctionism.

Nearby a small village temple with beautiful carvings and incense lit by invisible worshippers felt much more sacred than the huge statues of buddha or jesus in other, larger places of worship i have visited. across china there are small buddhist shrines and temples (as well as numerous shrines to local deities in houses, shops, restaurants) and for me it is the human peace that is found in these places that gives it the aura. i am perhaps slowly realising that my lack of belief in reincarnation and the worshipping of anyone precludes me from calling myself a buddhist, but the buddha's doctines certainly hold a lot of weight as a way to live a hearty life.

my fondness of the way the chinese flavour their pigs also is a bit of a barrier, and that night i felt like obelix as the huge family of the night before joined us in a 'farmers restaurant' and helped me eat a medium sized pig (and three chickens, and loads of wild veggies, and tarrow covered in sugar), just out of the underground oven. i knawed and sucked and drank lots of beer and then was presented with the brains of the pig, which tasted quite a lot like the fatty cheeks of the big fish of the other week, except a bit more, er, porky.

chinese people have been through many years of turmoil and food has been scarce for lots of people, lots of the time (one history book i read stated that in the late 1800s there were reports of mothers swapping babies with each other so they wouldn;'t have to eat their own), and so it makes perfect sense that they have developed ways of making every bit of nearly every animal into a tasty dish. in addition to that pig brain i have eaten pig ear, pig grotter, congealed pigs blood, ducks blood, chicken foot soup, shark fin soup, giant snails, frogs, peppered horse leg, dog (i didn't ask if it was pedigree), turtle, terrapin, pidgeon, sand worms, salted rice worms, jelly fish, hammer crab, razor clam and, the most curious delicacy of all, the foetus of a killer bee, which i watched being taken from its little hive cocoon and which was like a sack of pollen-scented jelly in the mouth. the dog thing is quite interesting, as it is a delicacy in the same cities in which the economic boom and love for all things western has compelled affluent city folk to groom, love and cherish these cat-sized dogs that are no use to anyone and treated like children. and in restaurants fish kept carefully for feng shui purposes swim next to equally beautiful fish waiting to be chopped and steamed and served with ginger and spring onion. i will leave the analysis/judgement to you, but suffice to say i am visibly putting on weight.

the next day we headed and to my grandfathers village, tucked away on a side road on the edge of a rapidly-growing city. This was the part of my whole trip in china that i had been looking forward to most. According to my dad there are only three surnames in the village, leung (the one i would have been if i had taken my dad's name) is the dominant one, and in theory we can be traced back to the founder of the village who was apparently quite a legend. my grandfather, not thinking i could handle village life, had booked us into a hotel, which i was a bit gutted about, but i persuaded them over a sumptuous welcoming banquet, which it must have taken several people all day to prepare, that we should all stay in the family home the next night.

there were loads of things to be picked apart from what i saw that night and the next, even though no-one spoke a word of english and didn't even seem to understand my scantily-toned mandarin. my granddad seemed much more at home here than alone in his hong kong flat- he was the oldest and this was the house he was born into, with big photos of his mother and father on the wall. he was clearly orchestrating the event of our homecoming (my dad hadn't been there for a few years either) and everyone seemed to be really pleased to have him, and us, there. i sort of picked up the backstory - my grandfather, who was in the nationalist army (the one defeated by mao) had an arranged marriage to his first wife but then for some reason had left after only a few months and married my grandma, and then they had escaped to hong kong when the nationalists were defeated. he had 6 children and worked as a coolie (dock labourer) and night porter for up to 20 hours per day to feed my dad and his siblings.

for 30 years contact between hong kong and china was almost impossible (if someone in china got a letter from hong kong they would be questioned by the police and often charged with spying, which could lead to execution), but after 1979 things became easier, and in the 80s he returned to his village to find that his first wife, whom he had abandoned, had stayed single, looked after the house (living on handouts from other villagers), apparently waiting for him to come back or waiting to die. it must have been a pretty emotional moment when he found her there. he then proceeded to rebuild the house (it was, i was told proudly, the highest house in the village for a time) and support his first wife, and returning every few months just like he was doing now.

