We're on the one road

Arden Street House - Dunedin

2010-01-17T00:31:00.000-08:00

Backpackers? You just can’t beat them.

Keep your 2, 3, 4 and even 5 star sanitised vacuums and leave me to the reality and humanity of the semi-precious gems that are the backpackers hostels, hotels and congregation points for us strange breed of people who actually enjoy meeting people, having a laugh and living our lives with the most likeable compadres on the face of earth.

Even if they do speak a completely different lingo, eat strange looking food (but tasty enough when you would gladly nibble the jock strap off a sweaty gorilla), and even if they seem to have this ability to be in control of their life; that is the most annoying bit! (By the way that is no reference to the nationality of those I have spent much of my time with, but to the fact that they are ’YOUNG’ and with youth comes an outlook that so many of us old fogies dismiss as the product of hormones, innate irresponsibility and the lack of good parenting.

Anyway, that’s for another time so let me stick to the point, these places are gems!

But like all gems the best, rarest by definition and most unforgettable usually lie outwith the normal trail of either the streets of our plodding feet, or the back doubles and lanes of our imagination. Let‘s be honest here, finding a black diamond in a coalfield is not just the result of it being there, but possibly that it was put there deliberately for only the most astute, the most persistent or possibly the most lucky to pick it up, put it in their pocket and on the most dreich of days to brighten up their hours by taking it back out and polishing the memories till they gleam again.

Walk, drive, cycle, or taxi along the North Road in Dunedin and just after you have passed the Botanical Gardens, you will come to a road to your right, signposted Glendining Street, with a subsidiary sign pointing the way to Arden Street!

You won’t see many goats there; it’s probably a bit too steep! But what you will encounter is people with back packs; those coming down with a smile and those going up with an expectation.

Well when you get to the top you’ll find that this is where smile meets expectation.

Joyce runs the ship, young Jules is her helper and technical expert - he provides the internet access, a genuine 12 meg transfer rate. The best I have come across.

But from the moment of your arrival to the second of your departure you just feel in that hackneyed phrase ‘at home’.

Of course it’s a business, but it is a business run for you by people who understand you, the space that you need, and also when a wee conversation is just the thing to be getting along with.

It is also NOT a hotel! But is a refuge from external as well our own occasionally self-inflicted madness.

The bare facts of what is offered is on the website www.ardenstreethouse.co.nz, but what isn’t there is just how much you’ll think nostalgically of that hill, of the absence of goats and of the welcome.

People make experiences and Joyce is a person who makes her place an experience.

Everywhere I’ve been there have been one or possibly two places that have stood out. People know what I think of the Armchair in Cape Town and the Base in Brisbane. They haven’t heard yet among many others about the Happy Hippopotamus in Durban or the Green Elephant in Cape Town. They will soon! They haven’t heard either about some of the less than recommended experiences. Again they will soon but……when in Dunedin, for me anyway, I’ll be staying at the GarDUN of EDIN- ArdenSt House.

Matt - Who stayed there 13th January 2010 to 16th January 2010 and was sorry that he couldn’t have taken it with him.

Magic, The Opposable Thumb and Matt Giteau

2009-12-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes in the travelling days or sleeping nights, memories though not specifically connected with the here and now, just creep up like a cuddle from that special place where cuddles come from.

This is the first of a few that I don't want to forget and though from a long time ago, has a spine that reaches right to today. Bear with me and we'll get there.

A Story in Four Parts!

Part 1

There are moments, and only fleeting moments at that when what is simply stunning reaches up to heaven and with a sprinkling of magic it becomes suddenly wonderful - full of wonder!

Outside the look of love, birth of my daughters and the sacrifice that others are willing to make in the service of those who they may even have no knowledge of, it has only happened three times in my life and each of those has been entwined with the marvel of music.

It was 1980 and I was sitting at Paddington rail station in London.

“Stocious. I’m feckin stocious!”

The Cork accent was unmistakeable as it was omnipresent in the bar.

He targeted me as a youthful and well to do mark, and in a life preserving sort of way, we (me, him and his pals) had a few Guinnesses. For the first few rounds I nervously paid, and then as the drink took effect (on me, as they were already blankety blank) I said I was paying for no more - other than my own.

Having told me that they had just been released from the Scrubs I was wary, but with the sleight of hand of a conjuror, a couple of them disappeared and a few minutes later returned with more money than was needed for a week on the batter.

No I never asked! No bloody way!

The band on the concourse started up. It was the LGWR Brass Band. London and Great Western Railways; a brass band whose parent name had disappeared with the creation of British Railways, but a band that would hang on to their heritage and just play their music till either they or the last train left dodgy city.

There was no formation, no acoustic ambience and no uniforms unless you include the demob style coats, flat caps, and shoes that Charlie Chaplin wouldn’t have been seen dead in.

But there were three things that to this day repeatedly keep me enthralled.

The instruments from cornets to tubas, from saxophones to trumpets, euphonium to trombone were held and played gently and expertly filling the station with the most marvellous marches, ballads, and all time favourites.

When they played the station stopped; Friday commuters rushing hither and thither froze and a hundred smiles begot another hundred smiles as fingers snapped, feet tapped and an occasional couplet was sung in accompaniment. Time sat suspended and every sound so resonant in the racous life of a railway terminus dulled and softened, exisiting only as an indistict back-drop to the stars on stage.

And then there was yer man! Coat button-less and flapping.

He didn’t play. He wasn’t even as neatly worn and scuffed as the band-members. He seemed to walk the edge of a physical life while his spirit memories and thoughts swum in a million patterns inside his consciousness. He was comfortable or maybe just content to be there; there as he moved slowly among the audience and never asked for a penny, but found not just pennies but silver and pounds being placed in his box.

“Thank-you from everyone of the LGWR Brass Band” it said on that box, every capital letter important; and I could swear with every donation the music got not only better but the smiles got wider and the listening and pleasure more intent.

I had decided by then that my pals for the night had been callously convicted by a politically motivated system and while what they had done was probably illegal in the eyes of the blind scales, in the moral world it was likely to be judged as ethical and right. They were good men and so I turned to them to point out the scene that was being enacted on that litter strewn, concrete cold stage a few feet from out table. I needn’t have bothered!

These hardest of hard men, these incorrigible villains and heartless criminals were as enthralled as everyone else and in every line on their faces, in every twitch of their eyes, every contemplative silence that replaced the forlorn stociousness and every stillness that supplanted the previous restless suspicions, a peacefulness was writ.

As the particular piece finished, I gathered a little collection amongst us.

1980!

Five or six of us. Them with nothing more than what they could gather with their wits and me with not much more.

We got about £30 together.

I was the delegate and I waited till up piped a brass version of Dvorak’s New World Symphony - the Largo sometimes called “goin’ home”.

I loved that piece of music and every time I heard it, I could see an olive branch caught in the gentle swell of a warm sea, being urged by then tide onto an undiscovered land where it took root and humanity was born. I still see and feel that at as the opening strains call to me.

Yer man was still moving among the crowd, his open coat still flapping in the draughty station.

I slipped the cash, not into the box, but undetectably into one of his coat pockets and returned to my pint.

The big fellow I was with, poked me in the ribs and pointed back towards the band.

Time had started up again and the sounds of footsteps, and engines at first echoed loudly and then dimmed to a far away place and time outside the bordering arches designed in the head of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

It was nearing midnight and the band were packing their instruments, shaking hands and heading to the exits at the four corners of the station.

Three stayed to account for the takings, sitting on a slatted bench seat under the platform clock.

The bookkeeper was about to annotate the takings, when yer man reached across and stayed his pen, pulling the £30 from his pocket. The bookkeeper made a quick recount and entered the new amount in the ledger.

They stood and went their own ways, the station now almost empty apart from the brushmen, sweeping discarded papers, cardboard cigarette ends and a thousand stray pieces of meaningless paper into a pile. As they swept they hummed the band’s melodies and as the wind whistled in accompaniment, I headed for the sleeper back to Wales.

I had five new found mates to accompany me mind. They wanted to get to the Cork Ferry and so we all piled into my sleeper much to the consternation but mute objection from the attendant. Being with hard men sometimes helps.

They disappeared in the mist of a cold damp Swansea morning and I never saw them again. I never saw the band again nor ‘yer man‘.

But I’ll never forget any of them or the moment that a man with nothing finds Aladdin’s cave and gives it away!

Magic? Be in no doubt it's music!

To be continued.

Armchair Theatre

2009-11-12T06:54:00.000-08:00

Bland, that’s how it always appeared. But it was a disguise, a ruse that it was long comfortable with and one that would see it bore its way into my brain, sit unsuspected, poised for its moment of triumph ….that fleeting vulnerable second when the imagination of the hour just past, drained away leaving the even blander prospect of another night’s sleep and work or school when the sun rose from its own slumber.

Armchair Theatre for those of the generation of two television channels, was never quite what it seemed. It was ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ rolled up with the ‘Twilight Zone’ and even as youngsters we were allowed to stay up till 11pm and watch it as a family. The drama was never less than riveting, the plot enthralling and as the hand on the clock ticked towards another trip to the dream factory, we would comfort ourselves that the bad guys at the centre of the mayhem, murder and deceit were about to reap the whirlwind of justice usually in the shackles of the electric chair or tethered like a squealing pig to the noosed end of the hangman’s favourite rope.

But this was Armchair Theatre, and Armchair Theatre always had a sting in the tail.

It was the last of the television programmes for the night, and so as the credits started to roll, my Dad would sprung from his own designated armchair faster than Usain Bolt, to intercept and destroy the opening bars of the English National Anthem!

His hand would stretch in victorious fashion for the off-knob!

But then, like a puff-adder or Cape Cobra Armchair Theatre would strike!

Its fangs would deliver its venom, catching dad in mid stride, turning the whole evening on its head, as those who seemed innocent proved guilty, and those who we judged definitely guilty were absolved of all wrong doing. But in the impressionable mind of a nine year old who had been let stay up far too late, the uncertainties of right and wrong became merely a backdrop as his bulging eyes peered through his fingers, his tongue bitten red raw and his untouched tea went cold on the little wooden tray placed at his feet on the hearth of the slowly dimming coals giving up their heat as the day gave up its minutes.

Such was my formative memories of the early sixties, the new fangled state of the art British Relay television on the shelf and the family gathered round for their Wednesday night treat and introduction to conniving duplicity. Mind you the telly took fifteen minutes to warm up, during which time those with things to do fiddled around and the kids waited for the sullen inanimate grey/green screen to metamorphose into a world of living greys and whites.

It was Armchair Theatre time!

“It’s ready” we would shout, and in a trice the throng had been assembled with those other compulsory attendees, Bilsland toast, Co-Op tea, City Bakers’ snowballs and Marks and Spencer’s biscuits that were usually reserved for visitors.

Silence enveloped the room like a blanket of conspiracy.

This was Wednesday, this was stay up late night, this was ‘wide-eyed with shock’ night, this was Armchair Theatre night.

Armchairs and all things related to them have, ever since those nights held for me a degree of mystery, of wariness but most of all suspicion that not everything is as it seems. “Beware the mocking gaze of a conman pocketing your cash” was always my guiding light to life and armchairs in particular.

And so it was that as my time in South Africa approached its twilight hours, I booked in for a few nights at The Armchair on Lower Main Road, Observatory, Cape Town.

I had done what I had set out to do, scratching the surface of South Africa Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and back through Swaziland and Lesotho. The Green Elephant (and much will be written about that haven from the insanity of the world later) had been my home from home while in Cape Town , but now the almost spiritual lure of ‘The Armchair’ proved too much and I found myself, disoriented, dizzy and doubtful, standing on the pavement opposite its ‘come and get me’ windows and coquettish doorstep.

I forcibly blinked and the enticing allure and siren calls in my head softened and muted.

Perhaps the sepia toned vision was a result of the two bottles of red wine (Pinotage if you’re interested) and seven Windhoek lagers of the previous night. As my vapours dispersed the building assumed, as buildings should, an emotionless appearance, almost unassuming with little to suggest to the desperate itinerant that this might be the place to rest his camel for a few days and find a sense of serenity, peace and tranquillity all wrapped in the potential for party, laughter, food, foaming ale, inspiration and flirtation.

I stepped over the threshold and passed through the Stargate into another dimension. One that told a hundred tales, sang a hundred songs and like a great reunion of the travelling world, brought together backpacks large and small, new and old, tattooed with a thousand badges and faded with the sun, rain and probably a million tears as people found not so much what the world had in store for them, but more importantly what deep motivations and hidden strengths made them what they were.

People of every age, colour creed, and gender. Men with grizzled beards, women with moustaches, men with make-up and women who needed make-up. And not just backpackers. This was a jigsaw of life where the pieces were assembled as gingerly as the Jenga towers that crashed with regular abandon to the peals of laughter or cries of disappointment. Like life, the pieces were picked up and the game begun again.

This was no ordinary hostel, motel, lodging or guest house.

Take your place and play your part in the singularity of the ages as television, music, braii, good beer, good food, sink-in sofas, and casually cast cushions vie for territorial claim with bar stools, tables, coffee, tea newspapers, ready laughter, a thousand stories of derring-do. This is a place where the pieces have been assembled with one aim, to meet the needs of the footloose, feckless, fancy free and drifting ships passing in the night but leaving an echo of their presence lingering softly in the air.

As Shakespeare pointed out, ‘all the world’s a stage, and each of us must play our part.’ So who are the players, directors and producers who have taken the bricks, mortar, fixtures and fittings of a typical building in a street of far from typical life, and transformed it into the revitalising drama and reinvigorating mental massage?

Well first there’s Sam. I’m not sure how exactly to describe the philosopher, artist and general observer of all the flotsam and jetsam that washes up at the beach of life that is the bar. So I’ll use her own words.

“Take a picture of me that shows just how tall and elegant I am”.

This was a challenge since Sam had been rejected by the pygmies for being too small.

In an inspired moment we built a very small model of a safe, positioned Sam in the open doorway of the 4ft high mock-up and with the magic of Photoshop gave the impression of unrivalled elegance staring down from the lofty heights of Kilimanjaro.

Sam whose full name is Sam (an unusual phenomenon in Africa), revealed that her name meant ‘gift’, a small present to humanity! In fact Sam made every day a birthday.

She is also seriously into marketing. Nothing gets by this girl when a business opportunity peeks its head above the parapet. As she looked around her little safe, she noticed the convincingly modelled grey bags with the sign of the Rand printed upon them.

“there must be a big demand for moneybags like these” she thought aloud, and immediately drew up her business plan and marketing mission statement

“Come to cape Town, call Sam - for the best in safe sacks that Africa has to offer”

The phone has not stopped ringing, although every call has been terminated by Sam shouting down the receiver “It says ‘sacks’! The advert says ‘sacks’”!

With a smile that could absolve even the most sinful of souls, Sam is your introduction, spirit guide and first clue as to the drama hidden in the folds of the armchair. Folds indeed that most warm blooded males would be happy to search! (rumours that some are still lost are totally unfounded).

Then there is Christian. Christian is Africa Cool , Cape Town sheik, Observatory laid back and the Southern Hemisphere’s answer to The Fonz.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of Christian, but this photo was taken of the bar when he wasn’t there. The skeleton hanging from the shelf is NOT supposed to represent him.

Walk into the bar when Christian is directing proceedings and ‘abracadabra’, your drink is on the bar, positioned perfectly for your left-hand’s grasp, your change by its side before you’ve even decided whether you are going to offer a 20, 100, or coinage in payment.

Christian just knows.

He takes the pain out of decision making and lets the night and you drift into a careless relationship of possibilities, while he tops up your glass, turns down the sounds, cools the ambience and smiles as if he knows a million things that you don’t . He probably does.

Now that’s cool and that is Christian!

Connery, Pitt, Clooney, Daniel Craig and EVEN ME. Believe me, the rules of coolness and street cred will need to be re-defined when Christian strides across the world of celebrity, for he is the walking, talking ‘God-made man’ embodiment of coolness that would keep your milk fresh for ten years.

And so to Michelle!!!!(And believe me Michelle deserves the four exclamation marks - one for each night I stayed there - in my dreams anyway).

Michelle strikes two poses as you can see. The professional and the relaxed. In either case the photographer faces a challenge; just how do you improve on perfection?

Michelle sits at the Armchair‘s answer to the Pearly Gates - the reception that gives entry to the feast of frivolity lying in the sound-proofed chambers of the residents’ zone.

Michelle finds rooms where before there was only an empty air-space. No request is unfulfilled, no fantasy unsatisfied, and cold, windy and wet doorways will go unused for another night. An angel in disguise some may say….and who am I to argue!

She has a secret squad of builders on the go just in case a late night knock echoes through the dark corridors of the romantically lit reception. As the spirits of the exhausted and lonely backpackers emerge from the gloom of the night, Michelle brings her magical skills to the party and by the time she has made the guests welcome, relaxed and comfortable, the bricklayers, plasterers and design consultants have finished a room with a touch of magic, built just to the needs of the night-time stragglers.

Magic is not really the word. I am reliably informed that the whole history of Christianity would have been changed if Michelle’s ancestors had lived in Bethlehem. They would undoubtedly have acquired a room for Mary and Joseph. No stable, no manger, no cows, goats and no a barn full of straw. The Star of Bethlehem would have settled over the nearest Hilton or Trust House Fortie, and the three wise men would have arrived with room service.

I think that Michelle’s power over the future of the world hasn’t yet reached its peak. Perhaps one wet and windy midnight a hungry destitute and poverty-stricken group will arrive unheralded on the doorstep of the Armchair. Michelle will conjure up a room and what they will go on to achieve will no longer be the child of a night on the cold homeless pavement, but a world changing idea dreamt up all because of Michelle, as their heads rested on the cool pillow and comforting quilts of the Armchair.

You just never know when it is going to happen…….but I think Michelle does.

But every orchestra needs a conductor and lead violinist, every dance a choreographer and costumier and every play a playwright and director.

As the cast take their bow, we all stand in applause as the ranks of the twinkle-toed part to reveal the life-blood of the show - Faith and Mike, Mike and Faith.

