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Something weird happened to me in Dumfries, although to describe it as 'happening' isn't exactly right maybe. I discovered something that surprised me, something that brought back echoes of other places and strange, sort of spiritual undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of my life.
In 1989, while i was living in the hills near Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales, i started writing a novel. I called it "Needles In The Haystack", which was originally a joke - a name for a soap opera i was talking about writing, about the melodramatic lives of the rural junkies i lived with. It was set mainly around that area at first, although the action moved around Australia and around the world, as i did over the next year and a half. I don't know what it all means, but a lot of things in that book had a more or less prophetic connection with events, places and people that came into my life after i wrote about them.
Not long after i started on it, when maybe a quarter of the story'd been written, i left the hills on the coastal strip of northern New South Wales, where i'd lived for most of the past nine months of so, to go and live in a community a couple of hundred kilometres inland. A few days after arriving there, i was high up on a hillside, overlooking the camp i was staying in, working on a water pipe with a couple of others. I looked around at the hills and the trees covering them and remarked to Chris, one of people i was up there with, "This would be a good spot for a pirate radio station. You could reach Brisbane from here with the right aerial and they'd never find you."
"Needle in the haystack." he said, a minute or two later.
"What?!" i was surprised, he didn't know anything about the novel i was writing.
"Needle in the haystack." he repeated. "That would be a good name for the pirate radio station. That hill over there, that dominates this whole area, is called the Haystack."
I told him that was near enough the name of a novel i was writing, but he didn't seem too surprised.
A day or two later, i was sitting on the rocks by one of the beautiful swimming holes in the river that flows along one side of the community, and chatting to Baz, another of the people who lived there. For no particular reason, he told me there used to be a bushranger who lived around those hills. "He was called Captain Starlight" he said.
"Shit!" i thought, "the Starlight's the name of the cafe in me book!"
Then, not long after that, at dawn one morning, i was working on the thatch of the humpy i was building myself, when Chris came past.
"Goonabah's here." he said.
"What?!" I did a double-take. At first i thought he meant this place was like Goonabah, which was the name of the town in my book. But then i realized he hadn't read it and knew nothing about what was in it. "What do you mean?" i asked, puzzled.
"Goonabah, the aboriginal elder, who Desi went off to get."
"Oh!" I was slightly shocked by this latest connection. At some point during his stay, i told Goonabah i'd been writing his name at least several times a week for the last couple of months. But he didn't seem nearly as surprised as i was.
There was also someone there called Max, which is the name of the rather elusive character Sally and Anton were searching for in the novel.
I had to go to Sydney a couple of weeks after i'd arrived at that place and, although i'd fully intended to live there permanently when i first went there, i never really returned - except for several shortish visits. However, i kept in constant contact with the people who did live there, most of whom, like me, lived a very nomadic lifestyle. One of them told me a long time later, well after the book was finished and she'd read the complete story, that a lot of other things i'd written about had happened there too.
On one level, i understand it all fully, although i could never quite work out why it was - what it was all about. But anyway, it gradually faded from my life, although the novel remained an unpublished millstone around my neck. Until a few years later, when it suddenly leapt back into my consciousness in Dumfries - a very unlikely place to find a connection with that other life.
I'd felt a sort of connection with the place straight away, although i couldn't quite put a finger on it. I thought it might have something to do with the fact that my great grandfather came from there. He ran a brewery in the town and was apparently a friend of Robbie Burns, who also lived there. But then something suddenly hit me - the river that runs through the centre of town and that my aunt's house looks directly onto, is called the Nith. NITH is the abbreviation i'd always used instead of the rather cumbersome title for my novel, "Needles In The Haystack"!
I can't say i understand it in a conscious way, but it makes some kind of sense, somehow!
The seventy-odd mile journey takes about three hours and passes through countryside almost all the way. It's a weird sort of countryside though - for me, at least. I was severely disturbed by the massive bare hillsides we passed through on one part of the trip. I've got so used to seeing hills covered in trees and i've become so sensitive to deforestation that the effect of these hills, which most british people would see as beautiful, unspoilt countryside, was very strange. It was like seeing a close friend, who's always had a good head of hair, go suddenly bald. I could only see the damage done, centuries ago now, by the destruction of the forests that used to cover this island. The forests of Scotland were systematically chopped down by the english invaders so the anti-colonial resistance movement had nowhere to hide.
