Britain
July 1995
Arriving in Britain was more or less like coming home - although it hadn't been my home for ten years. My mum met me at the airport and we went back to her place in Maldon, Essex - about forty five miles north east of London. This is the town where i was born, where i grew up and where i lived till i was twenty. For a long time, i'd hated the place. In fact, it wasn't until the last time i'd come over from Australia, nearly two years before, that i'd really discovered my roots there, my connection with the land and, particularly, the river estuary that the town was built beside.
It had taken me a long time. I'd realized, ever since i began to learn about the land from aboriginal people and had begun to see it the way they do, that i must have a stronger connection with the land i was born on than i was conscious of then. I looked for it on a couple of other visits, but for the life of me i couldn't see it. I didn't know why, or what had changed in me, but the last time i was there it had become glaringly obvious. It was much stronger than i'd imagined and i'd discovered it could be a source of strength, or power, or energy for me if i could tap into it. Which i seemed to be able to do. On that visit to Britain, i spent most of the time in Maldon, something which i'd never done before. In fact i'd really spent very little time there at all since i'd escaped at the age of twenty.
This visit too, i expected to be spending a large proportion of my time there, although i knew i'd be spending a fair bit of it in London, where i had stuff i wanted to do. I also wanted to go to a few other places in Britain and, as usual, i had plans to visit the mainland - in particular Bilbao in Basque Country, where i now had addresses of close friends.
When i got to my mum's place, there were a few letters for me, which was exciting after four months of no mail of any sort - and, really, no contact with anyone anywhere in the world other than where i was at the time. My laptop had arrived in one piece and working and, within a week of arriving, i'd set up an internet connection and was in direct contact with friends in Australia. This was an amazing leap - and the serious and disturbing feeling of isolation that i'd been suffering from for quite some time began to disappear. I got down to some serious writing and began to get in touch with friends in Britain who i could track down reasonably easily. I began to feel a lot happier and a lot less weird.
All that time in what for me had been isolation had begun to make me seriously deranged towards the end of my time in Mexico. I was fully conscious of what was going on, but of course i was powerless to do anything about it. In fact i looked at it as a necessary period of isolation, which would inevitably have long-term benefits, but which was very hard to come to terms with at the time. Although, during that worst, last period of it, i had more or less begun to direct its effects into creative and contemplative channels. And i had in fact, managed to gain some interesting and important insights into myself and my life and learn quite a lot from it. However, i was bloody glad when it was over.
I was still sick, but i began to get better quite fast - with the help of live vegan yoghurt and other sources of live bacteria of the type that your guts need to do their job properly, but were often in short supply in this horrible chemical, synthetic age. However, i only seemed to get better to a certain point and then the improvement stopped. Oh, well, i was getting so used to it that it hardly seemed to matter. It had been going on for six weeks and when i looked back on how sick i'd been at times, i felt quite healthy, although i wasn't really. An old friend who hadn't seen me for a few years was quite shocked by how sick and wasted i looked. I hadn't been conscious of looking that bad. I knew i was skinny, but then maybe she remembered me from pre-vegan, heavy beer drinking times, when i probably had more weight on me normally anyway... Who knows.
- - -
The main job i had to do over the next few weeks was to get my mum's sailing dinghy into decent shape for sailing. It was an old timber, twelve foot barge's boat and it was at least twenty five years old. It had been fixed up a bit about a year before, but it was desperately in need of patching up and painting. So the first thing to do was to get it out of the water and onto the seawall and start working on it. This, of course, was easier said than done. It required the tides to be at the right time of day. And we messed about for a week or two before we actually got it out of the water.
Time gradually passed. The weather was generally good, with occasional spells of cold and rain, mainly around the new and full moon. I went swimming in the River Blackwater a couple of times, while trying to get the boat organized. It was weird really, i probably wouldn't even contemplate swimming in a river like that anywhere else in the world. It was probably not as filthy as it would have been a few years before, but it was still undoubtedly full of pesticide runoff from the farmland around the area. And there was a nuclear power station only ten miles downriver on the North Sea coast.
The boat began to look better and eventually we got it back in the water. Naturally, after being up on the seawall for a week, in the hot weather we'd had at that time, its boards had dried out a lot and it filled up with water straight away. But after a few days it should have been relatively watertight!
That week, i got news over the internet that another round of talks was underway in San Andres Larrainzar, the second dialog since i'd been there last. I felt a kind of homesickness as i thought of the scenes that would be taking place around that little village. Of the people i knew who would be there. Especially of Oscar and his peace fire, which i was sure would be burning for the duration of the event. I felt sad in a way. I missed the place and the people and i felt a kind of regret that i hadn't had the dedication to keep up my presence there. I felt almost as if i'd walked out on them. It was strange and it wasn't something i couldn't really express in a logical way. One day i'd go back there. But it would be different then of course...
- - -
I went to London a couple of times in July and stayed mainly in Brixton, at Sergio's place. I'd met Sergio in January the previous year, on a beach in Goa, India, where i was travelling with Paula. We discovered we had some friends in common in London and we also discovered we were both heading to Melbourne at about the same time. He already had my address there, Chris our friend in London had given it to him before he left. She was around Goa somewhere too at that time but i never found her. Anyway Sergio wrote down the address and phone number where he'd be staying in Melbourne and, as he handed it to me, i thought "i'm going to know this person". And sure enough, it was an old friend of mine called Cath, who i'd met either in Melbourne or London, i'm not sure which. They'd had a child together and Sergio was going over to visit them. It's a small world....
Anyway, i'd ended up doing quite a bit of travelling with Sergio in Australia, over the few months before he left to come back to London, and it was good to see him again. It was also good to have somewhere to stay in London that wasn't in Stoke Newington or Hackney. That's the area where i lived for years before i escaped and went to Australia. And it's where i'd always seemed to end up again when i came back to London. But, really, i'd had enough of it ten years before and i was never very happy getting back into that same old rut again.
But Brixton was different. I'd never spent much time in Brixton before. In fact, i think i could have counted the number of times i'd been there on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple spare. But now i had the opportunity to get to know it, i really liked the place. It had a very different feeling to Stoke Newington and Hackney. It was somehow more cosmopolitan. Stoke Newington was just like a separate little town and, despite the fact that at least two thirds of its population were from non-british ancestry, it was somehow very british. It was quite a closed-minded and dismal little place really, in its own weird way. But Brixton seemed different.
It might have been the good weather, or the fact that i wasn't so familiar with the place. Or it might have been that it had an underground station and wasn't very far away from the centre of London. Or it could have been all sorts of things. It was hard to tell why it was so different and what was different about it. But then, one thing i'd definitely learnt over the previous ten years was that all places have their own feeling, their own spirit, their own spirits. All places have a particular quality which makes them different from all other places, while at the same time it connects them with certain other places too.