28 years later – Still Desperately Seeking Someone (or Something) on the Road to Nowhere

This weekend I went on a mens' spiritual retreat. To Alnmouth Friary. About a million things happened, or rather I had about a million thoughts about things that happened.

Where are we going again?  And what is it we're looking for?

The car journey alone I could write a novel about, or at least a decent sized pamphlet. I travelled up after work on Friday with Stephen, Mark and Adam. The playlist in the car included 'Road to Nowhere' by Talking Heads. Amazing how one song can set off a chain of memories that became pretty much the equivalent of seeing your whole life flash before you, except when you're just about to die it only takes a few seconds, in this case it lasted the better part of 24 hours. Unfortunately, I didn't just let these images flash before my eyes, instead they set off a stream of consciousness type monologue that had some of my companions reaching for the glasses with the eyeballs painted on the outside of the lenses so they could get some sleep...

The theme of the weekend was 'the still, small voice'. I am surmising that the idea behind this was to sit around being quiet for a bit, so that we'd be open to hearing the 'still, small voice' of God. That's all very well in theory, but in my case this weekend my internal monologue was so deafening, stomping around noisily in massive clown shoes and shouting through a loud hailer, so full of stories and reminiscences that I barely stopped to listen for any other sounds (actually I did a little bit, but I'll put that in Part 2).

I suppose I got a strong sense this weekend of the cycles that life goes in, and there were so many references to 1986 / 1987 on the trip. Those were the two years when my life started on the path it's on now, and in many ways despite the 28 years in between I feel I'm back at the same crossroads, with the same choices to make all over again, except with a few more aches and pains..  It's a bit like the 28 year long equivalent of trying to get out of Kirkby Stephen in a thunderstorm in 2007, where thanks to my complete lack of navigational skills we managed to cycle for 7 miles and for an hour along roads which were under water, only to find we'd been going round in a big circle and ending up back again in Kirkby Stephen, soaked to the skin, and with shoes full of water (it's a metaphor for life!).

Anyway, this weekend I found myself in a car going north in a VW Passat on the A1 listening to Road to Nowhere, in 1986 I was in a mini going south on the M1 to Nottingham when the same song came on.  I was going to a university open day there with my friend Andrew. We were visiting separate departments so we didn't go round together for the whole day, but part way through the day I passed his car and the lights were on (it had been raining when we set off, but dried out and he hadn't noticed they were still on). No way of contacting him (mobile phones were still walkie talkies), this could be bad, I thought.

Sure enough, when we met again around 4 pm the car wouldn't start. I think we may have tried to jump start it. Then in one of those dreamlike sequences that you think you must have imagined, 4 very attractive female medical students pulled up next to us in an almost identical Mini and asked us if we needed any help. They even had jump leads! That would have been good, except when we put the cars back to back to use them (old Minis had the battery in the boot), Andrew realised the boot key was still in Leeds with his dad...

Anyway, the girls gave us their address and said if we were stuck later, to call and see them...by this time the only way to get into the boot was to get a new key from the local Mini dealership but they were closed till the morning...so we went to find the girls' house. They invited us in, and they let us use their landline to phone our parents...one of them (from Ireland) thought it would be absolutely hilarious if just at the point when I was trying to explain to my mum that I was stuck in Nottingham she would shout 'Oh, Jonathan, put the phone down and come back to bed, will you!'....

Although they were all very attractive, my favourite one was called Honey (I'm not even making this up), I guess if you can be in love based on one viewing only, in the style of Jack Palance in City Slickers, I was that night.  Actually the same thing happened me again recently, at a church fair in October, when I fell in love with someone who looked a little bit like Geena Davis, who was queuing up to buy some soup and sandwiches, and despite having to wade her way through a bewildering queueing system manned by deaf geriatrics, which had left me a sweaty mess just to get a slice of apple pie and a coffee, she managed to exude style and poise during the whole thing, even managing to calm her two children and elderly mother from a distance, who were waiting for the soups...but that's another story.  Actually, it isn't.  That's it, in its entirety.

There is of course a fantasy ending to the story of Andrew and myself and the 4 female medical students in a house for the night, which you can make up for yourself if you want to, but the reality was something else. 

Honey and her friends had some male friends in another house who were away for the night, and we slept there, in an empty house (I don't think anyone fantasises about this sort of ending), we got the key the next morning from the Mini dealership, borrowed jump leads from the Physics Department at the Uni, and got back to Leeds in time for afternoon lessons the next day. By this time, the story had got round of us being stuck overnight in a house with 4 medical students (all our classmates seemed to have chosen a variation on the fantasy ending), but never one to pretend, I sadly had to tell them that nothing happened...probably based on this incident, I ended up choosing to go to Nottingham Uni, but that didn't work out too well either...

Shortly after this trip to Nottingham, aged 17 and a bit tired of most of my friends having girlfriends and me not having one, I formed a group called On the Shelf (a group as in a collection of people, not as in a band). There were three of us (myself, Fraser and Ben). The timing was pretty good because it was just before Valentine's Day, and there was a Valentine's Ball coming up at Leeds Girls' High School, which we planned to go to. This was in the mid 80s, internet dating wasn't even a glimmer of shiny in the long distant future...  It wasn't long after the film 'Desperately Seeking Susan' had been out.  We thought it would be a great idea to turn ourselves into a 3 man advertising hoarding by having the words 'Desperately Seeking Someone' ironed onto 3 matching white shirts and wearing them in formation at the Valentine's Ball. Even that didn't go quite to plan, as two of us got girlfriends before the night anyway, but we still wore the shirts. In fact, although I'd been seeing a girl called Joanne for about a week before the Ball, that night was the first time we held hands or kissed (Ahhh!).

