September 30th;
Gorgeous, lemon-sweet autumnal sunshine glitters off the buildings. Brief raspberry
soda with Ilan. I casually compliment our waitress on her elaborately decorated
fingernails, and it must have come across as snide, because she is silently furious.
Come to think of it, she has a point, since I inserted "Like the nails" into the
middle of ordering our drinks. Not sure what I was thinking to be so carelessly rude.
Ilan mentions growing numbers of Americans he claims are living in tents on outskirts
of towns in the US. In the evening, go to Venezia restaurant for a pizza, where I am
viewed indulgently as the intriguing Englishman who dines alone and brings his laptop
for the WiFi. A live singer entertains the restaurant with two hours of Italian pop
favourites, new and old, on his electric keyboard, including whatever
Procol Harum's
'Whiter Shade of Pale' becomes when translated into the language of lovers.
September 29th;
Journey to a large rather sad flat-pack-furniture warehouse called
Moebelix through a
quite chilly corner of the 10th district, full of people gloomily resenting the
approaching winter. One unwashed and irate man holds forth on the number 3 tram in
his best ready-to-fight-the-world voice while other proletarian passengers glare
silently out of the windows, wishing they were somewhere Mediterranean. I buy wheelie
coat rack in box. Flat lighting, no music, old staff members, sad feeling of a cluttered
imitation IKEA for poor people.
I take the thing home and it is quite easy to assemble, though feels a tad fragile
when in motion on its four castors.
September 28th;
Fascinating elevenses and later Indian curry with Rob, who tells me that by rights the
newly redone cafe in the big Andrassy bookshop where we are drinking together belongs
to him, since it was in his father's family, but his father couldn't be bothered to do
the necessary paperwork during the narrow window of opportunity in the early 1990s to
get it back out of Communist government stolen ownership after fifty years. We discuss
whether there is a formula for producing pop hits, Rob describes the film
'Inception'
with enthusiasm for its second half, and mentions an interesting article comparing the
end of slave-trading by Europeans, the end of duelling by European aristocrats, and
the end of footbinding among the Chinese. We talk also about endorphins and metabolic
rates. Drinks out late with Mystery Friend 2, who explains his theory with hand
gestures that if Johnny Towelhead continues to pop up in different places he needs to
be firmly but not too savagely bopped back down again each time. His mimed action
looks like a cross between playing the glockenspiel and gently smacking the tops of
boiled eggs with a spoon. As he does this 1-2-3-4 two-handed motion he opines that
Johnny Towelhead, like weebles that wobble but don't fall down, keeps on popping up,
but can keep on being bopped back down with a suitably restrained holding action,
for decades or centuries if need be. Other quotes: about one colleague
"She's a bit of a harridan, but in a good
way." He says an eccentric Swedish girl graphic artist he met in
London a couple of nights ago, describing her illustrated book about squirrels in Hyde
Park, told him that "One of the squirrels is called Keith.
He's named after the Great Cliffs of Dover." Of the GCHQ
cryptographer recently found
dead
inside a padlocked bag, "I find it a bit rum. We all zip
ourselves into a hold-all sometimes for a spot of sexual experimentation, but we
don't usually padlock it from the outside."
September 27th;
Another aerobics session, this time
Franc comes along.
We eat Turkish food afterwards. All my
lower back muscles hurt afterwards, but I seem not to have pulled
anything. We consider going to see Steven Z. for a bit of country sketching, and even
doing a weekend outing together next month to Gyongyos.
September 26th;
Rain & cloudiness. Exhibition
opening. Meet lots of people including Tom, owner of a yoga studio.
September 25th;
Pasta with Marguerite. We meet Peter, who tells us about abandoning his apprenticeship
with a harpsichord-builder in Switzerland and the joy of hay-making in southern
Transylvania. He is reading a biography of
an unusual early-20th-century woman.
September 24th;
More sleep. Finish the 2nd of the two books I borrowed off Ilan's shelf to his slight
puzzlement, 'Origins
of Virtue' by science writer Matt Ridley. Now this is a worthwhile
read. Ridley starts with an arresting contrast: Charles
Darwin's belief that nature evolves by self-interest, and the belief of his near-contemporary,
Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, that nature evolves - at least in part - by co-operation
between animals. Discussing the postwar gene-centred insights in evolutionary theory of
Williams, Trivers, and Hamilton, made famous to
a bigger audience by Dawkins, leads into more theoretical areas of how it's possible
to rigorously model organisms competing for space, mates, or other resources.