his first wife was super pleased to meet me, and did as old people seem to do- ignore the fact i don't understand what they are saying and just talk at me animatedly. which was great and after a while i did the same back. the women here seem so much less reserved and more intuitive than the men, at least to me.

she was tiny and hunchbacked with a kind of cackling voice, and her and my grandfather seemed to really enjoy each others company. so i was seeing this, i was seeing how my father acted in his home village, i was doing some intense environment absorbtion and seeing how village lift ticked, compared to zimbabwe and india (details different, themes so similar). i try to stay away from cliche and over romanticisation but it is hard cos they are often true- by and large people struggle and are happy unless they are hungry or lovesick, and the conversation is of things that can be touched and kissed and eaten, and an unquestioned god/diety/ancestor that is just there and must be revered. things make sense- the village is centred on a huge banyan tree and a well, with irrigation ditches leading to fish ponds around the village. people wake up at dawn and eat at dusk, and everyone, regardless of age, helps to move the rice from field to plate. old people are respected because they have the most wisdom, and if people are angry they shout and fight and then get the fuck on with whatever they have to do.

unlike mugabe though, the chinese authorities at least paid off the people it took land from. cities are only allowed to build on 'new' land on the edge of cities, which makes the farmers who have been there generations and then sell it to them suddenly landless, with some money, and with the new status of 'city dwellers' rather than 'farmers', which allows them a far greater freedom. it seemed that everyone had used their money and freedom to build taller houses and indulge more readily in their tobacco pipes (which had to be direct decendents of the opium pipes that were ubiquitous in china before the commies).

my insistance on staying at the home on the second night paid off, and my dad was the happiest and least stressed i have seen him the entire trip, talking a bit about his childhood and what is important to him as we sat by the fish pond outside the house with beer and mbira. it also meant i could get up at dawn with my good friend henry, who joined us for this trip, and watch the village swing into action. suddenly the little rivers at the side of the fields made sense (buckets were used to water the plants... ). a man with a stick tried unsuccessfully and it has to be said very comically to herd a gaggle of gabbling geese across a road. the market, on a bridge between our village and the next, salted fish, repaired bicycle tyres and stared blankly at the two strangers passing by. posters of mao could be seen in the odd living room, but peoples' attention was clearly much more focused on the rice grains drying on the concrete basketball pitch and the greying sky that would force them to sack it all up again.

like much of my trip- no revelations, no massive emotions, but a slow absorbtion of a culture and a family that is no longer abstract. and lots and lots of food.

Super Best Friends Train

45 hours in
we sit

a china teapot
4 tomatoes, 2 fat-fingered cucumbers
and the three of us

the lady, 74, the kindest eyes in town
the man, Anselmo, salting and cutting
a language of 3 common words

cramped and happy in coach 3
____

On the 76 hour train ride from Moscow to Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan, I experienced a little of what train-hoppers used to tell me about in America- after the initial day or so time kind of swirls into the swaying of the carriages and ones mind kind of seperates into two- the totally immediate and apparently insignificant (taking out the pips of a pomegranite with a knife one by one) and the totally abstract and memory filled. The two trigger each other off. The middle bit- normal reactions and appetites and logistical worries- seems dulled and inaccessible. Superb.

As described in the previous post, I was sharing an open carriage with around 50 other people, split by little walls with beds attached, with bedding and hot water provided. I got on and offered some peanut brittle around, which was refused by everyone as always seemed to happen, but in the process passed on 2 bits of information implicitly: 1. i don't speak the same language as you 2. i am not a threat and quite messy when I eat. The man across from me, Anselmo (so called not because that was his name, but because he reminded me strongly of the heroic character with the same name from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls), gestured to the crucifix around his neck and that everything we had was to be shared, and proceeded to pull out a flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers and a film canister filled with salt. The lady sat next to him, who by the end of the journey was scoulding me in Russian like I was her own child, brought out a jar of honey with little bits of lemon in. Bloody genius.

Anselmo was one of those men who have clearly had huge and varied experiences and no doubt their faire share of hard times, but have learnt through them to be totally humble, generous and straight up loving to the people and the world around them, and as a consequence his step was light and his eyes sparkled like a magician in disguise. It is to meet people like him (even if we don't have a shared language- if we did this blog post would be much longer for sure) that I travel.

