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.

Ubuntu

i write at my auntie's house- a plush apartment in northern Jo'burg and the setting for a weekend of recuperation after the culmination of our 'delegation' around south africa and before a 20 hour bus journey to harare and all that lies in the great country of zimbabwe.

i had the first dream that i remembered about mbira last night- a very happy thing for me as proper mbira players (of which i am a generation away from being) often talk of ancestors coming into their dreams and teaching them new parts, or giving encouragement. in this dream an old man took the mbira from my hands as i was playing a tune i know and said something along the lines of 'no, you haven't got the feeling yet, play the song like this' and played the same song in a way that made all the bits of it fit together in a very beautiful way, but when he handed it back to me again i still could n't master it. i also dreamt about riding my bike over small burgeons of grass and on and on and on.

my auntie works for the UN and it was interesting to hear the inside knowledge before and after on the 'development world' before and after we met representatives from the UNDP (united nations development programme) and the british high commission in pretoria. certainly, especially in swaziland (yet another ex-colony) people look to the UK as a country that may intervene to improve governance (i.e. help install proper democracy) and provide aid and to some extent international recognition for their social stuggles. whilst one of the people we spoke to seemed to genuinely be trying to make headway on the swazi issue (detailed in the last blog post), the un seems like a badly governed country that is as slow to acknowledge the gravity of issues as it is to act on them.

welcome relief to this beaurocracy was abundant in and around cape town. on 16th june, south african youth day in rememberance of the Soweto township uprisings in which mostly 13-16 year old children marched autonomously by the thousand in protest at having to be taught in afrikaans, and were met with live ammunition from the SA police. dozens died and white vigalantes were photographed shooting indiscriminantly at blacks in the townships. at the project we found beautiful and raw performance poetry, ragingly beautiful choirs and strong old marxists who had put the project together with tiny amounts of money and had seen a sharp decline in the amount of young people entering gangs in the area. as a white tourist i like to work to gain the smiles and respect of south african activists rather than be judged on the money i have or potentially will bring in to a project, and this was an excellent case in point. we shared food and music and talked about their home made library, funeral cooperative and reading schemes.

perhaps the most powerful day though was the day we were taken by ex-ANC youth members, who escaped the country in the early 60s to be trained in Tanzania, uganda and zambia in guerilla warfare tactics (Mandela made a speech advocating violent resistance in the late 50s just before he was put in prison and a militant wing of the ANC was established), leaving their wives and lives and coming back into the country to practice what they had learned as the white government got more and more extreme in their own suppressive tactics. we were taken to a place bang in the middle of the beautiful downtown of cape town to see the shrubby hills where no less than 60,000 blacks and coloureds were forcibly removed to the townships to make way for pretty white developments, and then travelled out to three of the townships (read black and coloured ghettos) where they had been resettled.

i have seen slums in india and uganda but never anything on this scale- kilometre after kilometre of tightly packed corrogated iron homes, the ones that were shipping containers looked the most stable, with small fires, tiny shops selling pumpkins and potatos, ladies carrying children on their backs and whole lives on their heads. we stopped and smelt the air where just 20 years ago hundreds were killed, maimed and abducted in running battles with the police, where only 15 years ago the ailing white rulers sent in agent provocateurs to turn zulu against xhosa to prove that blacks were always going to be violent and would never be able to run a country, and where even today we are the only white faces that can be seen. but we were being led by a man whose history and presence commanded respect from us and potential pickpockets alike. this was a comrade whose brother and father had been killed under aparteid, who had left his family to fight for his beliefs and who still, amost 20 years later, was living in the informal housing sector waiting for the government to build him a proper house. another legend we were lucky to have access to.

South Africa in a paragraph is one of inequality with such the extremes so starkly across racial lines that at times it feels like apartheid rumbles on through the much more subtle rule of the dollar, much in the same way that imperialism rules through the dollar rather than the gun in much of the world today. however, despite a government that bleats socialism but actually is liberalising markets faster than you can say 'IMF', the people on the ground have the concept of ubuntu i.e. support and empathy for your fellow man, firmly fixed into them, and i guess this is the only way to keep smiling when the perils of post-apartheid capitalism keep life so hard

and in my travels there always seems room for the absurd (indeed, it is essential). here it involved a 7am trip to an evangelical church in the heart of johannesburg- at least 700 people in a huge room focussing on a slick-haired, greasy brazilian 'pastor' who praised god and money in equal measure. he and many others wore tshirts saying in huge letters 'SACRIFICE IS A MUST'... which ofcourse meant giving shitloads of your money to the church (him). we were subjected to a 10 minute long film, the first 3 minutes of which detailed 'mr chippy' and how shit his life was before he ignored the protests of his wife and gave 2 months entire salary to the church. the second 7 minutes surveyed in details all the material possessions he now had as one of the most successful businessmen in south africa. we were then all encouraged to pick up an envelope from the front, stuff it with as much money as we had (if we didn't have enough we were, happily, allowed to bring it back the next week)... if we didn't do this, it was implied, there was little welcome to be had here. everyone loved the hope this man offered and it was painful at times, however the music they played and we sang to- the reason i was there- was somethign between hard drum and bass and 'feeling hot hot hot' style pop and i danced my tits off.

National Unification Strategy (NUS)

written on 11/56/09 but held back without internet till now... i think some of it was perhaps a bit rash...

This whole thing is kind of funny. I am in Johannesburg, a city that
oscillates between the brooding, colourful hope and exhaust that I smelt
in Kampala, and the stulted, wide boulevards of an LA suburb, with
teenagers licking ice creams and mirrored office buildings sitting at
every corner. Not that this somewhat negative impression scratches the
surface of what I am sure is a great and beautiful city- I just haven¡¦t
had a chance to explore it. We have been in southern africa almost a week,
chauffered between fancy hotel and wood panelled board room over and over
again, meeting various organisations and getting to know each other- a
group of 10 ¡¥youth leaders¡¦.