Ridley brings readers up to date with the latest state of play in the game-theory
tournaments held by computer scientist Robert Axelrod to determine which different
strategies for co-operation naturally gain ground in contests between programs for
repeatedly playing Prisoners' Dilemma. Rapaport's Tit-for-Tat still looks strong, but
things have moved on. Ridley's narrative moves between the mathematicians studying
nice and nasty strategies that self-interested creatures {or other units, like genes}
profitably follow, economists starting to lose faith in the self-centred rational
agent of neoclassical theory, anthropologists starting to discover that self interest
does underlie many basic social forms after all, and other ecological and zoological
tales about animals exploiting each other and co-operating with each other. Hobbes
turns out to have got it largely wrong, and Rousseau to have got it totally wrong, in
their attempts to explain how human societies are arranged and can be arranged.
Ridley shows how Rousseau's mythical noble savage, and the totalitarian politics Rousseau's
ideas made possible, is a misunderstanding of both the competition and co-operation
underlying real cultures, tribes, species, and ecosystems. The most seamless explanation
I've seen yet bringing together recent results in economics, politics, anthropology, and
ecology to reveal how and why we carry out altruistic acts, and do all we can to keep others
around us acting altruistically too.
September 23rd;
Sleep 10 hours. I think the endorphin deficiency idea might have something, since
this evening's session led by Annamari was difficult, but somehow not as draining as
Monday's. In the meantime tried 3 days of
DLPA.
Crowded class of 15 students, with one leaving after 20 minutes shaking her head.
September 22ndWhy
We Buy', by the enjoyably-named Paco Underhill. Mr Underhill
sounds like an affable, good-natured man with a penchant for careful observation. I
suspect sweet-natured but something of a bore. Starting out his career in sociology
and street design, making videos of how people use squares and streets, he gravitated
in the early 1990s to filming shoppers inside supermarkets and department stores,
gathering lots of data. With this he advises large retail clients on how to on the one
hand make things easier for their customers, and on the other hand how to make them buy
more produce. Some of this is common sense {old people buy more pet food, so don't put
it on the bottom shelf and force the elderly to clamber down on their knees to get at
it} and some of it is more unexpected {Americans veer to the right inside large shops}.
Underhill at times is positively evangelical in posing as an advocate of the shopper:
give them chairs to sit on, make changing cubicles pleasanter, make signs clear. Yet at
other times we glimpse him seeing shoppers the way his retail clients see them, as sales
fodder to be sold more than they can afford: he calls parents avoiding child-nag zones
an "alarming" "semi-revolt". He ponders how to subvert this unfortunate resistance
from the walking wallets. He probably feels there was no moral shift from youthful leftie
graduate-student work on better public spaces to his far more lucrative career
helping retailers milk shoppers and turn their children into brand-worshipping status
creeps. He's spent his career assisting and supporting manipulators, and hasn't noticed.
It all seems to him {judging from this book} part of one long wonderful adventure creating
a "new science". He has followed the American way of professional fulfilment through
mind-numbing but well-remunerated trivia. Retail is detail, after all.
September 21st;
Sleep 10 hours. After yesterday's session feel as if I got beaten up, with particularly
intense kicking of my stomach. Finish 1st document for
Lorant.
September 20th;
Sleep 9 hours. Lunchtime coffee with Kata, and then fruit tea with carbon offsetters
Levente & Rodrigo.
Evening aerobics with the alarmingly supple Kinga, first session in ten
days. Otherwise quite good day, though cold still hanging on. A decade-old piece by
Julian Barbour explains why he thinks
time doesn't exist.
September 19th;
Sleep 11 hours. When does this illness finish please? Christine O'Donnell looks to be
a fresh contender for the hotly-contested office of America's First Loony. Luckily, she's
keeping an eye on those Mouse People.
September 18th;
Rob sends me a 1960s Hungarian pop song - it looks to be from the same film as
Wednesday's. Zsuzsa Koncz looks adorably feminine & refined, singing
'I
Am Tired'. "I met a girl, she was sad. This is what she
said..." it starts in classic folk song manner.
