This is where you stick random tidbits of information about yourself.
Delphi
Monday, March 31, 2003
Budapest. I am wet. Saturated. Canāt get any wetter, so I relax into the rain like you relax into the sea. No resistance. I feel better. More calm, almost surreal. Place and time is irrelevant. I squat on the pillion and shoot through space with nothing to do but to be in the weather and the moment. And to think.
I could've kissed Kata. She'd introduced me to Mike and when he heard I`d lost my return flight ticket, heād offered me a lift. "But it'll be a bit of a race. Can't leave 'til Thursday night and the ferry is Saturday night·. By the way, you do know I'm on a `bike don't you?" I swallowed. Iād only ever been on a mo`bike once before, when I was fourteen, my uncle's 250cc "Beeza". I remember how weād been cruising at about 60 mph when we hit the dog. I remember the dreamy peaceful feeling as I sailed through the air before the pain when I hit the road, Jack, and slid on gravel for about a hundred yards. The dog just ran off barking mad. " Just lean into the bend when we make a turn and you won't fall off. Here's my spare helmet. Put your gloves on and any spare clothes, you'll need them. This is a Yamaha 1200 and we'll be travelling in excess of 100 mph when we can, but you'll get used to it."
The night explodes in a rainstorm. I wince as I cock my leg over the Yammy, it`s as big as a horse with a beam as broad as a barge. I almost split in two. As long as I keep my backbone straight, I can bend my knees. If I don't, my legs stick out like oars. Iām five foot four. The engine's thunder drowns any further instructions so stiffly we turn to our friend Kata. She smiles sadly, and opens her arms for one big hug then suddenly we are gone. We race from Hungaria into the future and the rain.
I think of Kata and Tomas and how theyād let me stay, an incomplete stranger. Kataās a typical mother. She made me one of her family. Then I think of last Wednesday night and how their daughter, little Judit, swathed in a towel had marched into my room carrying a big storybook. She stood in the puddle of bath water that had drained around her feet whilst she read me a bedtime story. I listened enraptured as she earnestly enacted the tale: the furrowed brow, the raised eyebrows, and the wagging finger. I smiled at her long golden eyelashes and the tiny beads of water left glistening as she blinked. At the end of the story she gently closed the book, leaned toward me, softly kissed my cheek and whispered "Yo eshakat. Goodnight." before padding out of the room. I closed my eyes and settled back. It was hard to believe I hadn't understood a single word.
Kata was my guardian angel and now here she was, optimistically showing me where she hides the house key, "in case I'm out when you come back." For the rest of my life Iāll remember that it's behind the door of the shed in the front garden, on the left, on a hook.
Now we drive in shadows. The cursory wave from the Bratislava border guards is like the starter flag at Donnington and the race is on through darkest Austria. Vienna in the wet is almost as romantic as Spaghetti Junction but without the icicles. Nevertheless we resist the temptation to dally and press on to dawn over the Saltzak at Saltzberg. The rain persists. Racing droplets course upward on my visor. My knees are freezing and I swear Iāll never sniff at bikers in all their padded glory ever again. Deeper now into Germany and on to Munich and Augsberg until we take a wrong road and realise we need sleep. There is a campsite at Karlsruhe and its commandant takes pity, suggesting we ignore our tent and sleep in the games room. He puts the heating on so we can dry out our wet clothes. I sleep on the Ping-Pong table and Michael sleeps on the floor. But not before we visit the Alpine Chalet Restaurant for steak and fried potatoes and a few steins of local brown beer to wash it all down. An accordion trio plays "Heartburn Hotel" and leer in painted smiles.
