Croatia

Friday 27th April

“No.”

“But can’t I take my...?”

“No.”

The answer is No. They should have this written above the entrance to StanstedAirport, the home of Ryanair. Every question you ever ask of the Ryanair staff, no matter what it is, that’s the answer. Customer service is an oxymoron with them. I only wanted to take my tuna sandwiches on board the plane.

“But can’t I just...” The attendant stared over my shoulder for a few seconds then back with a surprised frown, her pencilled in eyebrows arching like landed eels, as if to say, “Oh, you’re still here?”

Britain has exchanged Laurens van der Post for Bridget Jones and Bill Bryson. Results guaranteed and delivered bang on time.

Towards the end of the flight changes in air pressure sent me into shock. I couldn’t equalize my ears, had pains in my injured spleen and it felt like my blood was draining into the fuselage. My head became white cold as the plane banked into land. The Adriatic below was shiny under the day’s last few luminous minutes. The islands were slivers of black; serpents rising from the midnight blue.

Large black moustaches filled the passport control booths. Straggly ponytails, leather-look bumbags and excessive hand gestures crowded the baggage carousel. Three macho men loitered by the toilets. I loped past them and sat in a cubicle sweating, drained, head resting against the partition, waiting for the clamminess to subside.

Outside there was no bus into town. The centre was nine miles away and I didn’t fancy walking so I questioned two police officers about the bus service. They stood with legs apart, hands resting on gun holsters, shrugging a lot but knowing nothing. So I waited on the concourse for an hour until a taxi pulled up and the driver shouted aggressively

“Look, just get in! There’s no bus coming, I don’t know why, it just didn’t come!”

“Allright, allright, calm down,” I said, “how much?”

“Fifty Kuna.”

“Thirty.”

“Get in.” In the taxi he calmed down a bit and warned “This isn’t England you know.”

Saturday 28th April

Fish fled as I walked the pier. They’re meant to have a three second memory but instinctively they know that humans are bad news and are a species to be avoided.

“It’s not me, my friends...” I said, striving to be different, to distance myself from them, them, the others. The nightmare.

I’m not overly sympathetic to the Westernized branch of the human species. I can’t bear to pick a flower - to end the life of such a beautiful thing is surely a crime - yet the thought of taking the world’s major cities back to point zero and allowing nature to breathe again seems totally reasonable. I think it’s the way we’ve exchanged the Ten Commandments for a line in the sand that‘s turned me. And then that line in the sand for sets of flimsy morals that are erasable with the slightest wiff of a pay off.  Such a gutless sub-species on the whole. Makes me shiver to realise I need it‘s approval just as much as anybody else.

Switzerland

Monday 4th June

I sailed across the lake and headed for the Dent d’Oche, the highest point of the French Alps in this area. Its summit sits at a little over two thousand two hundred metres and the climb to it took seven hours. The last thirty minutes of climbing was a horror story. I pulled myself up narrow, sheer, misty gulley’s using slippery, icy-cold fixed chains. My backpack was heavy with camping gear and supplies of canned beans and sausage and constantly tried to haul me backwards. I knew that one missed grip and I’d fall into the grey cloud below, with nothing to stop me for several hundred metres.

The reward for this physical effort and extreme mental trauma was even more heavy grey cloud all around the summit and not a thing to see except the few square metres of rock at my feet.

A hundred metres below the summit is a climbers refuge. The manager and his two Alsatian dogs - I have no idea how the dogs got up here - directed me upstairs. My room here has three bunks which are to be shared between twenty people. They’re all loud weekend-hiker types with backpacks full of wine. The room got noisy as dark descended, as chests were puffed up by the booze and the achievement of arriving here alive. Everybody has their socks and shirts hanging up from the door and window frames, trying to dry. The smell of sweat and high-energy food-bar farts is gagging.

Tuesday 5th June

I went outside for a wee about midnight. As I stepped into the freezing evening the clouds cleared, almost magically, just for me, and literally at my feet was Lake Geneva, a black oval surrounded by twinkling town lights. Civilisation looked beautiful from this distance.

Friday 8th June

In Geneva the Jet d’Eau cloaked the harbour in a rainbow. Swans preened over their rippling reflections. When the fountain died through a power cut the bay became quite ordinary and the sky empty save for the clouds, which hung as solid as giant stepping stones over the hilly lakeshore.

Marijuana smoke mingled with fresh coffee and croissant smells at pavement tables (city days need extra fortification). Swarms of small men with big laughs and bigger wrist-watches exchanged a wealth based not on chocolate and cheese but on selling arms to both sides in the Great War. An economy fertilised by a whole generation of North Europeans.

“Our neutrality never was an ethic,” I recall a Swiss friend once saying, “only ever a business plan.”

A woman’s jeans brushed the pavement. I could tell she was wearing expensive stilettos by her tottering swagger and the heavenly click that followed her. An antique sundial, ‘protected’ and ‘preserved’ indoors, was fixed at nine o’clock, telling everybody they were late.