Possibly the thing you want to happen least immediately after you've had your first kiss with a new girlfriend on Valentine's Day aged 17 is to get picked up by coach and sent to Italy on a rugby tour for a week, but that's what happened to me. I left at midnight with the rest of the pumpkins, and for the next week, apart from a couple of payphone calls to Joanne, I had to just wonder what was going to happen next.  The story of the rugby tour, in particular my Rambo impersonation can be found here

What did happen next was me embarking on an intense 9 month relationship, during which I deferred my entry to Uni, and took a year out (Germany 1987 there's more about that trip here).  Before this relationship some of my friends had described me as in incurable romantic.  I thought there was just one special person for everyone and when you met them you'd just know.  Well, lucky old me, at aged 17, I'd met her already, and I was going to live happily ever after, in a rosy tinted future full of furry bunnies, and fluffy clouds (actually I might be confusing it with being dead)...

However, my notions of incurable romanticism were processed through that relationship like clothes through a mangle (ask your parents if you've never seen one).  It turned out that Joanne was the cure.  By November I'd been dumped.  We did meet for a final time in March 1987 (I think we went to see Children of a Lesser God about a man trying to communicate with a deaf and dumb girl which wasn't unlike the rest of the evening) before I left for Germany.  She had the shutters up towards me so completely it was like being out with an ice sculpture for the evening.  I think we had the 'let's stay friends' conversation, but I think what that actually translated as was 'I hope you get shot into space, and never come back'.

I even got the wrong bus home after that evening, and had to walk about 3 miles home in a thunderstorm where the trees were almost snapping in half all around me. At the time I was reading a story called 'The Cyclone' by Hermann Hesse about a young boy, who's about to leave home for the first time. In the story the cyclone had smashed up his home town and changed it forever and he now had to go out on his own 'to become a man, to stand up against life, whose first shadows had grazed me in these days'. I guess I felt the same at the time.

Well, here I am aged 45, I've been grazed by plenty of shadows in the intervening 28 years, I guess I'm still standing up against life, with mixed success. I'm still seeking, although these days I don't go around with felt letters on the back of a shirt, advertising myself to the opposite sex (you can advertise yourself online now, different levels of subscription are available).  

NB.  Just an update on the other two members of On The Shelf.  Fraser lives in Sydney with a beautiful wife and 3 beautiful daughters, Ben lives in Newcastle with a wife and 2 children (I haven't seen the photos, I'm sure they're beautiful too)....somehow the shelf is empty now, except for me....

Here's me sending out the wrong signals...

I'm not sure the tagline 'Desperately Seeking Someone' sends out the right signals anymore, if it ever did...probably something about the word desperately, which was of course, you've guessed it, my word.   

Now, all these memories came flooding back to me, just out of hearing one song on the radio. And I haven't even started on the weekend yet. At this point I'm still in the car on the way up the A1, and it's still Friday night...

To be continued....

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. But sometimes it's still nice to go there

My dad died on Halloween and he was cremated on Bonfire Night.  That's the sort of fact that sounds made up, but in my case it was true.  He died in 1974.  I know it's true because I was helping my mum look through some papers yesterday, and I found his death certificate.  I also found the death certificates for my mum's parents.  They were both born before the First World War, and they both died in the 80s.  These were the only grandparents I knew as my dad's parents both died before I was born.  My grandma couldn't bend her legs much because of arthritis and my grandad developed schizophrenia after jumping out a window.  All the time I knew them they were old.  There's a little bit more info about the two of them here

My first wife died on the 12th day of Christmas 1998.  That was 16 years ago today.  She was 34 when she died.  She lived for 2 years and 2 months after being officially told she was terminally ill.  She used to say that she was living with cancer, not dying from it.  I guess we're all dying from something, even if it's just life itself, so that's probably a good attitude.  She spent 70 nights in hospital between 1995 and 1997 and also 23 nights in Butterwick Hospice before she died, but in between that we used to go out as much as possible.  She never let being ill stop her going anywhere, if it was at all possible to go.  I can remember standing in the queue with her at the Showcase Cinema while she was carrying a cardboard sick bowl, and I think she had pyjamas on under her coat, but we went anyway.  She got a wheelchair towards the end of her life too, and we used to go to the coast a lot I remember.

I wanted to sell her car at one point, but she insisted on keeping it for when she got better.  And her last ditch attempt to stay alive involved a journey by mobile home to see a tele-evangelist in Italy.  Even though she couldn't walk at the time, she insisted on taking her driving shoes and being put on the insurance so she could drive on the way back.  There's more about that trip here

I guess I've thought about that time more recently, because I've been once again hanging out in the cancer ward, this time with my mum, and also prior to moving house, I found a lot of old papers and photographs in the loft, including some stuff I wrote about her illness while it was happening.  Somehow re-reading that made me both sad and happy at the same time.

I've been visiting the past a lot lately.  I've been going back to Leeds a lot to see my mum, and on one journey I went to see the 3 houses I lived in between ages 3 and 22.  On another trip I went to see all my old schools.  The rugby pitch I used to play on now has a cycle path through the middle.

On one visit I also went to see the shop which was both where my brother was born (1972) and my dad died (1974).  The thing that struck me most about those places was that they were quiet, and that the birds were singing when I got there.  It felt to me at the time that the past can't hurt me, because wherever it is, and however good or bad it was, it's gone now.  The present is all that's left.  And that will be gone soon too, so I better make the most of it.

Then yesterday I took my mum out for Sunday dinner, to the pub she used to go to with my dad 40 years ago, and which she hasn't been to since.  Inside it still looks like the 70s and they were playing Abba and Neil Sedaka songs, amongst other things.

She reminisced a bit about going there with dad, who she said was always the life and soul of the party, and about friends she used to go there with, who are now also dead.

And all this thinking about the past, and reflecting on loved ones who are now gone, made me think of a quote I'd read somewhere.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?” ― Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

Well, as far as my wife and my dad and my grandparents go, that time is not yet.  I remember them still, and even though sometimes thinking of them makes me sad, it also makes me happy too.  Happy to have known them, and to remember the time I spent with them.

My dad was called Jack, my grandparents were Alan and Lilian, and my wife was called Beverley.  They died in the 70s, the 80s and the 90s respectively.  A part of each of them still lives on in me, and I'm hoping to keep it that way for a very long time.  I'm not in any rush to join them just yet. 

