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.

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.