I brought half a loaf of bread with the last of my Swiss Francs and fed swans by hand. They’re less graceful eaters than they are swimmers. The ducks that darted in under the swans’ arched necks were as spiteful and petty as the English media. They pecked the tail of whoever got the bread.

A child ran amok in the airport, blundering through the book shop. The kid ignored it’s parents and started to scream for no reason. It must have been English. I browsed the bookshop myself and shuddered at the sight of some of the truly dreadful travel writing on offer. Some bloke living for months with a ‘lost‘ tribe (who were never lost, just out of fashion), another travelling about Ireland with an over-sized electrical appliance (it’s boring when self-effacement is this obvious), and a rich pretty boy pretending to be the first to cross the Northern Atlantic in an open, non-rigid craft (did Tim Severin not exist, then?), etc. Gimmicky rubbish at best, a complete fabrication at worst.

Portugal

Saturday 23rd June

The morning bus to the Algarve had seats free. Mercifully the modern young person’s craze for reserving every aspect of their supposedly free and easy road trip hasn’t reached day buses. Tall West Africans in long shiny blue robes called

“Salaam aleikum” loudly to each other down the aisle, ignoring us infidels. They sounded like they were in a desert and hadn’t seen any humans for months. It was all face though. Real religious people are as softly spoken as can be. A freshly showered girl sat next to me and played with a set of keys. The obligatory Samuel L Jackson movie serenaded our journey. The Africans giggled at the brother calling all the white boys filthy names in dubbed Portuguese.

The southern hills were coated with lilac wildflower. Some were topped with white villages that ranged down the slopes like Chinese graveyards. Our bus had a slight accident when raised forklift prongs jutting out from a building site spiked its mirrors. A foot further out and they’d have been through the window-screen. It happened in slow motion. Luckily the coach driver was travelling at great speed or it may have lasted forever. Phone numbers were exchanged and then we were in Portimao where the hunched, wrinkly British come to die, among the McDonalds and the all-you-can-eat buffets and the heat and the flies and the fat white shirtless sunburnt holidaymakers.

Sunday 24th June

West of Lagos the coastline is spectacular. Azure foreshore, un-crowded white sand, rock pillars rising from the sea, artful dung beetles, ants with jaws as long as their bodies, strong, refreshing wind (nearly lost my tripod over a cliff edge today, had to quickly pull my arms out from the dark-bag and grab its leg as it disappeared over a ridge of wildflower), gulls screaming like they’ve been murdered, no beach umbrellas or loud music or fake Irish pubs selling fake stout to fake travellers...

Monday 25th June

Today I walked for six hours from Sagres to Cabo Vincente, the very end of Portugal, along a near unbroken line of cliff - a natural bastion - pinholing the ocean and old forts.

It’s a relief to travel and yet not feel obliged to take the standard travel picture any more - the lovely landscape, always with somebody in it - as I used to do whilst working as a travel journalist. The figure always had to stand side on - enough of their face in view to make them human, not enough so that the viewer couldn’t imagine it was themselves in the picture - heroically looking out over a beautiful scene. The same beautiful scene that had impressed me so much that I had felt moved to write about it. The same beautiful scene that, by taking the picture and writing the article, I was encouraging people to flock to and inevitably ruin.

I’m so glad to have stepped out of that ‘Search out Eden. Write about it. Watch the crowds turn your Eden to Hell‘ circle. It‘s so much more satisfying to spend my time making surreal pinholes highlighting that which can’t be spoilt by others - the world of the past and of dreams.

Italy

Tuesday 24th July

Took train to Pisa and moved into a hotel room, a few yards from the station. Found a hastily forgotten book in a drawer. Gave the owner brief thought, identifing with their haste and mayhem before blasting them with condescension for their choice of novella.

The Leaning Tower complex was crammed with black people selling knock off watches and white, brown and yellow people taking stupid photos. The photos will show their friends standing side on, cowering slightly, backside stuck out and arms stretched above them, pushing up air. Apparently they‘ll look as if they’re holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which is close behind them. A nice idea would be to employ snipers around the complex to pick off those who insist on acting stupidly with their ‘Holding up the Tower’ pose, which naturally enough should be punishable by death. Why do these tourists want to pose in exactly the same way as everybody else anyway? Funnily enough, nobody wants to be shown pushing the tower down, to be seen as the bad guy. There was nothing to do to protect ones sanity but retreat to the shade and drink lots of chilled wine.

The British command of foreign language is so universally poor that when one member of an English tour group fended off a fake handbag vendor with

“Non, molte grazia” about twenty of their comrades turned in admiration, exhaling whistles of appreciation.

“It’d be good to take a group of Africans, none of them who’ve ever seen a printed picture before, on tour,” said M, a little drunk, “and see what they think is worthy of attention and photos. Don’t give them a guidebook. I’m guessing they wouldn’t be holding up the Leaning Tower in their photos.”