Their ways are different, their tasks are different and each brings their own speciality to provide a combined sense of service, smiles and every little effort that makes The Armchair the diamond mine it is. Don’t just come and stay. Ask Mike or Faith for something. If they can’t satisfy you themselves I bet they’ll know someone who can.

And keep your eyes and ears peeled for the first hint of their supernatural talents.

Faith was standing one side of the window between bar and non-smoking lounge; Mike was mouthing a request for a till-roll. Two minutes later Faith came into the bar, clear polythene bag in hand, almost bursting at the seams with lemons and limes.

“Doesn’t look much like a till-roll to me” I remarked.

“Faith said I didn’t need one. Changed it this morning. She’ll be right” Mike responded.

“I didn’t hear her saying that” I offered.

“She was thinking it” Mike countered.

“Ah but what about the lemons and limes?”

“I was thinking about them and she picked up on my thoughts”.

I pondered this little example of thought reading and dismissed it as a parlour game. Little did I know!

For there is more. Seated at the bar - “Matt’s end of the bar” as it has been renamed, is where Faith demonstrated her mastery over the occult and the secret rites of mind-reading.

It was an ominously foreboding evening , the clouds heavy and dark snuffing out even the twinkling of the brightest stars and the futile moonbeams. The breeze turned chilly as it whistled through the open door and as the travelling merry-makers made merry as merry-makers tend to do, Faith showed me a picture on her phone.

It was of brightly burning multi-coloured candles, bedecking the bar and tables, familiar faces peering out of the shadows, holding familiar drinks, smiling familiar smiles.

“It was the night the power was cut off without any warning” Faith said in conspiratorial tones.

AND WITH THAT THE ELECTRICITY WAS CUT OFF AGAIN!

Out came the candles and the bar was transformed again into a big birthday cake.

Yes, one word from Faith and Mother Nature bends her knee in obedience.

But not only does Faith control the elements, she can also see deep inside your innermost secret chamber and read your long hidden truths.

I had just completed the first draft of this blog entry, unseen by eyes other than my own, when Faith said.

“When I was young(er), we always gathered as a family to listen to the drama and mystery plays on the radio”.

The cold grip of fate on my shoulder tightened as surely it was no coincidence that here I was writing about drama, mystery and Armchair Theatre, and Faith tugged on a silver thread of magic between my writing and her childhood. Did she know in her soul what was being written? Was this another clue to the missing link between mind, body and life’s unexplored depths? Was Faith placed on this earth by the gods to open up a backpackers’ hotel as a cover for her more important mission - leading the poor lost tribes of mankind out of the darkness of superstition and into the light of a new self-awakening.

Have no doubt, you will be hearing a lot more of Faith. Raising the dead, turning water into wine, feeding the five thousand. No problem for Faith. Let’s be honest, anyone who can keep the beer flowing when the power is cut to her wish, and who can see into the depths of your subconscious is surely destined for demigod status!

And of course last, not least, and maybe even a first among equals is Mike.

Mike is the glue, the hammer and nails, the flitting presence that keeps the cushions on the armchair puffed-up and comfortable. Mike lights fires of mystery and keeps the embers burning till even the most Doubting of Thomases is convinced that time can stand still, logic can be suspended and every room in the building is another planet in the South Africa’s answer to the profound questions of creation.

Mike doesn’t actually appear to do anything, but you must not be fooled by his apparent devotion to sitting down, breathing shallowly and surviving on a diet of biltong and beer. This is just another mystery to be solved during your stay. Every room you enter, every stair you climb, every door, every cupboard, every ornament sports the indelible fingerprint of Mike at his creative best.

If all you remember from your visit is Mike asking for more beer and biltong, you will have missed the real secret of the ‘man with the plan’.

So enter the armchair with your eyes wide-open and your personal antenna primed for the unexpected, the irrational. Take no rule book, no recipe and leave your expectations on the doorstep. Experience the riddle of time as days turn into nights and weeks and the accepted laws of nature are bent to the will of the Mike, the master playwright.

And then when you leave, say your goodbyes and turn the corner leaving the haunting disturbance of The Armchair behind you.

But stop a moment and look back around the bend to see if it is still there, inviting you back, holding the potential for surprise and shock and guarding the secret of a changing world? Or has it dissolved like a ghost into ages past, or even worse was it just a product of an overactive imagination and too much Windhoek beer?

Relief will flood over you as you can still see the red painted building still standing tall and magnetic as through its open windows a laugh or exclamation escapes into the outside world. The memory of that first day’s disorientation, dizziness and doubt will make a surprising but welcome return as you whisper in amazement to yourself….“It was real after all”!

But unlike Armchair Theatre, The Armchair keeps it surprises only for those who enter its fabled corridors and so as you trudge to the railway, Baz bus, or coach station, Sam, Michelle, Christian, Faith and Mike get preparations for the next performance under way. Rooms are buffed up, curtains freshened, new music fills the air, a slight adjustment here, a movement of a cushion there. Everything needs to be just right for the next needy nomad who rings the bell.

The Armchair is expecting you; they know who you are, they know when you will arrive; and they know what you need.

How do they do it?

That’s the mystery and only they know the secret.

Your task is just to settle into your very own Armchair upholstered with all the wisdom of the ancients, let your worries disappear while your minds are cleansed and souls refreshed.

Make yourself comfortable as the drama is about to begin again!

As for me, well herds of wild unicorns will not prevent me from returning……..but next time I’ll bring Garlic and Holy Water, for on my final day Michelle informed me that The Armchair had originally been called ‘The Armchair Theatre’.

The world is not as it seems! Woooooooooooooooooo!

Hail hail

Matt

A Town called Catatonia

2009-10-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

Mountain dark! That is the blackest of imaginable darks! Nights when the stars are hidden by angry cloud and the roads, verges, precipices and disasters are indistinguishable at more than two or three yards.

Driving in those conditions at anything above a slow amble is not particularly recommended, but traversing in this darkest of dark nights well above the cloud line and in the eye of waterfall of this particular storm, the journey was fraught with unfenced edges of a canionesque crater. This was exacerbated by the fact that the road had recently been used by the South African army for target practice. Pot-holes were everywhere, and as the rain filled them to the same muddy reflection as the rest of the road, it was evens that one would get me and there I would be, broken axle, stranded a couple of thousand feet up in the uninhabited void between civilisation and the Indian Ocean.

Except, on this night on possibly the most inhospitable weather in the most inhospitable land, it was anything but unpopulated; From the mist, cloud and rain, people came from all angles, across fields, from above, below, all points of the compass they would emerge from a the background gloom and just as quickly disappear again.

Some were running, some bending against the wind, some with essential stuff balanced on their heads, strangely unaffected by the gale, some (just to make the issue even more precarious) had kitted themselves out for the weather in black bin bags.

Black people, covered in black bin bags and running out of a deep dark wet night, visibility - negligible, out of a unfathomable void of black cloud. It had the feel of a computer game; your going for the record score and the game throws everything it’s got as you plough your way through hazard and disaster. It’s you against the deviously nasty programmer. But you really, really want that record score.

Hit a pot-hole, go off the edge, avoid the pot-hole and here are five people on the way to work, home from work, or just out for a stroll suddenly appearing like gunmen in a high noon shoot out; wait a minute that’s a cow, goat, ass, horse; slam on the brakes, check heart and trousers.

I was heading for a seaside village called Port St Johns, a few hundred kilometres south of Durban, and the furthest point I could get before the road ran out forcing me inland towards the hyperactive city of Mthatha. I had passed through it on the bus a few weeks previous and it gave the appearance of a nuclear reactor.

As for Port St Johns, I had no reason for going there other than trying to stick to the coast and get an alternative view of Southern Africa away from the inland. The portents hadn’t been brilliant with two of the preceding towns not only bearing the names Margate and Ramsgate, but also being uncannily ‘English’ seaside towns. I just didn’t fancy that at all.

With every swerve, skid, panic and shuddering stop I was fancying this whole idea less and less. Mind you there was no turning back.

In a helter skelter, and I sped down the other side, my desire to get off the peak more motivating than the fear of potholes or human carnage.

I got my record score, but believe me nothing less than great fortune, a strong suspension, and very agile folk of the night who could beat the blink of an eye in avoiding a collision, all played major roles. I contributed little.

My heart fell even further; immediately after the town sign was a big KFC.

I found a place to hole up and occasionally peaked out of van curtains trying to discern anything of interest while I struggled for sleep.

6.00 am was my first real wake call as the town tumbled from its slumber and jumped to attention for another day of English Pub, pub grub, jellied eels, silly kiss me quick hats, what the butler saw and ‘just hit the frog on the head Justin Darling, ……..on the head dear,……… ON THE FLIPPIN HEAD YA DAFT WEE BOOGER!

(Justin breaks into tears, wets himself and the mother embarrassedly searches around trying to find her last elocution lesson! Mother buys him an ice-cream, he drops it, more tears and ‘you’re your fathers son, that’s a fact. He can sort you out. Right home! Boy smiles, he‘s won - he hates arcades.)

Oops! Sorry about that, just a scene more or less regularly played out every Sunday in Worthing, Brighton and Portslade when I lived in those towns. I am not a fan of English seaside resorts!

I jumped out of the camper prepared to move on almost immediately.

The sun came out.

And the music started.

The town rubbed its eyes, and faced another day with the left-overs of a smiling dream still on their lips and in their eyes.

A hive of activity with people rushing everywhere, opening their stores, setting up there stalls. One after one the pairs of giant loudspeakers bust into life and as I walked through town, reggae merged with soul, with Jazz, rap and Tamla giving every area of town a different feel, flavour and sound.

And with the sun, the laughter started, the smiles beamed, hand after hand was shaken and the voices of the street called from one end of the street to the other.

Port St Johns became the only place to be for the next few days at least.

This was my kind of town.

I was going nowhere.

And then it hits you. All this hustle and bustle, to-ing and fro-ing is a mask. As I strolled seemingly directionless, so did most of the inhabitants. Fifteen minutes in and you’ve already encountered the same faces at least three times.

They become familiar with you and you with them.

“Yo man, howzitgoin man.’

“yeh man, hanging easy and sweet man’ (that’s me by the way, I used that rather clever response to ….sort off…..blend.)

And then you get the boxers stance with their two thumbs stuck in the air in approval, one long stride forward, bend at the knees and do a choo-choo train action, 1-2-3. All done by at least three in harmony. With the obligatory “Cool man”!

I practiced it that night and can now do it pretty much as second nature.

But the real breakthrough came when they asked my name.

“hey man, who are you. What’s your name man.?”

“Matt’s the name, chilling’s ma game, man”.(Blending in really brilliantly now).

“Cool Matt. Won’t give you our full names, man cos they’re a bit long but we use their meanings anyway. This here’s Virile, Hero, Perfection, and yours truly Prestige” he stretched out the P-r-e-s-t-i-g-e finishing with an upward flourish.

‘Matt’ seemed a bit bland compared to their names.

“Of course man, Matt’s my formal name. In Scotland we tend to do like you and use the meaning of our names rather than the given handle……..man”

“What’s your name mean, man” then asked Virile

“ ‘Gift of God‘, man” (as so many names do mean when the people who allocate these things - what a job that is, you could have real fun with that - when they‘ve had a bad night and their hangover simple will not focus on the fundamental skill needed to define a name).

They seemed impressed.

“Yo ‘gift of God’, good talkin man. See you around man.”

I assumed the position, did my choo-choo train and said simply “Cool man”.

Everyone is doing this directionless wander, stopping a few times to update each other on the world shattering events on a parallel street not five minutes ago. But the general air is one of total relaxation, the epitome of Africa Time.

This town is so laid back in attitude that the rush to go nowhere is virulently infectious as I took my part in the dash for mental proneness.

Once you suss that ,you’ve got it. There is no point other than doing what you’re doing.

Every stall’s a different colour, offering fruit, clothes, electricals, second hand anything, hair cuts (internationally recognised), traditional remedies, dentistry, shoes, meats. This is an African Market town and seaside resort ; it is mainly black but with a smattering of white backpackers and refugees and asylum seekers from the lost world of western society! This is civilised in a chaotic (to the initiate) sort of way. Deals are done, goods sold and acquired, plans made and tales told.

This is Puccini’s La Boheme or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody …..with a black beat and an African tempo accompanied by the massed dancers of the town, moving in rhythm while conducting their business.

As the music and voices resound, the clatter screech and grind of four-wheel drive pick-ups and illegal taxis belting up and down the street roar out, oblivious to the pot-holes until the occupants in the open rear are thrown in the air as the offside wheel finds a two foot hole in the road. People jumping clear of mud, water and anything else that the wheels of the vans throw up. And everyone laughs; and so it goes on.

Up comes my man ‘Prestige’ for the third time in half an hour.

“Hey, The Gift Man (shortened already - another sign of status). Ganja man? Dagga man?”

I repeat my tactics of the previous two encounters and pretend that I don’t know what he is talking about, shrug my shoulders, choo choo train and move on.

“Hey, Gift man, I’ve got it man.“

His eyes lit up and he shouts out at the top of his voice “You already stoned man. Way to go man! Hey bros, the Gift man is high as his good old lord and protector”

I didn’t bother arguing.

And the day passed the pace slowed and thinned out.

Catatonic suspended animation loomed as the night began to fall, the stalls were disassembled or secured, shutters closed, the lights of the houses shacks and tents on the on the hill side villages shining like earth-ridden stars, and laughter, singing and the ripples of parties filtered down the gradient to the listening empty streets below.

Empty, apart from me anyway, absorbing the reality of civilisation and knowing that this ‘Emerald Jewel of the Transkei’ will eventually go the same way as any place with rolling waves, blue skies, gilt-edged sunshine and a welcoming populace.

The developers the planners, the builders, the architects, the exploiters and they will destroy it. Margate, Ramsgate will have the third ugly witch as we welcome visitors to the new Scarborough.

Now that is worth fighting against

See youse all man!

(Gift of God does Choo-choo train, ‘cool man‘)

Matt

p.s. I know it's not as perfect as it appears. Perhaps at those evening parties they conjure up all sorts of occult forces and wish ill on their fellow man. In fact I even encountered the seamier side in a confrontation with a security guard in their Spar supermarket. I had wandered in and had a look for a cash point, it wasn’t up and running and so I strolled back out again.

“Hey man, can’t you read”?

He pointed above my head at the sign saying ‘ No exit/entrance only’.

The 'No entrance/exit only' was beside it, no turnstiles, no barriers, no difference except the signs. Two identical gaps in the wall, leading onto the identical bitof ground.

I was going to argue but decided ‘Yo man, cool man’ and took two extra paces to my left and exited under the exit sign.

He was happy, his authority reinforced and I wondered why in a town where mass slaughter by random acts of psychotic driving was but a moment away, it was so important to go through that particular door.

I found out later..... I should have remembered!

In Pursuit of the Fallen Angel.

2009-10-12T23:27:00.000-07:00

October 2009

There was nothing below me; well nothing of substance, nothing that I could hold, step or rest upon, nothing that would give me peace of mind. Unfortunately there wasn’t even the whirlpool of disorienting space with its far away depth urging me with its sneering insincerity to let go and fall, to flail my arms pointlessly, to plummet through my own terror until either my heart’s beat failed to keep pace with my brain’s needs or to come a poor second in the battle of the fragility of blood, skin and bone versus the permanently unyielding might of granite, sandstone and the daggers of storm hewn trunks and branches.

All I could see, in the word of the indigenous Sotho, was ‘Rilithithithi’, ‘less than nothing‘, ‘darker than darkness’, a suddenly impenetrable mass of rain filled, cold strangling cloud. All I could feel was the icy impact of searing rain, all I could touch was the numbing poultice of wet mud and rocks, and all I could hope for was that the next step, the next ledge, the next painful wrench of another yard would yield somewhere, anywhere to give me a moment’s respite from deluge, wind and my hopelessly inbred dread of height.

It was October 7th 2009, and I was clinging to the vertical surface of a creviced mountainside approximately 2800 feet nearer to God’s realm than man in the normal course of events really should be. I was more than clinging, I was attempting to become a chameleon of the rock not just in appearance but in substance, hugging physically and mentally to the surface, the texture and the contours; but I knew that I couldn’t stay where I was; I couldn’t bear even the thought of trying to go back down never mind attempting the descent; so outrageous as it may seem (and believe me even I argued against the suggestion), I had only one option - I had to go onwards and upwards; I had to complete the next 200 feet or so to scale the height of this mountain, a partner to the more famous Table Mountain overlooking Cape Town, and once again face up to the curse laid on me by some prince of darkness.

On the climb this far I had heard the voice of fear and doubt whispering in my ear, ‘look down, look down, see how high it is, you feel dizzy, you might fall, you will fall, give up!’. By now the fear had approached barely controlled panic, and the voice was a gale spiralling and buffeting round the crags of both his choosing and even worse, his name.

This was “Devil’s Peak” in name and in just about every other sense you can imagine.

Adrenalin takes over and endomorphism kick in. I squiggled my feet secure in the rock holds and my right hand firmly in the grip of the sandstone and granite. My left arm stretched, my body trembling but this time through effort and with the cold, soaking and bone aching fatigue of someone who has just taken on about three hundred per-cent more than he should have and now faced the final insult. But that final insult at least wouldn’t be succumbing to the siren voice of fear; it would simply be the failure of having to accept that nature with even the merest of inconsequential whims was stronger than the ego and puny strength of any man’s arrogance.

I knew she was going to win (she always does in the end); but my stubbornness hadn’t been totally drained and so I knew that she was going to HAVE to win; There would be no resigned capitulation before I had exhausted whatever reserves of energy still existed. I just had to balance them across the priorities of keeping the autonomous life support systems working, breathing and moving on inch by painful inch.

I turned my face away from the tearing elements, took a deep breath and with my left hand in its new hold, I heaved my body upwards. My grip was solid…..for a moment….and then I felt a sudden sinking and wetness as the niche turned from sandstone to mud. The wind blew a final victorious blast, laughed in my face and screamed in my ear. “I WIN”!

