A City of Dirty Pissing Bastards and Thieves

5:30am. Coach 16, Seat 11. Dosed up on mocha and the Kronos Quartet. After a couple of minutes of tunnel turning the window into an unflattering mirror, I am gifted an A13 dawn.

The blades of a giant industrial windmill carve the air, there is a concrete road in the sky funnelling unrelenting traffic and I am on a train that travels under the sea. For a moment, this feels like the sci-fi future I dreamed of in 1976. I am moving through a landscape where UNIT trucks are sodium hour ghosts and Luke Haines’ ESP kids lie in wait for the perfect psychic ambush.

We move under the Thames and reverie stops. Kent is resistant to imagination. Its acres of sky dead to any possibility beyond the Monday morning commute. A landscape so bland, the black of the chunnel is actually a relief.

The milk chocolate brown of ploughed fields and verdant pasture that greet me on the other side are constant to the first ring of the Belgian rustbelt. When the last warehouses, container mountains and failed chemical plants eventually splutter out, Brussels’ ugly suburban sprawl begins. A choking catalogue of grey, narrow houses lined up on streets like a grubby second-hand paperback collection.

This morning every stairway and corner of Gare du Midi reeks of urine. I survive one pickpocketing attempt before I even descend to the Metro. A second happens somewhere between Troon and Kunts-Wet. I catch the would-be thief breaking the zip of my bag. Instinctually I stamp down on his hand. There is an awful, sickening crunch of bone. He screams out and drops my passport. Curses, pushes out of the Metro carriage before I can do anything else. As I struggle to pick up my stuff, I miss my station. Later, when it begins to rain, I discover the only thing I lost in the scuffle was my beloved monkey hat.

It is entirely irrational, unreasonable and ridiculous, but when I am let down by Brussels, I take it personally. I feel like shouting: “Both my grandfathers helped liberate you from fascism. Is it beyond you to be something other than a city of dirty pissing bastards and thieves?” Of course, I do not actually shout at anyone, just adopt a sullen face and stomp along till I get to Treurenberg hill. I can forgive a lot when I hear the 49-bell carillon of Cathédrale St Michel & Gudule.

The Energetic Kiss of London

The last two days have been stolen by swapping Wars of Dissolution stories with hard-drinking Anglo-Serbs and bonding over a shared love of cooking with a charming American multi-millionaire who was proud to have voted Bush. While it is great fun to swap recipes and discover my Serbian swearing is still up to scratch, I need to be home. My heart needs to be resting canalside.

I might be a southerner who loves the north, but right now I want to be inside the energetic kiss of London. Sitting at the station, all I want is speed. I want the landscape to blur. Synchronicity seems to offer hope of that. At the exact moment I pull out of Leeds, the iPod offers Gone Dead Train. Randy Newman singing: ‘Burning down the rail…’

However, instead of a jump edit between Yorkshire and King's Cross, there is an hour of static landscape. Starring at the same rough curtain of trees as the fields catch slow motion rain. The area outside Newark Northgate offers little to eyes waiting on signalling failures to be sorted.

We eventually push through Grantham – the town that spawned a monster – and I begin to detect the faint gravitational pull of the capital. The 14:40 feels it as well. The attraction accelerates us and we turn non-stop. There is enough speed to make station signs unreadable and render Stevenage a dirty smear.

We do not slow till just outside of Highbury. My heart somersaults with childlike joy when we pass the Emirates Stadium. Even after the last few games, a glimpse of 30-feet of Arsenal iconography adorning the curved wall of dreams still guarantees a smile.

Graffiti blooms in dense abundance. Green disappears from the palette and building after building bears the tired scars of pollution. I am responding to the beauty of familiarity, the beauty of recognition. The end of every small exile is made sweet by the love of home.

