Ep 59

Intro

This is Episode 59 of the weekly Eyecatching Words podcast, published on the 24th January 2024.

Music

Openings

Hello and welcome to the Eyecatching Words podcast. This is your weekly aural (spelt with an “a”) magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of the UK, as seen by a white privileged 65 year old Brit who tries not to be typical of his demographic.

According to an article in The Atlantic published on 16th November last year, “Talking about ourselves too much hurts our happiness—and can signal deeper problems.” This clearly means I have a problem since this podcast tends to be a bit self-centred. So I’ve decided to go full monty this week and talk about my travel experiences, for no other reason than I can and for some reason I am thinking a lot about the times I have been abroad. Possibly because I am now more sedate and just want to remind myself that there was a time when I embraced travel full on with everything that went with that. So let’s talk about

The travel bug

By which I mean when bugs get into your well planned travel experience. And I’m not just talking about cancelled flights, dodgy hotel rooms and upset stomachs. I’m talking about things you remember years, decades later even. Some of them definitely edgy, others just amusing. But always memorable.

I came late to travelling for a number of reasons. Firstly my divorced working class parents didn’t have much money. Not only did we not go abroad, most years we didn’t go anywhere. I improvised the long hot school holidays with friends, who fortunately did not all go away with their families at the same time. We were heavily into playing games, building camps in the nearby woods, and playing football and cricket with jumpers for goalposts and wooden crates for stumps. It really was like that back in the ’sixties. I would be out all day with friends in dry weather and we would be in each other’s houses when it rained, playing with broken toys and turning over the furniture for improvised wargames. It didn’t always turn out well. We used a postcard of Prince Charles as a dartboard once and my mother was furious. Then there was the time we tried a science experiment and threw a large and heavy nine volt radio battery out of a window on the end of some discarded washing line. It snapped back at the end of its tether and smashed through the window of the lounge, in front of which sat my eighty year old grandfather reading his newspaper with a fag hanging out of his mouth. He was showered in glass but surprisingly unhurt although we were picking bits out of his silvery white hair for days afterwards.

So my staycations as a child were happy and occasionally eventful, spent in the company of my mates across the road Ian Wade (typical 1960s nuclear family), and Gary Robinson (abandoned by parents and living with his very strange Romanian granny). There was also the Osborne Family next door, very religious, who believed in saying grace before every meal, and did not believe in contraception. As a result there was Mr and Mrs Osborne and their six children. Every weekend I was invited to join them for Saturday morning pictures at the Woolwich Odeon. Mr Osborne kept old mattresses in the back of a battered transit van and we would drive down for a double bill plus some cartoons, which meant he didn’t need to pick us up for about three or four hours. I always presumed that during this time he and Mrs Osborne continued their adherence to not using contraception but I could be wrong.

We did try and go on holiday. My mum scrimped and scraped one year and we booked a chalet in holiday camp in Ramsgate for a week, but we had to come home after three days as my brother had an asthma attack. I wasn’t particularly bothered but I thought he was a bit of a wuss. Going home to South London wasn’t going to cure his asthma although I suppose he could have had an allergic reaction to the holiday camp bedding. Incidentally as an adult my brother got tested and they told him he was allergic to over forty different things including human hair. Ironic given that had a large and ungainly mop and could out-Bolan mark Bolan in the hirsutology department.

Aside from Ramsgate all I had managed was a fortnight in West Wittering with my dad and my stepmother. By then I was seventeen, and my three younger brothers were all ten or more years younger than me. We had a daily ritual on this holiday. After a late breakfast we would go to the beach with bottles of pomagne and vodka and get drunk whilst the boys made sandcastles, although we did pop into the pub near the beach on occasions as well. Then in the evening we would have supper and open cans of beer and get drunk again, although my dad did like the occasional Dubonet and bitter lemon.

I seriously flunked my mock A levels that year.