The dyke above my head burst and the wetness turned to a sudden rush of a dam’s release showering me with rocks, mud, and enough water to solve the drought in the Kalahari. I tried to press myself against the side of the rocks but my hands, feet and possibly my will all gave way at the same time and I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!

*******************************************************************
Many decades earlier.

The wind howled like a banshee with piles, rain intermingling with bursts of hail strafing the windows, doing its violent utmost to breach the steel and glass lattice that protected the single bedroom of the five year old fast asleep in the safety of his pillow and dreams. Basically it was a typical fresh wee sma’ hours of a Coatbridge January; sadly all too typical and ever more disturbing for the other four occupants of the room standing around the boy and where he lay.

His father, mother and elder sisters watched, while as if in a fit of uncontrolled muscle spasms the boy tossed , turned, shadow boxed and kicked out at unseen demons, screaming and shouting in a foretaste of a future number one occult best seller.

They were resigned by now if not accustomed to the interrupted nights and disconnected days which followed. They had only once tried to waken him from whatever world he was in, but the almost catatonic reaction from the youngster had outlawed that as an option.

After an hour or so the outrage being enacted on the single bed eased and the screaming softened to an occasional moderated plea and a whimper eventually steadying to an uneven breath and moan.

Only his dad remained, sitting now in the little bed-side chair, having urged the girls to return to their room and ‘mammy’ to go and ease the weight of the advanced bump soon to produce another daughter and sister for the family.

The boy didn’t know the agonies that everyone else was going through but he did know that something was far wrong. The atmosphere the day after one of those nights was never the best, not bad, just not the normal liveliness of a child’s interaction with his family. Everyone else seemed so tired and the whole world seemed on edge.

Sometimes nothing would happen for months, sometimes only days but it would never disappear completely and another five years later, a brother on the way this time and the ‘terrors’ as he later found out they were called continued, irregularly perhaps but unabated in impact and ferocity.

They were never really discussed; how can you legislate for a nightmare? After all this was the West of Scotland, the land where men didn’t have feelings, emotions or tears, and in the unlikely event that they even admitted it to themselves, the possibility was immediately condemned and mocked as a passing phase.

The boy wouldn’t have told them anyway. After all it wasn’t just the dreams; dreams that consisted of falling from great heights, bellowing strangled screams, sharpened tree stumps getting ever closer, shifting position to prevent his pointless manoeuvres to evade their pointed intent, then just as the inevitable fate pierced his eyes the whole mad movie would start over again, this time a thousand moving stalagmites beckoning him ever closer.

The following day would be even worse as the fallout hit his life. ‘Good mornings’ sounded like accusations, simple questions like interrogations, every breath like a gasp for life, every sound, every movement and every touch like a threat, an attack or an assault.

He learned quickly to control it. He knew the dreams were the trigger; but then the secondary cause started. Heights would bring it on, not just standing somewhere high, but seeing it in reality or even in a film or on television. The world would become a bad place to be. Year after year it continued, and so as anyone who suffered from the affliction of acrophobia, NOT vertigo, but terrifying acrophobia, he took what he considered the only sensible action.

He took up parachute jumping, scaled the outside of multi-story flats, attempted (fruitless due to gendarme intervention) a mission to ascend the outside of the Eiffel Tower, walked over the struts and cantilevers of bridges spanning many of the world’s great rivers, gorges and valleys and in one particular episode at a place called Port Samson on the West Coast of Australia he found himself no more than two feet from the edge of a hundred and fifty foot sheer drop onto the rocks and swirling foam of the ocean below.
How he had got through the barbed grass and lethal flint shards was one thing; how he was going to get down, quite another.

As he got to his feet the wind changed direction and with a few more knots to its power, the journey down would have been solved for him. But there were compensations.

The view and vista of sea roar, wind song, and silence of mankind for just a few moments made it the only place on earth where he wanted to be and with a will and foolhardiness that he didn't know even he had, he stood on that two-foot wide ledge, stared first out to the distant blue horizon and then at the breakers below, stretched out his arms inviting the up draught to do its worse, closed his eyes and felt what it was like to be truly free!

The height did not phase him!

The height did not phase me!

Now though I hope that the above adds a wee bit of foliage to the wasteland of simply admitting to ‘acrophobia’, it also begs the question that if I no longer had the phobia, the challenge to be overcome, the fiend in my mind’s ear, why was I mucking around with extremophile plants and creatures with the added advantage of wings, at altitudes where re-entry rather than descent would have been more appropriate to return to ground zero?

Well, I suppose that there always remains the ex-smoker’s nagging doubt that a relapse is possible but on that day the real reason has to be put down to Bill Mitchell.

Everyone needs a Bill Mitchell.

We met in the car park of the Rhodes monument as I stared up at the peak disappearing into the wispy low clouds of an intermittently sunny day.

He introduced himself in the friendly manner that I had become accustomed to.

“That looks like a Celtic shirt. Thank god you’re not one of them.”

He then introduced himself as Bill Mitchell, Cape Town born and bred, but of solid Orkney stock who recently found himself at the top of Ben Nevis, admittedly by cable-car, and then he told me straight.

“The wind we normally get here is a warm south easterly and that is where our magic climate comes from. Tomorrow and for the next few days it is turning to a northerly blast that not only brings colder and wetter weather, but also the low dark cloud that foretells disaster for the idiotic who still try and climb the Devil’s Peak.”

The mountain loomed over the initially gentle rise that took those ‘idiots’ of Bill’s warning up towards the cloud enshrouded summit of the raucous ‘come on and get me’ ascent that overlooked the city.

The car park attendant, his name ‘Moses’ as I was later to discover wandered over, the rain just starting to pepper the air, ground and conversation.

“You wanta climb up there? Ok man, but not today. Try tomorrow and follow the winding trail. Take you a while maybe two hours but when you get there man, what a view of Kaap Tu,”

That’s Cape Town in the vernacular.

Bill Mitchell, pulled me aside and simply said, “if you can’t see the top, don’t even bother starting out.”

As the following day dawned I stood in the car park again and looked up dolefully at the shroud that swaddled the hidden peaks of the mountains. The sky was broken and at the level I was at there was a fair amount of sunshine, deceptively encouraging me to ignore the warnings and go for it. It wasn’t the height this time, but the cloud and the warnings that loomed as large as the peak itself.

I had been warned of all sorts of dangers in Johannesburg, Durban and now Cape Town, and had ignored them as the usual ravings of locals who were too familiar with and focussed on their problems not to see just how infrequently incidents actually occurred.

Unfortunately it was my judgement that had gone awry and skin of the teeth brushes with a couple of cocked rifles had stemmed my forays into the night life of the City centres. So this time I decided to heed the advice and turned back towards the car park exit.

Who should suddenly emerge from his little soldier hut than Moses.

“Hey Mr, you came back to do the climb today?”

I voiced my concern; well Bill’s concern.

“Stick to the trail man, and you’ll be fine.”

At first I remembered Bill’s advice and refused to buckle, but then I remembered it again. It was just too sensible and it wasn’t the peak that became the challenge, it was the warning not to go for it!

Mind you Moses’ smiling confidence definitely helped. (Never trust a smiling assassin!)

So once again I started towards the ascending rough terrain.

Moses called after me, sounding faintly like a final goodnight from Dave Allen …….“May your God go with you”!

He might as well have cackled and rubbed his hands with devious glee! Nuances and intuition never were my strong point..

********************************************************************
Moses’ had been quite clear, “take the rough path over two walkways and then take a left at the third walkway and follow it all the way round and round and round to the summit”.

I reached the third walkway and since I had already ignored Bill’s guidance I decided that I may as well ignore Moses’ advice and head through the low shrub and rain soaked mud coated basalt towards the hand over fist, foot over sense climb up the perpendicular face of the Devil’s peak.

I mean who in their right mind wants to simply walk up a winding trail to a vantage point, no matter how beautiful. The scenic route may very well have been aesthetically delightful, but the weather was coming in faster than a hun chasing a moonbeam and the hike would take about 2 hours, whereas the summit lay a tantalising five-hundred feet from where I stood. Surely no more than an hour and a half of exhilarating exertion.

It had been a good if challenging foray so far, the wind changing direction, rain then dry, sun then cloud, cold followed by a life affirming gust of warm air.

My moods had alternated with the elements. Confidence, pleasure, pain, enthusiasm, doubt and ultimate certainty.

But now I was in the final straight. Each three steps forwards were followed by a slip backwards, each three yards of clear gentle gradient led to two yards of lacerating vertical shrubbery.

Memories of Ben Lomond came back! But then, foolhardy and without any sense of what I was taking on, I had strayed from the signposted rising trail to the mountaineers’ ascent where ropes, clothing and years of experience were the basis of not only success but survival. I had been wearing a Celtic training jacket, Celtic trainers, Celtic track suit bottoms and carrying a mobile phone….. with a flat battery.

I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

This time the battery was fully charged….. Sadly there was no signal!

But old Devil’s Peak wasn’t as high as a Munro was it? Well it was and is. At almost exactly 1000m it passes the 3000 ft qualifying height by nearly 3oo ft.

The wildlife, flying, crawling, scampering or just salivating camouflaged themselves and with each chirp, whistle, growl or threatening silence they sniggered at my prospects.

The previously beautiful multi-coloured songsters became brooding mocking vultures.

“ Here’s another one. Look at him. He’s finished. Food for a year. Ha ha hah!!!”

I tried to ignore them all but as the rain swept in again from above I looked back down to the fast disappearing car-park! The doubts over my conquest of acrophobia came back with a ripping vengeance. The wind started shouting at me, the rustle of the bushes came at me from all directions whip-lashing my neck as I searched for the unseen and probably non-existent threat that lurked in my mind.

But what was as real as the rain was the mud on my hands, the numbness in my fingers, the pain in my knees and ankles, the tiredness in my spirit and the sudden prospect of the darkness of the cold cloud descending as I ascended and the inevitable conjunction of sightless eyes with impenetrable greyness.

I looked back down past my aches and pains to the incomprehensible sight of Cape Town spotlighted in a sun break in the far away clouds and then it was gone, the route back was gone, and all that was left was silence, cold, the return of fear and the deep memory of how I had never given in to it before.

A chimney through the rock appeared in front of me and as I clambered knees and back wedged in its narrowness to its exit, a wind cleared the clouds for a second and the sharp deliverance of trunks, branches and stalagmites called to me from the valley below. The cloud cover came back and I looked heavenwards.

I could make out some hand and foot grabs; I looked back down and could make out nothing. Up I went onto a place that I had never known before, a place that I couldn’t stay and one that I couldn’t go back down from.

This was fear and one that didn’t scream at me. Just one that whispered. It whispered my past, it whispered its patience and it whispered my future.

You know the rest.

“Rilithithithi, who gives a …..and then the deluge broke from the last hand grab and ‘I flew backwards spluttering and swallowing the cataract, plunging into the mountain’s halo of mist and mystery towards……..somewhere!’

I probably fell no more than thirty feet wedging in the chimney in V formation, jammed by my back pack of camera and Celtic towel, my knees level with my face.

I knew it was only another thirty feet to the bottom of the chimney and with a heave of my calves I freed my upper body and made the next stop with bloodied hands, face and pride where the final straight had started. I checked that my camera was ok.

I knew I was going no further up, and as I looked around at first dispiritedly, I cheered up when realised that the fear had gone again, blown up with the clouds as the sun shone through another gap on the downward trail. I looked up but the mist above clung still to the summit and the rain from its midst fell unrelenting, turning the mountainside into one huge cascade of water and rubble.

I followed it (or it washed me) downwards, tumbling, sliding and as the water cleansed away blood and mud, the birds and creatures of the undergrowth reappeared and made themselves heard, this time cheerfully welcoming my return and applauding my survival.

They still thought I was an erse!

The car park approached like an oasis and there was Moses. He was still grinning.

“Your God was looking after you” he said “you didn’t stick to the trail did you man?” it wasn’t really a question.

A little shadow appeared on my shoulder and whispered in my ear “you failed, I won!”

“Feck off, you never beat me, your just a fallen angel, a we feart fallen angel condemned to your own hell of misery. I found you and I beat you”.

Moses seemed to know what I was talking about.

I made my way back into town and thought 'Bill Mitchell was right after all. I’ll check the weather before my next attempt at scaling Devil’s Peak - the idiot’s guide indeed'.

Hail hail

Matt

The Sky at Night, Mugabe, the Chief, Spam and conquering my own prejudices.

2009-09-28T10:55:00.000-07:00

22.00 hours and in the depth of the night the headlights from the Intercape coach picked out the luminous cats’ eyes and exit signs from Johannesburg bus station as it started its four hundred mile journey to Durban. Roughly twenty five quid it cost me, comparable to the Glasgow to London ordeal but a whole heap more pleasant. The seats provided plenty of leg room, the reclining was substantial and comfortable, and once the sponsored TV adverts switched off at about 23.00 the gentle drone and vibration of the engine lullabied me to a much needed sleep.

Nature’s call roused me at about 01.50 and I headed to the toilet in the lower deck. The brightness in the wee-est room on the coach ill-prepared me for my return journey as in the contrasting blackness of the upper deck I stumbled, and in an instant was confronted by a hundred stars and fifty crescent moons suddenly lighting up the gloom like the sky at night; except these stars and moons were the abruptly opened eyes and smiling teeth of everyone else on the coach as my stubbed toe and painful exclamation awoke them from their own slumber.

I was the only white person on the coach!

A pale imitation of their grin crossed my lips and I awkwardly returned to my seat, any residual tiredness now dissipated with the embarrassed rush of blood to my cheeks. Then as with every other sleepless night I remember, the great bane of my life returned; I started to ponder the whys of the world and the hows of life.

The girl in the window seat beside me stirred in time to her regularly vibrating mobile phone that for some reason she always replaced in her cleavage! Five minutes would pass and then the gentle burr would sound again and after a few seconds and a little giggle she would reach down into the depths of that mysterious ravine and retrieve her little pal! She caught me looking; me with a fixed smirk and her with a knowing wink!

I smiled back in that subconscious way that we do when slightly embarrassed, and returned to my contemplation.

Jo’burg had created a whirlpool of questions, doubts, and reappraisal of long-held ignorant beliefs. Irrespective of revealed history it was apparent that wherever South Africa and its neighbours had come from it had never in any sense of the phrase been simply ‘black and white‘. good and bad, just and unjust. It was much more complicated than that.

Bill McIntosh (now re-christened McCluskey by his pals due to a slight typo by myself on the previous blog entry) had told me about his conversation with Margaret Mugabe and her response. The question was loaded but the answer was unequivocal and honest.

Bill : “Margaret, your a Zimbabwean. Given what you know now (a killer condition in any question), how would you vote, Ian Smith or Robert Mugabe?”

Margaret : “Smith! Smith! Mugabe is a bad man”

In the self-styled ‘civilised nations’ how often do we witness exactly the same phenomenon.

The desire and creation of change stems not always just from what is being promised but the intolerable nature of the existing conditions. Unfortunately it doesn’t take us too long to discover that like evolution change is a quite different phenomenon to progress, and we sometimes head down a cul-de-sac of hopelessness before having to fight a bloody retreat back past the hordes of ’me-to-ers’ who are blindly following the initial gadarene dash for greed. To all intents and purposes it has happened all over the ‘first world’, most demonstrably at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. How many millions of people see that what has merely happened is that one autocratic set of despots have been replaced by another, and this time with none of the disciplines that had become second nature to their every day lives.

So progress was needed but all they got was change, and not a change for the better. Now what are they faced with? Obviously it is unlikely that they really want to return to the way things were, but they don’t want to exist in a sad mirror image of that system either. I think they await another sober sensible gradualist Gorbachev rather than a drunkenly ranting Yeltsin. Many undoubtedly pray that they had made a different choice.

Zimbabwe is the same. I doubt really that they would want to return to Ian Smith and his white supremacist hegemony, but just maybe they would like to go back to the starting gun and choose a different answer to the multiple choice question. One modelled perhaps on a Nyerere, one modelled on a Mandela, a Tutu but not a Mugabe. Sadly I think that many people confused the apartheid of Smith with a characteristic of being ‘white’, and similarly assumed that changing that colour-base to ‘black’ would solve the perceived wrongs. It didn’t, it hasn’t and it never will until they change the values and become blind to colour.

Imagine what Margaret Mugabe is really saying about the horrors of the Mugabe regime.

Lets reverse the struggle, the deaths, the bloodshed, the sacrifices and the terror, all apparently worth it at the time, and all now consigned to the black-hole of worthlessness by a man who has taken the base concept of hatred and used it to divide and conquer his own people. Black versus white. Forget it. This is about power and the ‘white’ factor is only a tool to be used to fire up his Shona tribe, to give an ingredient of injustice to his fascist campaign, and to conjure up terror within the electorate. Margaret would rather choose to live in a state that views her as second class citizen, deprives her of basic human rights, and condemns her from birth to a life of uneducated poverty scavenging on the middens of the rich to eke out survival. In fact she did under Smith and those still in Zimbabwe stilll do under Mugabe. What a condemnation of the farce whose chief comedian is Robert Mugabe. Black humour indeed!

Mugabe is just a magnification of western style democracy’s devotion to lies and spin, spiced by the added ingredient of open brutality in the desperate desire for power. If the white vote was needed Mugabe would court that and sadly the western governments would see that as a virtue.

Instead of being a breadbasket for its own continent and possibly the world, Africa with the greatest resources in the world is steadily becoming a basket case, and don’t let us be in any way stereo typical here, this is allowed, encouraged and driven by the interests of big western conglomerates who shiver at the very thought of a united will and effective administration throughout this most colourful Eden.

Perhaps Mugabe’s inevitable demise will see a branch onto the real path of progress, but I doubt it. The infection is spreading and the treatment hasn’t even been identified.

However when that day does dawn, probably far into the uncharted future, Africa will be restored and recognised as not only the birthplace of humanity but also the founding empire of the future. It will succeed where barbed wire walls of the Grecian, Egyptian, Roman, Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian and Chinese imitations failed. Now there’s a prediction.