Going back to Lockerbie - 1 year on

It's almost 25 years since the Lockerbie bombing.  Last year during a trip to Moffat with friends I went to Lockerbie to try and find the memorial to the disaster but I didn't find out in advance where it was, and I didn't dare ask anyone where it was once I got there, in case I was intruding on someone's grief, so I never found it.  The full story of that trip of exactly a year ago can be found here.

This year I went back to Moffat and this time I did my research and so on Saturday I actually found the memorial.  As soon as I got off the bus I felt a bit dumb because the first thing I saw was a sign directing me to it, and I wondered how I never found that last year.

The memorial garden and the small visitors centre are situated about 1 mile from the centre of Lockerbie on the A709 to Dumfries.  It took me about 20 minutes to walk there from the bus stop in the town centre.

The memorial is at the far end of Dryfesdale Cemetery, maybe 5 minutes walk from the main road, and there are a lot of single graves you have to walk past before you get to it.  The thing about regular graves is that they are all individual.  Each person has died an individual death, most of the people are relatively old, most cases they've died of natural causes, and the dates of death are all different.

Somehow that makes it all the more jarring when you arrive at the memorial to the Lockerbie bombing because every plaque or tribute has the same date of death on, ie 21st December 1988, and many of the individual plaques are for people who were 20 years old when they died, which is the same age I was when I saw the coverage of the disaster on TV.

There is a small sign at the entrance to the memorial garden that explains that the 270 victims were from 21 different countries, and the range of ages was from 2 months old to 81 years old, and it's not to minimise the deaths of people of other ages, but I identified most with the people my own age, and it was a genuine surprise to me how many of them there were.

I didn't know before I went that 35 of the people who died were university students from Syracuse University in New York, who were returning home from European placements.  All the birth dates were 1967 or 1968, so they would all have been in the same academic year as me.

In the last 25 years, my life has had its disappointments and mistakes and foul-ups, but seeing the graves of so many of my contemporaries made me feel grateful to have had those years from 1988 up to now.  Because choices and opportunities and the freedom to make decisions about your future as a grown up and maybe mess things up along the way, are luxuries those who die young don't have.

At the rear of the memorial garden is the main memorial wall, and this lists all 270 people who died in the bombing and subsequent crash, in alphabetical order.  What I noticed immediately was how many clusters of names there were with the same surname, which meant that whole family groups had died.  I couldn't imagine the devastation of even losing one person, but what of those who lost entire families?  It doesn't bear thinking about.

I don't cry very often, and I didn't cry at Lockerbie on Saturday, but I was reminded of the last time I did, which was at the Gandhi memorial in Delhi.  I think it was probably partly a release of all the tension of getting to India in the first place, but the inscription on the walls there said 'Violence is Suicide', and somehow just reading that brought me to tears and while I was stood at the Lockerbie memorial it came back to me how true that sentiment is.

After I'd read slowly through all of the 270 names I walked back to the Visitors Centre and went inside.  A cheery Scottish lady greeted me.  I told her that I didn't really know why I was here but that I just wanted to come.  She said it's important to the families to know that people still remember.

She herself was a resident of Lockerbie and I asked her if she remembered the night of the crash and she said she did, and she showed me on a map where she lived, and told me that some of the plane fell in her garden, and she was lucky it didn't fall on the house, and I said 'Lucky would have been if none of it had happened', but then I wished I hadn't said it because, if you experience a terrible thing, maybe it's a comfort to think of how it could have been even worse.

She also said that home is where you should feel safe, and yet that was where those Lockerbie residents were when they were killed.  And I thought about that, I thought about the fact that getting on a plane carries a risk, and how you maybe think about that before you get on one, but you don't expect to die in your living room while you're watching TV or getting ready for Christmas, but that happened to those people in Lockerbie, whose homes were destroyed by falling pieces of aircraft.

She said she'd been working in the visitors centre 8 years and she's met many of the relatives of the dead, and I noticed there were lots of seats where people can just sit and contemplate, and there's a memorial book called 'On Eagle's Wings' which was compiled by the mother of one of the victims, and in it there's a page for every person killed, and a pictures of each of them, and amongst other things, it said that the purpose of the book is to remind people that each of the 270 dead is not just a number, not part of a statistic, but someone who was loved, and who is missed every day by the people left behind, and I read as many as I could, and again I was drawn more to the people my own age, but on every page there was a story of personal tragedy that could break your heart.  On every page a story of unbearable loss.

The bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie was timed to go off over the sea, so that the evidence wouldn't be recovered, but because the plane set off late it exploded over land.  And that randomness was one of the most haunting things about the tragedy for me.  The bombers had specifically targeted Pan Am, most of the people on the plane were American and it was Americans they wanted to kill, but the plane coming down over Lockerbie, that was truly random.

I have no connection whatsoever to anyone who was killed at Lockerbie and yet I felt a very powerful urge to go there.  And when I got there I found it unsettling, and moving, and sad, and incomprehensible, and lots of other things that I can't explain in words.

I don't know how the families of the dead carry the burden of their loss, but a thought occurred to me as I left the visitors centre to walk back into the town.  I wondered if the fact that it happened over a town instead of over the sea, at least there was a focal point to their grief.  It gave them somewhere to come to, and the community there embraced them and cared for them, and it pulled together and helped in any and every way it could, and those bonds survive till this day.  Maybe the fact that their loved ones died in a place, rather than being scattered at sea, is a comfort in some way.  I don't know.  Who knows how anyone really feels in a situation like that?

Before I left, I wrote my name in the visitors' book, but I didn't write any comments, because what can you say that makes any sense of any of it?

I still can't define why I went, I don't know what it means to pay your respects, or what remembrance  is, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I wanted to acknowledge that this terrible thing happened, and I wanted to register my own sadness that these things happen at all, a sadness that people can be so far removed from any kind of empathy, that they will willingly murder and destroy and ruin the lives of others, with no thought of the consequences.