Anyway I graduated from Uni in 1980 having had very little experience of travel and never having been abroad. So I resolved to lose my travel virginity by going around Europe with a forty pound interrail card and one hundred pounds in spending money. Yes you heard me right. One hundred and fifty pounds for everything – accommodation, food and beer. My mate Roy and I did Europe on a fiver a day, or £5.75 if you include the cost of the railcard, which gave you unlimited travel for a month on the continental rail. We mostly camped or slept on overnight trains although my Uni room mate was Danish and put us up on his bedroom floor in Copenhagen towards the end. And we had a pension for two nights in the red light district of Barcelona because it was actually cheaper than camping. I think that was the only time we actually slept in beds.

This was a hugely liberating experience. An eye opener as they say. I was skinny as a rake, could drink my bodyweight in beer, and was quite happy roughing it. We made our way through Belgium, France and Italy, occasionally taking in museums and touristy places. Vienna reminded me of South London and it rained in Germany but my love of art was jump started in the Munich Museum of Modern Art where I saw Giacomo Balla’s “Abstract Speed The Car has Passed”, which remains one of my favourite works of art, obscure though it is. We finished up in Denmark then came back via France and the ferry to Dover.

We did meet a lot of people and had a few drunken nights. I remember being in a clinch with a beautiful young Irish woman but waking up the next morning in an empty tent, unable to remember if anything had happened. That was on a campsite in Rome, and things did get a bit out of hand. There were about twenty of us who had formed a drinking club on the first night. The second night was bonkers. We got so drunk that we broke into the camp shop when we ran out of beer and wine We didn’t steal anything or force entry, and we left the money on the counter. But they sent a security guard out to sort us, who unfortunately spoke no English. He waved a large pistol around and said something very unconvincing in Italian which we didn’t understand. Then someone shoved a beaker of wine in his other hand, he holstered his gun, sat down, and started drinking with us. The next day we were asked to leave the campsite but we had planned to move on anyway. Looking back on it I can understand them being pissed off but we really were just young and exuberant and completely harmless.

It was on a train a couple of days later that I met Bill Bryson. I can’t remember where we were going but he was heading down to Rome so we must have been going somewhere that was en route for both us. I didn’t know he was Bill Bryson as he wasn’t famous at tha point. He was a short, large and eccentrically dressed American who was travelling in the company of a tall, handsome blond beach guard looking friend. It was like that movie Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito, they were so different to look at you couldn’t quite believe they were hanging out together. Bryson had an annoying habit of taking out a notebook and making copious notes, and also was keen to interrogate us about where we had been and what we had experienced. We told him to be careful of the traffic in Rome. The streets were wide and Italian drivers were notoriously crazy. “The only way to cross the road safely is to wait until you see a nun, or better still a group of nuns” I said. “Stick with them. It’s the only thing drivers in Rome will swerve or stop for.” Years later I was reading one of his early books – Notes From a Small Island I think it was – and he recounted the story word for word. He also recounted how he was travelling with his tall good looking mate, which is when the penny dropped. It still makes me smile to think that I found my way into one of his books, albeit anonymously. If I ever meet him I shall demand he takes me out for a drink as he most definitely owes me one.

The only time I felt unsafe on my European travels that year was, ironically, in that most sedate and orderly city of Copenhagen. It was a lovely place but suffered one enormous disadvantage to the traveller on a budget: booze was horrendously expensive. In desperation we booked on to a tour of the Carlsberg brewery where we endured the usual lecture about ingredients, brewing vats, history of the factory and why Carlsberg was probably the greatest beer in the world (which of course it isn’t). At the end of the tour you were sat down with three small bottles of beer and some nibbles and given half an hour to drink up and leave. To our astonishment we found we were on a table of eight with six American teetotallers. They drank orange juice and we drank their beer as well as our own. Fast. I mean really fast. We rolled out completely drunk half an hour later, lit up in a nearby park, and just let the pleasant late June weather take us away. I don’t think either of us spoke for the next two hours. Or moved even.