Having said this, some of Africa was found on a 3 day sojourn to
Swaziland, a landlocked absolutist monarchy that is home to just over 1
million people and the highest HIV rate in the world. We took the 6 hour
drive from Jo-burg as the landscape changed from flat prarie land to deep
valleys and hills that are almost mountains. The Swazi people are really
lovely, relaxed people  who are for the most part off the tourist trail
and so tiny crime rates and no cynicism. We visited some growing co-ops
and walked a little in the hills.

My fellow ¡¥youth leaders¡¦ leave me flummoxed. Four work for the labour
party, either as campaigners or PAs for MPs. One of them used to work for
Liam Burn, ex-immigration minister and a total Daily Hate Male. Three have
close links with the NUS, including it¡¦s vice-president- an organisation
that this year has decided to campaign against binge drinking (as opposed
to free education, student housing or anti-racism) in a bizarre twist that
makes students effectively pay to be mothered. The rest are trade
unionists (always good eggs, and this case is no exception). Talk is of
nonsense NUS and labour insider politics- this in between meetings where
we hear how the world bank is withholding aid, people are dying of curable
diseases if they are not dying of AIDS and many of the people we meet look
to the UK government and therefore the labour party to ¡¥do something,
please¡¦.

The juxtapositions are everywhere: a meal where the pay of NUS full timers
and general sabbaticals was bemoaned before we met the Swaziland NUS who
have NO money and have to go cap in hand to local NGOs and pay for meeting
venues and transport out of their own pockets. Talking about fair trade
food over a meal in which half the food ordered is wasted. Intense
meetings about our collective solidarity followed by a shyness in engaging
with the people we meet on a social level immediately after.

The wrong people have come on this delegation. SOAS development studies
students would not only bring so much more to the table when we meet
genuinely knowledgeable, interesting and inspiring people (we had to
clarify what ¡¥Harare¡¦ was today) but they would also understand the many
pitfalls of westerners coming to help ¡¥develop¡¦ for 2 weeks staying in
well fucking posh hotels and sponsored by coca cola. They would also be
committed to do something beyond these weeks, something I seriously doubt
members of this group are (guys, if you are reading this please don¡¦t be
hurt, I think you know anyway) Even in ethnomusicology we talk about the
¡¥insider/outsider¡¦ way of doing fieldwork, (fieldwork is what this
essentially is) and taking a community on their own terms using its own
value sets to figure out what practical steps we can take together to
forge real positive change. This, by contrast, sometimes comes dangerously
close to voyeurism. We visited an orphanage for all of 45 minutes, handed
out food and listened to them sing (which was magic, and I briefly fell in
love with the soloist), cuddled them a bit and then spent the journey back
talking about how much we pity them. Awwww. I had a short but intense
moral dilemma shortly after- should I go and say hello to the woman in the
house dying of HIV induced TB who needs her mother to speak for her?
Everyone else was.  In the end I decided that playing mbira to her might
make the experience overall positive and I did and it was nice, but only
just.

In contrast to the lack of real Politik amongst the delegation, the people
we have met- reprentatives from the zimbabwean and swazi national student
unions, who regularly face imprisonment and beatings for standing up to
the state; members of civil rights groups who travel for miles from rural
areas to meet us; aswell as the taxi drivers and hotel porters that speak
the truth wherever you are in the world- are amazing and it is a real
honour and inspiration to spend time with them. And there is proper
revolutionary activity happening- the Swazi equivalent of the trade union
congress asked for a photocopier and 10 bikes so they can take the truth
to rural areas. Also in Swaziland, the last demonstration to free two
political prisoners ended when the police got a good hiding and ran into
the hills. The people we meet are young, totally dedicated, totally
lacking the egos of the Britist student movement and all the stronger for
their lack of cynicism about the political process.

And this is what I am here for and makes the whole corporate sponsored
endeavour worthwhile. Despite what Ed said about how I could do this by
myself if I really wanted and avoid being tainted, the bottom line is that
I wouldn¡¦t have access to these people if I hadn¡¦t come with ACTSA and
they wouldn¡¦t have access to the myriad of possibilities that are brewing
in my mind for what we can do from London.

The perspective on my life that I feel I have almost entirely lost in the
big city with the big job and dense (but joyful) squatlife is beginning to
return, and I once again feel that I can interact with the world on my own
terms and get excited by the big and small things. I have the same cycle
each time I go far away from home- the initial elation and exhaustion of
travel and solitude gives way after a week or so to some strong pangs of
loneliness and the question that ¡¥if this is what I feel the best thing
for me to spend my time doing is, yet I feel kind of homesick and lonely
then what is left?¡¦. This usually co-incides with the residual bits of
cannabis leaving my system and along with it the fuzziness that makes many
things bearable, but soon both these things turn from bad to good and a
clarity comes that is the marrow in the middle of the bone that I secretly
look forward to. I am almost there ļ.

And my mind races forward to zimbabwe¡K we have met quite a lot of
zimbabweans here and I have picked their collective brain about the
current conditions in zim, ability to travel, availability of goods etc
(apparently they have rolling tobacco so I can stop smoking imported
Camels¡K). The bad news is that in their desperation for food and fuel the
people killed lots of the wildlife and chopped down lots of the ancient
trees in the national parks. This is shit, but I have heard that some of
the national parks in the north are still pretty ok. I have also made
contacts with some Jazz musicians in Harare and it turns out that there is
a Jazz festival on 24-6 June in Harare, just at the right time to for me
to make a leisurely overland trip there from SA. I have brought some good
musical materials with me and have been learning new tunes on the Mbira at
every opportunity.