I’m not naïve enough to think that I’ve even scratched the itch never mind the surface; when I get to Harare I’m sure that a completely new panorama will be presented to me. But the above is a scenario that is regularly voiced by many here who fear that Zimbabwe is a rock tossed into a pool and whose waves will spread outwards to Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa in the years to come. The ripples are already being felt and the waters are rising.

Mind you I’m feeling quite chuffed at the moment.

I arrived a few days ago at the ultimate in back-packers accommodation. The Happy Hippo on Mahatma Ghandi Road (until recently known as Point Road). It has everything a man of the road could possibly desire and most importantly it has a unique welcome offered by Norma and Sunshine, the two wee Zulu girls on reception.

Compliments are a real bargaining chip in this land, and the silver tongue has worked wonders again. Not only am I granted almost open hours on the internet (I pay for one and get three free), but I have been allocated the best suite in the house. None of rooms are numbered but are named after heroes, tribes, battles or landmarks. Mine is simply called ‘Inkosi’ which everyone knows simply means ‘Chief’’! And well deserved it is especially with its echoes back to the Glaswegian Patois…”Aw right Chief?”

There is also Xhosa, Rondavel, Nguni, Ndebele, Kraal, Sangama, Umjondola, and many more but that should be enough to keep you and google going for the moment.

Oh, there is a communal room called Washywashy; No it’s not Zulu, it’s just the laundrette!

Breakfast starts at 6am and I’m sure that the early start led to the journey’s first ‘Monty Python’ moment.

I had decided to have a ‘breakfast Treppanazzi’; basically two slices of dinner-plate sized unleavened bread sandwiching fried tomato, mushrooms, bacon, Italian sausage, and scrambled egg.

I love tomatoes but prefer them raw.

“No tomatoes please” I asked.

A couple of minutes later the waitress returned “Sorry sir, we have no tomatoes. But we have caramelised fried onions instead ”.

“Ok, No caramelised fried onions then”!

“Very good sir”.

The Happy Hippo bar on one evening (that’s about all I could stand) is an ever changing variety of nationalities Dutch, German, English, West Brit (Bhoy did he hate my Letterkenny Wolfe Tone’s shirt), Afrikaner, French and American whose conversation focusses almost entirely on where they come from, (the delights of winter in Lowestoft anyone), how much they are spending, what they do as a job, and how many of the local shorts they think they can drink before falling over. Converstaion obviously inspired by some as yet unacknowledged Gods!

Across the road is my preferred house of relaxation, The Vic. It’s a Zulu run bar, used mainly by Zulus but with an open handed greeting that sees a fair sprinkling of the fairer skinned folk enjoying the great company and repartee.

Tulthste, (I called him my Spirit Guide) latched on to my ‘Australian’ accent, ordered some food and drink and insisted that I eat my share. I almost said ‘no thank you’, but the words hadn’t even formed when I could see the disappointment in his eyes. I don’t know what it was, but it was green, spicy, meaty and tasty, tasty, very very tasty.

We’ve sat most evenings late on since in a group of six or so, and all they want to discuss is what I think of South Africa, Africa, why I am there, what memories I will take away, what I think will happen to their country and a hundred other subjects.

Tulthste is a university student of history and modern studies, an inspiration and a real beacon of hope for the future.

He and all his friends are desperate for Africa to achieve its true potential and he left me last evening with a little story about his lecturer.

She said to him “When I was young I wanted to change the world, and failed. Then I wanted to change my country and failed. Then I tried to change the government and failed. Finally I tried to change myself and succeeded. Do that first!”

I think that is advice worth heeding!

I’ll get the chance later to test my new found motivation when I dip my toe back in the eclectic mix of the Happy Hippo bar, where the conversation has probably turned to the relative price of their nattily sloganed Primark products of exploitation.

I promise I will rid myself of this prejudice, after all they can’t help being arseholes!

Hail hail

Matt

p.s. Hope to visit Bloemfontein Celtic in the next few weeks. That should be something else!

Bok to the future - Part 1

2009-09-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

6000 ft up in the air, with neither wings nor parachute and you would think that my mind might be on something a bit more important than the fact that my nose was constantly blocked up.

Mind you in keeping with my own philosophy, it was a socialist blocking in that it didn’t exclusively favour any one nostril; after each blow it seemed to moved to share its work-to-rule within the recesses of the other nostril, transforming itself from a simple stoppage to a sudden full blown general strike of Synexally Natural Odour Treatment (SNOT).

Three bloody days and it just wouldn’t stop, but I suppose that is what comes from suddenly transferring from a life of sea-level temperance to this lofty existence 6000ft above sea level, up the Highveldt in Johannesburg’s Northcliff district.

With it has come an unusual tiredness that manifests itself particularly at night when I find that as the witching hour takes hold of the moon and the stars, I drift off into a deep sleep only to be awakened 9 hours later by the insistent laugh of the hadida bird (for those who know him, imagine Billy Shannon through an amplifier, for those who don‘t think of your childish reaction to the laughing policeman) or the ‘hoo-ooo-oooop - hoo-ooo-ooop-hoop-hoop-hoop-hoop’ of the surprisingly-named hoop-hoop bird (C’mon the Hoops)! It’s odd how the mind works as in its idle moments it ridiculously suggests that the sleep may be a normal by-product of a (relatively) alcohol free existence and dreams uninterrupted by nocturnal calls to the bladder relief room.

Anyway enough of the physical alterations to a goat-like existence on the sides of the mountain and the liberation from a life tied to Guinness and Sharkeys bar stool.

It had been an interesting journey, more from my own surprise that having been wasted on the Saturday night and then intermittently staying up to watch Mayweather versus Marquez , I was still functioning as Sunday 06:40 ticked into existence. Sufficiently programmed I dragged bags and myself across the road to meet up with Brenda and family for the journey out to the Airport. I was quiet the whole way. My brain was neither sure that it belonged to me nor that I was its normal compatriot. Fortunately Brenda, her mum and Paul kept up a running commentary on life in general and I just left my brain gearbox in neutral, my neural engine just ticking over enough to ensure that life sustaining functions operated in the background. Mind you if it hadn’t been for the help I received to automatically create my boarding ticket, I think I would just have given up and got the bus back to town.

Never mind, I got to Heathrow having eaten breakfast without actually realising that I had done so and while waiting the hours and minutes till my departure for Jo’burg I watched the Celtic v Hearts game on the net, the picture freezing at 1-1 and 1 minute into injury time. I trudged through security, sat down to a pasta meal, checked the final score and lo and behold, a new man appeared at the handle end of the fork. I even phoned Pat! It was gratifying to hear that not only had Celtic grabbed a stoppage time Hearts-breaker, but also that I wasn’t the only one in the world with a grand-canyon sized hangover and memory blank!

And so to Jo’burg and that city’s first encounter with the new Bumblebee - purchased at the last minute from the handily situated airport Celtic shop (tax free I hasten to add - ah the benefits of international playbhoy-dom)!

It was one of those paradoxes in life that Ray (my designated chauffeur) was an East Belfast lad. Oh the banter !!

Bill McIntosh and his wife Gioia, my hosts for the first few days , made my introduction to this new and fascinating culture as smooth as is possible. I can imagine now the apprehension that faces an immigrant, refugee or asylum seeker embarking on a new life in Glasgow. I am the different colour here! I speak the different language. I don’t know where the shops are, what to ask for, what to pay with. I don’t know the safe areas, the dangerous streets, the humour, the intonations of friendliness or threat, and most of all I don’t know where the nearest bar is which sells a decent pint of Guinness - the sole reason I am alcohol free!

Bill’s an ex-pat from Castlemilk; a dealer in gold, diamonds, medical services amongst other activities; Ross, his son is at Uni studying physics - I’ve been a great help to him in his thesis on string theory; Laura his daughter sleeps most of the time, and Gioia or ‘Mrs Bill’ as I call her having picked up the local patois, makes lasagne - but not just any lasagne - not even M&S lasagne - this is lasagne with dreams built in.

They’ve got two dogs - Boorbools - that a pack of Dobermans would do well to avoid, and a maid called Mrs Mugabe that the Boorbools do well to avoid. She makes me breakfast and also fires disapproving looks and grunts in my direction on a fairly regular basis. I take this as a sign of affection.

Johannesburg itself, that is the place that everyone would recognise as Downtown Johannesburg, is a dump and is heading for an implosion as once beautiful buildings, monuments and palazzos are destroyed in an orgy of retribution by immigrant opportunists taking advantage of the efforts to recompense the once downtrodden indigenous black peoples. What must have seemed like a golden age of opportunity for those who had long struggled for recognition or at least acknowledgement, has been decimated by an influx of tenuous kith and kin from Nigeria and Zimbabwe in particular, and that opportunity undoubtedly created has been washed away in a tidal wave of corruption, drugs, murder and Uzis. 50 murders across the country every day!

Businesses by the hundred have deserted their totemic buildings; bohemian city dwellers on a par with Paris have escaped the broken windows and shattered hopes; and societal civilities have been swept into the drains and sewers with each flood of desperate take-everything-give-nothing land-grabbers. The Government is paralysed, confused and leaderless believing that somehow next year’s World Cup is a fairy godmother with a magic wand.

Meanwhile a new city has sprung up, one that is the Johannesburg of old. Sandton is its name and since apartheid’s demise and the decay of the original city (replaced it seems by an epidemic of original sin) it is here that businesses have moved, people have relocated and society has begun its own fight back. But this is no simple like for like replacement for the old regime. Here the hopes of the new egalitarian dawn still shine. Perhaps it is still a bit too glamorous, glitzy and capitalist for me but at least there is no barrier to progress irrespective of colour or creed; and right in the middle sits Nelson Mandela Square (a wee bit more evocative than our very own back in Glasgow), a statue to the great man rising to the heavens as tall as the tallest building but unfortunately bearing a striking resemblance to Lionel Ritchie.

There is a continuing struggle, a struggle sadly echoing the days of the ghettos, the days of the shanty towns, the days of apartheid. But this struggle is not one of colour, nor even one of money or haves and have-nots. This struggle is one of law and order versus anarchy. It is a real battle and the locals, those who believed in the country and stayed (the whites and Afrikaaners), those who triumphed through justice (the blacks), and those who have already embraced the new integrated future (the coloureds) fear for a new ghetto-like existence where vision becomes imprisoned behind strictly defined walls and outside the battles for the quick-rand, the quick adrenaline rush and the quick fix become even more myopic as the country flounders in a disastrous magnification of Zimbabwe.

That is the sad sad truth of a future that one as beautiful as this country is, with the most beautiful people in the world, flashing the most inspiring smiles and welcoming with the most warm of handshakes, just simply doesn’t deserve.

The World Cup may be as good as it gets!

I hope I’m wrong.

I’ll be more upbeat next time as the lack of Guinness and too much sleep probably begins to become the norm for my new lifestyle. I’ll also hopefully be in Durban by then.

Hail Hail

Matt

The outback must be less dangerous...oh and Henrik

2009-04-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

And so Sydney is now nothing but a distant, fast fading memory. Except it isn’t.

How could one of the most beautiful cities and locations in the world, having etched itself on my mind like print on my palm ever become an experience that would dissolve into the miasma of amnesia.

I left Sydney on the 16.20 train on Friday 10th - Good Friday - and for the first time ever in all my travelling, felt the taste of gnawing regret.

Without exception, wherever I have shaken off then dust of travel and tethered myself for a rest, the first thought has always been ‘Where next, what next, and when next”.

Not this time!

Maybe it’s not just Sydney; maybe its all of Australia; I’ll find out soon enough, but from the magnificence of Darling Harbour, the astounding beauty and mystery of the inlets and bays, the hinterland, the peace and serenity of Mrs Macquarie’s road leading to her chair of contemplation, through to the contrast of Kings Cross and a hundred other little scratches that I made on the surface of this astonishing place, Sydney specifically grabs you and in a way that even to the stranger to contentment, makes you feel as if this is a natural place to just ‘be’!

The thing is it shouldn't really be beautiful. It's a puzzling mix of old and new, of a hundred cultures, and a thousand architects who just seem to have built what they wanted, where they wanted and when they wanted.

But it works and I am sure that that is because of the Australian people, ancient and modern.

This is a country that like so many other ex-colonial outposts either has already or is in the inevitable process of escaping the straitjacket of ridiculous constitutional monarchy and subjected supremacy, and like so many of those other outposts the ubiquitous mementos, monuments and echoes of that past as evidenced in statues, street names and buildings are no more than they appear to be - small ripples from a turbulent past caressing the shores of the present and the paths to the future.

There is little virulence, little disdain or even little cynicism with regard to that history. The Australians seem much bigger than that and too concerned about the winding path they are now on to focus on what they just simply regard as an essential history, but a history now gone.
They seem comfortable in the clothes they now wear and know and celebrate their own indelible contribution to the wider world. They are making, creating and celebrating there own place in the world.

I’ve mentioned before about Sydney’s cosmopolitan make-up and how they have not only welcomed people from all over the world, but how they have actively celebrated it through monuments such as that honouring the women who escaped the Great Famine, but there’s more.

An acquaintance of some readers, Sydneytim, put me onto it.

Many of us will be aware of Vinegar Hill, the 1798 rebellion and the aftermath. In Sydney it is actively commemorated, marked and honoured with a special Mass on Easter Sunday, held at the gravestone of Michael Dwyer in Waverley Cemetery .

Did I say gravestone?

Follow Oxford Street (which must be one of the longest in the world) as it wends its way from Hyde Park in the City Centre, out through Paddington and Queens Park, kissing the edge of Sydney Cricket ground as it approaches Bondi Junction. Carry on down the hill until Bronte beach grabs you by the retina and marvel at the rock enclosed magnificence of the golden sands as they are embraced by the azure rolling surf.

Turn to the right up the hill and choose between pathless road or rock climb.

Choose the rock climb!

Before you lies the panorama of Waverley Cemetery, built like so many great cities on undulating hills and vales. See before you a panorama of Celtic crosses which seem to dominate every two out of three monuments as far as the eye can see. But then without knowing about Michael Dwyer, scan the marbled scene before you and guess which one stands in honour of that great man.

I know which one you’ll pick, and you’ll be right!

The story of why he lies here, a deportee from the ‘98, his rise to power, decline into notoriety and subsequent resurrection, I will leave to you to have a wee delve round the web. But here is the esteem within which he was held, here is the toil and craft of those who held him in such regard and here is concrete of his leadership and beliefs fashioned into stone and words which have echoed all those thousands of miles across the world.

Have a look at the inscriptions and perhaps in those words we can all not just recognise the sacrifice and strength of men such as lie here, but we can feel the intensity and see the footsteps that climbed every mountain and barrier which lay in their path.

I kept my place on the stool in ‘Cheers’ bar as long as I could, it being the home of the Sydney CSC. As a quick aside I have travelled far and wide and in many a bar or club or by design or accident, every Celtic supporter I have met has been top-of-the ladder! I have drank with them, ate with them, disagreed with them, but without exception I have had an empathy and affection for each and every one that says a lot about them, irrespective of their web persona and even more about our Club.

Sydney CSC is no different and to all who I met can I briefly say thanks and if Wendy ever wants to put the Signed Henrik Larsson shirt into secure storage, all she has to do is give me a shout.

As a subtext to my aside, we (we as in Celtic supporters) have romantically given Henrik ghod-like status. Well in a wee side street just before you get to the Cathedral, this is what I found!

I think the Finnish Lutherans have great foresight! Although I was wondering if Palvelupiste was perhaps the Finnish equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous!

Anyway after my third ‘last pint of Guinness for the road’, I finally said goodbye to Cheers and Wendy, Tim and Tony. The previous two evenings I had also said cheerio to Jolene, Mary-Anne, Kevin1, Kevin2, Derek, Keith, Liam, Colin, Sam, Joe and Jean Logan (who had only stopped off from a cruise to watch the game, and Jim from the Perth CSC!

Joe Logan was a great pal and playing partner of Charlie Gallagher, and what a man. His stories of his time at Celtic Park were superb, funny, sad and always riveting. They are his memories and will remain his stories.

The picture below was taken the day after the game and after a fair number of scoops as well.
It was taken by Wendy and from left to right you can see Jolene, yours truly, Kevin, Mary-Anne, Liam and in the red and white, Stoke City Steve! He is mad in a sort of insane way and was chucked out by Wendy later (not an unusual occurrence) for not sticking to the agreed rule, I.e. he gets served and can even get drunk but he must not insult the customers or shout ‘go on ye Stoke’ to the detriment of people’s ear-drums.

I loaded my worldly belongings onto my back, pointed my bending burdened frame down-hill and in a lumbering acceleration headed like an unstoppable force to the Central Railway Station and my appointment with the delights of Australia’s train system and the beckoning delights of Brisbane.

Sixteen fairly uneventful hours later I alighted on the Roma Street platform.

The train had been fully booked, but unlike our own little apology for a public rail system, the concept of travelling without a seat is as foreign to Australia (and most other countries) as a reasonably priced sandwich is to Network Rail. They even come round and ask you what you would like for dinner, and then announce when each carriage’s meals are ready for collection in the buffet car.

Sydney Tim had warned me that the trains were the cast-off 125s from BR/Railtrack days, and so they were but much as I searched I was disappointed to find no trace of the half-eaten chicken and yuck sandwich down the side of my seat!

In fact the external appearance was deceptive.

The trains had been modified and now offered double the leg-space and reclining seatbacks. An attendant made sure you didn’t miss your stop, and all in all it seemed that the concept was to provide a service to the travelling public.

It will never catch on!

Anyway, apart from the man across the corridor from me who took his teeth out to eat a pot noodle (he really should have put boiling water in it), the journey went exactly as planned. Well almost!

It was the teeth wot dun it!

He had placed them on his pull down table and every time I closed my eyes to sleep, I knew the teeth were watching me! I could hear yer man ‘gumming’ on his latest mouthful of mono-sodium glutamate and could sense the dentures’ desire for a bit of mastication.

With one suspicious eye watching my molar adversary, I could see his own eye-teeth sneaking a glance in my direction. Tiredness (and ten pints of Guinness) and an overactive imagination are uncomfortable bedfellows.

