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.