Back in the UK. Thirty seven days, seven countries, twenty five stops, almost four and a half thousand miles (the little jeep is now over 145,000 miles old and going strong, yeay!), fourteen gigs. Below is the final route that I covered:
Thankyou to:
Renia, Micha, Michaela, Sandera at Intersoup, Ewa, Kathi and Wojtek, Matze and the Leipzig WG, Tonelli's Circus, Hans, Ulla and all at Wallhalben, George, Marco, Ornella, Mickey, Patricia and all in Giove and Bomarzo, Lucia, Hayley and Sheju, Marco at Straripa, Cesare, Alberto and Vale, the man at the campsite in Cannes, Leo and family in Carnoux, Helen and Faz, The Bonds, Matt Weinreb, avmp32, Jane, Rose and Xander, Liz, Rodney, all at Palluau and everyone who came to a performance.Special thanks to Susannah for planning help, co-driving, co-singing, co-swimming, co-eating, long talks, insect bite cream, and so much more.
This trip has been fuelled and aided by:
Ice cream, alchohol of many kinds (several not legal), huge amounts of amazing food, satnav, mobile phones, wifi, German automated toilets, my aged laptop, my tiny red jeep (keys now on the shelf for ecological reasons), chemical advances in insect bite treatment, digital cameras, digital pianos and stage equipment (even if it failed at times), pop up tents, LED torches, self inflating ground mats...I have techno joy, as a traveller in the modern age, I embrace progress.
Here's a few things that I learned along the way
The generosity, kindness and openness of people you have never met before can blow you away.
If you say you are singing for your supper, the supper will be REALLY good.
If you want to do something, you can.
Some insects can bite you through your clothes.
ALWAYS tell the French that you are Irish, not English (ask me for details)
Use public transport or bike or walk or rideshare - there are too many cars
An eighty-one year old can be as young and energetic as a teenager
If you have a talent for something, you should do it, otherwise what's the point of being able to? This is from the inimitable and sparkling Rose.
Reading your horoscope in a different language is funny.
Tree frogs are really pretty good at jumping
It is possible, in life, to be confused and hopeful and nostalgicand optimistic and happy and introspective and determined and feckless all at once, without any of it being contradictory.
Always buy the strongest insect repellant
Listen to the stories you tell about yourself to new people. It might teach you a lot about yourself.
Camping is great fun but not camping is bloody amazing
When you are a stranger, and just passing through, it's amazing how much people will tell you about the most intimate details of their lives (I haven't written any of the juicy stuff)
Some people say they like animals more than people. Now, I really like animals but I have discovered that I love, love, love, people, with a heart splitting joy (and I just don't care how this sounds - join my cult, why not). Interactions, emotions, stories, hospitality. Humans. You. Are. Great.
In my travels I met a disco dancing, hip-hop loving, orthodontic supplier, a bee farming, guitar playing artist, a ballet dancing financial philosopher, an accordion playing, wild-hog feeding, interesting herb smoking, hugely vivacious eighty one year old Frenchman, a mural painting, ex-arms dealer's pilot, a celebrity gardener, an ex bouncer, mechanic and pop-Larkin style barterer, a chemist on the brink of a life changing, life-saving discovery, a romantic Italian blues guitarist with a dry sense of humour, I met heartbroken people and happy people and musical people and actors and artists and scientists and so many different sorts of people and they were all, without exception, brilliant.
When I was wandering around the Isle of Re, I thought a lot about why I was doing this journey and writing, what I want to create out of it. I know that I wanted to come and tell stories and hear stories as I think they are an important part of who we are but I tried to pin down why. The following ramble is my unedited stream of consciousness from a beach in France. The thoughts are rather unformed but I wanted to set something down in writing, to show where my mind has been going in this journey, so that when I create something from it, the starting point will be there.......
.........I think it has to do with time and with language. Travel and places are important but we don't use space as a marker of life, time is our marker. I hope I'll always remember my journey this summer, but as part of my life it has a point in time rather than in space. The spaces I went to, I went to in a specific time. Rocks stay still(ish) but we move through time and time, in a different way than space, changes us. We change spaces, time changes us...
So - nostalgia is important, stories are nostalgia or certainly evolved partially from it. Things that occur, people and places and situations, become stories to hand down through time. To help us understand ourselves or others. Maybe to stop bad things happening? Like in Surinam, the older people left or died and no-one was around to tell the stories so now the president in power is the man that erased a generation.
Why is travel so important then, if time is the thing? Migration, holidays, holy days, pilgrimages, summer working of peasants long ago, the European tour of the gentry, backpackers. Going to new places makes parts of time stand out and enables us to stand back from the ongoing story of our life and to tell new stories about who we are. Making time special with existing relationships or meeting new people. New meetings are always an exchange of stories and often these stories can swing from pendulums of crossed knowledge .Every time you meet new people, the stories you tell, whether they are of travel or music or heartbreak or just that really amusing anecdote about the bucket and a broken rib, reinforce or redirect or shape who you feel yourself to be, just a little bit. And who you feel yourself to be is really, pretty much who you are - the language you use, the people you choose to share stories with, the way you organise your personal timeline...Maybe the Buddhists wouldn't see it like that, although they tell stories too. They say a lot about living in the now, but the language of this itself has a history, a timeline. Maybe in the enlightenment there are no stories, no language, no time lines, no history - but wouldn't that just be a bit weird? (god bless the buddhists).....
 |
| Photo courtesy of Matthew Weinreb |
________________________________________
Where does music come in? I think because music is glue. Ornella told me in Giove that I changed the atmosphere of a room (thankyou). I had the experience yesterday of music for me healing a rift. Music can give a film a heart. Music, from it's earliest incarnation, has carried stories. So in my rambling sillysophical way, I want to write something where I sing stories and tell a story of stories, a tale of who I am and where I am in time, and how thirty seven days of terror and love (thanks to Cesare for this phrase) influenced this. Doing it because I can and therefore I should (thankyou Rose). Doing it because sharing stories, handing them through time, is what makes people people.
No comments:
Post a Comment