And so we roll on. Tommorow we tour a coke factory. I am going to go well
armed (with facts) and then cape down early next week.

Baku nin

ahoy! or, as they say here: salam! that and 'sahol' (thank you andgoodbye) are the only two words i have picked up here in baku, azerbaijan,to my shame. it is all one seems to need though, with muchgesticulating, mostly the action of putting donor kebab in bread, thestaple street food here. they mix it with yoghurt, coriander, tomato,cucumber and spices, a far cry from flames or similar, and also about1/5th of the price.

you find me (or i find your inbox) at 1230am local time sat with asunburnt chest eating peanuts from the minibar in a very posh airconditioned hotel room in the 'new' part of the city. i have just hadquite a special night- we went to the home of mir taymurhttp://azari.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai123_folder/123_articles/123_mirteymur_architecture.htmlwho is going to do live art during our concert on monday. he and hisfamily were amazing; their house in the walled old town is a piece of artin itself, filled with his sculptures and paintings and those of his wifeand students. he seems obsessed with curves, including the '[infinitecircle' that is essentially a short cylinder that is turned over at onepoint so if you were to draw a line along it with a pen you would coverboth surfaces.we ate walnut cake and he showed us the work he has done over the last 40years.

i have been cast as the 'boy' among the three of us (the trio thatmakes up our band has a azeri violin player and an iraqi-british oud/daffplayer- search 'ben sellers soas' and have a look at any except the firstresult, which has bad sound- they are both a few years older than me)which is brilliant as a)i can act like a boy and be silly and b)when i doadult things, like drink lots of azeri vodka and not fall all over theplace i look dead cool.

anyway, point is mir teymur's son looked just likeme so , although we had no language in common, we took to each other rightaway. the whole thing was like something out of arabian nights (or maybedisney's aladdin) with a stooped old man showing his treasures among highshelves of books, canvases, sculptures and old soviet photos. after toolong centred around this hotel catering (very well) for businessmen andtheir too-tanned wives this was a breath of non--airconditioned air and aglimpse at the azerbaijan of old.the city itself is really lovely in its own way, reflecting it'sgeographical position straddling east and west- turkey to the west, iranto the south, the caspian sea to the east, russia to the north- and racingto put soviet times behind it. much of the city is a building site, withmassive tower block hotels and apartments going up literally everywhere.there is oil here and lots of it, baku is the starting point of a pipelinethat extends through 3 countries to turkey where it supplies muich ofwestern europe's oil. even in the tourist video the 'i' of azerbaijan ismade from an oil tower.

i have only seen a certain side of the citythough, apparently a drive only 20 miles in any direction will show theroads turning to dirt and the people on the breadline. why aren't wesurprised? despite this, the city seems much more egalitarian than someplaces i have visited- less beggars and dodgy people than both uganda andindia, and no sense of a menacing police force. the streets are filledwith ladas and mercedes and nothing in between.

and i must segue for a moment into something that seems to be taking aneven more central role in my life these days- food and its appreciation.here it is all about LAMB and flat bread- lavash- and its variousmanifestations. there are also many nuts and fruits in savory dishes- weare talking cherry rice, apricot and butter lamb that literally melts inyour mouth, spinach with raisons... i could go on. the man from del montesays DA.

my days are made of rehearsal, deciding which swimming pool to go to,wandering round the city and fulfilling pretty random engagements. thecompany that is paying for us to be here represents- from what i cangather- upmarket boutiques (jewellrey, clothes etc) and other hideouslyexpense outlets, our violin player had met him at christmas and he hadinvited us over. he is paying for everything, from minibar to internet totaxis, fucking strange and generous until you realise the amount of moneythat must pass through his hands and our status as a cultural jewel forhim to show off to his friends.

on wednesday night i found myself in thebeautiful fountain filled courtyard of a traditional carpet making factoryfor an 'open rehearsal' with this guy and his guests. we ate caviar andthe essence of rose petals (rose petals boiled with sugar in water thendistilled) and drank vodka and hennessey cognac (supposedly the best inthe world) with, amongst others, the conductor of the national orchestraand the wife of mr hennessey himself. i learntafterwards that she had flown into baku from vienna just to meet this guyfor a potential business deal. we were the court musicians, entertainingthe drunk royalty whenever they desired.

i was told to play animprovisation thinking about 'the people who died in the earthquake insichuan' when i told him my grandma was from there (she isn't, i don'tknow where is from, but thats the only name i could think of). i almosttold him she had died in the earthquake just to shut him up. i played itand played it well, and he talked on his mobile phone. we were just likethe food- there as a glorious symbol for people who didn't necessarilyappreciate it for what it was.

among the other guests was a russianbusinessman who said little and had on his arm a beautiful blond nymph wholooked 17 at the oldest and was his wife. pretty fucking sick but again,what was there to say? today we were asked to go again as the guy wasentertaining one of george bush's brothers. the oud player is an iraqirefugee. we said we were busy.

earlier in the day we had met two professors from the conservatory inbaku. they were amazing, intense guys, one of them was a composer with 4gold teeth who could not sit still. the violin player, sabina, hadcomissioned a piece from him which he presented. it is avant garde andminimalist and i haven't decided whether i like it or not, but it iscertainly powerful and the first work that has been commissioned for me!

other highlights have included a full body massage from a buxom russingduring which i had to full my head with dismembered bodies and stuartpearce in order not to get billowing erection. infact, since i obviouslystopped smoking weed when i came i have been RIDICULOUSLY horny all thetime, aswell as remembering my dreams and writing them down as much aspossible when i wake up. two mornings ago, still half asleep, i wrote

stealing a bike. man in door saw me, was painting but didn't do anything.rode past cops. last day of term, went home, all partying in gower street,cleaner took notes. massage not hard enough.

strange eh? when i read the notes i remember the images but not the orderof them. its cool though to remember dreams as normally the weed killsthem all off.oh and yesterday we played a gig at the azerbaijani parliament!!! part ofthe 90th aniversary of the parliament with the president of azerbaijan andfull of ambassadors and chicken on sticks. ambassedors and theirentourages are as bad as soas undergradutes for fighting for the bestfood... we thought noone was listening to us but various people came up tous afterwards and said they liked it, and the croation ambassador said hewould like to invite us to a festival in croatia! so watch this space.

the fact thati am here as a 'musician' is kind of cool- i have always saidi wanted to be a musician and my family have always smiled and wished megood luck but i could tell they didn't think it was a feasible option, buthere i am, finished degree and taken all expenses paid to the old sovietrepublic to perform the musical masturbation they call improvising :).