I didn’t sleep until all the pot noodles, jam doughnuts, and post-prandial crackers and cheese had gone. As the gnashers were reinserted I dosed off, while reminding my subconscious that if it detected even the merest hint of a mint being popped, it was to awaken me immediately.

So at 06.35 and the Roma Street, Brisbane platform appeared on schedule outside the window.

Within a few minutes I had met up with Kit and been whisked off to his Ponderosa in the northern suburbs of Brisbane. - Just past Eden Street, Paddy Road and my favourite Cabbage Tree Creek!

Kit, Sue and their boys Connor and Robbie, simply ooze Celtic camaraderie, bonhomie and hospitality. Nothing was too much trouble and I am sure that if I had asked they would have let me move out of the barn and into the house!

Only joking, but after four days of feeding, housing and chauffeuring me everywhere (including pubs and restaurants) it was time for me to stand on my own two feet and learn from my own mistakes.

My learning experience started immediately and what a education it turned out to be.

The prospect of camper-vanning across the outback gets my adrenaline pumping. We all experience the serrated edge of the unknown at times, but this was edge was serrated with shark teeth, coated in Taipan venom, and as unpredictable as the darting tail of the scorpion. Yet the prospect of being isolated a thousand miles from water, an impassable hell-fire of unforgiving sands blocking the pass to salvation and the unrelenting gaze of Icarus’ desiccating chariot seemed like an oasis of sanity in a desert of lunacy when I booked into a ‘back-packers’ hostel.

Cheap? Don’t believe it; not if you place greater value on your rational existence than you do on the contents of your wallet!

What is happening with the adventurous and iconoclastic inheritance that we children of the fifties and sixties left as a legacy to future generations?

Those great bequests of drugs, promiscuity, protest, ridiculous hairstyles and certifiable fashion sense, all gone!! Washed down the drain in a tidal flood of mediocre defiance!

In one of those Darwinian bursts of activity all the really important rebellions of disrespect have become respectable!

And in this sea of visionless horizons, what do they decide to do to show their independence and intellectual imagination? They bang doors!

Day and night!

And not just any old slam bang. The shutting mechanisms are tested fifty times, the handles are wrenched 50 times, and the card key is slammed in 50 times. Obsessive behaviour is the new rock ‘n roll!

“It effin works” I shout.

Then as if to encourage them, in a sad parody of Hi di Hi, the tannoy system, on the half hour, every half hour ,breaks into life…..

“breakfast”

“dinner”

“10 dollar meal with free booze”

“Dancing/wet tee-shirt/quiz contest with 100 dollar prize”

“best hostel food in Australia”

And off go the door megalomaniacs again.

It’s hard to describe but ‘banging doors’ is the wrong term.

They dismantle doors with all the alacrity of a wrecking crew. With the enthusiasm of a Pamplona ‘bull run’, heads bowed and probosces snorting, they crash through the door, get trapped by the sprung closing portal as it snaps on their back-pack and then struggle like a bluebottle in a Venus-fly-trap, guffawing and squealing and probably prematurely emptying their bladders until the whole of the slumbering hostel are wide-awake and on the verge of chronic old-man grumpiness!

That slumbering hostel would be me by the way, since I appear to be sharing the whole building with my daughters and their mates and this behavioural anomaly of the latest hitch-hiking, back-packing, daddy/mummy funded ingrates seems to be the equivalent of us wearing kaftans, getting our ears pierced, and liking Adam Ant (I exaggerate to emphasise the point)!

The Tannoy breaks the monotony of splintering locks!

“Time for the 10 am check-outs to bring their pillow slips to reception”

I pull my head from under the pillow and break!

“SHUT THE **** UP!”

Movement seizes, noise freezes and silence reigns supreme. An embarrassed crackle scratches the loudspeaker as doors stop in mid swing, guffaws dissolve in mid air, and the drumbeat of a hundred pairs of walking boots is deafened by quizzical looks and puzzled reactions.

Unfortunately somewhere in the heavens someone flicks a switch and the whole cacophony of rampant hormones burst forth once more like a Clydebank blitz.

All it needed to complete my misery was one of those boy/girl break-up dramas, accompanied by greetin faces, snotty noses and suicide threats. A plenary indulgence would undoubtedly be mine!

I heard the approaching sob and soulful drag of the feet before the despairing knock at my door (with broken lock).

“Matt, ooooohhh, he’s dumped me. Waaaaaahhhhhh!”

“Go away”

“Waaaaahhhhh”

“Ok then, what’s happened! Tell the man wae mair patience than Job”!

There has been one good thing to come out of it mind you. As soon as dawn cracks the breaking backcloth to the moon’s nocturnal tapestry, I have a four minute shower (you get timed by the environmentally PC brigade), remove assorted shades of prematurely balding backpacker’s hair from my toes, and head off to a places unseen by those who exist in the purgatory of being between seventeen and twenty-five.

And here lies enlightenment; here lies a kaleidoscope, not of colours, sights or even mirages; but a collage of little windows and doors (without trapped backpacker) that give us glimpses of what we don’t know and clues to how we might know.

Here lies Brisbane and another thousand stories!

But before I go into those, I’m off to Mick O’Malley’s on Queen street and the home of the Brisbane CSC.

So for the moment, Slainte and

Hail Hail

Matt

p.s. outside my door this morning the following conversation took place.
“Yeah, he bought it off some guy in Barcelona, but it’s got some security key on the boot-up screen and he doesn’t know how to get round it. Maybe someone in the hostel will know about computers.”

Barcelona, Computer, Security key! Surely not. I’ll let you know!

From cockroach to Cockatoo ...oh and Spruiking!!

2009-04-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Spruiking …..a word that appears regularly in the excellent Sydney Morning Herald. I think it means ‘spouting in a sort of holding-court way’.

If it does well I am about to spruik, and if it doesn’t well, it should.

It had to be William Street. After all I had just left King street and the Australian Sunrise Lodge and here I was heading for the centre of the City and William Street to complete an unlikely and fairly disturbing brag hand. King …William …Lodge! Not bad for a Tim in his first week in Australia!

I suppose like all ex-colonial cities and countries Sydney and Australia has its fair share of echoes from a cap-doffing past. George Street, Pitt Street, King Street, Victoria Street, Regent Street, Elizabeth Street to name but a few. But of all the ones possible, my hotel (rough description - think Belgrove hotel wae clean curtains) has to be on the street named after the great pillock of the Boyne.

Still let’s be rational here, they’re all just names and it would be childish in the extreme to think that history’s thin thread vibrates down through the centuries and exerts still a trace of the glorious revolution and its inglorious anti-hero through such a mundane object as a street name or whatever!

After all we’re not really paranoid are we? We really don’t seriously avoid coincidental names, colours or descriptions just because they may have some tangential relationship with you know who. No way are WE like THEM!

I don’t think I’m specially chosen! I am not one of THE PEOPLE! I accept reluctantly that I am incredibly lucky to be born into such an amazing culture of intelligence, wit and good looks, but never would I consider that I have been especially chosen.
I didn’t move to this hotel in the centre of town, away from the bohemian delights of Newtown because my family kept asking me why I was staying in a LODGE? (my brother’s comment that he assumed I was studying beavers was of course just a joke). The real reason for moving was that since Bazza’s sad demise beneath my inadvertent stamp (well three of them till I made sure the wee bugger wouldn’t rise again), things were never going to be the same!
As for THEIR disdain for anything that even suggests a slight composition of ‘greeneness’, well I don’t forego the colour blue just because THEY wear that hue of jersey. I simply bought the aesthetically tinted green and white handled disposable razors because I prefer Lady-shaves to Gillette 3-blade swivel heads.
And I don’t worry, that the shopping bill comes to £16.90, its just that I always forget that packet of chewing gum, until the checkout girl has told me the final bill!

So who cares that the most depressing, pollution soaked, pot-holed, crime-infested street that my hotel happens to be on is called after some big feather-hatted woose, riding a white horse! Not me that’s for sure.

Anyway, I’m moving to the Leisure Inn on Regent Street on Sunday - God I can’t wait. After all it is nearer to Paddy’s Market! Yes!, Sydney has it’s very own Paddy’s Market and not an Irish accent to be heard, unless it is the Chinese branch of the Ilish Diaspola. For Paddy’s Market is in Chinatown - the biggest Chinatown I have ever seen, in fact it is so big it is actually bigger than China! Also, don’t even try and equate this Paddy’s Market with the one and only (soon to be defunct) version which sits in the Briggait. This one is modern, air-conditioned, clean, controlled and regulated. It does however still have bargains, none of which you either need or want, more along the lines of an-upmarket Barras rather than the fire sale of someone‘s last few possessions in an attempt to keep the tally-man from the door.

And so I will be moving closer to what I regard as my spiritual calling - buying stuff cheap - rather than making any infantile gesture by snubbing William Street.

And then in about a week-or-so’s time, I up the ante in the pursuit of the big adventure! I hire a camper van for a mere fifty bucks a day all inclusive apart from fuel and the world’s my oyster - well the Blue (see told you I’m not childish) mountains, Jervis Bay, Cairns, The Outback and who knows perhaps fame and fortune beckons as ‘Alligator Glasgow’!

However, what about Sydney?

This is a city and a half, and not just because of its outstanding beauty, its brilliant climate, its marvellous people, and its reasonably priced drink but because right at its heart and soul lies a story of intrigue, cut and thrust, deception and adventure and ultimately herosim that many of us will identify with and many others need to learn from.

Just how in an age of ant-clericalism, specifically anti-Catholicism, did the Church and its adherents not only gain the approval and backing of the Anglican and secular authorities but how did the undercurrents that seen the waves of the 1798 Wexford rebellion and the battle of Vinegar hill resound across the seas to the antipodes? How did these waves eventually result in the emancipation of the Catholic faith through the efforts and faith of convicts, the smuggling of priests into the country to minister to the needs of the Irish community, the whispered underhand conniving of the Catholic hierarchy to allow the means to justify the end, the secreting of the blessed host in laymen’s houses, the humanity of a youthful nation to hold out a hand of welcome to the women in particular who were fleeing the great famine, and the eventual pivotal creation of St Mary’s Cathedral by priests, bishops, and congregation who simply would not give up.

There is a story here that throws back in the faces of those who stayed behind how the principles of respect and justice can create a nation of strength and principle while the motherlands left on the other side of the world carry on their own internecine vindictive war of hatred.

Simply put, the Catholic faith not only was accepted in Anglican Oz but like many other sects and religions that followed it was seen as naturally a good thing and a force for peace and stability, long before it became so in the British Isles! (And even that remains a moot point for some areas!)

And then look around at the towering bridges and buildings that were conceived, designed and built by convict, soldier and settler in an alliance that they all knew was vital if they were all to survive and prosper. A society that from the outset recognised that it was a man’s abilities, ideas, ambition and application that made him what he was and rejected the false straitjackets of his school, his prejudices, his bloodline and his misfortune.

This country, so young still in years is a millennium ahead of our own islands in culture and maturity. There is so much to be learned and so much to be taken from a people who whatever their roots are comfortable in the clothes that they now wear, ambitious in their vision and confident in their ability to achieve it!

Yes of course there are issues, but issues that as a country Australia recognises and is addressing. If they fail it will not be for the want of trying.

There is a song from a few decades whose lyrics go ‘I come from the land down under’.

Well ‘I come from the land up over’ and in that land that has given so much to the world in inventiveness, ideas, culture and industry, but one that still cowers in the thrall of mediaeval sectarianism, administered within and without by governments who are terrified to deal with it in case they lose votes, served by a press who ignore it unless it affects their circulation.

A country who sits within a union that still pays an irrational subservient tithe to the bastard institution of an even more sectarian ‘royalty’ and refuses to accept that all men are born equal.
A country that puts a face of pretending to welcome other people, while conveniently ignoring the truth that we are too busy brandishing the cudgels of bigotry or fending off their swingeing blows, to be concerned about others as they become part of our society.

I heard a joke the other day. Clever and funny in its structure and delivery but less so in its not-so-hidden truth.

An Indian salesman is walking along the banks of the Boyne when he is confronted by a couple of drunk-have-a-go loyalists.

“You a Taig or wan o us?"

“I am neither, I am from Delhi”

With that they battered the Indian fella silly, spitting their venom at him as they left him on the ground….

“That’ll be Londondelhi ya Fenian B…..”

There is so much more to be said, but I’ll leave you with this.

In the Centre of Sydney there is a monument to those women who escaped the Irish Famine.

Their names are recorded on glass windows inset in a wall specially built to commemorate ‘An Gorta Mor’.

I suppose Scotland’s highest profile equivalent is Celtic Park and look at just how Scotland’s empty vessels have treated those who created it and their descendents.

If I ever get 12 months spare I will write the whole story, one that Scotland, The six counties, Britain and the world can learn from, one that accepts differences, one that celebrates variety, and one that says it is not about tolerance, it is about respect.

This is a story that needs telling! Not in the historic sense of this happened and then he did this and she did that, but in the context of motivations, personalities, hurdles overcome, deals done, visions created, shibboleths destroyed and self-regarding authority disobeyed. It is a human story that will need that year to comprise rainy days and the scouring of the resources of the Mitchell and Dixon libraries..

It is a story that must be written and must be read by a world so intent on ripping itself apart on the back of twisting the true message of faiths.

Think what Scotland has achieved despite this noose of hate that hangs around its neck strangling dreams and smiles. Think how much more would be possible if that noose was removed and the debilitating fear of the trap-door to oblivion was obliterated for ever.

It is a marvellous story and I am so pleased that I found the ripples still spreading onto the beach as I strolled by.

Having spruiked above, I must admit that an event this afternoon right outside my window has spooked the spruiker!

A majestic white cockatoo, its ruffle a brilliant yellow, was sitting on the tree outside, paring its beak on the branch of the Julabub tree (I made that up, I haven't a clue what type of tree it is!)when, in trying to get a better picture I managed to startle it and off it soared first up towards the blue sunlit sky and then down towards another patch of greenery across the road.

It briefly disappeared from sight only for the afternoon air to be rent with squealing, squalking and the bird equivalent of terrified screaming.

Like a silver streak, the Cockatoo shot back towards the tree near me, pursued by a cutty sark of predatory sea gulls. It crashed through the branches and tumbled to the ground, not quite still, not quite lifeless, but beaten, battered and bloody.

By the time I made my way down the five flights of stairs, it had gone; hopefully it had recovered but somehow I think that it was ‘got’. I feel guilty!

So from cockroach to cockatoo, I don’t bring you indigenous species a whole lot of luck, do I?

Be warned, especially you dingoes, snakes, spiders and crocs. Stay away or you're for it!

However, and a final however as well, for the moment.

Sydney has the worst system of pedestrian crossings in the whole universe!!

Hail Hail

Matt

If only Icarus had kept his table tray up!

2009-03-29T00:58:00.000-07:00

Multi-cultural is fair-enough, in fact that state of Utopia should be heroically strived for provided the objective is to both accept and celebrate the differences and not to create a bland amalgam that stands for everything and means nothing. But as I worked my way through the entry filters that all countries seem to have in their heightened state of self-induced paranoia, out of approximately seven people that I had to deal with, only one was Australian!

South Africans, Phillipinos, Germans, Croatians, Brits, and Malayans; is this really Australia?

Where have all the Aussies, aboriginal or pioneering (even if it was only to leave the Fields of Athenry), gone?

I finally got to meet my first local at the final checkpoint. He was a big lad; 6ft 4” or more, with atypical red-hair and pale skin.

This was the place where they check for foodstuffs and substances which are not allowed into the country - there’s no ‘nothing to declare’ channel.

The fellow in front was being given the usual suspicious interrogation.

“Any foodstuffs, drugs, pets, drugs, perishable items, drugs………etc etc?”

Drugs seemed to be the main focus of attention!

He was sent to have his baggage examined.

Now it was my turn, I swallowed the last of the mints they had given me on the plane and looked on the bright side of my recent trials in Spain. They had nicked all my drugs there! -----JOKING!!

“Where have you flown in from mate?”

“Glasgow pal”

“What’s that badge on the side of the green bag?”

Even after the evnts at Toronto, I didn’t hesitate (even Customs interrogators can read after all) and replied confidently…

“Celtic”

While I didn’t expect him to break into ‘You’ll never walk alone” (Toronto had not completely been erased from my memory) I didn’t expect what followed either.

“OK, your clear straight through”

I was so surprised I nearly questioned his decision.

Fortunately with that my mood began to lighten and here I am, still with my lap-top and all my luggage.

The trip hasn’t been without its fraught moments of impending doom and disaster, but I think the combined effects of suspicion (from recent events in Barcelona) and exhaustion have been a major contributory factor in those.

Tiredness has long been a misunderstood part of the human psyche. For too long it has been ignored in favour of the examination of sleep, dreams, nightmares and REM. (Although why anyone should want to study an 80’s Brit pop group at all, escapes me!)

Tiredness is seen by too many as a simple by-product of being awake for too long, and considered as nothing more than the skeleton of a day’s physical efforts, denuded of its muscle by the graft swinging a hammer, wielding a pen, kicking a ball, invading a middle-eastern potentate or bringing a first world country’s banking system to its knees.

In source, cause and effect however tiredness can be seen as so much more than the simple depletion of physical resources, far more powerful than simply needing to sleep, and more mysterious than even the alter-egos of the sandman who visits us with those gentle dreams and terrifying nightmares of the eight hours between the sheets, in a shop doorway, or like me most recently on a 36 hour long haul from Glasgow to Sydney.

After that it is clear that the irritable ennui of tiredness is no corruption of our more normal and lively personas, but an essential ingredient of our autonomous nervous system that albeit like heads to tails, or black to white, both fashions our actions and emotions all day and every day bringing a darker pessimism and negativity to the more optimistic liveliness of our undoubtedly sun basked personalities!

No, tiredness is not something to be eliminated and avoided but almost a necessary emotional response to be welcomed and understood as a Darwinian mechanism that gives an edge in the rat race of survival!