September 17th;
Sleep 9 hours, like yesterday. Headcold not quite gone, and I feel tired all the time.
Talk to Regina about the .pdfs, which of course are accepted as fine by
other printers.
September 16th;
My printer really starts to annoy me. Four weeks after changing to them, they tell me
there is some problem with the .pdfs, and I have to "re-submit". They're certainly
unwilling to do any conversion for me. I could have had this information perhaps after
...one afternoon? To unwind, I go to the exhibition
of drawings Nannette curated, and meet some charming people who are very patient as I
drink random wine, eat snacks, and rant about
said printer.
September 15th;
Sleep 11 hours. Health slowly gets better. Pop song
'These
days anything we do' from 1960s Hepcat Hungary. Note dignified audience in suits &
cocktail dresses, ranks suddenly broken by one giggly air guitar right at
the end.
September 14th;
Sleep 9 hours. Totter off to some shops feeling frail, but less so than yesterday.
Sinus
pain still bad, but cough & headache improves. Diligently cook and eat my
aerobics-instructor-mandated plain rice, white meat, green veg three times during day.
September 13th;
Sleep 10 hours. Still ill. Fail to meet
Robin.
September 12th;
Sleep 14 hours. Feel very
ill.
I hate this beyond words.
September 11th;
Worrying sore throat and persistent headache. Could this be from getting wet shoes
yesterday? Oh bother. Take lots of vitamins and Marguerite & Theresa to 3-Girlfriend
Tamas's party in the 2nd district. I get us lost on the way, but the party is only just
gearing up when we arrive. Bump into surprising mix of comrades in the kitchen like
Todd, Bullet, Nannette,
as well as meeting Kata, who is looking into carbon-trading law.
September 10th;
Late breakfast and lazy lunch in rainy parts of Buda with Rob and his umbrella.
I recap my sailing holiday, he discusses what he suggests
makes
most women unhappy, and we catch up
on
Freud and political gossip
in Greece & Britain.
Back in the flat, without grinding my teeth, I phone up my new printers, and Sue
{"Hi Mark, I'm very sorry to hear that you feel this way this
is the first I have actually heard this our some of our large customers just to name
a couple like Cambridge University and Oxford University don't appear to have found
any issues however I will pass your comments onto the Web Committee."}
kindly talks me through the permitted way I'm allowed to
upload my .pdf files "through their system" {the .pdfs I sent them two weeks ago, and
that the other printer had four weeks ago}. I keep my temper and stay pleasant. Five more
working days for my files to be "processed", she says. Jolly good.
September 9th;
3rd morning back in Budapest, and the 1st morning where my apartment
is not gently swaying when I wake up, so
the effect of the boat must be wearing off now. Day of chores. Evening aerobics
with Annamari of the steel thighs. I ask her about food after: she suggests
rice, white meat, green veg, nothing else. In the sauna the stripper with the
excellent breasts is back from two months work in Greece. She seems glad to tell
me she's back on her grinding fitness routine and reassure me her small fluffy dog is
on good form. Last year one day in the fitness cellar she told me that "all men are
dogs." forcing me to retort "But you love your little Daisy!" She had to think for a
minute about that one. Now she says I should get some rice & chicken from the Chinese
takeaway opposite the gym, so I do.
Some Mike Flowers:
Wonderwall, and
Light My Fire. The real thing
had better music and worse visuals. What possessed Dusty Springfield to
wear this frock? The eyeshadow? The hair?
Spooky Little Boy Like You. Look away
from the screen.
September 8th;
Unintentionally funnier than usual
diary rant by some angry New York woman:
"DAY ONE 9 a.m.: Awake to dream about the last guy I was involved with,
Mr. Guy. In the dream we were having sex. I want him back. He has been avoiding me the past
two months and is unavailable. It doesn't help he lives a few blocks away. 9:15 a.m.: Throw
out vibrator. Can't stand looking at the pink leopard-skin any more, and I'm out of batteries.
I want a real man, not a battery-operated one. 11 a.m.: My love life is like a big missed
connection. I have never been with a man long enough to call him a boyfriend. I attract
unavailable men with whom I have sexual flings, or nice softies who I don't want to sleep
with." etc.