Uganda

so i got off the plane in uganda to a fully yellow moon hanging in the sky like a fat opulescent apricot straining on its branch, judith and mariah took me back to their apartment just outside kampala that they had just moved into from a more crazy place, i think because they thought i would be uncomfotable there. we used their place as a base to do not very much- cook delicious food (they have a very carbohydrate orientated diet, americans would hate it even thought it is physiologically totally sensible if you live in the real non-SUV world) with things like matooke- mashed green banana-, posho- mashed plantain-, chapati, akona- ground millet, and then meat in sauce that you dipped everything in. good fish too from lake victoria, nice beer. then the twins introduced me to freddie, a radio producer for the 3rd biggest radio station in kampala, dembe FM- 'peace FM'- and i hung out at his radio station and interviewed all the big names of ugandan music, very fun and all for the good cause of my degree, some really interesting conversations, the things that are really big in popular ugandan music are ragga and reggae; hiphop is just starting to come up from the streets into the mainstream conciousness, and there is also alot of god music, and therefore interesting ethical dilemmas- should god music be played in nightclubs, which are still full of christians but christians mostly engaged in some sin or another...

then two amazing things happened. first, we went to these islands on lake victoria, me, judith, mariah, and this other guy also called ben (he is ben1, i am ben7) who i am shared an apartment with last year in london and who is also into his refugee support systems, anyhow this island was quite like paradise, purple cranes, yellow birds with huge huge feathery tails that flew by the dozen from the bushes across the beach we were on as soon as the sun turned from yellow to red, waders nibbling snails, jays diving for sardines, achingly beautiful sunsets, fire on the beach every night with various holidaying gringos, i felt a bit like a sage here and there, one night there was a big party of newcastle students our age, first big trip abroad, the fire (that normally would have silenced everyone and made me paranoid) and 'impressive' (to those who either need to feel impressed or contemptuous when meeting new people) experiences meant we could talk quietly enough that the secrets could be heard behind our words and we could slip into the night with our ideas intact, next day monkeys, a tiny village/town thing int he middle of an island with sprinting children, the next night judith gave me a masterclass in cooking on an open fire- she made it in such a way brances could be fed in to regulate exactly the temprature of the fire. i got sent to find salt in the nearest village, had almost the entire village lauging their heads off as i tried to explain salt through various hand jesters, and then they laughed even harder when they finally realised what i was after.

i also stopped smoking weed whilst i was out there, after 3 days i had a sweaty and very depressed night where everything came crashing down, then the next night, or maybe the night after that, i had a night of not euphoria but a sudden grip on my brain where all the experiences of my year in america and now uganda a bit were brought into perfect focus and i realise that i have grown up loads and changed a bit too, and that really the world is my oyster and i actually understood it as opposed to just deducing it, and i can be whoever i want to be and dictate my own social and cultural agenda, and through that make political change, and not fall for any of this paranoia nonsense and dance and i realised that really my mum, my grandma and getting j and m to canada are really the only truly important things in my life and thats fine and cool and as it should be and i got a bit worried that all my friends, alot of whom are now in long term relationships (when my band reformed when i got back all 6 other members were in or close to the big L, with cheesy gawps to prove it), would be too in love to have those 12midnight to 3.15am chats that are the things of life blood, but actually since i got back that has been the case except for sam and lizzie, who are similarly skeptical about the comfort and mindless joy of love so we have been doing those platonic all nighters that i still feel are where i am at, but anyway i digress, got over the weed, felt great, then boom i am back in scarborough and caning it in.

other amazing thing after the islands, i had heard rumours of mbira music in the east of the country, and my contact had another contact, so we had a long hot bus journey north east, where the civil war raged for 20 years until recently, got invited to a wedding, and then the next day made our way to an old wisened mans village to hear his music. wow. a 10 piece mbira/marimba/drum/vocal explosion oh my gosh something amazing, i will send you it when i have it rendered, music so full of energy, the village came out to greet and spend time with us, we drank homemade hot millet beer out of a common put through huge cane straws, shared instruments, laughed alot, there if you aren't married by 18 you are a bit wierd, if your not a parent by the time your 20 there is definitely something wrong iwth you (cos you die when you are 40), a philosophy as relevent as our 'family planning', there they lobby for existence, if there is not enough food to feed everyone people stop having so many kids according to the advice of the village elders, or people die, and that is accepted, and those who survive the day thank god and sleep easy knowing that tommorow they can have another day.

then i interviewed the singer through a translator, very candid, then they played more and for the last song i jammed the fuck out with them! yes! one of the best days of mine and the other bens life i tell you. all in the beating sun, kids eating mangoes like apples, hands on hearts, kick your shoes off and dance. after i have had 150 eyes on me, wondering if one of the two white men in the whole 50 mile radius can dance or not as i dance, i can go to any bullshit club or gig here and be the only person dancing! and thats what ive been doing a bit.