Through silent observation, shared food and tea and us talking to each other in languages that made no sense to the other but were significant anyway, and the fact that the whole situation was pretty unique anyway, we created an atmosphere that i can't in any way convey here in words but that was totally magic. Summed up in our silent, sunset mind-reading tea ceremonies.

The rest of the carriages were dominated by young families and males who I can only guess were either businessmen or migrant workers, or both. We communed in the smoking end of the carriage and on the regular and long platform stops. These were highlights too- each few hundred miles a new and more elaborate collection of food hawkers- platform goddesses with boiled eggs in their arms and chilrden at their ankles.

A myriad of gastronomic delights. Breads stuffed with minced lamb, steamed dumplings with carrot and spring onion, cartloads of melons big as fat babies, huge dried fish, paper cup-fulls of sunflower seeds that left their mark on the carriage floor... and at stops further east the saliva-inducing smell of lamb being roasted over charcoal... and as we travelled east the faces of the hawkers were slightly different, and I couldn't tell you the point at which everyone suddenly looked a lot like my reflection in the mirror but it happened... or was that a dream?

The scenery also kept slowly melting into itself- first forest, then low hills, then a slow but sure decrease of vegetation from trees to bushes to slow-waving straw-coloured grasslands, to tiny bushes clinging to the now yellow soil, to the cracked and moon-like landscape of the roof of the Kazakh steppe; the huge expanse of land that still sustains only the odd herder and contrasts with a white to azure sky that picks little holes in the mind if you look at it for too long

snow and sun
suffocate in turn
leaving yellow stalk grass
husky and mute
the trees hunchbacked
the foxes cunning

This is where the USSR used to do their nuclear testing back in the day. There was a whole deep day of this out of the window and i have to say it is one of the best days i have had on my whole travel so far. On the morning of the 3rd day we woke to see the landscape change in reverse as we went down the other side, a popping in the ears barely perceptible, and the back of the journey broken. It was around this time that i really started chatting to the uzbek with 5 gold teeth and the russian

the russian extra
freckled
fat scars like lips on his cheeks
intense, soft eyes like shifting dunes
rimmed with lichen

he is determined to tell me his story
of why the barely enclosed rage
of a thousand men returned from war
bubbles clear under his skin

through tone and gesture alone
and a single mobile video of his victory
in an army-fatigued bare knucke wrestle
i glimpse and grope
at a shared history:

every other man in our
70km/h train circle of men
wore the uniform of the red army.
a belarussian with bright blue eyes
has lenin's head tattooed on his shoulder

___
Towards the end of the journey I was invited to gamble with cards by said russian. I declined but went to watch. As soon as I sat down with him I realised there was some tension going on- everyone else seemed to have left the vicinity of him and he kept looking down the corridor. Eventually he got up and disappeared, and a moment later two massive Russian police, who i didn't even know where on the train, passed by in the direction he went. I sat for a bit and then went back to my own seat, with my new mama clucking her disapproval... later I found out that everyone thought the russian was trying to cheat me out of money and the police, with no evidence, had tried to get a bribe out of him anyway. At least this is what i think happened from the gesticulations of various people.

______

We reach the border late at night
Around the tran huge banks of lights
Dogs and barbed wire
Glimpse memories of the iron curtain

Inside the carriage
we sit silent and sleep tense
Starched uniforms in control
the secrets of luggage brashly rummaged

My visa is not in order
I don't and won't know why
The old lady pleads my case with conviction
My passport is stamped and we go

____
I have just read this post and i think i have failed to capture the moments of it. Maybe i have partly forgotten it myself. Early in the morning of the 4th day we arrived to another sunny city and everyone got off sharpish without saying goodbye.

Moscow

In all honesty I could not remember a single thing about the train from Riga to Moscow, except that we arrived at the border at 2130 on the day before my Russian visa started, and that it was left to my fellow passengers to argue fervently on my behalf until the robust female Russian border guard sighed and stamped my passport and people mumbled receptive acknowledgements when I grinned and mumbled a thanks (the border people were still nearby) to the general company.