Under the shower I notice my skin is pruning but luckily there's no sign of a chill. En route for another border, I chant a mantra to myself, "Please stop soon. Please stop soon. Please stop soon." Eventually we do stop for resuscitating breakfast in the little caf near the bridge. I am trembling from so much discomfort that when my coffee spills over my hand, Iām too numb to feel anything. In the toilet I wring out my gloves and remove my wet underwear and rub myself dry. So good to be back in France. It's Friday. We cross the Rhein at Strasburg and a warming sun nudges the rain clouds away. As we approach Metz, Michael asks if Iād like to go right into Luxembourg or left and continue through France. Our clothes are steaming. We're born to be wild. I choose Luxembourg and what a thrilling, spiralling joy it is to be screaming along towards our ferry, receiving nods and waves of recognition from bikers down the line. On to mediaeval Luxembourg and out through Arlon, eating up the E411 into Belgium and Brussels in time for dinner. Not far now and we gun the last seventy miles straight as an arrow until we screech to a halt at the coast. We park the Yammy in a little square outside an Ostende music bar and settle behind a couple of beers and grin and let the jukebox soothe away the anxieties of the last two days. Our race is won with time to spare before the ferry. Next stop·Trepanning and er·Blogger· Ibid
Sunday, March 30, 2003 Sunday "Some people have been on holiday all their lives! It`s a state of mind." "Rubbish! A good holiday is a break from routine. The state of mind follows." "Wrong! And Iāll prove it!" Weād woken up this morning with nature sitting there trembling on the windowsill balancing somewhere between winter and early spring. Itās glorious sunshine streaming in through our bedroom window defying us to stay in that stuffy old bed another second. It was almost 7am. Then just when I was hoping it would fall back into winter again, my wife complained that we never go anywhere but the local beach for half an hour to walk off the Sunday lunch. "Living in the most beautiful county in Britain, we should make more opportunities to take advantage of the summer weather. It`s our heritage. Letās be spontaneous. It would do us good. Just once in a while to forget our responsibilities and disappear for the day." Sheās just finished reading Tess of the Dāurbevilles. So, we fed the cat, watered the plants and off we went like Thelma and Louise in our own road movie en route for the very end of Britain. Our only plan - no plan. Sixty minutes later we pulled into Shady Cove with nothing between ourselves and New York but the deep blue sea. Over to the left about a quarter of a mile from the beach lay the huge rocky plateau that seems to lie there like some ancient crusty sea monster waiting for its prey. Its name is Folk Rock. I turned to point it out to Sandy but by the time she turned to look, it had completely disappeared from view. Then, the moment she turned to look down along the bay again, it reappeared from beneath the waves. We guessed that in the days of sail this sobering feat of nature must have driven many a navigator to drink. The cove itself seemed surprisingly small and deserted but further along the arc of the bay, one of the most inspiring in the country, we could see that all the action was on the beach and out at sea. Surfers and aquanauts rode the waves waiting for that perfect moment. Down to our left stretched the creamy soft stretch of the irresistible white, sandy bay. We couldnāt wait. A short trek along a narrow footpath overlooking the ocean, across a rivulet trickling down to the sea and up again onto the comfortable warm shore. We conquered a dune and watched the long rolling waves building and crashing at the waterās edge. By now, over fifty surfers had gathered and the waves were getting higher. The divers had dived. We stretched on the sand coated in Hawaiian Tropic, eating succulent red cherries and kiwi fruit while watching the beach bunnies hopping and leaping around. Everyone seemed to be in the sea, delighted with the power and the roar. All ages and sizes whizzed by on boards. I could resist no more and cautiously went for a paddle. But there is a point when you wade where you have to make a decision. Either you turn back to shore as though youād forgotten something of importance or you meet a roller full on and thereby disguise your fear and cowardice. Suddenly, that decision was made for me when an icy shower ricocheted off a little girl and drenched me completely. My jerk reaction almost put my back out. In an attempt at self-composure, I bit the bullet and threw myself beneath the waves. I opened my eyes to a flurry of a million jade bubbles and all once was converted, exulted, childlike and thirsty for more. I ran forward with great stiff strides waiting for the next breaker and when it came, I turned my back and stiffened in a crouch, lurching forward when it hit me, spearing me all the way into the shallows. I