The Haircut I Never Had

“There was only one road back to L.A. US Interstate 15, just a flat-outhigh speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo, then on to theHollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity, justanother freak in the Freak Kingdom” .- Fear and Loathing

Hiya everyone :)

22.18gmt, my uncle dave’s house, south London, my flight leaves in 8 hoursso going to make this as short and sweet as a miles davis solo when he wasin a bad mood. The last couple of days have been a jet lagged daze ofchasing after bits of paper around the capital- letter of endorsement fromSOAS for my research (failed on that one), lawyer documents for the twins, yellow fever certificates, you name it, I had to sweat to get it. But everything is pretty much lined up now; I even have a bumbag. I realise I missed England now I am back- the non-fancy number plates, the sophisticated advertising, steak bakes, interesting architecture, thinroads, mmmm its good to be home, even though I CAN’T SMOKE IN PUBS! Can there not be a smoking room in a pub that staff don’t have to go in, or could be paid a little more to work in? I would work in one. Perhaps the future is squat gigs and illegal bars.

The highlight of the 2.5 days Ihave been here though was seeing Samuthka, the sharpest former-marxist inthe northern hemisphere, we last saw each other almost 2 years to the dayin Pune, India, at a pretty bullshit ‘young people change the world’conference, we stayed up all night being righteous and the last thing shesaid to me was something like ‘when you get to my age you will have givenup your ideals and anger too’ and I was like ‘no fucking way!’, and Ithink we were kind of both right, I think I am less about fighting now andmore about building out of the (ever growing) cracks in the system thesedays, cos the bubble that capitalism works within now cannot survive theharsh wind of DWINDLING NATURAL RESOURCES and when the average man whocares about his family can no longer be persuaded that capitalism islooking out for him, then he will need an alternative, and there needs tobe a good one in place, or at least a good way by which each individualcan realise his own alternative and the necessity for direct human solidarity, and that is where our energies can be best used I believe.Capitalism will destroy itself, we just need to have some sort of glue toput the pieces back together in a less headfuck way. But I digress, shecooked me a fat south Indian meal with her grandma’s special spice mix andthen there was no need to argue anymore. But yeah isn’t it cool when youthink your never going to see someone ever again and then you do? Bonanza.

So remember the last blog? I was just about to go to Vegas. Well I did andit was actually really amazing! As rich said, it’s a Disneyland for therich adult, the best food, the best ways to spend money and make money,(allegedly) the hottest and most dirty women, the best drinks, a hot tubin my room, the best entertainment, we went to see ‘Zumanity’, a kind oferotic cabaret with, amongst other things, two girls in a giant fishbowlbeing nymph like, crazy acrobatic silk things and the spectacle of tworandom members of the audience on stage being tested to see how liberatedthey were, very very funny. And wow the most juicy steak I have ever hadin my life, bloody hell that thing was amazing, I still dream of it. Ilost all my gambling money, even though I was doing quite well for awhile, but hey, what do you expect. Vegas is really mental though, eachcasino has a theme, one, themed on Venice has a canal system in it,another a roller coaster in it, another a lake with a pirate ship… smooth

Then boom back to San Fransisco, an Mbira lesson and words of advice aboutUganda in Berkeley, then Santa Cruz, I was itching to get on the road andit rained and I had no money, pretty tedious couple of days punctuatedonly by a final naked swim in the sea with the Duffman, but then thumb outsouth with Nick and by evening we are in Big Sur, ‘the greatest meetingof land and sea’, just in time for an outdoor Open Mic at the Henry Millerlibrary (H Miller was another writer of the beat generation who wasostracised even amongst his own peers for being too sexual) with the bigsur locals, a lovely night full of fairy lights and faeries (and faerywannabies), I played Mbira and it went well even though I was drunk;forgetting the words isn’t so bad when they are in a language that you are99% sure no one in the audience speaks, ended up camping in the forestwith a guy who had open mic’d NWA’s fuck the police on acoustic guitar :).Next day me and nick went to a beaut beach and read Steinbeck’s TravelsWith Charley (Charley was his dog) aloud to each other and then hitchedback on (not in) the boot of someones car! Now that was fun.

And me andnick said goodbye and now the sign I found back in april could be usedproperly

101 SOUTH

first car that drove passed me picked me up, an Isreali couple who livedon a Kibbutz, all the way to San Simeone. I was meant to be meeting withJono that night but the sun set (there is no way you can get a ride whenit is dark) but not to worry! By the last light of the setting sun Iwalked back up the coast and found a beach that the town looked over, butwith a perfectly sized and positioned log so I could sleep right up nextto it and be invisible to the road and the town. I drank the beer nick hadsent with me and revelled in my solitude. Travelling with someone isreally nice, but there is nothing like just having noone to answer to orrely on or entertain but yourself (and the birds), just walking with thewaves eddying around your feet, doing a little dance, smoking a wholespliff to yourself, singing to the seagulls, reading your book, stashingyour stuff, climbing a rock, its like a constant silent scream of joy justexisting in situations like that. I was in a completely arbitrary place,meeting completely arbitrary people, and I could not exist to all extentsand purposes, and when you might not exist you can do ANYTHING YOU WANT.

So quite a lot of people have been asking me about the practicalities ofit, so please indulge me whilst I pretend to know all the answers, youneed:

A strong bag
Water
Bread and cheese or similar basic but filling foods, I like bread andcheese because I love cheese and a loaf of bread and a block of cheeselasts a day and a bit for me, which is perfect.
Something to readA
sleeping bag

And that’s it really. Honest. Perhaps I knife if you are in hostileterritory (or pepper spray, but I don’t carry either). People have hadthat for hundreds, if not thousands of years, generally if you are in abeautiful place that is enough mind stimulation, and whoever picks you upgenerally talks quite a lot, and is interested and a nice person(otherwise they wouldn’t have picked you up in the first place) and incali I never waited more than about an hour for a ride, maybe 2 hours onceor twice, but generally about 20 mins, and each car on the horizon is ahope, so you don’t really get bored, and the feeling when a car pulls overis really one of the best. Thing is, like alida, if you put yourself outand are relying on the human spirit there people just go out of their wayto help you precisely BECAUSE you have put yourelf out there. Everyonewants to live in a world where there is no fear and people help eachother, but is just the fucking daily mail and rich security companies thatturns neighbours into strangers. I look in the eyes of so many people Imeet and they have the same lust for travel that I am quenching, and it isjust like JUST DO IT! You don’t need to buy your entertainment, there is awhole fucking planet of it and your very own feet can take you there!