Fortunately I wrote some stuff down and reading it back now after spending a total of 220 hours on trains as far west as riga and as far east as shanghai, i can say that what i wrote contained themes that echoed along the desolate expanses and uncountable scrag-ends of cities (coming into the outskirts of a city on a train is sort of like sneaking up behind it when it hasn't got it's makeup on) out of the window, and the cosy and time-paused warmth of the carriages.

The first was the physicality of the train itself. The 'Moskva Express' was a huge hulk, much wider and higher than British trains and with a little step ladder to get into the carriages, which even the most dainty of local old ladies swung up neatly. Each of the 'hard sleeper' carriages was split into open compartments containing 6 beds in sets of two across three sides, with the top bunk folding down during the day and the bottom one being the seating. At the end of each carriage was a coal-fired boiling water dispenser, a list of times of station stops and a little room where a conductor sat, responsible for the safety and happiness of his carriage. The train tickets are much cheaper than planes (maybe 1/3 of the price) but take much longer, so as a consequence the carriage is made up of the type of people who know the value of things, young and old, that I find are by far the most wise and interesting.

The train rolls on, and to my left the gathering darkness of the forest outside the window slowing brings into focus the reflection of f an old man with eyes like he has been in Douglas Adams' Total Pespective Vortex. Opposite and above is curled a woman of about 50-60, who earlier gave me a gherkin and whose wrinkles are squashed into a spiders web by the hand supporting her head. In the middle of the night I awake badly needing a wee as the train slows into a station. I arrive at the toilet just as the conductor locks the toilet (so no-one shits down onto the tracks in the station) and engages me in a discussion of the premier league, , but now i REALLY need a wee in an irrational way that happens in the middle of the night when you stand up quickly and I tell him as much, but as there is a copper on the platform I cant piss under the train and then I resolve to piss in a ... well to cut a long story short i ending up pissing all over my pants and the floor of the guard's washroom and thank the god of chamberpots that it is the middle of the night and i can waddle my steamy crotch back to the triage area of my bed without the whole carriage thinking that i was incontinent.

I arrived in the sunshine at Moscow's Leningradski station at 7am two days later. After getting completely lost, having de ja vue (all the major stations look EXACTLY the same and i kept finding them and thinking i had been there already) and stomping round the wide and traffic-filled streets of Moscow all day, I met my couchsurfing host Dima at the end of a Metro line at which a Kyrgyzstan national thought that I was his countryman. This mistake potentially explained a lot- people had been rude to me all day (pushing me out of the way on the metro, closing the metro ticket counter in my face when I finally got to the front of the queue) and Russians- especially in Moscow- are known for their dislike of people from the further reaches of the former USSR. Something akin to Mexicans in america. I didn't know whether to feel better for this revelation or worse.

Dima and Roman (Dima's flatmate who had just hitchiked to massive distance to the Ukraine and back, only spending 4 hours in the Ukraine, just for kicks) were perfect hosts, showing me the sights (we sneaked into a beautiful piano lesson in the Moscow conservetoire until we were noticed and kicked out). They lived in an old soviet apartment block and ate the suitably russian meal of smoked mackeral and boiled potatos on my first night. On the second night I saw the couchsurfing 'community' in action, going to a 'Banya', like a Turkish bath with sauna, steam room and ritual flogging with hot leaves. It was very interesting, a members of the small, young, middle classes of Moscow with expats, students and one other surfer, a french girl from Brittany on her way to Mongolia. Later Dima showed me some totally hilarious videos of Boris Yeltsin behaving like a drunk teenager on youtube- they were well worth looking at and made me think he was probably the greatest ever russian leader.