After leaving Lockerbie, I caught the bus back to Moffat, and I spent the evening with friends, talking and laughing and sharing a meal, and I was glad that I had that life to go back to.  I was glad to have a community of my own to be part of, who support me and who love me.  And I felt grateful for my life.  For all of it.  The good parts and the bad.  Because not everyone is so lucky.

This can't be History! It hasn't finished happening yet!

Yesterday I watched the FA Cup Final, between Wigan and Manchester City.

Wigan were the underdogs, but they won, and they deserved to.  They were the better team, and so when they scored in the 90th minute I was pleased for them.  It reminded me of the first FA Cup Final I watched in 1978 when underdogs Ipswich beat the favourites Arsenal.  That final was also similar in that Ipswich played better, had lots of chances, but didn't score till near the end.  When they did score it was completely deserved, justice was done blah blah blah.

My enjoyment of Wigan's last minute winner was however, spoiled somewhat by Clive Tyldesley, who, nanoseconds after the winning goal, set off on a speed-talking sprintathon down Hyperbole Avenue which didn't stop for about 20 minutes, going on and on about what a historic moment it was, and how it was the most historic moment since 1988 when Wimbledon won, and then he pretty much went through all the underdog goalscorers they've ever been in the history of the FA Cup.  He also pointed out that goalscorer Ben Watson looks like Prince Harry, and then tried his best to get a load of Royal references in there too.  I would have switched the telly off, or kicked it in, but I wanted to see Wigan celebrate their success.  The only time good ol' Clive stopped talking was to allow the equally naff Andy Townsend to get a few equally nonsensical words in, about finding the last piece of the jigsaw and other unrelated tosh.

please see previous rant about over-excited commentators

Later in the evening, I found a documentary on ITV about Aberdeen winning the European Cup Winners Cup in 1983, when Alex Ferguson was the manager, and they beat Real Madrid in the final in Gothenburg.  The programme itself was absolutely excellent, but a special treat was the highlights of the Final, which was commentated on by Brian Moore and Ian St John.  Tyldesley and Townsend they are most definitely not!  They didn't go on about history in the making and all that, they just talked about the actual game they were commentating on, and what was happening in it.  And sometimes, when there was nothing that needed saying, because it was all up there on the screen, they didn't do any talking at all.  They just sat there quietly.  

if you want to see what I mean, follow this link

It's fair to say that when I was 15 and I watched Aberdeen win the Cup Winners Cup I was aware of what a good team they were, but I probably didn't fully appreciate the quality of the two guys in the commentary box.

Brian Moore died in 2001.  Something I didn't know about him was that he was a lifelong Gillingham fan and the club's fanzine was called 'Brian Moore's Head looks like London Planetarium', which in turn is named after a line in the Half Man Half Biscuit Song 'Dickie Davies' Eyes'.

here's the video. I think the guy smashing his flat up at the end might have just finished watching Tyldesley

I pinched this little excerpt from the fanzine's website:

The recent loss of Brian Moore was felt right across the British game. He was an icon, and not just because of the shape of his head. For many of us during our formative years he represented the face of football on ITV – fronting The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon. His commentaries were knowledgeable and passionate. His love for the game was obvious for all to see (and hear).

He was from an era where football was less about money and greed and more about the sheer childish joy of watching the game. His style was unique and his reading of the game on a par with any of his peers. He came across as a true gentleman without the arrogance or ego of many within the game.

There are millions of reasons why you could argue that modern day football isn't what it used to be.  That's maybe why football commentators over-excitedly seize on any drama whatsoever and shout it from the rooftops.

I miss lots of things about the football I remember from my youth.  And since yesterday, I miss Brian Moore too.

Foals and Chimps - a tour of Edinburgh

I've been to Edinburgh before, in 2005, but I was in no state to enjoy it by the time I arrived.  I'd spent the week cycling there from Newcastle with Ruth, and after spending 5 hours doing laps of Edinburgh looking for our accommodation we weren't in much of a mood for being tourists.  I did go for a look at the castle after Ruth was passed out in bed but it was full of seats for the tattoo or something, so I couldn't get in.

Or even any good art?

The story of the 2005 episode can be found here

A scene of past misery

I've had this week off work, and I've planned and re-planned how I was going to spend it to within an inch of its life, then at the last minute, Ruth and I decided that the umbrella heading of 'getting away from it all' included getting away from each other for a while, and taking a break from our ongoing attempt to retain our title as undisputed 'World Bickering Champions of the World'.

The Royal Mile - Edinburgh

She went off to a cottage in Cumbria on Sunday which left me with a decision to make, and I am terrible at making decisions.  I was thinking I might go back to the West Coast of Scotland, to visit some bits I've previously missed, maybe Jura and Colonsay, but there's some big walking festival on in that area this week.  Seeing the pictures on the internet of last year's event, wizened but fit geriatrics wearing rucksacks the size of houses and walking boots and grinning from ear to ear as they pour out of boats onto the normally sparsely populated islands put me right off.  Also, when I saw the forecast it looked like I'd probably be blown home again anyway.  I took it as a warning that Alex Salmond's personal wind turbine had been blown over in high winds.  I figured the east of Scotland would be less windy, at least for the first couple of days, so I decided to go back and have another go at Edinburgh, 8 years after my first aborted attempt.

I almost booked into the same B&B as last time, miles from the centre of town but then I got an email from Travelodge advertising cheap rooms right bang in the centre of Edinburgh.  That'll do for me, I thought.

My hotel room - between Jenners and Thunderbird 3

I could have gone to Edinburgh on Monday, but I went to York instead, to have a practice run at being in a city on my own.  I did really well.  I bought some new shoes (I'd got yellow paint on my other ones taking stuff to the tip) and I also bought some Foals cds from HMV to listen to while I was away (Holy Fire and Antidote).  I did especially well with the shoes because I could have bougtht some for £50 which didn't fit as well, but for once I paid extra and got the £70 ones.  I didn't even get a sweat on, I just paid for them and left.  In fact, I kept them on, and put the ones with paint on in the Clarks carrier.  I sat down outside Fenwicks for a bit, casually texted Mr Fenwick's grand-daughter who I happen to be a close personal friend of, looked at my shoes, and thought how much better I looked in them.