The Everyday Made Sacred by Intent

A while back, Stephen Grasso commented to me that he appreciated reading the entries on my blog about cooking, how the tales of finding ingredients and preparing them were actually small love stories. Perceptive. Whether baking bread or pulling everything together for a risotto, my cooking is often one of those commonplace expressions of love that can easily be overlooked. A bit of the everyday made sacred by intent. Sometimes you want to tell those who command space in your heart and mind your love them with words, other times by plucking basil leaves from the pot in the kitchen and adding them to the tomato sauce you have been reducing down for the last hour.

Another higher function cooking serves for me is as creating a meditative space within my life. When I am being slammed hard by a storm of deadlines and worrying about trying to fit in making a speech at a literary convention, a child’s birthday party and a visit to Nanna all on the safe day, cooking grounds and centres me. The urgent tang that comes from sweating onions and garlic cuts through the roaring static of my stress. Building the flavours of a sauce becomes alchemy. Combining ingredients I transform base elements into a temporary panacea for my ills.

The moment in the day when I take down the wooden board, pour olive oil into the pan and begin chopping while Radio 4 throws out voices is always special. Cooking is not just a chore, not just a pleasure. For me it can be as essential as sleep for gathering up the cares of the day and making a feast out of life.

Dreaming Under Different Stars

I am back in London. Washed out light on a dragon breath morning. A quarrelling parliament of geese on the canal. Cold rain washing the face.

Given the problems I had with flying – blood, pain and inappropriate unconsciousness – I cannot return to Australia for a few months. My heart is back in blue haze mountains, Balmain’s Royal Oak Hotel and skies intent on mimicking the opening sequence of The Simpsons. The best part of me is dreaming under different stars.

English Dreaming, English Rain needs plenty of backfilling. There are tales of songlines, red dirt and hallucinating dinosaurs on the Pacific Highway to be told. However, there are also magazine articles, proposals and a book my editor needs yesterday to be written. Entries may be sporadic and hidden away in months already gone, but they will happen. It is just right now, the words I need to write are destined for elsewhere.

Sanguine Humour

The respite of Singapore is short. Within an hour I am back on the plane. It is the first time in my life I have not been eager to leave an airport.

Over the Java Sea, blood begins to trickle from my left nostril. Quickly soaking all available tissues, it keeps on flowing, falling onto my jacket with Pollockian intent. Great, just great. I will have to face Australian immigration looking like I have been in a street brawl.

The pain begins to build again till I am exporting a gloopy claret that would turn even the stomach of Clive Barker film fan. Somewhere in the back of my mind I see an image of myself being bled by a medieval surgeon, trying to relieve the sanguine humour – the classical element of air. Turbulence shakes the plane and I phase exhausted into my seat.

After hours of dark, I eventually see a band of orange. It expands to define the horizon before giving in to the inevitability of blue. Dead Can Dance fills my ears as I try to grasp the alien landscape below.

At first the lack of roads is breathtakingly strange, the miles and miles of earth unscarred by man a novel sight for European. I take in twinkling encampments of clustered light, separated from each other by three days harsh walk across scrub, sunburnt hills and red dirt. Pools of water, as rare and precious in the hard-baked back of Bourke as the smooth silver metal surface they show to the sky. The world speeding outside the window is one of bleak and dangerous beauty.

Clearly, I am not in Kansas.

Beyond the Edge of England

On the ground, the screen in front of me shows London as a huge yellow boil growing from green skin patterned with thin veins of blue. Only three roads are marked: A4, M25 – the city’s magic circle – and A13, first ley of English Hoodoo and my ancestral road. I wish my journey only involved taking one of these paths. It is 5,767 miles/12 hours and 50 minutes to Singapore.

As we taxi, the engines whine like whale song, building to a storm crash as the bulk of the 777 finally fights gravity. At 5,000 feet the sodium orange of the streetlights below mark fiery labyrinths on the map. At 14,000 they are reduced to the smudged trajectories of civilisation, isolated villages and towns revealed as blazing worlds in the blackened landscape of the night.

We reach the Essex coast and suddenly the fires stop. Beyond the edge of England there is only a black void. We carry on with only a belief that there must be sea below till we reach the scattered clusters of light which signal Holland.