Moscow is certainly beautiful in the extreme- huge, historical and supremely detailed buildings, leafy parks with statues, metro stations with chandaliers on the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls and gravestone-sized slabs of marble on the floors. This, and my couchsurfing hosts, are about all I found positive in this imposing city. The people on the whole were unresponsive to my parkbench greetings. Prices were comparable to London and all the public toilets cost the equivalent of 50p. People were dressed immaculately and showed the wealth they had, or were in the throes of base poverty and sleeping on the metro circle line. Money was clearly the dominent father, son and holy spirit. Fat men dressed as Lenin and Stalin charged 50 roubles for a photo with them, competing with a monkey dressed as a baby (same price) and every multinational food outlet you could imagine for the tourist dollar. Russian police imposed huge on the spot fines for visa irregularities that had no basis in fact. The Courgettes were pumped with so much water to make them bigger that my 8-egg omelette i made for the next train ride didn't stick together.

But no mind- i scooped it dripping into a cut off yoghurt container and got on a train that would take me the longest distance yet- over 3000km and 72 hours over the Kazakh steppe to Almaty.

Riga

If you haven't read my previous post, 'london to riga', then you might miss out on the context a bit :)

The sun was shining as I walked across two massive bridges into the beautiful and well-historied city of Riga, capital of Lativa. All signs were good. There were tramlines. Graffiti on the bridge depicted a smiling girl with her middle finger in the air and the words 'Fuck the Crisis!'. Further down wisened men stripped copper from a washed up boat and then as if by magic I wandered into this huge, joyous market, both outdoor and indoor, selling everything a vitamin-lacking hitchhiker could want. I kid you not, there was a room the size of an aircraft hanger full of fish, the next one full of meat, the next full of veg and then next one...... full of CHEESE!!!! I had landed. I sat in a corner of the market with a huge grin eating pomegranites, raspberries and sticks of individually wrapped honeycombs, watching an old man selling flatcaps and his neighbouring female stall holder who sold ties gently arguing and joking with each other, and the veg seller nearby being ridiculed for eating some sort of kale raw...

Riga, it turns out, is quite a tourist spot, with a huge notra-dame esque cathedrals and dozens of beautiful old buildings clustered round squares filled with cafes and oak trees, with acorns stuck between the translucent cobble stones. After Poland and knowing that I was now deep in ex-soviet territory I was expecting something colder, harder and more concrete. This was naive. Latvia was occupied by the Red Army twice, with Hitler taking over for 4 years during WW2. Each promised 'partnership', but the museum there told of unspeakable horrors meted out on the population, as well as deportations to siberia of anyone who might have in the past or future thought badly of Stalin and his wicked ways. Over 30 years a total of 1/3rd of the population was either killed or deported.

Consequently, and from my limited perspective, it felt like the city (Riga holds 1/2 of Lativa's entire population and apparently things are quite different everywhere else in the country) was still buzzing from its independance and revelling in its national identity. Theatres and concert halls were prominent, cafe culture was in full swing and (in contrast to what i was to find in Moscow), even the people in uniforms had a smile tingling somewhere near their lips.

My hosts, a gang of 4 arty 20-somethings, epitomised this mood. They had just thrown their hat in the ring and started 'Cafe DAD', a flawlessly decorated cafe with a piano and guitar in the corner, their friends' art on the walls and spinach soup with massive croutons floating inside. My link with them was tenuous (a bandmate of a bandmate) but they played host real nice, and on the last night i realised why the first question I was asked was what my religion was, and why there were evangelistic 'god can make you rich if you believe enough' books on the shelves- they all met in church and were the young, preppy, experience-led christian believers that make christianity seem to have its place in our generation.

I did read a slim volume called The Prophet http://leb.net/~mira/works/prophet/prophet16.html - for a taste

During the day i would walk around the huge parks and through narrow streets, pretend to pray in churches so i could look at the pictures on the walls for free, and sit on benches watching numerous young couples in love with a whole range of vague and spongy emotions. In the evenings I busked hard. The first night, in an underpass, the acoustic was excellent but the takings were poor. On the second night i occupied a spot that the night before I had seen a man playing bob marley riffs whilst his friend rapped over the top to the delight of a gathering crowd. It was at the apex of three narrow streets, near the entrance to a TGI fridays, and as the Mbira's polyrhythm bounced off the stone walls I got good money and even a box of chocolates (which I later gave as a present to a couchsurfing host and found they all had marzipan inside which neither I nor my host liked but hey).