This is York, not Edinburgh

It was only when I got back from York that I realised Ruth had taken the laptop away with her, the very thing I was going to use to transfer the cds to my phone to listen to while I was away.  The bloody Linux computer I was given, which is excellent in many ways, can't seem to read the phone, and it makes the music files absolutely massive so you can only get about 3 songs on, so that was a no-go.

Can you help me please?  Is this the way to the zoo?

I was so determined to listen to Foals while I was away, that on Monday evening I crawled up into the loft and reassembled an old PC from discarded bits and pieces, to enable the cds to get copied.  Luckily I'd been up in the loft for hours in the last few days throwing stuff out, so I knew where to find the monitor, keyboard, mouse and 3 cables required to effect the copying of the cds.  It was my brother who got me into Foals btw.  I'd never heard of them before then.

Edinburgh Castle - It's on top of a volcano (almost everyone knows that)

As well as her laptop Ruth had also taken the car to Cumbria, so I had to improvise.  I got a Sikh to give me a lift to the train station.  He charged me though (it was a taxi).  I booked a first class ticket from Darlington, it's not much more expensive on certain trains and they give you free coffee and sandwiches, so you effectively get your money back.

Princes Street Gardens - Spring is finally here!

I sat next to a beautiful young girl / woman on the train with dark hair, pink painted fingernails, a yellow hoodie and a massive red rucksack.  I couldn't make out the writing on the back of her hoodie, but I imagined she was part of a rowing team, or a student or something.  I thought about talking to her, but I didn't want to be the annoying guy on the train who talks to you, so I didn't bother.  Besides, she'd bought a first class ticket, so I thought she might want to be left alone with her laptop and her nine other electronic gadgets.  It was probably as well I kept my distance, otherwise I could have microwaved my own head, just being near all the chargers.

Don't look directly at the sun - you could die!

I like Travelodges.  They may be no frills, but they're usually right in town centres, and it's not like B&B where the owners want to know your life story and they want to interview you about the state of the NHS, and where they don't want you to bash the antiques or damage the hand carved wallpaper on your way up to the room with the fucking expensive curtains that are on strings so you don't get hand prints on them, and the bath has got a roll top which is just the most stupid idea ever because where do you put your shampoo?  Actually that was just once, but you get the idea.

Travelodges don't give a shit who you are.  You pay them up front, you turn up, they give you a keycard, they don't ask you a thing.  They give you a room with absolutely no sensory stimulation in it that could have been designed by the Soviets, and they forget about you.  And this week, that was exactly what I needed.  Edinburgh is stimulating enough, without having art in your bedroom.

This particular Travelodge was about 10 feet from the epicentre of Edinburgh.  It was down a back alley in between some bins, but I didn't care.  It was close enough to the centre I could nip back to the toilet while I was out sight seeing if I felt like it.

Princes Street Travelodge

Before I even checked in, I went to the Tourist Information Centre.  Where's the cinema and where's the zoo, I asked?  One was a 10 minute walk away, the other was a bus ride away.  Don't you care about museums? they asked, they're even nearer.  I'll have a look at them when I've been to the zoo, I said.

After I'd checked in to the least stimulating hotel room on the planet (something about it reminded me of Kafka, ie my prison cell, my fortress), I went for a walk in the wind.  The hotel had everything you need from a hotel.  A bed, a hot shower, a kettle and some cups and some tea and coffee.  It also had a TV but I never even switched it on.  I don't go on holiday to watch TV!

The excellent view from my hotel room

I stood around outside the Scottish National Gallery for a bit, trying to get a sense of the scale of the place, and then I offered to take a picture of an Argentinian.  She was trying to do it herself with the timer but her camera kept blowing away.  In exchange she took one for me.  I also took a picture of some Korean guy but he was like David Bailey, he took all the spontaneity out of it by trying to spend hours setting the shot up, and then he wasn't happy I hadn't got his legs in, so I just wandered off and left him to it.  Eventually he roped the Argentinian in to help. It was a good job I met the Korean before seeing Olympus Has Fallen, otherwise I might just have blown his head off with a bazooka.

Here's a picture of me taken by an Argentinian

I felt a bit overwhelmed at first by Edinburgh.  I always feel like that in big places, like cities and mountains.  Also, as well as the usual city noise, there were about 50 million workmen bashing the hell out of the city centre putting tramlines in.  I hadn't eaten on the train, even though free crisps had been available, so I wandered into a shopping centre and bought a Greggs meal deal for £3, followed by a Millie's cookie.  Both the young girls who served me told me to 'Have a nice day'.  Give me a chance, I've only just got here, I didn't say.

I was glad to be out of the noise and the wind and the sun (I remembered everything but sunglasses).  I sat and ate my late lunch between the Early Learning Centre and Dorothy Perkins.  There wasn't much overlap between the two sets of customers.  I guess if the young mums populating ELC ever did shop at Dorothy Perkins they had now abandoned this in favour of buying go-karts and educational drumkits for their offspring.

This could be the title of my autobiography - or anyone else's

I like people watching.  I sat there for ages, feeling relaxed and feeling sorry for some kid who was traipsing along behind his Channel 5 documentary size parents, munching his way through a family size tub of muffins.  His life's fucked already, I remember thinking, it was only later in the week I realised he was probably killing chimps as well with those muffins.

Around 5.30 pm I went back to Kafka's study for a bit, had a shower and a shave, listened to some Foals  and then went to the cinema.  I passed a lot of beggars on the streets.  Almost all of them had a black dog.  I used to have a black dog, who I loved.  I'm glad I didn't have to live outside with him.