landed at the feet of the little girl who rewarded me with the biggest grin on the planet. A bearded surfer skimmed by grunting something meaningful to my flooded ears and gave me the broadest grin in the universe. Brothers of the surf. Behind him a shining wall of glistening sea was curving down to cover us. It was now or never. Filling my lungs, I waited until it was almost on top of me then at the last moment I dived straight through it. I would have been OK if I`d been able to dive but I can't. It rolled me and dragged me and I thought my lungs would burst. Then I hit the sand. There was blood on my palm from where I`d scraped it on the shingle but I didn't cry much and anyway, it didn`t show. First blood of the foolish season was over. Swaggering back to base towel on our dune, I couldn`t help but snigger at the squeamish newcomers gingerly testing the temperature with their toes, their arms clutching their bodies against the spray. Ninnies! Ibid
Saturday, March 29, 2003
at last i'm back. ibid
12:02 PM
Thursday Today I drove to the next town with two other teaching Assistants, Judith and Eileen, to attend a training course in working with children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Eileen had missed the first two sections of the course due to a pretty serious illness that also kept her off work. It didnāt take long for us to realise that the course was directed at TAās who work with Primary school children. But our kids are aged 14+ and are experimenting with drink, drugs, music and sex like other kids their age so we thought the course might be a little irrelevant. Youād think that when a course was offered to a school with Special Needs Children, they would stipulate the age group to which it was aimed. We had to make a decision. Do we leave and just have the day off and risk being reprimanded by the department head or stay in case some of it might be of benefit to the students we are assigned to and thereby get a free lunch and a certificate of attendance at the end. It looked like rain and there was a mist coming in from the sea. The others looked friendly so we decided to stay. But it was over-simplified and repetitious. A little like when you lie in the dark and canāt get back to sleep. Thoughts crash through your mind. I thought of little Harry, my next door neighbour. Five years old and he asked me once if I believed in aliens. "I donāt know if I do. Do you?" "I think they live in our eyelashes." And once he called round to my flat and said "I think Iāll live here instead". His Dad told me to stop corrupting his son because I told him all that sometimes all the reality you need is when you close your eyes.
The room had no air. By 3pm the carafe of water on our table tasted stale like the perfume of the forty-odd ladies in the room and me, the only man there smelling like a canvas tent at Glastonbury. Not that I've ever attended but you get my drift.
In the lecture, we grew restless and started making fun of the tutors. There was the guy in charge who acted like the most important job on the planet and the only thing worth living for was to patronise others. If you questioned the speakers, like I did when one of them said that learning a foreign language was irrelevant, they got spiky. My point being that on the contrary, it was utterly relevant. Not about learning the language, but about tolerance and compassion for people of other cultures. The speaker had a face like thunder at first, then came over during the coffee break and literally knelt at my feet to quietly apologise. Extraordinary.
Anyway, I began to realise that I had learned something. Now I know how students feel when they are trapped and as bored as we were this afternoon. I think the spiteful teacher chappie would have liked to kick us out or give us detention because you know how laughter is infectious, particularly when youāre not supposed to even breath, well by now others were as bored as we were and were whispering and giggling. But the only sanction he took was to refuse to give a certificate to Eileen because "This is a certificate of attendance and you have only been here for todayās session" he said snottily. Tomorrow, in school, I will photocopy my certificate and replace my name with Eileenās. It's misty in Cornwall. Ibid.
During half term last October my wife and I paid a visit to the Greek island of Karpathos. Antonis was one of the regulars of the Halkia Taverna and the day he dropped into the chair next to mine, Iād been waiting so long to get served that I almost felt like a local myself. We started chatting whilst waiting for the morning breeze to cool our coffees. He ordered two Metaxa brandies and before he spoke, he huffed and sighed then lightly touched my arm heralding an all-important announcement. Thatās when I found myself entrusted with either some of the most extraordinary snippets of gossip that it has ever been my pleasure to hear or it might have been simply a modern folk tale used to pass the time with gullible travellers like me.