Later 3 underage boys asked for some of my money. I told them that they couldn't take any of my money, but they could have a go in my spot playing mbira and singing. One of them picked a cup out of a bin for a hat and for a couple of feeble minutes they tried, but then one of them shouted a warning and they scampered off. The police drove past.Nearby an engineer tried to send tourists to a strip club. A few minutes later the boys were back, and this time I taught them a brief mbira song (they didn't speak english) and i played as they sang. But once more a shout went up, they disappeared into thin air, and sure enough the patrol car drove past again through the narrow street. When they appeared the third time i gave them the empty cup and tried to explain that if they sang a song that everyone knew with heart they woudl make money. When, shortly after, they ran again and the police came again, I figured it was time to go. I left some of what I had made with another, older, beggar who seemed to know them and he thanked me with vodka-stained breath and left in the direction they ran.

The next morning i went back to the market, bought more cheese, salami, rasperry jam and fruit, then got myself on an overnight train to Moscow, got out the food and started eating it...

London - Riga and why i went

I wrote the first bit of this sat in the cab of a lorry on the Polish/Lithuanian border, waiting until 4am for the tachometer to reset itself. My Latvian driver- an aging, rotund and unshaven man with a cab to match, whose un-panted trousers sat halfway down his hips as he drove- played freecell and offered me coffee (it seems all european truck drivers carry gas cookers in their cabs). He was taking me on the final leg of a long hitchhike from Holland into Riga, capital of Lativa.

I was feeling good, having- until about 3o minutes earlier- been faced with the prospect of a second night behind a petrol station in a sleeping bag, except this time 150 miles further north (and therefore colder) and with a frost coming on. I had varied between hanging around outside the slightly surreal 'Swiss-themed' truck stop waiting a driver of one of the 10 or so lorries parked outside to appear, and hitching in the dusk- and then dark- on the main road between Poland and Lithuania, neither of which appeared to be working.

But then aha! the beautiful sound of a truck engine being revved, and the driver was surprised when I accepted his offer of "only go 20km?". Much like those abominable but somehow tragic charity street collectors (the ones with clipboards), once you are in the cab of the truck your benefactor can't just leave you in alone in a tight spot, so when we arrived at the border 20km later, this amazing gent asked around a few of the other waiting truckers, using what I can only imagine as some inherent Truckers Code to get me a ride with the first guy going north. Which was now the man grunting in satisfaction and passing me cigarettes by the nightlight of the cab.

I had been making good time from the off (except on the way to the ferry, where I missed a train connection after helping a huge and typically heavily luggaged Somali family through the underpass)- taking the ferry Harwich- Hook of Holland, failing to soften any truckers in the special Ferry Truckers Lounge with my 'Berlin Bitte!' sign, and then taking beautifully fast, efficient Dutch trains to the most easterly point of Holland (my amazing 50 pound ticket took me from london to ANY dutch station), 'Hengelo Oost'.

Hengelo Oost had a whole series of streets named after famous composers- 'Mozartstraade, josephhaaydenstraade- fucking awesome. I walked through them by streetlight and felt like i was finally On The Road. Since i left my job at SOAS at the end of July and went back to Scarborough things had felt a bit like one extended goodbye, with me repeating the same plan and timescale to friends in London, Scarborough etc. My ego wanted me to go quickly and everyone to miss me lots, but as it was i was only a couple of hundred miles of overpriced railway away, with the trip long planned (in my most stressed out days at SOAS this was the end point and light at the end of the tunnel) and the season quickly turning. London was promising a beautiful and musical future, my exquisite girlfriend lay by my side and there was plenty plenty of revolutionary fighting to be done (not to mention whole tracts of punk lyrics about the tories to be penned), and for maybe just a moment I asked myself whether this was the correct path to be taking.