I mean, if the simple fact that after 27 hours flying time both stimulated and depressed by copious amounts of beer and wine, an epitome of tranquil contemplation (that’s me by the way) has to ‘Muttley-growl’ under his breath to contain his growing cynicism at the whole irrational and condescending charade of the in-flight Pavlovian customer conditioning, then it occurs to me that ‘tiredness’ may very well be the first stimulus for all sorts of great corrective deeds of the past.

After all we get ‘tired of’ this, ‘tired of that’, and tired of the next thing’. That’s when we do something about it.

Let’s be honest Brutus got tired of Caesar, Wallace got tired of Edward, France got tired of royalty, the Soviet Union got tired of communism, Brother Walfrid got tired of hunger in the East end of Glasgow, and I got tired of listening to Aussie soaps on television. (I don't see them here in Oz)

I know that some less than great things have also been done through tiredness, but that just demonstrates the essential neutrality of this phenomena. After all nuclear power, or knifes, or guns or scissors are not per se evil, but how we use them is, and ‘being knackered’ may very well have the unstoppable potential to weed out evil in this world, or the equally immovable latency to lay waste to culture and progress!

Anyway eventually when we get ‘tired’ of something, it’s then that we do something about it!
And if ever something needed to be done, then the pointlessness of flight protocols and the (excuse the pun) elevated status that pilots and cabin crew give themselves really gets my hackles getting into training for an attempt at the world hackle-rising record.

For God’s sake the Pilot is a bus driver and the Cabin crew are waiters and cleaners.

This is no attempt to demean any of those two categories, but I don’t get on a bus (although I have noted the neurosis starting to infiltrate train personnel) and go through the nonsense that accompanies a plane journey.

So through the essential sensitivity of ‘tiredness’ I started to ask and answer my own question regarding just what this whole farrago of flight disciplines is all about!

First, just why can’t I be left alone to sleep?

Flying from any point A to any point B, is now no more than the aerial equivalent of “One Flew Over The Cuckoos’ Nest” where Nurse Ratched and her cohorts are dressed in the livery of BA/Quantas cabin crew, the inmates sit around taking their directions and medicines on schedule, to order, and as decreed by ‘those who know better’, while in some of us the fuse of R.P. McMurphy burns towards the explosion of ‘air rage’.

For God’s sake, just why do the blinds have to up for take-off and landing (other than the pilots that is)?

Why must the cabin lights be dimmed for take-off and landing in the hours of darkness? After all we can all put on our overhead lights?

Why even more mysteriously does the upright angle of the seat backs have to simulate a brush handle down the back of our shirts?

Why are we patronised by the statement that ’you may have travelled on a plane many times, but that subtle differences are to be found in this one’ ? NO THEY’RE NOT!

And further I couldn’t give a monkey’s what the pilot, co-pilot and even more ridiculously the cabin crew’s names are and how they are there primarily for my comfort and well being!- NO THEY’RE NOT.

They are there to maximise the amount of hard earned cash from their captive audience.

Listen , if a plane is about to crash, the least of my worries is whether the guy in front has his seat at a slightly more gradual angle; if we hit terra firma, or even ‘aqua slightly less firma’ with the impact of an asteroidal collision then the fact that he/she/me has a table-tray down, or that objects falling from the overhead lockers may hit me on the head, takes on all the importance of a shaving nick in the "Bates' Motel"!

And as for this preoccupation for reminding people that smoking is illegal anywhere on the plane; well they don’t also say that rubbing two sticks in the quest for fire or kids playing with the chemistry set that their auntie Mary bought them for Christmas is also illegal.

We sort of know that.

Anyway, it’s far more likely that someone will get third degree burns or contract beri-beri from the rubbish that is now proffered straight from the microwave as in-flight catering.

As an aside, being a non-smoker of ten years or so, I have also contemplated carrying a single Cigarette and lighter with me just in case of the catastrophic loss of power at 35,000 feet. Believe me that I would calmly light up as we plummeted to our fates but I suspect that while it may prove to be the most enjoyable cigarette ever dragged, there would also be an announcement informing me that in the unlikely event of my survival, the police would be waiting to arrest me!

"All mobile phones must be switched off"!

Of course vthey must, after all the airlines have invented a revolutionary new technology which means that people can use 'their' mobile technology instead, and pay through the nose for its use. This new technology is called 'changing the rules when profit is at stake'!

“All hand luggage must be stored in the overhead lockers or placed safely under the seats in front of you”!

Really?

As the quest for squeezing more and more people onto a plane in order to maximise ‘ROI’ (Return on Investment, NOT Republic of Ireland’) it is likely that Easyjet and Ryan Air will lead the field to set restrictions on height, leg length and hip size as well as setting the agenda on the size of wallet you will be allowed to carry. After all they will need all the space they can get their tiny grubby hands on to ensure that ‘Gin and Tonic sir?’ or ’Coffee madam?’ can be offered at the same cost as the flight did in the first place. (You can still get economic flights with the above two carriers, provided you don’t want to take any luggage and are prepared to fly in the nude)

BA and the others will then follow suit or should that be birthday-suit!

So as the inside of the aircraft is gradually filled with human Lego and all other space is taken up by replete overhead lockers and over spilling underseat spaces, where do we then stick the cushions, blankets, socks, eye-masks and other paraphernalia that are provided ‘for our comfort and safety’?

Well, if airlines could also set a rule as regards the alimentary orifice of staff working in the cabin, I know exactly where I would stick them.

So treat us with some intelligence and be honest.

I really won’t verge on the edge of psychosis if I know WHY things are done as you suggest. I won’t become tired of the charade, and I won’t store up every little inconvenience until it becomes one big grudge that demands ‘something must be done”

For when ‘something must be done’ it usually is.

Something had to be done about Hitler, Ceausescu, Communism, Capitalism, Bush, Blair, Thatcher, ‘the Board’, John Barnes and Bertie Vogts.

So my friends in the SS Cabin Crew, don’t think you are immune!

Oh and by the way, you are not alone!

Having been cheered up by the reception from Mick (my name for my Aussie mate at customs), I was then surprised to find that Ned Kelly is still alive and flourishing in the antipodes!

He now dresses in the attire of the airport Vodafone representative.

This one is still running but when it comes to a head……believe me ‘something will have to be done’ - and when it is you will hear all about it!

For the moment G’Day and ……

Hail Hail

Matt

I loved Paris in the spring time.........

2009-03-16T16:56:00.000-07:00

but now its time for the trek to Toulouse!

Did you notice that clever juxtaposition of words giving a play on the famous French character!

That's it, every place I've been to so far, (well maybe apart from the Priory Hotel) has stuck in the memory for all of the right reasons.

You can't 'do Paris' in a day or two, but you can sit back on a sunny morning at the highest point of Montmartre and quite simply be amazed at the magnificence of the Sacre Coeur, the view over the south of the city and the comfortable cosmopolitan and welcoming city that Paris is.

And then their was the Harp Bar, with Nils - the Swedish Dubliner - a tremendously friendly host whose every characteristic exuded Celtic charm, whichever way you pronounced it, Conor from Dublin, Steve from Aberdeen, Stephane, Wully and young Liam from Devon, Charlie and Maria from Castlemilk, Steve from Springburn, Matt and Kieron (father and son) - from somewhere in Glasgow and the wee lassie whose name I didn't catch who came in with two Americans one with his American express card at the ready.

Out came the absynthe, and as they sipped it through the heat of the doused flames, she just looked and stared at Celtic Banner after Celtic Banner. Each time she simply said

"A Celtic bar in Paris........"

And with each repetition her 'mid-atlantic' accent took on more and more of her original Edinburgh rumble!

By the time she said to me

"Wae that shirt oan, ye must be a Celtic fan tae".

I was sure that she had been reincarnated in Westercraigs!

Anyway, a thousand stories later and I'm off to Toulouse - possibly with a stop in Bordeaux.

Bit of a tricky one this one, as following our win yesterday I was a wee bit lax in organising transport and accommodation.

Will be getting into Toulouse really late - if trains hold out - so this could be my first night sleeping in the station!

Still it is much warmer and even Paris was shirt sleeve weather!

One moment worth mentioning happened on Saturday evening when a wee Columbian, possibly partaking a wee bit too much of his Country's main cash crop, haltingly asked me if I wanted to buy a DVD called 'La Clef Ecossaise".

I don't normally buy DVDs in pubs, but I think he may have missed the irony of offering me one about the creation of French Freemasonry.

So onwards and upwards.

Hail Hail

Matt

That was only Dover

2009-03-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

“Ten minutes” He said.

“Aye that’ll be shining bright?” I questioned to myself as I headed towards the ‘SF Rodin’ and the definitive start of the journey to the centre of Celtic consciousness or possibly my own unconsciousness.

I hated being right. Especially as it meant pain for me and to be fair he had only missed out three wee words. So really it was a sin of inadvertent omission rather than one of deliberation!

Unfortunatey the three words were erse, feckin, and my! As in……..

“Feckin ten minutes, my erse”!

“Ten minutes maybe, for a normally constructed man with the requisite specification of limbs and joints, but not for me – the human tortoise/snail – depending upon your phobias or tastes”

It had always been obvious just why those overburdened creatures of Gods mischievous sense of humour were so slow, but obvious in the same way that daylight comes from the sun is obvious. But the sheer undertaking and understanding of how the universe functions in the way it does only becomes really important when you become personally involved in making sure that the light just keeps on coming, plants grow, snow melts and Jimmy Calderwood gets a tan!

For the moment I’ll leave that to God, as I was having enough trouble attempting to walk along Marine Parade in Dover with all my possessions and accoutrements loaded and packed within the bulging, straining straps and flaps of my heroic backpack.

Snails and tortoises now have my unbound admiration.

Thirty minutes later and I suavely and coolly entered the travel centre via the auto-start/stop revolving doors and fifteen seconds later, having ignored the signs that said ‘keep walking’, I left the same travel centre this time on my back, propelled by the unstoppable sweep of the same auto-start and slightly less efficient auto-stop revolving door.

Profusely tendered apologies that ‘the automatic safety stop was intermittently inoperative”, stemmed neither my embarrassment nor the unstifled guffaws of the waiting, watching passengers. The suavanometer and coolguage plumbed the bottom of their scales and I only hoped that the sniggering mockers of my affliction weren’t travelling on the same ferry as me!

Mind you after my one day and evening in this final stepping stone to Europe and all its potential, I should have learned how to deal with adversity and embarrassment.

I had met the master; his name is Flynn; he comes from Mayo; and he owns the Priory Hotel!

I’m saving the whole story up for later, but believe me if you ever have the fortune to find yourself at Dover Priory railway station. Then under NO CIRCUMSTANCES miss the opportunity of Dover’s answer to ‘From Dusk to Dawn’, looming like some praying mantis, scooping its victims into its voracious mandibles.

I had arrived at the station on March 12th three hours late and had decided to stay overnight in Dover rather than rush to get the last ferry!On reflection I am glad I did this, but at the time I was well and truly tired, hungry, pished off, and a wee bit of the opinion that Britain not only conspires to prevent people from entering the country (unless they are free of all curry stains, have made their money by pillaging the poor, or are indictable on charges of causing crimes against humanity), but also pulls strings and levers, derails trains, causes road crashes and generally does everything possible to prevent anyone leaving the country (unless the have never eaten an onion bhaji, believe in equality of opportunity and contribute to Amnesty International - in which cases they will provide first class accompanied air travel, possibly a big whack of cash, and maybe even a change of identity if necessary to speed the unwanted on their way. The even have invented a new term for this largesse – Extraordinary Rendition).

Anyway I had slipped through the net of the normally impeccably efficient security service’s beady eyes and had been delayed at every possible opportunity finally arriving dishevelled and dyspeptic in Dover (now that beats 'Down and out in Beverly Hills’).

It’s a strange but welcoming wee town which probably feels the pull of Europe more than most since its whole economy and existence is now based upon the ferry system that keeps its arterial sustenance pumping through its vital organs – the Bureau de Change and the B&Bs.

It’s said that during the second world war, German Generals with binoculars or very good eyesight used to point their beady eyes at the lookouts on the tops of the white cliffs where the Home Guard were correspondingly ‘watching them, watching us, watching them’.

Personally having stood both at the top and bottom of those same white cliffs, I tend to think that the Krauts (vernacular of the time applied only to those who gave the orders) were thinking “I vunder vot ze idiots are doing at ze top of zose hills. Vy vood anyvun vish to try and invade zer unless zey were totally mad. Zey must be planning zumzing else, zo keep your eyes on zem”! (apologies to allo allo!)

Anyway, having arrived and exited from the station I looked around and, my back pack feeling like another body stowed on my shoulders, was totally underwhelmed to see that the handily placed St Albans hotel – “ideally placed for the weary rail traveller” - was exactly where it was designed to be…..right at the top of about 50 steeply rising steps. It wouldn’t have been that much worse if it had actually been in St Albans!

However, I state this without a word of a lie.

This wee diamond of a hotel is well worth the climb, oxygen and muscle spasms.

It is run by Theodora, a young lady who I would imagine is in her early thirties with a smile that could bring world peace and eyes that could put the stopper back on Pandora’s box.

Her poached eggs and tomatoes are to be savoured as well.

Great wee hotel, great welcome, and at thirty five quid for the night all in, it was ‘jist magic’.

As I looked out the cleanest room I have ever been in, back down to the station, the Priory Hotel lay pulsating in its rough hewn, come -and-get-me, hard-to-get promising sort of way! Somehow I knew that behind those dust ingrained curtains and peeling paint lay an experience with an edge. I would have to visit this obvious monument to the misanthropes of the world.

So about three hours later having separated body from belongings, eaten in a Chinese buffet (eat as much as you can for ten quid) called Chapter Eight (and brilliant that was too) I retraced my steps to the railway precincts and entered Dover’s answer to the OK Corral. He spotted my hooped shirt and in an instant had wripped a St Patrick's day tricolour from the bar and swathed it roundmy shoulders.

Flynn’s from Mayo, but as well as running 13 pubs in twenty six years has also spent ten years in the clink and owns a stud in Tipperary. His brother won £17,000 quid at Cheltenham that morning, but he had only won a grand. He hated running pubs and while he put up with ‘customers’ they were really only a necessary evil. He was going to place all he had spare on two horses tomorrow (Barber shop and Exotic Dancer)! Anyway he had sold up now and was heading back to Ireland, Dublin this time, where he had three pubs already. Those were turning over £250,000 a week and anyway money wasn’t everything.

I learned all of the above from Jo, the head barmaid – in fact the only barmaid.

From the moment me and Flynn had struck up our rather one sided conversation, I had listened intently but the deep deep Mayo accent and the habit of making a sentence into one word left me breathless and unenlightened.

If it hadn’t been for the raven haired Jo’s translation, I would be telling you about the town’s version of neds and chavs.

Anyway I never paid for a pint; after all I was wearing a Celtic shirt (and a fine ‘6 pints of Guinness’ it was Flynn) – and Flynn’s Cousin had played for Celtic and a fine full back he was too. (I won’t name him for the moment since the fellow lives in the Gorbals and some of the stuff needs confirmation)!

At this stage of the evening Flynn was taunting some ‘Marines’ with the heroic history of rebellion in Ireland, and they were all laughing in the way that people laugh when they want to dismember you and your mother! After all it was she who was miserably at fault for giving breath to you!

And there was I standing in the middle with a tricolour wrapped round my shoulders and Flynn having a great time.

Even God decided that that wasn’t funny!

I don't know if anyone's wish that the ground would open up and swallow them whole has ever come true, but while not specifically requesting divine intervention, fortune of fortunes, a drip of (possibly holy) water hit the floor and within a second the ceiling caved in as about twenty gallons of the self-same-stuff crashed into and around the (swimming) pool table.

What happened next?

Ah that’s being saved for Sunday best but believe this; Flynn is larger than any character I have ever met.

And let's be honest that was only Dover!

More to come but the ferry is about to dock and Calais here we are!

Gloire Gloire, Les Celts sont ici!

Matt

There's only one Terry Fox

2009-02-20T16:44:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

I prepared an update this morning ready for posting when western Europe arose from its slumbers.

Sometimes however serendipity takes over and a chance encounter makes me draw breath and just wonder who I am.

I walked today in the most amazing weather imaginable for this time of the year, perhaps five kilometers along Douglas street to the outskirst of the inner harbour.

It was a day that only magicians could have conjured up and as a million words tumbled into phrases and sentences, as a thousand pictures formed and focused in my inner kaleidescope, as sounds of people living became the music of life's beat, I reached the junction of Douglas and Dallas.

A statue stood, obvious but unheralded off the main walkway. It seemed a little misshapen, one leg obviously larger than the other.

I walked across, a little intrigued but oblivious to the fact that that same Serendipity had taken my hand and pointed me towards the figure.

I'll leave you with a picture and an inscription and this thought.

Sometimes even for a product of the Celtic Nations, a wee tear is not a slight on our virility.

Mine today was not a tear of regret but one of inspiration, admiration and humility.

Perhaps Terry Fox's 'Marathon of Hope' was more successful than even he could have hoped for; for surely as long as we can recognise the 'real heroes' and 'real heroines' in this world there is 'real hope' for us all.

Terry will always be for me one of those heroes and heroines!

Click the pictures! and then google his name and 'Marathon of hope' for the full amazing story.

There is indeed only one Terry Fox

Matt

Go Canucks Go!!

2009-02-14T18:11:00.000-08:00

Damian strode down the bar towards me.

“Not long now” he said.

“Not long to the clash of the titans, David v Goliath, Little Red Riding Hood confronts the Big Bad Wolf eh?”

Damian was a walking cliché. He could have been Keith Jackson or Chick Young in disguise.

He was right though, even in Vancouver the temperature was rising both metaphorically and literally, as the clock ticked inexorably by; and with each passing second either the fears of the apparently helpless fans dissolved into a black-hole of irrelevance and confidence began its unstoppable ascent towards irrational certainty; or like ying and yang the upbeat buoyancy was eroded by the constant riptide of bad memories, and the insidious fear became magnified as it echoed loudly around the dark dank cavern of what might happen in our nightmarish imagination.