ButI also take

Mbira, Penny whistle
Sewing kit, camera
Spare shirt, a little money
Bivvy bag, chocolate, diary, pen, tobacco

And you kind of collect things on the way. By the time I got to LA I had aCoyote bone and two eagle feathers (all from the same great guy), a thicksheepskin jacket, a flick knife and lots of bellies full of food. And lotsof music recommendations. People just like helping people, that’s allthere is to it. And those that don’t don’t pick up hitchhikers, and that’sfine with me.But I digress, next morning a cereal bar, a long wait then a short ride toa bigger village, Cambria. Get picked up from there by Joe, a Vietnamveteran with lots of stories to tell, all of them really depressing,razorblades in Vietnamese prostitute’s arses, falling down a gold minewhen he was 28, got out of hospital in a wheelchair to find his wife hadspent all his gold money and was moving away with his best friend, carcrashes on the way to funerals, ‘I sure hope there is reincarnation,because this one has sure fucked me over’, we smoked and Jono called justas I was getting out of the car, Joe was like ‘have you got everything?’and I was like ‘yeah yeah’, got off the phone and wheres my bag? Ohfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck joe had driven off with my passport, myclarinet, my visa….fuckfuckfuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! uh oh, panicstations. I didn’t have his number, couldn’t remember his name, or hiscar, I just knew loads of peripheral details about him, like how he wasdoing up his uncles house, and how he was born in Idaho.

But then jonoarrived with his magician friend Eric (who had been ‘outside of thesystem’s radar’ since the Vietnam war) and they were very pragmatic andwere like ‘so what if you have lost your passport and can’t get home andcan’t go to Uganda and have no money?’ think of all the things you CAN do!And it was a sunny day and really nice to see jono and me and eric hadread the same obscure book about a tribal people called the Ik, who onlyknew hate, and that was exciting, and Jono’s mum swung into motherlyaction and sent emails round to all the people who might know Joe, who atthe time I thought might be called Jesse, and I mellowed and then Jeffturned up all the way from Santa Cruz and we bought a big bottle of whiskyand went ‘on the ranch’. Jono lives in a small Beef wild west town namedSanta Margharita with a saloon and a single jail and a rodeo and suchlike,and the whisky and jamming (we had, amongst other things, a bohran, irishframe drum) and tree climbing and last night magic meant I once againfound myself putting my finger up to the ticks, taking all my clothes off,dancing and cawing like a seagull whilst jeff and jono screamed eulogiesto the moon. It got quite tribal.BOOMBABABOOMBOOMcawwwwwwwwwwwBOOMBOOMbOOMBABA…

What do males have these days that isn’t consuming that bonds them? Prosport- consuming. Drinking- consuming, women- all consuming. I feltsoooooo good on that hot night running around in circles screaming, thecoyotes screamed back, I think I might start doing it on every full moon,though maybe it was just warm enough that night and that’s why peopledon’t do it more often.Next day all day back in the village I got picked up in, trying to find mypassport, posters up in every window, not looking good, intrigue at thepharmacy, tight lipped locals at the Mexican restaurant, then to cut along story because my little cuz wants to go to bed and so should I, joecalled my mum (I gave him my number in England incase he wanted to come toEngland when his terminally ill wife dies) and my mum called me, prettypissed off, and everything sorted itself out. And I made a good friend injoe, god/nature/the chaos theory works in mysterious ways.

Then one big fat ride in the back of a huge motor home the size of a bus(I kid you not) from san luis Obispo straight to the heart of the City ofAngels, we stopped in santa Barbara for ham sandwiches and minestronesoup, they were totally not going to give me a ride except they neededhelp fixing their motor home and I provided it, and they realised what aplucky young Englishman I was and didn’t want me getting bumraped by anyold person so ofcourse gave me a ride. I slept on their sofa and wasallowed to smoke rollies. They had one of the biggest TVs I have seenabove their drivers seats. Did you know you can stay in any walmartcarpark for free overnight if you have a huge ass camper van?LA- I had been before with my mum over Christmas and, frankly, didn’t likethe place, but this time I saw it through the eyes of the locals, firstTravis, a great kind of skater kid who lived in affluent north LA,Glendale, him and his friends showed me how they live, driving acrossfreeways to this person or that person, always trying to find somewhere toblaze where suburban curtains wouldn’t twitch.

Then 2 days later a ridedown to Carson, seen by many as ghetto LA, right down by the huge stinkingoil refineries and docks, to stay with good friend and amazingly naturallygifted drummer Moises, a second generation Mexican immigrant, but don’tlet that define him, he is one of the kindest, coolest, hippest and mostsensitive cats I have ever met, he took me to a crazy part of the LA coastwhere a road had fallen half way down a cliff and the locals had turned itinto a big graffiti space and skatepark. Amazing.Ok shit I really have to get some sleep, I have to get up again in 2.5hours and fly around another good chunk of the world. Life is amazing.Well then, Mrs mack would complain this is all description and noanalysis, but whatever, it is late, you’ll here from me again if you emailme, otherwise ill see you in a month, and this time I am HOME. But fuck,is noone coming to WOMAD? Behla? George? I can’t dance by myself you know.