BA Station 12 plays Morrissey’s Vauxhall & I on continuous loop. Mozza is about the worst oracle soundtrack I can imagine. ‘There’s going to be some trouble…’

The stewards enforce a false night. When I sneak open the shutter I glimpse wonders. The Himalayas. The Bay of Bengal. At one point I see jungle mountains surrounding old Dagon. The trees an encircling army, providing paranoia that the vengeful spirit of the green may not be something the junta can hold back with chainsaws and conscripted labour alone. A thin string of white sand marks one border of the Andaman Sea. Part of my mind wants to translate it into a fractal equation, but my eyes only want to communicate awe at its simple, devastating beauty.

Descending into Singapore the pain starts. It feels as if my teeth are being pulled, yanked from my mouth in clumps by industrial pliers. There is a knife blade scouring the white of my left cheekbone. A pencil being pushed into my brain.

I want to scream. I have had bones snap, molars shatter, but nothing as bad as this. I want oblivion. Anything as long as it stops.

Hands tear the fabric off the seat as I fight the increasing destruction in my head. As we drop below the cloud, 200 ships appear below. Anchored in a rigid grid, clothed in emaciated gauze of mist, their lack of motion suggests death. We are falling towards land over a bulk freighter graveyard.

I stumble into the neon buzz of the airport already near blind with headache. Giant plasma screens blast RSAF propaganda. The Black Knight’s F-16C Fighting Falcons perform precision rolls, acting out action snatches from every big budget sci-fi film and computer game cutscene of the last decade. Slogans proclaim: ‘Air Force - Above All' and 'Careers – Like Nothing on Earth.’

With me, they are preaching to the wrong demographic. Right now I do not need any Manga technology death fetishation to fear aircraft. Right now, I bloody hate flying.

Flying to Oz by Winged Monkey

I am sorry for the lack of recent posts. I am even more sorry that I have not yet responded to everyone took the time to wish me a happy birthday last week. The desire to write has been obscured by the ill health of my Nanna and the preparations for shifting my flesh 10,500 miles to Australia.

Unfortunately I am not flying to Oz by winged monkey, but with the tepid assistance of British Airways. I may trust BA to get me safely over the Himalayas, but I have substantial doubt whether they will deliver both me and my suitcase to the same airport at the same time.

The prospect of a 22-hour flight tightens my flesh and knots my muscles. Whilst I have no fear of flying, the dread of being carried off a plane on a stretcher again still clings to me. There is no escaping this horror. It has to be confronted. I have to fly. My bag is packed. I have selected my two books for the journey – Sinclair and Lichtenstien’s Rodinsky's Room and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. There is nothing left to do now but finish typing this, shower, shave and lock up.

The Simple Magic of Email

When a wonder becomes pervasive, there is a danger we become dull to its innate splendour. You can ignore any miracle if it is routine. Today I was reminded of the simple magic of email and Internet by unexpected treasure in my inbox.

On Friday, hobbling back to the canal, my mind still blazing with literary fire, I thought of the forces which shaped my relationship with words. I was wishing for chances to thank the links in the narrative chain that helped make me a writer. One important name summoned was Bee, my A-level English teacher. Her belief in me and the conversations I enjoyed with her in and out of her class are something I still treasure nearly 20 years later.

This afternoon I received an email from her. She had heard me doing a back on the farm radio interview on Radio 4, recognized my name and my ‘distinctive voice’ (probably a polite way of describing my Essex barrow boy consonant crunching) and looked me up. Bee’s words were wonderfully kind, taking delight that I had ‘not lost that alternative, quirky outlook on the world that took my interest when you were in my class’ and pleasure in seeing that I have ‘become such a fluent writer because I can remember how promising I thought you were and how frustrated you must have felt at times with study assignments.’

The power the Internet and email delivers to its users to connect is still breathtaking to me. Yet even more wonderful is being so gently remembered by someone I hold in high esteem. Thank you Bee. Thank you in the now for making my day and thank you in the then for being one of those forces that made me a writer.