My dog died before I got a digital camera, which I regret

I never know what to do with beggars.  Are they for real?  In Edinburgh a lot of them had signs which said things like '100% genuine beggar' and 'I really am homeless'.  These affected me a bit like signs in the supermarket which say things like 'Our beef isn't full of horses'.  It just added to my mistrust.  This may be a poor statement on my humanity, but there you go.  Also, I got pretty good at blanking beggars in India, even the ones that used to hold hands with me and rub my leg.  I did eventually give a small amount of money to one beggar in particular, and I selected him partly because he didn't even have a dog (maybe he's saving up for one)  I'm not even capable of looking after a dog properly, so it seems a bit irresponsible to have one if you haven't got a home.

At the cinema I saw Oblivion with Tom Cruise.  Although the Moon and most of the Earth had been destroyed in a post-apocalyptic future, they had really nice white clothes and shiny apartments in the sky and Looper it was not.

Anyway, I thought it was excellent.  Then I ignored some more beggars with dogs and went to bed, although I had a Yorkie first from the vending machine in the Travelodge lobby.

Vue Cinema Edinburgh - now with extra Giraffe

I woke up at 6 am on Wednesday feeling really hungry.  By 7 I was showered and in McDonald's eating a sausage McMuffin, which came free with a greasy hash brown (actually I think it was the other way round).  I also ordered coffee and orange juice.  The whole meal only cost about £4.  McDonalds was so close to the hotel I could have ordered it out of the window.  I'd intended to go to the zoo first thing, but I didn't want to get there before they opened so I wandered up the castle for a look around, took some panoramic photos in the rain and then I started meandering down the Royal Mile.

Edinburgh Castle Car Park in the rain

By the time I got to the Starbucks halfway down my new shoes were wet and so were my jeans.  It was 8 o'clock in the morning.  Things weren't going well.  I went in to Starbucks, ordered a massive bucket of coffee, and went upstairs to look out of the window and dry out.  And it was great.  I really started to relax.  I had a book to read, about a vicar working in a supermarket, a fantastic view out the window, and coffee.  Loads of wet cyclists with wet kids on the back in hi-vis ponchos kept bouncing past on the cobbles and I was safely indoors.  As I sat there relaxing I remembered the stress of arriving in Edinburgh by bike 8 years earlier and having my fillings loosened on those very cobbles, and being completely lost.

Starbucks in Edinburgh - they sell coffee in buckets

By 10 am it had almost stopped raining so feeling dried out and recharged I went off to get the bus to the zoo.  I stopped at a couple of museums on the way, but that didn't hold my attention for long because all I could find were pictures in gold frames of 300 year old people in wigs, who all seemed to have exactly the same face.

I caught the bus to the zoo, which cost me £3.50 for a return.  The young blonde female bus driver didn't remind me at all of bus drivers at home.  She even shouted me helpfully when it was my stop, even though there was a massive sign out the window that said 'Zoo'.

This was the toilet at the zoo

By the time I got to the zoo, it was nearly 12 and raining heavily again.  I paid my 16 quid and went in. The girls on the desk were in a bit of a flap about not being able to show me the Giant Pandas.  I'm not bothered I said, I didn't even know you had any.  For the first half an hour in the zoo all I could find was a wet dog hiding so I went for a sit down and a sandwich, in the monkey cafe or some such place.  It was pretty expensive, but a sticker on the sandwich assured me it had been made on the premises.

Lunch at the zoo - I chose a table with a plant on it

It was actually quite nice, and the young girl who served me was still brimming over with youthful enthusiasm and keenness.  As I sat and watched the rain bouncing off passing schoolkids I wondered whether I'd wasted my time and money coming here.  Then two wet women with two small wet children came in and sat at the next table.  A boy and a girl.  The little boy was called Walter.  They were so enthusiastic about what they'd seen and they couldn't wait to tell daddy, and their unbounded joy totally blasted me out of my cynicism, so I thought I'd go and have a proper look.  I saw them again later, and they were doing some more marvelling at stuff, talking about Edinburgh and all its majesty.  A fragment of a half man half biscuit lyric came to me: 'see how we yawn, at your bile and your scorn, it's a beautiful day, Peace on Earth has been played, make a noise with your toys, and ignore the killjoys, 'cos it's cliched to be cynical at Christmas.  It wasn't Christmas, but you get the idea.

Some penguins, doing what penguins do

I looked at some penguins for a bit, and then I watched some lions sleeping, until the big male lion woke up and if he was wanting a staring competition he didn't get one because the glass between us didn't look anywhere near thick enough for my liking, so I pretty much ran off.

The lion that stared at me

Most of the animals were behind glass, which made the photographs come out quite badly, but the zebras were just behind a fence, as they were considered low risk, so I got a few pictures of them which are better than the rest.

Zebras - not considered to be overly dangerous

I liked the monkeys best.  Probably because they're most like me.  98% to be exact.  It was in the chimp house that I found out that the chimp's habitat is being destroyed to make biscuits and toothpaste, and I felt bad about it, even though I'm not the one cutting the trees down but I do sometimes eat cheap biscuits.  I'd rather have the chimps.

Chimps and Veg

My enjoyment of the chimps was a little bit affected by a young girl talking into a dictaphone (or whatever the modern equivalent is).  She was actually commentating on the chimps.  'It's 2.05 pm, Eddie is urinating, Stella is eating some fennel, Archie is throwing a banana, 2.06 pm Archie is eating some broccoli, now Stella is urinating'.  That sort of thing.  Not sure if she was a zoo employee, or just a keen amateur, but I wished she'd go away.  Which reminds me of a joke (it's not really a joke).  Q. What's the difference between a chimp and a human?  A. When a chimp looks in the mirror he knows he's looking at a monkey.  The joke that isn't a joke works just as well if instead of the word human you substitute the word commentator.

Here's me playing Spot the Monkey

After the chimps I drank my orange juice from McDonalds which I'd saved for later ie now and I went back into town.  I had some Harry Ramsdens fish and chips served to me by a dour female Eastern European, who pointed out as if it was a novelty that I could have them with salt and vinegar if I wanted.  I was having them with salt and vinegar 40 years ago while your parents were still street urchins in Vilnius I totally didn't say, and then I went to the cinema again.  This time I wasn't so lucky with my film choice.  The film I went to see on Day 2 was Carry on up the Whitehouse, also known as Olympus has Fallen.  It absolutely had to be a spoof, except no-one had told the stellar cast and they were all playing it dead straight.