Ok bye
Love ben

the importance of being ernesto

hiya :)

thursday night, back in san Francisco with rich and ernie, tired and happy. academic year 06/07 is ancient history and
it is SUMMER! fuck yeah. once again horizons broaden and everything is put into the context of potential-filled
summers days and life-affirming nights in any place your feet care to take you. tommorow it is Las Vegas, viva, talk
is of canal systems inside hotels and the infamous LAS VEGAS BUFFET. This afternoon i walked to the edge of the
bay at alameda, where you can see the skyscrapers of san Francisco in the fog, and it was like i had come full circle
from when i did the same 9 months ago when i first got here. what has changed? not really sure. I felt the same sense of mute happiness mixed with a slight twist in my stomach when everything is shifting and moving and you are by yourself and you know you can handle it but you are going to have to dig your feet into the sand and not let the waves knock you over. The birds were there again though, little waders chasing the outgoing waves to eat what they left behind.

i had my last exam yesterday, 8am, after a few quickly-passing weeks of santa cruz quirk. it was my 21st birthday a
week ago, turned ‘legal’ twice, but here you get a free drink in every bar on your birthday! and twice it was
newcastle brown ale haha, i used to get tetchy about being the centre of attention on my birthday, but this year i tried
to see it more as a chance to decide some great things to do and give people no choice but to do them with me, so off
to a theolonious monk tribute band with clarinet (it was an exploration for me of how a clarinet can hold a
performance with just bass and drumset and keep everyone interested, but this guy didn’t really manage it), then irish
style pubs, then ‘99 bottles’ which had 99 different types of beer, but no hoegaarden or krononburg, then i can’t really
remember much except some delicious lime cocktail and a moment, and then later screaming WA-AR! on the
traintracks and losing my bag (i found it), snoring,

A good birthday all in all though, and it got even better then next morning as nick and jack did a superb job helping me avoid a hangover by getting me up in time to hop the cement train to davenport (7 miles away), wow i used to dream of this
reading Harbinger round sam’s, the train, a monster with UNION-PACIFIC written on the side, slows down as it comes
into downtown santa cruz and goes round a corner, as the last few carriages come past, at say 15mph,. The three of us, squatting in the bushes near the depot with two others, sprint out of our hideout and grab the ladder things hanging down, then in a fluid movement swing up onto the back of the carriage and hide in the kind of crevice in between the cement and the wheels, heart beating fast, and sigh. when the train gets out of town and hugs the coast north, we climbed up into the top of the carriages (the train didn’t go much faster than 20mph i would say) and lay around in the sun, carriages clanging,
waving at the mexican farm workers taking breaks in the shade, looked at the birds circling around. really
special. Stillness in movement. jumped off at Panther beach, dropping our legs down the side of
the train and running along for a bit before letting go and stumbling along the sandy side, then a swim in the rough
sea, a climb up a big rock, nick accidentally pulled the leg off a crab (he could have been more careful), more birds.

Nick didn’t really know when the train came back, but when we were satisfied we walked back up to the train
tracks and walked along a bit, and what do you know the train (only 1 per day, 3 days a week) came back!, we
repeated the process but this time only managed to get on the back cars, which were empty grain carriages, so we had
to make a human pyramid to navigate them back to the comfy cement carriages. the walkways at the ends of the
roofs of the carriages kind of extend, but there is about a 2ft gap between them, and even though technically it is as
simple as jumping 2 foot over a little stream, the mental impact of the whole thing being at speed on top of a train
was something that took me a while to get over, and i didn’t dare do push ups in between carriages like the others.
but it was all brilliant! total release. that night we went back to guerrilla cinema (political films projected against a
warehouse wall on the traintracks) and saw REAL trainhopping, Technicolor glory, in all honesty it scares me a bit
too much for me to do it for fun like that (though i am sure i would get used to it), dodging train security, not
wanting to fall asleep incase i fell off, eating all my food too quickly, but (as was shown in one of the films) it is a
great way to travel around as an activist, potentially much faster than hitchiking, and a great place to meet special
people. alot of the people i have met here are thinking about doing it this summer, the last big group of young people
to do it was during the depression in the 30s where people left home looking for work, what do happy ucsc students
see in it? freedom? cycles.

bicycles- every revolution is a revolutionary act

The clarinet trio on my birthday perhaps seemed a little flat because the last band I had seen were the Esbjorn Svennson Trio, Swedish nouveau-jazz gods who really blew me away a week or so before. They have this psychic connection with each other, the drummer too cool even for the conventional riproaring solo, instead kind of bending under his kit and playing what sounded like many Tibetan singing bowls at once, the bassist as good as any I have heard, but with an ease and relaxed fluidity, sometimes also with an overdrive pedal, and then the pianist, esbjorn svennson, controlling the sound of the bassist and the drummer with a little effects box on his piano, and then playing this piano that veered from catchy but overarching pop kind of stuff, through glimpses of trad jazz and avant garde and then just POUNDPOUNDPOUND with fast shifting ostinato in the middle of the piano with his right hand and then left hand going everywhere, walls of rich sound, so anyway when I get back to London it is going to be time to really crystallise all the adjectives and ideas that have been spinning round my mind and start a new band. My ideal a few years down the line (sorry to repeat myself to those I have already told this to) would be to have a pool of say 12 or so musicians, a cellist, great jazz/funk drum bass piano, trumpet, MC, female vocals, really versatile thoughtful guitar player, etc etc and then maybe 40 or 50 songs, and they don’t all use all the musicians all the time, maybe some can just be cello and clarinet, or drum machine, sampler and Mbira, or whatever, and be able to play a completely different set 5 nights of the week. Wouldn’t that be great? And the music being the main thing, but lyrics adding an extra dimension and being penetrating in their sparseness, like

Stock exchange? Nonononono

Or

If I had coltrane’s babies they would all be called john

Or

Listen! Listen!