“But would they even have photos, and think of the future? Or would they exist correctly, and purely enjoy the present...?”

“I thought first off a sniper would do it,” I said, finishing the second carton of wine, “but now I reckon a machine gun nest might be in order.”

“An indiscriminate massacre?” egged on M.

“No, no, more a cull of fools, of followers, of those who only wish to recreate what is already stale.”

I tried to take some pinholes but the old problem of gleaming white tower and church against gleaming white sky equalling very little chance of any success reared its head and so after a few exposures I gave up and went back to what I do best - lazing about, talking rubbish and enjoying wine.

“I tell you, when I came here twenty years ago, all these attractions were mostly empty of tourists and free to enter,” I said, slurring, “or so cheap that they might as well have been. Now look at it. Overrun and everywheres charges the earth!”

“I blame the camera,” M countered, “no cameras, no travel! What would be the point for them if they couldn’t capture it all? How could they use it to define themselves? How could they say, hey Mom, this is me, posing, arse out, hands up, looking like I’m having a crap, but in reality, I’m supporting the Leaning Tower?”

A group of English girls sat near us. We chatted a little. They talked like they were in a factory tearoom at break time. A lot of nothing. They only talked like that because they were pretty so they thought they could get away with it. I suddenly got so bored I felt I was going to be sick. The blood drained from my head and I started to sweat. I lay down and ignored them and sometime later they went away.

A tourist accused a local bicycle hire man of overcharging. The local threw up his hands, keeping them close to his body, palms outwards, like a stereotyped John Inman-style homosexual, or a thalidomide, and appealed his innocence to complete strangers. He spun around on the spot and wailed. Everybody ignored him so he refunded the money and made a point of looking hurt.

There were a few Russians there. You could pick them out easily. The women looked like they worked the streets, the men like they slept on them.

“Ignorant drunken peasants who should never be allowed to leave their potato patches,” stated M. “Did you see that group swear at the African vendors earlier, and ignore calls from other tourists to mind out the way whilst they took photos? Savages!”

France

Tuesday 7th August

I rested yesterday evening at London Cemetery beside High Wood. The wood cackled, cooed and whooped as it settled down with the dying sun. I looked for a place to sleep off the ground, so as to avoid rats. The rats of the Somme are legendary in size. So much to eat, faces first (the unknown soldier), has made their breed unnaturally large. I lay out my bivvy bag on a bench under the stone cemetery entrance arch and read by torch-light a little of Sassoon‘s ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer‘ (good books are best read on location if possible). During the night I talked intermittently to the dead soldiers buried around me. I slept little. It was a healthy eight degrees, which was sixteen degrees warmer than the last time I slept at High Wood in the freezing winter of 2001, but still my toes complained of the cold every five minutes, demanding to be wriggled and not rested.

Dawn revealed a brutally clear sky. Mist lay heavy in the lower valleys. Church bells struck, crows cawed. There were also cockerels and the distant rumbling of grain trucks. I left dark footprints in the silver dewy grass as I walked to the edge of the cemetery, to look upon the ground that the Royal West Kents advanced over in 1916, loosing over four hundred men in the process. I rubbed dew into my eyes to wake up and ate a can of corned beef with a plastic fork. I could really see what the soldiers had to contend with from where I stood. The huge open boggy expanse that had to be crossed. Visions of how it must have been attacked me.

The sounds of faraway trucks became a barrage and the mist cloaked figures that I couldn’t quite make out. For five minutes I was a German machine gunner, watching the Allied troops come on, slowly, waiting until they were easily within range, knowing that there was no rush, that the mud was slowing their advance, and my overwhelming thought was that this wasn’t fair.

“Do I have to do this? The poor bastards, they’ve no chance. What can this gain for our country, this massacre?” The sun limped slowly after the dawn, tired and haggard by the centuries.

If Germany had won the Great War, would they have gone into recession as they did, and felt so bad about themselves as to need Hitler?

A red Citroen rumbled between golden wheat fields at Mouquet farm. The stink of cows, of gas, was ripe. There was a Tuscan look to the rolling farmland. The horizons were lined with trees, the roads attractively scarce of people.

The cut grass of Thiepval monument glistened with spiders webs. They were trampled by spoiled English kids baying for crisps and fizzy drinks. A generation lost, mostly without chance to impart it’s morals, and this is what you get.

I wanted to go to toilet but was too early for the visitors centre to be open and I couldn’t desecrate the woods there so I kept walking fast around the monument to hold it in, nearly bursting when I squatted to make pinholes.

The site of Hawthorn Ridge mine crater is now an overgrown circular wood growing from a deep depression. A child’s playground. A makeshift camp has been constructed in the deepest hollow out of scrap wood and iron. Outside the wood, standing on the old German front line, I heard the cut corn crackling like a bowl of rice crispies.

Echoes; the wind in the crater, the persistent bird call, the machine gun chirp of the insects, odd distant sounds, unidentifiable but very real all the same.