It was absolute carnage.  It was like the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, but for the whole film.  It was like a much bloodier version of Die Hard, or Air Force One.  People weren't just getting shot, they were getting bazooka'd in the face and having their heads cut off with helicopter blades, and having bombs put down their trousers.  It was horrible.  The two Scottish girls next to me were gasping and nearly passing out with it all, as was I.

Quick, let's blow some shit up

Amongst the most ridiculous parts were the fact that Gerard Butler had been fired from his job 18 months ago, but he still knew all the access codes for everything in the White House. and the combination for the President's private safe.  But the most stupid part was at the end.  Not since Roger Moore dressed as a clown in Octopussy have I seen such a clumsily handled defusing an atomic bomb scene.  (I wrote about that one here)

Poor old Gerard Butler (who is almost as old as me) only had a minute left to save the Earth but to do it he had to input a code that was about 77 characters long, including hashtag and back slash and all sorts of stuff, both in upper and lower cases.  You could see him thinking 'Oh, for fuck's sake, I've just killed 47,000 terrorists, now America's going to be completely destroyed because of my lack of keyboard skills'.  After the film I had another Yorkie, went to bed, and fell asleep listening to Foals.

View from Calton Hill

The next morning (Thursday) I was up at 6 am again, paid for an extra night in the Travelodge because I was liking being in Edinburgh so much, showered and was in McDonalds again for 7.  Same breakfast.  Greasy hash brown, sausage mcmuffin, coffee and orange juice for later.  I went for a walk up Calton Hill, it was still a bit windy, but sunny too, and with a bit of rainbow thrown in.  The views were amazing, I took about a million photos including some photos which I took outside the American Consulate without being shot at.

Outside the American Consulate

Rainbow! One of the advantages of getting up early

Part of the reason for staying another day was that I wanted to go to the Museum of Modern Art on a free bus to see Death to Death and Some Mothers Do Ave Em or some such exhibition about the human body.  On the whole I prefer modern art, to paintings of George the First, but not this time.

Whatever you do, don't get the free bus

The first free bus was at 11, so like Wednesday I spent another couple of hours in Starbucks on the Royal Mile and did pretty much the same as the day before.  Reading, looking out the window, relaxing and drinking coffee.  A line I came across in the book I was reading was this: Hurry takes us out of the present, and makes monsters of us all.  I thought back on my past holidays and how often I'm working to a schedule, and trying to get somewhere, and how that turns me into a monster.  A monster with a timetable.  here's an example from last year

So the question I've been asking myself this week is this:  Should I even be on holidays with a timetable?  Often with holidays the times I look back on most fondly are those where I'd completely stopped and wasn't trying to get anywhere.  Mevagissey Harbour wall reading Murakami, Charlestown harbour having a coffee with Ruth and Hudson, Craster out the back of the pub eating crab sandwiches and looking at Dunstanburgh Castle, having a big fat burger at Felixkirk on Royal Wedding Day.  There's a joy that comes from movement, and from arriving in and passing through places, especially on a bike, but there are also times when what's most required is to just to sit and do nothing.  To look out of windows and to not have an agenda and not to have anywhere to go.  And this week I needed that more than the moving around stuff.

Nice building, shame about the art

I spent so long looking out of windows I missed the 11 am free bus to the Modern Art, and with an extra hour to spare I went to the National Portrait Gallery instead.  Inside there was the House of Annie Lennox, which was like the Seventh Circle of Hell, and then I saw the best Art I saw all week, although it was photography, so I'm not sure if that counts as art.  It was lots of black and white photos from the thirties by Edith Tudor Hart.  Even if she was a Russian spy, I definitely recommend it.  Nobody's perfect.  Seeing all the grim thirties portraits brought home to me how lucky I am.  In terms of times and places to be born, I pretty much hit the jackpot.

Here's me being a kid in the 80s

I was born at the end of the 60s in England, just before the moon landing.  I grew up in the 70s when there wasn't much else to do but run around playing football, go to the library a lot and watch westerns and Harold Lloyd, so I never got massively overweight as a kid.  I learned to develop an attention span for boring things, by not having a lot of different things going on at once.  Although we've had a few small wars, I've never had to go and fight the Nazis or any other fascist dictators.  I've always had enough to eat, and technology only really took off when I was getting on a bit, so it never dominated my childhood.  Rather helpfully, I grew up at a time when you didn't need a laptop and an i-Phone to get through a two hour train journey.  Just being on a train was exciting enough.  Whatever is outside a train window it's got to be better than watching re-runs of Bonanza, Skippy and Champion the Wonder Horse.

One of Annie Lennox's suits - Welcome to a World of Pain

Anyway, back to Edinburgh and my desire to see Modern Art.  I did manage to catch the second free bus of the day, but I wished I hadn't.  The inside of the bus was only big enough for action men and barbie dolls.  Not only were my legs crushed as soon as I tried to sit but the bus was hot and full of other crushed people.  Also, Jeremy Vine was on the radio.  If Annie Lennox was hell, this was a close second.  The outside of the Modern Art museum was pretty cool, but the art inside was absolute crap.  It was all drawings of penises and old lilos and sculptures made out of piss and breasts made out of wood hanging from the ceiling and I wished I hadn't bothered.

Here's me glad to not be on a bus anymore

Instead of waiting for the free crush-a-bus, I walked back into the city and went to see yet another movie, this time Trance by Danny Boyle.  No bloody idea what was going on in that one, but I got to see Rosario Dawson naked, including her front bottom, so it wasn't all bad.

Walking back into town - better than the bus

My cinema visits had been getting earlier, in fact my whole week of Groundhog Days were starting earlier and earlier.  Tuesday I was at the 8 o'clock cinema showing, Wednesday it was 6, by Thursday I was getting in at 4.  I had kept forgetting to have lunch so before Trance I went and had a three course meal at Ben and Jerry's (or it could have been Frankie and Benny's) before the film.