But it was clear that it was. For a number of reasons. In my gap year (and even before) I discovered travelling in general and India in particular; the art and science of trusting the wind and impulse (and, er, a Lonely Planet guidebook) to fill the days with great people, beautiful things, surprise and hard won lessons. (my god that sounded cheesy... but you know what i mean). When I was 17 I went with sam, lauren and alex to La Gomera (an island near tenerife), and as a totally overwhelmed youngster learnt that hippie communes do still exist, and that it is possible to play music without knowing what key you are in. When I was 18 I sat in a trance in the golden temple in amiritsar and decided that music, not politics, was what i wanted to study at university. In Goa I got high with a crazy old Italian with one white eye, at dusk watched thousands of Fiddler Crabs wave at the sky in silt left by the tsunami and decided that this was the life for me (and that I would do university for my mum and because I knew at 18 i didn't know for sure exactly whether i had everything laid out in my head correctly).

But going to SOAS to do music was probably the best decision i have made in my life, and the subsequent short jaunts are detailed in this blog (i will get round to writing about zimbabwe one of these days). So reason one for going was so i could look my 18 year old self in the eye and say 'yeah man, you knew what you were on about... duties are discharged, lets go'.

The second one was almost the opposite- not to find but to seek. Of course I have changed loads since I moved to london (5 years ago), as everyone does between 19-24 (Jeff said that he had 'never met an 18 year old who knows who they are') but, straight after uni (the time when most take stock, have a moment of panic then strike out) I started the hugely rewarding but totally energy and spacious-thought sucking job as co-president of the union. So many of parts of my life- responsibilities, friends, campaigns, scenery, institution- were the same (and for the most part i couldn't have asked for better) but my own time and energy were so limited that i couldn't give them my all anymore, and the consequence was that i didn't know if i still wanted various bits of my life or whether i was just too tired to appreciate them.

When I come back I will be able to do things i want with people i still have loads in common with, find new musical modes without feeling inferior to my peers (and get over the whole black hole of competitive musical thought anyway) and, crucially, look freshly at the political scene and figure out how best i can support my communities without a)people demanding i take a certain line on things and b)feeling guilty when i don't want to go on a demo.

don't get me wrong, the revolution is going to happen, and i am going to give it my all so i can be part of it, the question is (and has always been in the groups i have been part of) how to mobilise and empower the people who are actually being fucked by the system to fight it. The trouble is that those who really need emancipation in our society- asylum seekers, migrant workers, working class kids who can't afford university, young and old who have generally been failed by this capitalist system- are in no position timewise, mentally, emotionally, to put in the massive effort of organisation to take on the huge, well funded, insipid state. They are given just enough to stop them from dying, but only if they work so hard all they want to do when they have freetime is to eat, call home and zone out. Or, for British working class people, they have had seeded in them such low morale and angry frustration, as well as an irrational hatred of that which is foreign (literally and metaphorically) that they pit themselves along racial and local, rather than oppressed/oppresser, lines and your average student activist or fuzzy liberal just does not have any vocabulary or common ground to engage them in the fight.

does that make sense? for a perfect example look at the EDL stuff. my lowest moment as an activist came when i stood outside parliament sometime in spring and watched hundreds of white, angry, working class, disenfranchised people (EDL) and, across the road, hundreds of predominantly white, pro-working class (even if not exactly working class themselves...), angry young people (anti-fascists) screaming 'fascist!' at each other, whilst the police guarded the BMWs and Mercedes driving in between the two groups and the drones in parliament peeped out of their windows, not doubt making snide comments about the lot of us. it was heartbreaking.

but i am tangenting badly. when i am discussing with my non-revolutionary friends (some of you are no doubt reading this) why I bother when the revolution is 'clearly not going to happen', I respond by explaining that

1. the capitalist system inherently needs an oppressed working class and that people and the environment are dying all over the place because of this system
2. if everybody who had figured this out did their best to change it (rather than saying they couldn't do anything about it so why bother) then it WOULD change
3. If I am not a hypocrite

then

4. Doing my best to change things- i.e. get rid of capitalism, is necessary for my happiness and peace of mind.

I have learnt that this can only be done on a local level and the secondary benefit of this (or is it the primary one?) is that even if we don't overthrow capitalism then we can sure as hell keep that playcentre open, or make sure the institutions we are part of don't invest in the arms trade, or at the very least make some suits go home and question whether their holidays and champagne lunches are worth the suffering we have told them about or the shit we have sprayed on their heads from modified kalashnikovs.