Our Danish friend had arranged to meet us after he finished work and take us to Christiania. This was an old army camp that had been taken over by hippies in the 1970s and was run as an anarchist commune where you could buy booze and dope and show peace and love. Needless to say we were in a very loving mood after our pleasant afternoon courtesy of Carlsberg and enjoyed everything that Christiania had to offer. Which was fine but what we didn’t know was that the place had been increasingly infiltrated by biker gangs and hard drug dealers. Listen to this account from the Christiania wikipedia entry of what we were innocently wandering through:

“During the 1980s, motorcycle gangs fought their way into Christiania, seeking to gain control over the drug market. One gang in particular, Bullshit Motorcycle Club, managed to fight off a chapter of the Hells Angels to establish sole control of the drugs market by 1984. In 1987, after police found the dismembered body of a man under the floorboards of a Bullshitter bike shop inside Christiania, the Bullshitters were broken up and cleared from the area following a combined response from the community, the police and reprisals from the Hells’ Angels. From that point on, biker jackets were banned from the Freetown”

So there we were around midnight, off our heads, our Danish friend passed out and propped up against a wall, when a couple of guys came up to us and asked us where their drugs were. “Our friend gave you the money then you didn’t come back with the goods” they said, in perfect English having discovered we were not locals. We assured them we were not drug dealers. We were just two guys travelling around Europe having a good time. They seemed unconvinced and talked between themselves about whether to go and get their friends to sort us out, hoping this would intimidate us. Fortunately their friend came up at this point with his drugs and started telling them they had got the wrong guys. They seemed genuinely apologetic. We rolled cigarettes and gave them an account of our travels and they told us which way to walk to get out and find a taxi.

One thing about the Danish, even when they are discussing beating you up they are very polite.

Fast forward four years and I am with my first wife in Thailand. My world has changed. I have a job, a relationship and am a property owner. My travelling experiences I now very different. Although I am backpacking I am not camping. I have swopped the hurly burly of the rolled up canvass for the deep and satisfying pleasure of a bed every night, even if some of the places we are staying in are very basic. In one dodgy hotel I was dive bombed by giant bugs. Another was on the edge of a swamp and bizarrely a kitten came up through the toilet (which was just a hole connecting to a sewer pipe if you are wondering how even a small cat can get around an S-bend). We fed it tinned pilchards and wrapped it in a towel and took it outside.

Staying in Phuket was a bamboo hut by the beach with electricity that went off at 9pm. I would lie there and shine a torch into the rafters and watch the geckos chasing the cockroaches.

In those days Thailand was very popular with Germans. Particularly German men who liked Thai women. Or Thai boys. The local brothel owners used to vie for trade, sometimes violently. On one occasion a brothel was set alight and all the women died because they were chained up and no one had a key to release them. There we were in the stunning beauty of the Andaman Sea, every sunset a mind blowing spectacle of light, the white sand still unsullied by beach front hotels, but surrounded by the worst of human nature.

Our resort consisted of about twenty bamboo huts and a cafe where you could buy supplies, drink beer and get breakfast. At weekends the owner would take his moped into the nearby town and rent a movie on VHS tape for us to watch on his small TV. We would crowd around the bar and jostle for the best view. On one occasion he asked my opinion on what to rent from a long and badly typed and photocopied sheet which gave no information except the title of the film and the year it was made. “That’s a good one” I said pointing to a Mel Brooks film called The Producers so he duly rented it. That evening we settled down to watch but five minutes in I realised what I had done. Nearly all the audience were Germans and here we were watching a parody which included the famous song “Springtime for Hitler”.

I didn’t get asked to recommend any more films after that.

In Malaysia we had an even more bizarre experience in a place called Maxwell Hill just outside Taiping. This is a small mountain that you can get to the top of in a Land Rover that has to traverse seventy two hairpin bends. We stayed there for three or four nights in a tiny guest house where they basically cooked you whatever you fancied and you could just hang out without any distractions. No tv, no radio. Just beautiful scenery and lots of comfy seating. On our second night we were befriended by a Malaysian businessman who treated the staff terribly, insisted on plying us with drink and buying us dinner, and taking a range of mysterious pills which he washed down with Mekong whisky (a devastatingly potent brew distilled from rice wine). Before passing out he became very abusive and the staff all scattered and hid away.