I was so knackered from the early mornings and all the walking that I went to bed at 8 pm on Thursday.   I walked so much every day the actual soles of my feet were sore every night.  But it was a good kind of sore.

What? - No caption?

Since I'd arrived on Tuesday, when I'd felt a bit overawed by the size and the noise of Edinburgh, I felt by Thursday that I'd really started to relax into it and feel at home.  I'm no good at following maps and guide books on paper, I prefer to wander round first and build a mental map and then compare it to the paper one.  The more I started to understand the layout of the city, the more I started to like it.  Being able to mentally place the Castle and the Royal Mile and Calton Hill and the cinema and the museums and all the other places I'd been in relation to my base at Princes Street, and to each other, I started to feel like I belonged.  I've had similar experiences in other cities, Bath, Wells, London, Leeds, Duisburg, Hannover, Essen for example.  Rather than finding a place on the map and deciding to go there, I like to do the going part first.

Friday morning I was up even earlier.  I had trouble sleeping past 5 am.  Again I went to McDonalds and had the same easy breakfast, although I was enjoying it less each day.  Also, the old guy sitting near me who I'd seen two days before with his mass of grey hair held together with some sort of mesh was freaking me out.  He might have even been a woman, I wasn't sure.  I don't think he'd bought any food, but he'd stocked up on the free miniature milk cartons and he was drinking them like jelly shots.

Castle

The good thing about the breakfast was that it kept my hunger at bay, and kept me fuelled up for more exploring.  I went back up to the Castle and in contrast to Wednesday it was an absolutely beautiful sunny morning up there.  I had another go at taking the panoramic pictures and these ones looked a lot better because you could see the distant hills a lot better.

Now that's why I call a Panorama

This time I walked the whole of the Royal Mile, and ended up at the Scottish Parliament building at the bottom of the hill, where I saw a duck and sat down and listened to some more Foals.

The Scottish Parliament

Here's a duck I found

As I sat in the sun feeling relaxed, I remembered being here 8 years earlier, tired and lost at the foot of Arthur's Seat in dire need of a map, without a clue how to find my B&B.  It felt better, being back again, knowing where I was this time, and with no particular place to go.

My second home in Edinburgh

I walked halfway back up the Mile, and for the third morning in a row ordered a big bucket of coffee from my favourite Baristas at Starbucks.  It was later in the day than my other two visits and some people in suits were in there having business meetings, either in person or on the phone, talking about emails and spreadsheets and network cables, and saying things like 'to all intents and purposes' and 'taking the process forward' and 'blue sky thinking'.  The only blue sky thinking I was doing was thinking I'd like to go outside and see some more blue sky.

Here it is

Being alone in a city for a few days, I did feel lonely at times and I noticed a lot of other people spending time alone.  I wondered if any of them were lonely too.  But it's so hard to tell, because these days a lot of people who are spending time alone are so absolutely laden down with gadgets that it's impossible to tell if they even feel alone, never mind lonely.  If you're getting constantly battered with status updates from everybody you've ever known, are you ever technically even on your own?

My phone is so old I could only do one half of the social networking thing on it.  I could send messages out, and sometimes I did that just to keep me from bursting with sensory overload, but my feedback loop was missing in that I couldn't see what responses I was getting, if any.

I went to the Tourist Information Centre a couple of times to use their internet, but this was only to find stuff out and to book another First Class ticket home, I didn't really have enough time to talk to anyone. I wonder if it's a sign of the times that an internet shop by the escalator in Waverley station has shut down.  With everyone and their dog now using smartphones, they probably went out of business.

Princes Street Gardens in the sun

It's like a park, but it's right by the shops

Like York, Edinburgh still has a HMV, and as it's a big one, so I thought I might be able to pick up a third Foals album to listen to after I got home, and I managed this successfully.  The third one is called Total Life Forever and I'm listening to it now.  Later I'm going to climb into the loft to transfer it onto my phone.

Although Edinburgh had really grown on me, by Friday lunchtime I was glad to be leaving.  It was filling up massively with weekend tourists and I'd enjoyed it so much during the week, when it was relatively quiet, I didn't want to have my memories ruined in the crush.  I'd already been crushed once this week.

Goodbye Thunderbird 3

The train home was the best First Class I've ever been in.  I had a seat which was both an aisle and a window seat and as well as free coffee, I also took some free crisps this time.  I sat opposite a young geeky looking man who was studying an AAT textbook.  He looked at me when he sat down with a look which seemed to say 'I've seen you but I don't really want to talk to you'.  I felt pretty much the same, so I wasn't offended.

Darlington is only 2 hours away from Edinburgh on the train, but arriving back there, it seemed so much smaller, duller and less exciting than Edinburgh, and although I felt like I got out at just the right time, I still miss it.

I got the train back to Thornaby, where I had to mix with the second class masses again (less laptops) and then I got another taxi home.  Not a Sikh this time though.

I got home and in my absence a team of cleaners had been in and cleaned my house from top to bottom (this wasn't entirely unexpected as it had been pre-arranged), and there was a £20 voucher waiting for me, for winning Team of the Month at work.  It's a Cineworld voucher.  Both these are exactly the kind of surprises you want when you get home from holiday.  So much better than a mouldy fridge.

It probably sounds as though it should have been, but this holiday was not in any way sponsored or endorsed by Starbucks, McDonalds, Travelodge, Millie's Cookies, Greggs, Vue Cinemas, Cross Country Trains, Frankie and Benny's, Edinburgh Zoo, HMV or any other big multinational companies.  Maybe it was just because I was in an unfamiliar place, that I chose to fall back on things where I knew exactly what I was getting.  I'm not sure.  What I did find though is what I already knew really, which is that all those places are only as good as the people who serve you when you go in, and everywhere I went I got service with a smile and people wished for me to have a nice day.  And I did.  I had a nice day every day, and I came away thinking of Edinburgh not so much as a holiday destination, but more of a home from home.