All I need is a free or very cheap practice space in London, then some imagination and early morning forest walks. On that note, if anyone is looking for a housemate or two next year let me know. I think it might be quite tough for me to readjust to urban living, the forest just sucks all my problems away into its vastness, hopefully a band will be the anti-dote to that, but I can’t be sure.

3rd best thing about santa cruz- two (sometimes three) chipmunks are on hind legs on a pallet when i wake up in the mornings looking at me, they eat peanuts out of my hand and i call them alvin, simon and theodore. their tails waggle fast whilst they eat. there are also a family of mice that come out at night and try and break into my rucksack so i can’t keep my rucksack too close or they climb on me, sometimes i give them peanuts too.

But endless goodbyes! the downside of being transient. lots of strong hugs, which of course is great, but still everything
tinged with sadness and inevitability a bit. the worst is with the people you know you could have got on with really
well if you had had more time or chance had happened differently, saying ‘yeah, wow i really enjoyed your company
from afar, ill see you on facebook’. after naive scepticism at the beginning, i say goodbye to loads of people i know
are going to have such amazing lives and create great things, max and jack being cases in point, i saw jack off on the
greyhound, he was going to ‘trail blaze’ for 10 hours a day in the hot sun, sleeping on the trail, he is this [-] close to
being able to just stand there and be like ‘yo...’ and do his half poet, half mc thing with epic lyrical twists and
captivate everyone in the room. edmund, my first flatmate, who didn’t really leave the house much, was ‘asleep’
when i left, even though i had lost my wallet and there was hubbub, and gian carlo, the guy my fees were going to
pay the wages of to look after me, who was younger than me and straightedge, hadn’t been seen all day since max
put a hash cookie with a thank you note from ‘building 11’ for him. but I gave max a fat hug and maybe he is coming
to england at the end of summer.

Also had to say goodbye to Jackie, the girl who was serving Brie at Food Not Bombs one Wednesday (a testament to the levels of high-quality surplus goods here). For the second time since I got here it was all ‘ben stop worrying about chasing after girls you have not really anything in common with, just relax and wait for girls like this!’. she plays (mostly) banjo and sings like you imagine Ma Joad must have sang when she was young, and we sat in some trees and drank homemade lemonade and she showed me some constellations and then we broke into the uni swimming pool at 3am and swam with steam rising up from the pool, the sound of the disturbed water echoing around. But as usual (the last months) I meet the best people when either I or they are about to be somewhere completely removed from where the other is, so we said bye bye. Right now she backpacking in the central valley.

the american police are a money making machine. They have QUOTAS of the amount of money have to fine people, and there are lots of different departments- the santa cruz county police, the santa cruz sheriff, the university police, the highway patrol, all justifying their existence all the time. BULLSHIT. If you get a DUI- driving under influence- not only do you have to pay THOUSANDS of dollars in fines, or go to jail, but you also have to PAY FOR YOUR OWN REHABILITATION PROGRAMS! Or go to jail. So they put the poor ones in jail and charge the rest through the nose. And if you are under 21 and have drunk so much as a SHANDY that is a DUI. And if you don’t’ have your seat belt on that is $100 on the spot fine. And if you piss on a cops face…well I dunno about that, maybe you would get your head blown off.
Even national park rangers have guns and can arrest people.

i just can’t stop listening to nick drake. i am listening to him right now. ‘the world keeps raining through my head’

My mum came for a week just before our birthdays (hers is the day before mine), we borrowed Jono’s trailer (very kind of him) and had a lovely time. Once again mum was really tired from her busy work life in the Boro but she took to the trailer park like a duck to water and was soon talking about selling our house in scarborough and buying a caravan in wales. I told her it wasn’t my ideal. That weekend we went with uncles rich and ernie to Yosemite, the crown jewel of all California’s natural wonders. The photos on face book tell the story better than I can in words, but Yosemite just has the best bits- huge waterfalls with drifting mist floating across and cooling your face, huge 2000ft rocks screaming out of the ground with tiny mountain climbers as small as pins half way up it, then huge mindblowing vistas that look like something out of lord of the rings…epic. Also some of the biggest trees in the world (in terms of volume), giant sequoias, huge things, you can cut a hole in them big enough to ride a hummer through and the tree will live on regardless.

Then that night rich and ernie took us to a native american casino (apparently gambling is too immoral for white Americans and is illegal, but if the natives want to do it, well our working class will go and spend all their money there), amazing food, strange atmosphere, lots of people losing lots of money, tower of power playing in a kind of stadium outside (my old band member trumpet player was part of the opening act for them! I said hello and he was his usual LA torrid but nice self), a stunning, I mean stunning, native american girl about my age with a sad face taking shit from fat white Americans in a 1950s style diner, serving them steaks and ice cream Sundays, $100 dolls of Pocahontas in the casino gift shop… native american lucky charms selling like hotcakes so people can WIN MORE MONEY, quite a lot of bullshit really, can’t really evoke the atmosphere properly but I guess you can imagine. Was certainly interesting though.

so the plan is to get back from vegas, spend a couple of days in santa cruz, then hitchike down to LA (about 500 miles over 7 days), stopping in Big sur for an open mic, then san luis Obispo to see Jono, jam and let him try and fulfil the idea in his head that his friends party harder than English people… I don’t’ think so, then to LA to be shown round Hollywood and long beach by a couple of hardcore punk kids named Travis and Jared and a great Mexican djembe player named Moises respectively. I lost my wallet so have exactly $123 dollars to get to LA and out with, going to be a challenge.

Ok, going to cut it, if I start talking about the what I have learned and what I have learned about america here im not going to stop, let it brew whilst I travel around over the next week.

Whos going to be in London on 28th june?

Ok speak soon, hope the sun is shining on everyone
Love Ben