"Forgive me my friend, but fate is a bitch and before you get up to leave, I will tell you how I know she is a bitch." He lit a Karelia cigarette and I could almost hear the cogs of his brain working as he puffed away. Karelia cigarettes are made from donkey droppings, rust and sand. "I work a ten hour day all through the winter building new houses and for what? I get peanuts for all my hard work and then in the summer I am not much better off renting out sun brollies on the beach to the sun worshippers. So tell me, how in Godās name am I supposed to pay taxes out of that small amount?" Absentmindedly, he flicked the ash from his cigarette onto his lap and continued. "I`ll tell you how. I charge a large price for each bed instead of just the brolly. He nudged my arm. There are at least two beds to each brolly, so you see how I make a little money for me. I know this is a sin but what else can I do? Eh?" He nodded in the direction of the proprietor, Zacharia, and lowered his voice. "Some people have the ear of God, believe me my friend. Listen, thirty five years ago when I was young and foolish, me and Zacharia went everywhere together and there was a time when we were doing some building work over on the big island of Crete and one weekend the God did something that I can never forgive." Suddenly Antonis had my full attention. "It was at Pasca or as you say, Easter, and we were driving back across the mountains to the south coast after a couple of nights in the capital when our car broke down just as it was getting dark, leaving us stranded in the middle of nowhere. I noticed a light from a house in the distance and suggested we go and ask if we could stay until morning when we might get some help to fix it. Zachi was reluctant at first but we had no choice and so we trudged across fields and through ditches and even surprised one or two streams in the dark until finally we knocked on the door. You will not believe what happens next my friend, and I swear on my motherās life that it is all true."
Antonis paused just long enough to take some fortification from his brandy and to acknowledge the greeting from a passer-by. "A vision of true loveliness, dressed ready for bed, answers the door and is not only happy to help but insists we stay in the house and not in the barn as we had hoped. As luck would have it, her parents were away for the weekend so she suggested she sleep in their room and we could either share her little bed or one of us could sleep downstairs on the couchetta, whatever we wished. She was American and the house was magnificent. I mean it had everything, even a pool in case you donāt like to swim with the fishes. So we flipped a coin and I slept upstairs in her scented bed whilst Zach slept downstairs on the couchetta. Anyway, one thing led to another and I am not bragging when I say that that lady and me had one helluva a night, I can tell you. I will not forget it. The next morning Zachi fixed the car himself and we went on our way, promising to write and all that but we never did, in fact we never do. Also, I never told Zach what had really happened during the night."
It was my turn to take a long drink from my glass; I`d completely forgotten my brandy up Ītil then. "Keep listening my friend." Antonis touched my arm again. "The next part haunts me to this day. About nine months later, at Christmas, I was having a beer in a taverna in the harbour when in storms Zacharia and marches straight up to my elbow. ĪHey, Antonis,ā he yells, ĪI must have words with you urgently and in private. Please come outside.ā So I went with him into the back street behind the shoe shop. ĪDo you remember when our car broke down in the mountains of Crete and that lovely lady let us stay the night?ā ĪYes, Zacharia my friend, I believe I do recall.ā ĪDo you remember that I slept downstairs on the couchetta?ā The eyes of Zacharia were wild and I thought he might do something dangerous. ĪEr, yes, you were very noble Zacharia.ā ĪNever mind that. Tell me the truth Antonis.ā Zacharia seemed to brace himself as he formed his question. ĪDuring that night, did you and your overrated skill with the women sneak along to where she lay sleeping and seduce her?ā ĪWell, I wouldnāt say sed·ā I tell you my friend, I groaned as he gripped my arm. ĪDonāt interrupt! Did you or did you not give her my name and address of my family home here in this town? And I want the honest truth Antonis, do you hear me?ā By now, my friend, I was shaking with fear for what he might do to me. His face was purple with emotion. So taking a deep breath and bracing myself for a blow, I said quickly, ĪYes. Yes. But I can explain.ā Put down your glass and listen closely my friend, because I was not prepared for what Zacharia said next. He said, ĪDonāt bother. Now I understand everything. You see she has died and left me the house and a small fortune in her will.ā Antonis drained his glass and turned it upside down on the tabletop then looked out to sea.
"So that is how Zacharia gave up the building work and bought this taverna, the most popular in our village and all I got for my share was a little house on the edge of town, and I did all the work. I tell you my friend, fate is a woman and she cheats, thatās all."