Daft really how the game grabs you and puts you in a tumble drier of ever-changing direction and temperature.

More of that later.

Meanwhile, Vancouver is undoubtedly (and possibly surpasses the Italian City) the Rome of the north. Seven hills would have been a mere warm up stroll for those who have hewn this city of magnificent geographical and climactic contrasts in a cooperative endeavour of Caucasian, Chinese, Inuit and most importantly indigenous Indian inhabitants.

Romulus and Remus might, just might have been hired as willing and promising apprentices.

From the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1887 as it hacked, battered, mined, and exploded apparently impassable stone, and then weaved its way over, under, round and through the gargantuan guardians of the Rockies, this community and its peoples have spread to every corner, every depth of valley and every height of mountain imaginable.

If ever there was a definition of the word ‘Railroaded’, then the establishment of Vancouver is its expression carved in concrete, flourished in forest and manifest in mountain.

A city built on mountains and a city built with a respect for the environment that sees not only bears a relatively common sight, but also numbers among my sister’s occasional garden visitors such cuddly little, soon-to-be domesticated pets, as timber wolves and cougars.

Next week I have promised myself a walk in the forest and, passing the pinned-up requests and pictures for information on the whereabouts of lost family pets, hopefully to experience the thrill of even the possibility of an encounter of the first kind – although not quite the same encounter as the mourned family pets, so forlorn on the fading novenas!

Me and wanted posters have a bad history!

Of course evolution will sprinkle the necessary fairy dust of survival and something will probably give, and maybe even here, the sights and sounds of our fellow travellers will be but a final cry in the dwindling wilderness; but I hope not and hope even more that this is the place where an equilibrium has been reached within which we all can live and trumpet an example to the world.

Burns' observation of "Man's inhumanity to man" is rightly resonant and famous but while the term inhumanity would be illogical in relation to other creatures, it is hard to be emotionally neutral at the prospect of the loss of the natural magnificence of Gaia’s gift to all of us.

Take away the gift and what is there to appreciate other than the rats in the race – and sadly we’re the rats.

Anyway if you’re ever in the area then remember that scene from “Where eagles dare”, as you ascend in a Gondola to the top of Grouse Mountain.(where you must try some of the Grouse Mountain Cream Ale)

Stare down on three sides at the valleys, the mountains, and the vast ocean inlets, forests and huge conurbations and breathe, taste and wallow in the genuine awe of man’s ability to fashion shape and form from whatever raw materials he happens upon; wonder at the motivation, imagination, expectation and final thoughts of those who first set foot here and having experienced the vagaries delights and challenges of the four seasons, said to themselves “yes, this is a good place to be”!

Stare over the Cleveland dam and in the mind’s eye and ear for a second or two put yourself in the place of Dr Richard Kimble peering down into the unforgiving power and depths of the murderous white cataract, Marshal Sam Gerard cornering him, and then (I know it was only a film) making the decision to dive or jump.

Look upon the mountain called the two lions as they appeared to the original settlers and also at the man-made Lions Gate bridge, built by the Guinness family, and wonder what was the greatest of the achievements, but have no doubt about what given the true course of nature will be the most enduring.

These Lions get everywhere (there's a Lions Park Station in Calgary as well - I wonder why I notice things about Lions?)

And then there is the Capilano Bridge!

Here lies acrophobia unbound, as the prospect of a sudden gust of wind or the man-made rocking of the bridge’s equilibrium threatens to toss all upon it, into the Capilano river some 230 ft below!

“I believe that many in this room will live to hear a whistle of a steam engine in the passes of the Rocky mountains, and to make the journey from Halifax to the Pacific in five to six days” Joseph Howe 1851

Joseph Howe was a Nova-Scotian journalist, politician and public servant!

Imagine that! A combination of probably three of the four most ridiculed professions (imagine if he had been a lawyer as well....only joking), and yet one who not only had vision and imagination but one whose portrait of the future came to fruition in 1887 as the final rocks fell away and the age of steam travel heralded its arrival on the west coast no doubt with a celebratory scream of the steam whistle!

What would we do now for individuals with such creative minds to trigger the endeavours of men and women, to see life as an uplifting challenge and not as a grinding burden.

And with that first train and those that followed, came people not just with imagination and dreams, but with the skills and callouses, perseverance and belief, stubbornness and heroism; men and women versed in taking on the wilderness, not to destroy it but to open up its magic to all who wanted to see.

One of these was an ‘Entrepreneurial Scot’ who went by the name of George MacKay, who having bought land either side of the Capilano River enlisted the help of two Indians, August Jack and Willie Khatsahlano to erect this bridge for no reason other than to create an attraction.(Not sure if Jack and Willie were their given names!!)

He arrived in 1888 (a fine year) and by 1889 the first real public attraction had been opened in British Columbia.

Pictures do so little justice but believe me when you see, grown men take a breath and sway with the bridge while putting on a brave face or where similar souls sink to their knees as a sudden wave crosses and lifts the securing cables, and then when you walk across its cedar planks yourself, as a slight wind urges you to hold the side (just to set a good example mind you), then you realise just what a marvellous idea it was, especially since no evidence can be found of George MacKay having any engineering qualifications.

Wherever you go in this unforgettable city you cannot escape the mountains.

On bus, train, boat, car, foot or even plane there they stand not brooding but smiling like a master conductor waving his baton, bringing order, fun and resounding music of life to the land, sea, sky and creatures who enjoy and enhance this unique garden.

And as the day disappears beyond the Vancouver Island and the rim of the pacific it’s time for a bit of modern day mental massage and though there’s Gastown and Chinatown there’s nowhere better than The Library Square Sports bar, home of the Vancouver Shamrock CSC.

Damian’s yer man on the bar and he and his staff have been given the expert’s award for the most well poured pint of Guinness in Canada. Not necessarily the best pint taste-wise (it was excellent mind-you, but so were others), but in terms of the ritual, chat, and final body and head he and the gorgeous girls who serve in the pub are beyond reproach.

**the expert who made this award by the way was me!

I suppose it would be crass to note negatively just how ice-hockey, and sport in general, mad this nation is, especially coming from as football daft a culture as our own.

BUT.

Three screens confronted me as I sat at the bar, my Guinness to hand and my eyes flicking left to right and back again as each game vied for my attention.

One was dropped almost immediately; I had no emotional or logical ties to either team.

The others were different.

To my left a City that I have rarely had little time for, Washington, were performing heroics against the obviously arrogant supremacists from New York – those garishly clad red, white and blue New York Rangers.

There was only one team for me! "Go on you Capitals! "

To my right, a stirring and close fought contest was being enacted by the San Jose Sharks and the Pittsburgh Penguins.

I was about to eliminate them from my roving attention when the subtle and attractive shades of the Sharks Green and White caught my eye.

That was it!

Just “Show me the way to San Jose”.

Cross eyed and neck-strained I switched and swapped from the support for the Sharks to the antipathy for the Big Apples!

The games were even. Capitals ahead, Capitals Drawing! Sharks ahead, Penguins reply. Pitch and toss, to and fro. Time was called on both games. Full time draws.

Overtime began.

My self-imposed limit on Guinness had been reached and my last pint of the evening was all I had to see myself through to the potential tension and guillotine of a shoot-out.

One minute to go, San Jose on the break, but so are Washington. Shimmy right, shimmy left, the goaltenders advance , they’re left stranded as the Shark leaves the Penguin all at sea, and the Capital outprints, I mean outsprints, the lower case rangers.

As one, the two attackers swing their sticks and in synchronised acclamation the bar (well me rise) to greet two amazing and stonewall deserved victories.

Unfortunately both shots take off like a Dixie Dean penalty and the whistles go.

I sit back down, silent, humbled and but for the dregs in the glass, bereft of booze.

Two shoot outs and you know the rest. Is it not always thus!

Capitals and Sharks both lose 2-1.

Still it’s only Hockey!

Except “only” isn’t really an applicable word.

This is a great sport!

It has speed, skill, aggression, controversy, commitment and artistry that rivals everything but one other sport. I not only could get into this but I am already into it, and through my family out here all I can say is “Go on Vancouver, Go on you Canucks”

And so Sunday looms and the gathering of clans is taking place here in Vancouver.

Damian asks me if I am going to watch "The showdown!!! "

“I’ll be here” not wishing to sneer too much at the daftness of the question.

“Better get here early “he says,” it could be packed, there are a lot of both camps in town and they all want to see this one”.

“Aye but there will only be one team’s support in here” I suggest

“Nope, open doors here buddy”

I’m going off him now!

“Being as you are the Vancouver Shamrock CSC, AND I only see Celtic games advertised, AND there is only a Celtic scarf to be seen, AND the huns will be off seeking necks to bite at 4.30 in the morning, I would have thought that this would have been exclusively a little bit of Paradise, the Holy Ground, Celtic Park, Heaven on Earth EVEN Parkheid”

He shakes his head forlornly!

“I’m taking about Vancouver against Montreal, the Canucks against the Canadiens in the afternoon.”

I try to look as forlornly but with a frisson of pity back!

“It may be speed, skill, aggression, controversy, commitment and artistry, but sorry Damian it’s still a game for pussies” I said

I look even more forlornly into my barely damp glass, and drain the remnants of the evening.

“Hail Hail, see you after Damian”

“After? After what?” he queries.

“After now” I reply.

He shakes his head again.

“OK, see ya buddy”!

Hail Hail

Matt

Beyond the Rockies

2009-02-10T08:50:00.001-08:00

Greetings from the Pacific coast of Canada.

Made it phew!

Twenty hours on and off the Grehound service from Calgary and finally crossed the Fraser River with it’s thousands of logs floating downstream to the timber yards and mills.

At Chilliwac (as in a scouser telling his mate that it's cold), the snow suddenly disappeared like the artist had gone for his tea. The land was suddenly verdant and fertile again, and was being worked with the enthusiasmm that probably only comes with rare opportunity!

Arriving in Vancouver, some snow still lay on the ground, but in comparison to the prairies - very little other than garden patches and resiliently built snowmen.

I’ve got about a fortnight to visit the three major clubs in the area, Vancouver CSC in Port Moody (I’m staying in that town), Vancouver Shamrock CSC in Downtown Vancouver (watching Celtic vs them there), and Victoria CSC across the water on Vancouver Island.

Especially for SFTB.

The bears out here (big black grizzly specimens) have taken a liking to human food (that’s food that humans eat, not eating humans). This has altered their behaviour patterns and they tend not to go into any extended hibernation. (a bit like the Glasgow Town foxes coming out during the day)

The bearesses and their cubs are regular visitors to the bins put out for collection and they have even sussed out how to get round the sophisticated tamper-proof locking mechanisms.......they just smash the bin open on the ground. Bit like Manchester on UEFA cup final night.

My niece Carly, showed me the fence that they have put round their property to keep the bears out. Somehow I think a six-foot high mesh barrier isnae going to stop a hungry bear!

So guess who won’t be taking the garbage out!

Just before leaving Calgary I walked across the frozen River Bow.

You might normally expect a river to freeze smoothly.

But if you open the picture and zoom in a bit, have a gander at this.

The huge blocks and lumps are broken bits of mini-bergs from much further upstream that have floated down the gradually freezing downstream river, till in a slow version of ‘the day after tomorrow’, they finally ground to a halt and concertined the floating bits into the air!

Meanwhile, it’s 09.04 here and time to grab a bite, intrigue the local curtain-twitchers and tease the bears with the sight of someone ‘Walking’; and especially for the bears - wearing a celtic top!!!!!

I may even spray green vegeatable dye hoops on the Snowmen!

Hail Hail for the moment

Matt

Goodbye Cowtown, Hello Vancouver (Soon)

2009-02-08T09:05:00.000-08:00

Morning/afternoon/evening all.

Time to get on board that Bus bound for them there hills!

Well it will be at 23.15 this evening arriving in Vancouver at 14.45 tomorrow.

Spent yesterday after our game, going to the saddledome to watch Calgary Flames getting beaten by Anaheim Ducks 2-1 (Ice Hockey).

I think sport the world over is being priced out of everyone but the mature and well off. I could've counted the young future of Calgary near me on slightly less than two hands. Still losing to a team with the monicker 'Ducks' is probably as low as it gets

Anyway, many a good memory of the cityso far, but I was caught by this shop whose name and colours seemed to have a certain je ne sais quoi!

I tell you, if we don't solve the problem of resistance in anti-biotics, this sort of bacteria will spread like a plague!

Hail Hail

Estadio

Hello Cow Town (That's Calgary)

2009-02-06T07:36:00.000-08:00

It's o8:37 a.m. and I'm heading off to Denny's for some breakfast before crossing town to search out the Calgary CSC based at Peanuts Sports Pub, Carriage House Inn, 9030 MacLeod Trail South.

Just love the address, "Macleod Trail South".

I'm staying at a place called the motel village on "Banff Trail NW".

The street and road names (and the snow and frozen over Bow river) conjure up tales of pan-handling, gold-rushes, mounties in pursuit of pistol Pete, and having to decide which of the huskies to shoot and eat in order to survive another night in the wilderness!

Times were hard then!

Still I'm gooing to catch the cross town C-train which for the princely sum of $2.50 ($1.50 ish) will speed me in Comfort from Banff Trail station to Heritage in approx 28 minutes.

Got to arrange to see the Queens park game the morra at 7 a.m.

Will be here until Sunday when I get a bus across the Rockies.

That should be interesting.

Fortunately I think that the bears (brown, white, or teddy) are all in hibernation at the moment, although it would be good to upstage the Saltmarket bus with my tale of encountering a grizzly on the snow capped peaks of British Columbia!

Mind you if you've ever had the misfortune of foolishly wandering into Whitelaws after a game against 'them', a Grizzly holds little fear!

Hail Hail

Estadio

Farewell to Edmonton, Tina, Rose and Daphne

2009-02-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

Thursday morning. Edmonton. 09.18 Mountain time.

Got my new camera, Pentax k200d. WOOOOOOOOO!

So Rose, when you read this please send me another picture since the ones I took of you are on the lost camera. Another one with that figure hugging wooly jumper would be perfect - I just loved the pattern.

Went down to McNally's High Run Sports bar, home of Edmonton CSC. Failed miserably in my attempts to get in touch with the club's president - Steve Kerr so will try again on my return journey across Canada.

The bar has 14 pool tables and 2 full size snooker tables, and a really well poured pint of Guinness!

98 avenue where the pub is must be the biggest avenue in the world. It starts not far from my hotel on Stony Plain road and takes half an hour to get to by taxi (and thirty dollars).

Meanwhile a big hello to my resident Taxi drivers - Bashir, Sam and last but not least Raj.

Raj in particular had a strange fixation with Brussels. I didn't explore it too uch as I felt there may have been a dark secret involved. But what an entertaining bloke.

Also I mustn't forget Daphne (who didn't like her surname - so I won't tell anyone that it is 'Jerome') and her boyfriend Sean. They are from the Northern Territories and came south to live in Edmonton to try out living in stone buildings instead of Igloos.

Daphne (I taught her how to spell her name correctly- she always thought it was DAFFNY) has a smile that can kill the devil at 200 yards and Sean has a beard. So you should be able to tell who is who in this picture.

Anyway off to get the Greyhound now. Calgary next stop!

Hail Hail

Matt

Peope drink Red Eye here. That's lager and Tomato Juice!!

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!

2009-02-04T08:52:00.000-08:00

NOOOOOOOOO!!!

I only went in because it was called TB's bar. Thought it might by some weird rip in the space time continuum, be Tommy Burns' bar, but it wis Tony Burke's Bar.

A biker or rather ex biker of the highest order,

Drink flowed, stories were told, pool was played, pictures were taken and more drink flowed.

I've lost my Camera, so if Tina (of the flashing smile), Rose (of the dreamboat eyes) or James (of the 'don't call me American') happen to read this, have a search around the floor, I may have dropped it when doing the Cossack dance.

The advert for tequila was a classic!

"Tequila - have you hugged a toilet today"!

Just remembered that my walk home (I passed TB's bar 3 times at last count) was punctuated with a number of Torville and Dean moments. (probably a bit more Orville than Torville)

Camera has probably skidded into the depths of history by now.

HOWEVVAH

Before its sad demise I did transfer the following to my pc the view from my Edmonton hotel room!

Nooooooooo!

Hail Hail

Matt (Estadio)

Where the hell am I now?

2009-02-01T12:03:00.000-08:00

Failte everyone.

For anyone that's interested I've made it to Winnipeg where at 06.30 this morning (12.30 UK time) I dragged myself from bed and headed to the Irish centre to watch the ICT game in the company of the Winnipeg CSC (and two ICT supporters)!

What a miserable game and outcome. Still faithful through and through.

Meanwhile, some of you may already know that I visited the Bramalea CSC on the outskirts of Toronto. It is a magnificent club with magnificent people who are a credit to Celtic, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and England.

Here are a couple of pictures of two Murals.

This one is the Huddle painted during big Rab and Bobo's era. (spot Bobo's legs)

This one show a magnificent hand painted collage of Brother Walfrid and many a Celtic legend mounted on the wall within a context of other Celtic heroes.

This is the main mural blown up into greater detail. It really is superb.

What a welcome I received at the Bramalea and I will forever be in awe of people like Martin Guthrie (pictured in the huddle mural), his absolutely crackin wife Pat, Tom Donnelly, Colin Phillips, Tom McCardle, Michael Wooley, Tom McGougan, and everyone else who extended a true hand of welcome.

Pat in paricular stands out from her response to my enquiring if she was Canadian.

Fair affronted she was as she replied 'Get away with yourself, I'm seventh generation Irish'!

You'll do for me!

So to Winnipeg and the attraction of my hotel was the promised outdoor heated swimming pool which in this weather conjured up images of the hot springs and spas of Iceland.

Not quite!

The Winnipeg CSC is only a small unit of about 15 people, but no bigger Celtic hearts will be found anywhere and my thanks and admiration go to them all and in particular Archie Kane, Lawrence Malone, Jim Stewart and those who suffered this morning. It is the first time I think I have watched the full game while drinking a cup of tea - and fine tea it was.