Wherever i go now, Australia, Mexico, India, Britain, i'm constantly aware of the damage that's been done to the land around me. I see not just what it is now, but what it would have been like before people started destroying it. I visualise a forest covering bare hills and i notice signs of erosion and soil damage caused by recent deforestation. Of course some places were ruined a very long time ago - Europe in particular - while others were only destroyed recently, as a result, more likely than not, of european colonization. I see destruction where others, less aware of truly wild nature, see beauty. I makes me sad to see bare farmland, with only a scattering of stunted, scrubby trees, but most people think it's nature and it's wonderful. They don't know what a real forest is.
I think it's fairly safe to say there are no real forests in Europe. Sure, there's plenty of little clumps of trees that people call forests. Like Epping Forest, for example, just to the north east of London. Epping forest may well have been a forest once - as, in fact virtually everywhere on the island was - but to call it a forest now is a bit of a joke. Epping Wood, would be a bit more realistic. But then, the so-called "United Kingdom" is the second most densely populated country on the planet, if you don't count Singapore and Hong Kong, and it's only very recently been overtaken by India. So i suppose it's not entirely surprising that the entire island has been completely ruined by overpopulation.
Anyway, the bus eventually arrived in Edinburgh and i was met at the bus station by Ian, who i'd come to visit. I'd never met him before, but we'd swapped quite a few email messages via internet over a bit less than a year. It's strange meeting people you sort of know through that type of method of communication. Somehow you unconsciously get an image of them, like you do when you listen to people talking on the radio, but they never look like your image of them.
Ian was playing in Samba group who were performing at the Jazz Festival that was taking place in Edinburgh that weekend. They were going to be part of a procession through some of the streets near where the festival was taking place and we walked from the bus station to where they were due to start from. There were a few other things happening there too, including a brass band who were playing in the street and led the procession. I've never really come into contact with Samba before, in any way that made me conscious that it was 'samba' i was listening to, so it was interesting to find out exactly what it was. Samba's entirely percussion, it originates in South America and uses quite a few different types of drums and other percussion instruments - i can't remember the names of any of them. I like percussion and i enjoyed listening to them playing as they wandered along the streets.
That evening, we went to a pub in Leith, overlooking the water of the Firth of Forth. It makes a lot of difference to a city, being on the coast. London's a horrible dismal and depressing sort of city, but if it was on the coast, it could possibly be quite a pleasant place. I felt that if i had no choice and i had to live on that grim little island, i'd probably seriously consider living in Edinburgh. Although, i doubt i'd be able to handle the cold winters there - but then, i can't handle the winter anywhere in Britain!
I didn't fully have my bearings, although i didn't wander too far off course. But my rather roundabout route took me past Cyberia, which is a cafe where you can use public computer terminals to access internet. I looked at it for a while and then went in. I had time to spend half an hour playing around with this stuff. I didn't have anything better to do and there were a couple of things i needed to do when i could get internet access of the sort they provided there. I had an internet account myself, but i could only use it for email and the public message areas, known as newsgroups. Internet has a lot more services available than that, but i had to use a different system to get to them - and this was an opportunity.
After i left Cyberia, i went to the bus station. I'd had less time than i thought i had and it was getting close to the time when the bus was due to leave. But i hadn't had anything much to eat that morning and i was about to take a four hour bus trip, so i thought i'd better quickly check out the cafeteria. One large plate of microwaved chips and baked beans - which were actually surprisingly nice - later, i left Edinburgh after a visit of less than twenty four hours.
Anyway, we eventually got to Huddersfield and i went to the pub where i'd arranged to meet Margaret. I don't remember its name now, but it was a weird place, faked up as some sort of rural irish pub i think, although i'm not exactly sure why it also seemed to be pretending to be a hardware shop too. Maybe that's what pubs are like in Ireland, i don't know, but it doesn't seem too likely. Anyway there were brooms, wellington boots, buckets, scrubbing brushes, pots and all sorts of junk hanging around the walls and from the ceiling. It was all new and it each thing had a price ticket on it with some ridiculous price written on it. It's bizarre what goes on in the imagination of the people that do these places up!
I spent a week in Huddersfield and, although it's not a bad little town, in its own weird way, there isn't really a lot to say about it.
Margaret and her friend Tonya lived in a back-to-back in a muslim indian area, somewhere out the Manchester side of town. I'd heard of back-to-backs quite a few times, but until then, i never really knew what they were. They must be one of the pokiest, most cramped form of working class housing in Britain. They're like the ordinary two-storey terraced houses that you find all over the place - in the south, anyway. But instead of each house being one house, it's two. They're separated into front halves and back halves. The front house has a door onto the street and the back half has a door onto the back yard. In their house, you came in the door to the bottom of the stairs. On the left there was a doorway into the small living room, which would originally have been a tiny living room and a tiny, dark kitchen. Downstairs, the cellar had been converted into a damp, cold and dingey kitchen. Upstairs would originally have been two rooms, one for the adults and babies and the other one for the children. But the smaller of the two had been made into a bathroom and the bigger one had been divided up to make one small bedroom, with a window onto the back yard and one tiny bedroom with no real window at all. It was bad enough with two people living there, with a family it must have been a real nightmare.