Antonis shot me a glance like a lost dog as he finished his story so I ordered a couple more Metaxa brandies and left him to brood in silence whilst I stifled my laughter in the toilet.
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Tuesday morning. Lesson One. I queue in the corridor with class 10P to go into the laboratory for Science. Everyone is taller than I am. And they know it. The Head of the Science Faculty demands absolute silence of the testosterone fuelled, after-shave drenched, baby-boys. They smell of toilet cleaner. One of the chatterers is caught out but just before the Doctor can pounce, the boy pleads in a loud, firm voice ćCan everyone listen? Please?ä He looks hurt. A definite Oscar nominee. In the staff room at break, a waif of a Teaching Assistant, only two days into her new job, is delighted that some of the boys already acknowledge her in public. ćOne of them waved to me as I went in my front doorä. Scary. Next lesson, the IT teacher tells the group ćTake off all hoodies, jackets and anything that is not school uniformä. One of the boys, obviously stoned, puts on a bright orange baseball cap and smiles at his hands. He has no pen, no book and no idea where or who he is. He asks if he can go outside for a walk because he feels ćstressedä. One of the boys is carefully eating a kiwi fruit with a spoon from between his knees. Another is putting on his trainers with a shoehorn. The last lesson is English. The teacher begs the students ćCoats off, bags on floor. Iām waiting for everyone to look this wayä She is totally ignored. The girls brush their hair and apply make-up. Two of them continue a conversation that they seem to have started last September. The prima donna is doing last weekās course work and when sheās told to stop, she tugs her work from the teacher and whinges, ćShut up. Leave me alone.ä And continues, disobedient. The boy I should be helping is fast asleep. His eyes roll in his head. Thereās a girl sitting with both feet resting on a chair. Sheās chewing gum. Outside, workmen are sanding down the window frames. Two of our Year 10 lovelies are making eyes at them and have put a sign up that reads, ć In your dreamsä Some of the class gives three cheers for Michael Moore. Outside itās Spring and the air is clean.
Monday, March 24, 2003
I am a Teaching Assistant and amateur masochist. Amongst my other punishments, I work in the local community school with Year 10.
Monday. Teacher: I will take sanctions against anyone found using the Internet during my lesson. Nobodyās listening because they are too busy sending emails. One of the kids has discovered a teacherās password and is busily interchanging all the studentās passwords. On my left, the screen shows the website for the band, Black Sabbath. On my right, one of the kids is slipping in a floppy to show his mate some porn. In Practical Science, four young ladies are ignoring pleas from the teacher to stop playing cards. One of the friendlier female students whispers Īw****rā in my ear and grins as she walks away. Distracted, I say ćWhat?ä So she shouts from across the classroom, ćI said ĪW****R!āä The teacher seems not to hear. In the row behind, two heads are nodding rhythmically to a personal stereo heard through shared earphones. One of the kids whoās been banned from taxis seems to be having a little nap. The teacher asks no one in particular ćDid I call the register? No? Oh, dearä. A newly acquired bass voice booms, ćSir, you look stressedä. A couple of scallywags are altering the teacherās instructions on the board to a more suggestive message. One of the kids is regarded as a Īboffinā because he actually keeps his head down. Next lesson is English Language and one of the prettiest young ladies pouts and frowning, whines at the teacher, ćDonāt you dare ask me any questions, Iām in a foul moodä. Later the teacher foolishly forgets and tries to explain what she wants but the prima donna is adamant, ćYou are so annoying. Look! For f***ās sake, go away!ä This afternoon the whole school had to get out into the playground after the fire bell screamed its warning through the classrooms and corridors. It happened to be one of the kids in my care, in fact the same one whoād turned off the main gas supply during the cooking GCSE exam. Strict rules regarding school uniform and eating in class are completely disregarded because fashion rules and also, teachers donāt want enemies. At last, an hour to go, but the pupil Iām supposed to be helping sulks throughout the lesson because I wonāt let him play cards with the girls. Tell me again. Why do I do this job? Ibid
5:16 PM