Finally on a stroll earlier I passed the Winnipeg Goldeyes (baseball) stadium.

Just outside it's precincts I stumbled upon what I regard as one of the most well thought out combination of colours, outlandish dress and descriptive words.

It reminds me somehow of a group of peepul never far from my pen's aim and was put togethjer with all the skill of a master cobbler fashioning a hand made-to-measure brogue.

Anyway, It's Edmonton next, followed by Calgary and finally Vancouver before I start the return journey when I hope to visit other CSCs and thriving little outposts of Paradise that personal imperatives made impossible on the outward part of the trip.

So for now

Hail hail

And guess what - It's snowing again.

Matt (Estadio)

The plan takes shape

2008-12-18T04:14:00.000-08:00

Failte

This one is asummary of the last e-mails between me and over 50 respondents.

Thanks to everyone and the offers of support and help coming in are brilliant.

Anyway to date:

The list is as follows.

Town/City Country
Sydney /Australia
Melbourne /Australia
Perth /Australia
Baku /Azerbaijan
Dhaka /Bangladesh
Brussels /Belgium
Fortaleza /Brazil
Phnom Penh /Cambodia
Ottawa /Canada
London Ontario /Canada
Toronto /Canada
Bogota /Columbia
Dover /England
Paris /France
Charente Maritime /France
Frankfurt /Germany
Flensburg /Germany
Syros /Greece
Budapest /Hungary
Kuala Lumpur /Malaysia
Mexico City /Mexico
general /New Zealand
Tauranga /New Zealand (N)
Singapore /Singapore
Okpo /South Korea
Madrid /Spain
South Murcia/Benidorm/
Torrevieja /Spain
Khartoum /Sudan
Gulf of Thailand /Thailand
Hua Hin /Thailand
Pattaya City /Thailand
Dubai United /Arab Emirates
Las Vegas /United States
San Francisco /United States
Pompano Beach ,
South Florida /USA
The Bronx - New York /USA

I’m still awaiting replies from the various CSAs around the biosphere and also some input from celticbars.com so there is some filling in of the gaps to be done yet.

Distilling all of the above my current plan is :

No final dates as yet but I will be starting on or about February 1st.

I will basically be taking the trip in about 5 phases.

- Europe
- New states and down to SE Asia
- Australia New Zealand
- US, Central and South America
- Possibly Africa .

I am for the moment concentrating on Europe and intend to go in the following sequence:

a) Last Stop on UK Mainland – Dover
b) Paris
c) Charente/Bordeaux
d) Madrid
e) Valencia
f) South Murcia
g) Flensburg
h) Brussels
i) Hamburg
j) Frankfurt
k) Gdansk
l) Warsaw
m) Wroclaw
n) Budapest
o) Greece and the Greek Islands

It is likely that my next stop will be Baku and then Dubai , and then down to Indo-China and the antipodes, but just for the moment I need to concentrate on a) to o).

So just before I finalise dates and travel arrangements, I would appreciate some advice, guidance and help.

Assuming that I hang around in each location for about 3/4/5 days each, I will be looking for pointers on cheap digs. I am in contact with the hostellers association etc, but local knowledge of cheap accommodation with the basics (like a roof) would be appreciated.

Also if there is any chance of casual bar work, sweeping streets, rubbing sun-tan-oil on the backs of sun-bathing beauties, beer tasting etc to fund a few extra beers and solid food would be brilliant.

I am travelling light, but will be carrying a laptop/notebook, so any gen you can provide on free WiFi access, BT Open-Zone coverage (or similar), internet café access, facilities to recharge battery and mobile Sim card availability, would go down a treat.

I am now looking at rail cards and bus passes to cover the European leg of the trip and I am starting to taste all those different national varieties of beers, boiled eggs and ‘stuff that don’t ask what it is till after you’ve eaten it’ which have been my staples in previous jaunts around the globe.

So let me know if you can help me with any of the above, and I will be forever in your debt.

I’ll even mention you for posterity and ridicule in my dispatches.

Anyway, for the moment

Hail Hail

Matt

Soon to be 'Of No Fixed Abode'

2008-12-12T05:49:00.000-08:00

Morning, Afternoon, Evening, and a happy unsocial hours to anyone who happens to be reading while sitting in the smallest room in the house wishing they had gone for the Korma and lager instead of the Vindaloo and Guinness!

I’ve been quiet on progress over the last few weeks, mainly because I wanted to ensure that I had a lot of bricks in place. In particular, the missives had not been agreed and while there should have been no problem, I ddn’t want to go too far down the line only for it all to hit a barrier.

The formal signing takes place on Monday 15th Dec, so with that agreed and new Passports, Driving licences, and birth Certificates in hand I can start motoring on the substance of the plans.

So following dropping my beloved LCD TV off at my No 1 Daughter’s house in Ammanford (South Wales), stopping at Daughter No2 in Chepstow South Wales and kipping at a mates house in Southgate North London, I expect to formally start the odyssey on 1st February-ish, with hopefully a stopover in Dover at the home of the Ramsgate Emerald CSC.

Its then into Europe, including France, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Poland, Luxemburg.

In the next week or so I’ll be trying to coordinate travel plans with those who have already been in contact with me, and organise a European Rail travel pass.

After Europe, I’m still in two minds about which way to go, but it is likely that I will head East through the Ex soviet satellites, down through Baku and then ???? how the hell do I get to Dubai. Big decisions on Africa and South East Asia have to be made before the Australia, New Zealand and Chinese legs are finalised, but much of this will be settled as I travel.

Finally it will be the Americas, but that is probably at least 18 months down the line, so I won’t worry about that just yet.

I intend to stick as far as possible to land travel and avoid unless absolutely impossible, the airlines!

Over the next month or so I also have to look at Visa requirements, and follow up with potential sponsors and income opportunities.

If anyone can help with a wee bar job or a couch for the night (one only – the Slabbery Wummin is not doin’ the European leg) then I would be ecstatic to hear from you.

I’ll be repeating the request in the e-mails over the nest few days.

We’ve been selling off most of the contents of the house, which really hit home yesterday when I bought a DVD for us to watch in our now Spartan living room. Unfortunately I’ve sold the DVD player so we satisfied ourselves by reading the ‘rushes’ and summary on the back of the box.

We then acted out our interpretation of the film.

Fortunately it was an over-18 classification but unfortunately I can’t describe exactly what happened!

The wee guy from EPS was a welcome visitor today as he brought the package with the tickets for the Govan Gutter on 27th December.

Sadly (three of us go regularly to all the away games), we only got two in the ballot or however they decided the allocation.

Now, I’ve got the tickets and since Tony and Paul are friends, I should put all three in a hat and we should have an equal chance of getting a ticket.

OR

Since I’ve got the tickets, only one should go in the hat and Tony and Paul should dunk for the prize.

Problems Problems!

Anyway, back to planning the car-boot sale and I’ll be in touch.

Hail Hail

Matt (Estadio)

P.S. As usual you can e-mail me on msincent@yahoo.co.uk

2008-11-27T04:53:00.000-08:00

Typical isn’t it. As the formal travel itinerary starts to take shape, the world continues its descent to self-destruction

I’ve got one of those ‘morning after’ feelings where the toxins in the brain induce feelings of apprehension, suspicion and fear.

There I was, putting my wee yellow/pink/orange/green stickers on the map of Thailand when the background buzz from BBC News 24 reads my thoughts and says “Bangkok”!!

The Airports are barricaded, the troops are out, Government and opposing forces are staring each other down, and the Prime Minister has headed to the hills in the North!

“Never mind” says I, “after all I was in Nigeria during the ‘bloodless’ coup in the late 70s and early 80s; It’ll all have blown over soon enough.”.

I looked at my list of stickers and carried on with pressing them onto the big chart.

Disappointingly I didn’t have one for Mumbai!

The disappointment metamorphosed in one brief history of time into unrivalled elation and relief as the newsreader was suddenly interrupted by the breaking news that “man’s inhumanity to man” once more showed its ugly face and an al-Qaeda style attack had led to over a hundred deaths, hundreds more injuries, hostage taking of UK and American citizens (where is that bleedin’ Irish Passport), and the attempted razing of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

I looked on as the flames roared out of the windows, firemen on giant rotating ladders rescued the occupants of the top floors, and reporters recounted the bloody battle at the main station, the assault by the Indian army against the so called ‘Deccan Mujahedeen’ and the continually increasing casualty account.

“Still” I pondered “In 1992 our London flat had burnt down on Xmas morning, as we slept, and by a miracle we had got out with nothing worse than being wired for sound for a few days, two months of scorched coughing lungs erupting with ozone unfriendly burning carbon, and black speckled spit and phlegm tasting of an untended fire grate.”

But perhaps I would go to Bangalore instead!

I looked round at some of the other stickers.

Bogota in Columbia!

“What a great idea. Probably bump into the cartel brothers’!

Australia!

“That should be fun especially if the locusts have eaten half the greenery!”

California and Mexico City!

“Must be due for an earthquake or two”.

Baku! Khartoum! Dhaka!

“What could possibly go wrong”?

Anyway. As you can see from the picture above I have at the moment over forty locations well spread around the globe. There are however a number of gaps and I am attempting to fill them through celticbars.com and the various overseas CSAs.

In the meantime, I have also built a formal project plan and Mind-Map to try and keep everything under some semblance of control and to ensure that every step is taken with at least a passing reference to our wellbeing and continued symbiotic partnership of body and soul.

The major tasks over the next couple of weeks are identifying ‘income’ opportunities, sponsorship discussions, and contacting publishers. I’ll also be in touch again with everyone who has contacted me.

One thing I have promised myself is that I need to stop working on the plan with BBC News 24 on the background!

After all we really are looking forward to the trek from Baku down through Iran and over the Gulf to Dubai.

The Slabbery Wumin has been looking forward to the azure waters, golden sun and a wee bit of houghmagandy on the beach!

I repeated to myself "What could possibly go wrong?"

Hail Hail

Matt (Estadio)

P.s. I know the picture isn't easy to read. I'll post the full list of potential destinations later.

The World

2008-11-19T03:23:00.000-08:00

It would be dishonest to say I took the event in my stride. But it would be equally dishonest to say which of the emotional mix was dominant.

In any venture, especially a new one, and despite all the planning, anticipation, confidence and enthusiasm, there is a defining moment of dread, exhilaration, silence, humility, all glued together by a resolve to succeed.

If at that moment you can’t envisage success; give up!

As I unrolled the 103cm by 138cm, 1:22,000,000 scale, 1 inch to 347 miles world map, stuck the double sided adhesive paper on each corner, fixed the picture to my wall and stood back, I pondered and stared for more than a few minutes in silent awe!

It had been many a year since I had viewed the whole vista of our earth never mind looked at it as more than simply a picture; after all this was going to be my living room, bedroom, kitchen, study and garden for the foreseeable future!

As my eyes went from east to west, north to south, and darted here and there the enormity of what I was attempting to do froze the tumbling emotions into not only the crucial determination to succeed but also into the unbreakable faith that I would.

Names jumped out at me from the colours and the contours; many familiar and some less so, many old and many new!

I have travelled to many places in the past either following Celtic, through work or on holiday. But this was different!

After all in the past, adventurous as some of the trips had been, they were all wrapped in a cocoon of security whether by travelling with many others or having all the arrangements organised for me. I would get to the airport, sit in the business lounge, be pampered on the airline, whisked to my hotel and transported to and from work.

But what I now could see on my wall wasn’t just the places and my sketchy knowledge of the peoples and the cultures; what was shouting at me was the sheer scale of the distances, potential barriers and the unknowns that lay in getting from A to B to C.....to Z and then back to A!

The British Isles, no more than a wee set of countries just over an inch long was drowned not so much by the huge expanse of waters covering two-thirds of the earths surface, but by the sheer numbers and magnitude of the living, breathing, evolving countries and peoples making up our biosphere.

347 miles to the inch!! Just under the distance from Glasgow to London and even with a reasonably common language that would be challenging enough with only a back-pack. But thousands upon thousands of miles of mystery. This really was going to be 'something else'!

I focussed in on our own little part of the western world.

Glasgow so different from Edinburgh! Edinburgh so different from Aberdeen! Dublin, Belfast, London, Cardiff, all with their own histories, ways, ambitions and futures.

I could see Spain, Italy, Hungary, Germany, France all within a few inches and all so different but perhaps with a future that may have much more in common for the people than the bloodlust for power and domination of the past!

And yet even in their geographical size these few countries from this small postage stamp had at times dominated the world through the Greek and Egyptian fount of knowledge, the Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Prussian and British empires. Through a leading edge in the technologies adapted either for travel, commerce or warfare these small specks of power had diffused to all corners of the known earth and in one way or another had left a legacy that had created the enlightenments, the medicine, the opportunities, and the political systems which we see the influence of even today.

But look closely at that map not only in our own environment, but look at the Balkans, the expansive variety of Africa, Russia, Indo-China and think back 10 or 20 years. Think of the changes that have occurred, good and bad, since then. View this change as the society’s primordial sludge of evolution and wonder about what in 10 or 20 years time another snapshot of the world will reveal as the content of the earthly melting pot!

There is an urge within us all to know more than we do, whether that be about little things, big things, people, football, history, chemistry, or even the unknown!

But there is more to it than that; I look at the map of the world and the names that inhabit our discarded papers and quickly forgotten bulletins force themselves back into my mind’s eyes and ears. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Burma, Columbia, Chechnia, Alaska, Palestine, Israel, Zimbabw, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuala, Cuba and a hundred more!

In my head I can see the geographic features, the mountains, lakes, towns, roads, and railways; But I can also see and hear the people; I can see and hear the politicians; I can see and hear the traffic and the arguments. I can smell Life!!

But the sights, voices, sounds and smells are indistinct. I have cotton wool in my ears, motes in my eyes and my nose is blocked by the cold of unfamiliarity.

I need to go to see better, to hear better, to taste and to touch better!

But most of all I need to go to understand better; for surely understanding is the first step to respect and respect is the foundation of peace and love.

Everyone should have a map of the world on their wall. Every child should grow up with that map.

It just might make a difference.

Hail Hail

Matt

If You Know The (Hidden) History.....

2008-11-18T06:24:00.000-08:00

How many times have we stood on the terraces, stands and even in the bowels of Celtic park and belted out the anthem with gusto, passion and belief proclaiming to the world what the history of Celtic means to us and them? But more importantly when do we take the time to peel off the veneer of the words and examine the story the history actually tells, and just why it makes the club a bit special and a bit different from most of the others?

That is no boast on my part, after all I only live in the reflected glory of giants of times gone, nor is it meant to belittle the devotion that other clubs’ supporters have for their own teams. It is simply a statement of fact that whether through blood-line, empathy, romantic attachment or sheer accident, once the embrace of this club swaddles you, the warmth welds club and soul with a strength that is as unbreakable as the steel hawsers that launched and guided so many Clyde-built leviathans.

We know so much of Brother Walfrid, Willie Maley, the club’s first breath drawn in the collapsing lungs and distended bellies of the famine, the ‘floating bridge’ of ‘heads and faces’ and the hundreds of players who have graced the turf at Celtic park. Words far more expressive and knowledgeable than any that I might fashion, have flowed like ambrosia from the pens of such as David Potter, Graham McColl, Archie McPherson, Marie Rowan, John Burrowes, Pat Woods, Peter Burns, John Cairney, Tom Greig and even a young Gerry McNee.

But rarely if at all has the hidden past, the flourishing present, and the confident future of the single most important and most influential history been adequately addressed.

The history of the fans.

Such an undertaking is impossible for any one person, any one story, or any one lifetime, but it has to be started by someone, it has to begin somewhere, it has to commence sometime.

So I and the affectionately monickered ‘Slabbery Wumin’ have sold up and we’re off to hopefully scratch that surface of Celtic’s diaspora.

In early 2009 starting in France and then over a period of time (however long it takes) we intend to make our way across Europe and Asia stopping at places where outcrops of Celtic fans have lain their hats.

Each one has a story and each story contributes a piece to the jigsaw of Celtic’s hidden and untold history.

Who are these fans? How did they get there? How do they fit into the local community? How do they maintain their connection with Celtic? Where and how do they see the games? How often do they get back to Celtic park? How large are the communities? Where do they see their future? What lessons are there for others trying to start the same type of venture? How do they view the current state of the club, the players, the organisation, and the media? What is their message to the club’s custodians?

These and a thousand other questions can only be answered by the people who matter the most. The fans.

Try as they might, the efforts of Celtic in becoming a world-club through holding friendlies in far-flung places will lead to little of any resilience. But the enthusiasm, devotion and example of the world-wide support can create a permanent oasis of romance and allegiance in a desert of opportunism.

So if you are based anywhere from Calais to Calcutta, Krakow to Kiev, Berlin to Beijing and would be interested in telling your story, just let me know.

E-mail me at msincent@yahoo.co.uk

Tell me where you are and obviously your contact details. We can then discuss the venture further. Assuming I get enough and a suitable spread of responses, I’ll then attempt to set up a schedule and itinerary.

Stare into the depths of space on a clear Glasgow night and shining back at you will be a thousand visible stars each one telling a story of the past and perhaps lighting a path to the future. But hidden from the naked eye are another billion billion stars each one unique and each one adding the totality of the universe. It is the hidden story that gives meaning to the visible spectrum and it is the hidden history that gives meaning to Celtic’s history and future.

I cant tell the whole story but perhaps I can find just a few more stars and perhaps their existence, their tales, their past and their ambitions will be the seeds that will take root in even more exotic places and ensure that Celtic has a future clothed not only in the gaudy bling of commercial necessity, but also thrives on the life-enhancing, heart-racing, blood-pumping, four-leaf-clover emblazoned hooped soul of passion!

The story of the millions of supporters across the globe needs telling, so to paraphrase

‘let the people speak,
the stories and the songs…….’!

I look forward to your e-mails, posts and failing that? Well thanks for listening

Hail Hail

Estadio (Matt)

msincent@yahoo.co.uk