Hornsea was a very typical english small-time seaside town. It wasn't one of those frantic holiday resorts like Southend, Clacton, Brighton or Bridlington. It was a fairly quiet little place, with "bed and breakfast" signs all down to the seafront.
The beach was the usual british strip of muddy gravel, with great timber breakwaters running out from the shore every couple of hundred yards, in a vain attempt to stop the vicious North Sea taking away what's left of the gravel - and the rest of the island with it! There were quite a few people on the beach, although it was surprisingly uncrowded for the middle of summer. I suppose everyone goes to Spain now, not to the coast of Britain for their holidays. It's probably cheaper. There were the usual array of windbreaks - five foot high strips of canvas, stretched between poles stuck in the beach. I've never seen them anywhere else in the world, except on the cold and hostile beaches around the North Sea and other parts of Britain.
We sat on the massive concrete sea wall and had something to eat and then went down to walk along the beach. The water was surprisingly cold - much colder than the Blackwater, where i'd been swimming recently. I contemplated the idea of going for a swim, but i didn't manage to convince myself it was a good idea. The pub up on hill above the beach looked much more inviting and eventually we ended up there.
After we'd had enough of Hornsea, we drove down the coast a bit, to Mappleton, a fairly uninspiring place, not far south down the beach from Hornsea. Here, there was a car park at the top of a great earth cliff overlooking the beach. The cliff near the carpark had been heavily bulldozed in an attempt to stop it crumbling into the ever-advancing sea. It was a good seventy or eighty feet down to the beach and if you looked down the coast a short way, you could see it was in a constant process of being eaten away by the erosion which is nibbling constantly at England's east coast.
We didn't stop long at Mappleton, not even bothering to go down the long steep path to the beach, and we got back in the car and drove a bit further south, in the direction of the mouth of the Humber.
At Aldborough, a few miles further on, we stopped again and got out of the car to have a walk. The erosion here was much more spectacular than any of the other places and you could see the land was literally crumbling onto the beach. There were signs of roads that had disappeared, along with the hundred feet of soil that had lain beneath them, and houses gone too - probably pulled down for salvage before they fell into the hungry waters. A whole strip along the edge of the land was subsiding gradually and obviously suddenly falling occasionally, probably after heavy rain.
It was a heart-warming sight in a way. I couldn't help feeling that as the sea advanced, gradually, but relentlessly, inch by inch, day by day, there was a definite point, somewhere unfortunately a long way in the future, when this dismal grey little island would have been completely consumed by the waves. Britain would cease to exist. The world wouldn't be much worse off without it, that's for sure! Maybe, rather than completely disappearing, it would become two islands, as the North Sea and the Irish Sea became one radioactive chemical soup, glowing green and phosphorescent in the night, between the north and south islands of Britain. Maybe the growing divide between north and south, that's become more obvious than ever during the years of Thatcher's ransacking and pillage, is just a social preview of the physical reality to come. Maybe by the time it happens, nobody will notice - except, of course, those unlucky citizens of the midlands, whose picturesque slagheaps will be gone forever.
*-*-*
I'd never been to a car boot sale before. Margaret and Tonya were moving soon and they had a lot of junk they wanted to take to a car boot sale and sell. Some of it was theirs, but most of it had come from Tonya's mother who'd also moved recently. So early on Sunday morning we loaded up the car with a folding table and a dozen or so boxes containing an amazing variety of household bits and pieces. The boot sale was in Halifax, which was about twenty minutes drive away, and when we got there it was already quite crowded.
The sale was held in a carpark near the centre of town. Anyone with a car and a pile of junk could pay a few quid and set up a stall there. Before we'd even stopped the car, we were surrounded by frantic would-be buyers, hoping for the lucky find, the bit of junk that wasn't - wasn't junk, that is. I don't know if they were dealers, collectors or just plain crazy, but they were all over the stuff in the boot before we could even get it out.
It was amazing. I hadn't seen anything like it since the one time i worked behind a stall at a jumble sale. As soon as the doors had opened, this massive wave of desperate people rushed down the entire length of the hall, like a deranged swarm of locusts, out to devour every bargain they could get their hands on. I don't know what it is about second-hand stuff that gets british people so excited, but if you value your life, you don't try and jump the queue at a jumble sale!