The next morning we were eating breakfast with him when three policemen entered the room. They did not say a word but walked silently in our direction and the one in charge leaned over and placed some handcuffs on the table. I became aware that we were surrounded by a small group of spectators and was also aware that all three of us were being eyeballed, not just our crazy rich businessman friend. I honestly thought we were all going to be arrested. The silence was far more threatening than any words that I could imagine.

The manager came over and gestured and whispered. The lead policeman spoke to our businessman friend and after a few minutes he went quietly with them whilst staff packed his bags for him and they all went off down the hill in the Land Rover. Later I asked the manager how it had ended. “Turns out he is friends with the governor for this region. They dropped charges and took him to stay with him.”

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. That’s the same in any language, the world over.

On the other hand travel does mean you get to meet new people. My travels around South East Asia in 1983 and 1984 ended up in Hong Kong. In those days we never really worried about booking in advance and we always managed to find somewhere to stay but there was one exception. Rather stupidly we took the hydrofoil to Malacca for Chinese New Year not thinking that this would be a problem, but the fact is that half of Honk Kong went over there for a gambling weekend at this time of year. We wondered from place to place unable to find anywhere to stay but at midnight we ended up in a hotel where they said a guest was leaving early the next morning and we could have the room at 8am. We sat there feeling a bit sorry for ourselves when a bunch of fireman invited us to join them at their table in the restaurant. Now Malacca is a former Portuguese colony and there has been a lot of interbreeding and culturing exchange. The dinner party was celebrating one of the fireman’s birthdays, a young man who went by the unlikely name of Jose Chung. His features were essentially Chinese but he was more dark skinned and his face had some very European elements to it, particularly the nose and chin. We stayed with them until 3am, drinking beer and eating fish, which they seemed capable of eating in enormous quantities. Jose told me he had once done a cultural exchange and spent two weeks with an English family. He liked the English he said but not their cooking. “Every night, pie. Pie. That’s all they ate.” The expression on his face was of someone reliving a deeply ingrained traumatic experience.

In later years I travelled to Canada, America, Australia, Israel, and new European countries that I had not seen before such as Poland and Portugal. I visited Istanbul with its many wonders. I went to the Czech Republic and to Holland. But I never had any serious adventures. In Israel we accidentally drove into a secured residential compound and found ourselves locked inside a steel fortress, but we managed to get someone to let us out and it was a disturbing rather than scary experience. In Toronto I was mistaken for a food critic and plied with free wine. I was trapped for two weeks in Singapore in 20010, unable to return home because of an exploding Icelandic volcano spreading ash throughout European airspace. But these were all minor affairs. The older you get and the more responsible you become as a parent and someone with a career, the more your holidays reflect that new lifestyle.

My travel experiences as a young man were never seriously life threatening, although I think I had a lucky escape in Christiania. That could have been me dismembered under the floorboards of a biker gang’s hangout.

But one thing about travel is that it does personalise your experience of global politics. The world becomes more precious to you because you have been there and that is a good thing. Ignorance and lack of experience of other cultures breeds indifference and even xenophobia. When I get angry about Erdogan’s regime in Turkey it is made more real because I have been to Istanbul and seen the beauty of the place and experienced the warmth of its people. When a bomb exploded a few year’s in New York in the very district we had been eating in just days before, you could see the pictures in your mind’s eye. When you have been to Washington and seen the astonishing culture that is embedded in the Smithsonian and their democratic institutions you become still more angry with that bastard Trump and his republican co-conspirators. When you have been to Poland you rejoice all the more that they have democratically swung back from the precipice of right wing extremism. And with a daughter living in Canada I am very conscious of how global warming is affecting the environment and the beautiful countryside she lives in.

That is all from me, I hope you’ve found my small adventures interesting. The playout this week is Rotterdam by The Beautiful South, which contains a few pertinent lyrics if, like me, you have fond memories of seeing other countries and getting drunk in them. Have a great week and see you next time.

Closing remarks

The weekly eyecatching words podcast is assembled using Day One journaling software. Recording and production is done in Hindenburg Pro, and AI voices are by Revoicer. Sound effects are by Soundstripe. To see the written version of this podcast, and to view sound clips and additional material, go to www.eyecatchingwords.blog.