A Journalist Wanting Words

In my career I have interviewed Oscar winners and 15-minute pop stars, political heavyweights and hip comedians. Down the wire and in smoke-choked bars, I have filled notebooks with scratchy field recordings. From heroes like Bill Hicks to Serbian warlord villains, I have asked questions, stolen quotes.

More than 20 years of interrogating have given me good technique. I research. I charm. Give me 30 minutes and a couple of drinks and I will always get more than the usual tired procession of recycled anecdotes.

However, I am not used to being the interviewee. Hundreds of hours of professional questioning make it feel uncomfortable when it is time for role reversal. Being grilled on the BBC One O’ Clock News holds none of the terror of meeting an unknown journalist for beers and a personal probing.

Beyond contractual obligations, I do not turn down today’s interview because all that experience means there is too much empathy for a journalist wanting words. Given our career trajectories, Matt and I run deep with respect for regional media, the hard slog of provincial press. Having been there and dealt with too many no-listers with egos the size of planets makes you want to be better.

Come lunch, I stop work. Take a break from writing tomorrow’s speech, walk along the canal to my primary local. Buy a strawberry beer, sit in the pub’s library corner and wait on the journo. The strangeness of speaking to inland Oz via a meeting a hundred yards from my home is not lost on me.

The editor of You Magazine is funny and clever, good at what she does. Almost instantly she has me talking about curries with Matt, the black humour of newsrooms and invocating the Cosmic Joker. Both of us ruminate on God’s penchant for fatal punchlines. She offers up the comforting thought that by writing 1001 Ridiculous Ways To Die, instead of dying in some absurd accident, I have probably guaranteed a death 50 years in the future: “Grandchildren around the hospice bed.”

Bonding over Underbelly leads to questions on canalside life and the Lady Love. They do not get dodged. I bore on the spatial shock and casual splendour of Australia. Drift from stories of my lifelong llama curse to views on religious hubris and the evil of hippos. We discuss the interconnectedness of all action, the loneliness of solo authoring and what Matt and I might write next. The paranoiac bible gets a big thumbs up. I just hope when it gets written up, she uses my words on mayfly days and eating the extra chocolate biscuit.

One of the marks of a good interview is it feels like this one – conversation, not interrogation. At the end of it, I come out respecting and liking my questioner. I am even sufficiently charmed to agree to being photographed on the blue bridge. With my narrowboat neighbours behind me, I look into the massive lens and surprise myself with a smile.

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.

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.

Pulled Along in the Westway’s Undertow

Morning may have arrived with a burst of exuberant sunshine bothering the curtains, but it was clear to me I was not going to be able to match its energy. I have been running on vapours for too many days. It took until nearly noon for me to drain my second cup of tea and let the arrival of my ticket to Australia to sink in.

Depending on route and weather, in sevens weeks time I may be flying over the Himalayas. I know what I am like on these journeys. I will push my face to the window to glimpse the rocks below. Relate them to the childhood dreams of exploration. Relish every moment that expands the map of wonder.

My journeying today was more pedestrian. I drifted towards Portobello Road, pulled along in the Westway’s undertow. At the market figs were bought to be roasted with honey, vanilla and cinnamon. Derogatory songs about Operating Thetans were sung as the peddlers of Scientology plied their trade. Cold was warded off by Malay sweet corn fritters and a banana version of Kueh keria. Some Sinclair retrieved from a charity shop, a New Statesman comic found for 50p.

Later, the figs hot and sticky like a teasing kiss in the mouth, the lights low, Zodiac rolled across the screen. The geese outside honked as Mark Ruffalo mumbled and Robert Downey Jr. shouted: ‘Jesus Herald Christ on rubber crutches Bobby!’ I knew I might not get more than three hours sleep when I crawled beneath the duvet, but at least the batteries of my will were recharging.

Feeling the Contour Lines of History

I am trying to prepare myself for going to Australia. Beyond the 22-hour flight, beyond travelling into the 11-hour time difference future, I have to be ready for total dislocation from my land.

Wherever I walk in England – from London’s event patined streets to Dorset’s fossil rich beaches – I am always connected. On the green lanes and sweep paths of Kent or Sussex, in the woods of Hereford and copses of Essex, I am connected. I can see the shimmering temporal projections mapping past, present and yet to come. I navigate through feeling the contour lines of history.

Atop the remains of the North Thames Cliff still bearing its Ice Age scars or squeezing through the cobbled claustrophobia of a York alleyway, I can pick out ancestral footsteps. They resonate through earth and stone, resonate through myth and folklore to carve out the invisible, underlying topology of place. In England I can always sense the undertow of temporal currents that manifest in the drifting patterns of psychogeographers.

Under railway bridges, on uncared for industrial estate mud or overgrown boneyards, I can always find imaginary fire. There is forever magic I know I will never fully capture with my words. At every crossroads I am but a step away from English Hoodoo. A step away from being in the English Dreaming.

However, all of this is about to become meaningless. The ley lines of my English imagination are about to give way to Australia’s dreaming tracks, it songlines. I am travelling into the Aboriginal sacred landscaped defined by their ‘Footprints of Ancesotrs’, the ‘Way of the Law’. There is no way to escape the fact that in less than two months, I am going to become an alien.