And this boot sale was like a gigantic jumble sale. All sorts of second hand things you could possibly imagine were on sale there that morning. Cups, plates, knives, records, radios, coats, shirts, fishing rods, televisions, washing machines, wardrobes, clocks, electrical gadgets, computers, badges, books, lamps, chairs, spanners, hammers, chisels, rope, wire, ornaments, pictures, cameras, toys, typewriters, everything.
We spent most of the morning there and sold almost everything we'd brought. It was an interesting experience. So typically english. I'd forgotten about these sort of events in my years on the other side of the world. I've never seen anything like the british passion for other people's junk anywhere else i've ever been. The only thing that comes near it, i reckon, is the second hand car trade.
Long distance buses are still quite cheap - certainly compared to the rest of the public transport system - but local buses are really expensive. For example, it cost me about two pounds fifty to get from Maldon to Chelmsford, which is a distance of ten miles. Huddersfield to London is twenty times as far and costs four times as much. In London, the buses are expensive and the underground is extortionate. The shortest journey on the London underground costs one pound thirty - which is over thirty times as much as the longest journey on the Mexico city metro! It's no wonder that the traffic in London is at a virtual standstill almost all day every day.
It's a disgusting waste of petrol - which has no doubt got something to do with the fact that the petrol companies run the government. And of course the phenomenal levels of pollution that result from having millions of cars sitting in traffic jams with their engines running constantly are one of the most disgusting things about that filthy and polluted city. You hear all sorts of things about the pollution in Mexico City, but when i was there it wasn't anywhere near as bad as an average day in London.
Anyway, polluted or not, i arrived there from Huddersfield quite pleased to be back. I stayed in Brixton for a week and visited one or two friends in north London too. The beautiful weather looked set to carry on for a while and temperatures were well into the thirties which made the place quite bearable.
In fact, the good weather made Britain into another country. The normal constant and universal greyness was nowhere to be seen. Not in the skies. Not in the streets. Not in the faces of the people. And not in the unusually relaxed and happy atmosphere that seemed to have come over this normally miserable little island. I could almost consider living here if the weather was like that all the time. But of course it isn't and it's not likely to be either. Global warming or no global warming, i'll never be able to stand the british climate all year round again.
I went to a gig at the 121 bookshop that Friday, it was some ancient punk band called Oi Polloi and an all-women band called PMT. The gig was in the basement of the bookshop and was pretty crowded. A lot of the people there were punks from the mainland, on their way back out of the country after the punk festival in Edinburgh and there was a really good atmosphere. It was good seeing Oi Polloi, but i preferred PMT.
I still wasn't really that keen on getting back on the road again, even though it was only around Europe, which is almost like home really. Or it should be, anyway, but i wasn't so sure.
Anyway, as i was going to leave the country soon, i thought i'd go back to Maldon for a while and get a bit more time in by the river. It was time to get the boat sailing again. We'd been trying to finish fixing it up for nearly two months now. Surely we could get it together to get the fucking thing sailing!
Of course, it's never a simple matter. Nothing ever seems to be a simple matter when it comes to boats!
I went back to Maldon with the intention of finishing the job on the boat very soon, but of course, there were plenty of other things to take my mind of it. Plenty of excuses not to do it and plenty of opportunities to do something else when the tides were right to do that work.
I don't really know what i did do during the last ten days of August. Mind you, i'm writing this bit of this chapter two months later, so it's not really surprising! I know i still wasn't fully well again, although i was much much better than i had been when i'd arrived in Britain nearly two months before. But i still didn't feel fully fit and healthy. I still had an intermittent low fever and my guts were still a bit on the dodgy side, but the illness was passing. Gradually.
I was enjoying being at home - having a home. And i wasn't really going out very much. One thing i've noticed about myself more and more over the last few years is that i move around over long distances a lot, but when i'm not doing that i find it very hard to get around the local area very much. I tend to travel a long way and often by a very weird and roundabout route, and then stay put, not even moving a few hundred yards a lot of the time - except to go to the shops and things. It's a real schizophrenic lifestyle. A kind of claustrophobia combined with a kind of agoraphobia. One seems to spark the other one off.
I don't know... i seem to have a lot of extremes in my life. And i somehow have to find a balance between them. Most of them seem to be geographical extremes too. Britain and Australia, Melbourne and Cairns, here and bloody there, all over the place. I can always keep a sort of balance in my life, by hopping from one extreme to another. But like a pendulum, i never seem to be able to stop in the middle, which often seems to be where i'm really trying to get to.
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