And so when I get back i will carry this on, but in what form i do no know yet. this is something i hope to find out.

(Reading a history of china (which got confiscated at the chinese border- more on that later), it turns out that Mao and his cohawks basically manipulated it to look like the 'peasants' rose up with communist principles- infact many were just pissed off at the local bullying militia, were starving to death anyway and got fed by Mao or, worse, were straight up pressganged into fighting for him.)

but anyway.... where was I?

Oh yes, in Holland, walking through the musical streets. I had seen a truckstop on google maps before i left at what i thought was about 5km out of the town, and started walking along the hard shoulder of the motorway. A good while later I came to what I thought was the stop, but the moody Polish trucker told me the one I was looking for was another hours walk on, and he was going to sleep...

I forgave his lie when he couldn't ignore my tactical hitchhiking position in the corner of his eye and woohoo! i was in his cab and on the way to Poznan, Poland!!! Here we go... he didn't speak much english, but enough to tell me how shit my tobacco was, and to show me how to use his rolling machine to make rollies that look exactly like cigaretters (the papers have an orange filter attached to them...). His tachometer was broken so he drove though the night listening to rock music whilst i dozed. At dawn we stopped and ate polish bratwurst and supernoodles with a radioactive maroon hue. His name was Kaieta and his most memorable (and repeated) words were 'fuck life, fuck my boss'.

He dropped me off at lunchtime on the road north and I ate soft cheese and apples under the polish sun and scratched my name into a bench. There followed a day and a half of small and medium length rides with the good people of north east poland. I saw tobacco drying in the sun like smoked kippers in scarborough fishmongers. I learnt that drink driving, and overtaking round blind corners, is not uncommon. I got a potted history of poland as good as i would find in any museum and from a wide range of (mostly despairing) drivers. It seems polish politics is extremely polemic, with one party seen as the 'traditionalists' and one as the 'modernisers' but both just old men arguing amongst themselves. Same record, different language.

Poland is really a very beautiful place, similar in landscape (i suppose obviously) to Germany, but more rural and with a 'tractor driver waving at old ladies as he drives through the village' and 'haymaking with a pitchfork' vibe that i think was lost in germany a long while ago.

Even the night I spent behind a petrol station was pleasant enough- i spent a few hours under the glare of the strip lights asking for rides and wrote the first poem of the trip

Snails on the fire extinguisher
liquid petroleum gas 2
trucks with curtains drawn
sawdust in the cracks

are you going to ostrada?
nej nej no

wagon refrigeration motor
tv news mumblings
smelling dry sharp autumn cold
i buy a beer

waiting for a ride in ...

I was meant to put the name of the village instead of '....' but i never did find out where i was. i might take that last line out. very satisfying, writing poetry. sometimes it just seems the best form in which to write down what i am trying to describe, and therefore doesn't matter if it is any good as Actual Poetry.

And in the morning i got away quickly, but ended up going to the wrong border. my map of 'europa', which i found back at wilkinson house and therefore is probably sam's, is circa 1989 and still has the soviet union, rather than individual countries, borders. I had drawn in the belarus borders as i knew i couldn't go there (50 quid transit visa!) but hadn't bargained on Russia needing a deep water port that didn't freeze over, and their subsequent retention of Kaliningrad after the collapse of the USSR, leading to a totally random outpost of russia on the baltic sea... my face must have looked quite the picture when i got there and realised i was about to enter the wrong country.

and then to fast forward on a few rides and here i was with with my man on the lithuanian border. from being a bit grumpy and incredulous as to my presence at the beginning, he ended up waking me at 2am and letting me sleep on his very own bed! what a nice man.

In the morning i woke to the first of many life-affirming dawns of the next few weeks. we were somewhere in northern lituania, a thick but low mist in visible patches on the hill-less landscape, frosty tufts of grass like sculptures by the side of the road. my driver sat leaning on his steering wheel going a steady 70 and overtaking other trucks with movements like gestures. I felt a bit like Lyra on the back of Iorek bryrinson but less like a babe.

The dawn slowly cleared and the roadsigns counted down the miles to Riga, where my trucker left me at a petrol station on the edge of town.