September 7th;
Budapest: Go to the djuice
cafe to use their WiFi hotspot and to gently show the blonde curvacious Evi that
my last two five-gigabyte amounts both mysteriously finished at around 4.5 Gb. She tries
to sound puzzled & surprised. My guess is that I am being subtly punished for having
dared to complain, but never mind. It's actually raining here today.
September 6th;
Tangier: We breakfast in the bazaar. Passing street peddlars utter random strings of English words
at us such as "fish and chips Rollo Marks & Spencers" in an effort to charm us into
examining their overpriced ugly produce. One man offers me sunglasses {which I need}
and quotes "20" for a pair I can just about accept, only saying when I hand him 20 dirhams
lent by Wendy that he actually meant 20 euros, not 20 dirhams. Since you can get sunglasses
in any chemists anywhere in Europe for five to ten euros, this is obviously about greed,
not honest trade. I give him the sunglasses back, and he follows me whining pathetically,
unable to believe I don't want to waste a quarter hour of my life haggling
him down to twice what the crap shades are worth instead of four times what they're worth.
Martin tells me that the Beats originally jokingly named themselves to mean they were the
"deadbeats" or "losers", and they loved this town, coming here to meet
Paul Bowles,
William
Burroughs, and so on. Get to the sleepy Tangier airport. A man takes 30
minutes to book in four people, but is sweet about my luggage being over the weight
limit. We shift some items into my hand luggage to get the hold bags under 20 kilos.
There's a 3/4 hour delay and a brief chat with an airport lady who sells me some sunglasses
for a third what the street vendor wanted. In hot sun, I board my flight to Madrid, and
find myself sitting with a cheerful pair of Arab-looking brothers who are likely
lads brought up in London. One, with his likeable English girlfriend, is an Easyjet
steward not on duty today, and tells us all how the plane is working, speaks the staff
announcements along in chorus, and generally adds some liveliness, though he's a bit
repetitive in style. A half-Italian air hostess with remarkable eye
makeup comes up to compliment me on the eight words of French I spoke to her while
getting on the plane, saying she thought I was French. I'm very slow off the mark
sometimes. Only a smirk from her fellow steward and a flinch of embarrassment on her
part tells me that she is hitting on me, as Marguerite would phrase it. We land at
Madrid. Airport not as remarkable as I hoped, though the signage is in those pastel
colours they like in Spain, pink, orange, that soft pale green, and so on. While
queuing at Madrid luggage check-in, I finish Martin's copy of
'The
History of Sexuality: an Introduction' by Michel Foucault,
translated into English by Robert Hurley. Foucault's main argument is that the account
that said that the rise of capitalism coincided with increasing social control over
sexuality gets it wrong. For those of us who never bought that story the first time round,
the news that Foucault is helping us see through it might seem a bit late in the day, but
doubtless he is helping someone inch closer to clear thought, however circuitous the route.
Foucault says rather that the last three centuries have been a time of
growing discussion of sexuality while pulling it into the framework of science and medicine.
He is much more in his element when saying what is not happening, though.
"In point of fact, this power neither had the form of the law, nor the
effects of the taboo.... It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of
specification of individuals... It did not set up a barrier, it provided places of maximum
saturation." His style has this rhythm: he says what something is not,
and then he caps it with a sphinxic phrase {'places of maximum saturation', 'mode of
specification of individuals'}. Sometimes he leads with one of these deep-sounding teasers
{"There are not one,
but many silences..." he starts one sentence} and one feels a bit awkward
interrupting to ask something as naive as what this actually means? As far as I can
see, Foucault has stripped out all the boring bits of Freud and Marx dull enough to make
actual claims, however incoherent, and left behind a kind of shimmering web
of interlocking suspicions {not unlike Lacan's rubbery surfaces of metaphor}. Pure power,
pure knowledge, pure paranoia, a deliciously eerie
sense that everything is interconnected, seamless, interdefining, and a bit dodgy.
MarxFreud, smoothed to creamy consistency in the food blender of Parisian dialectic. As, I
suppose, an advanced form of the Hegelian idea-become-thing, his peculiar, rather
charming, word pictures tossed into the text at places with fake carelessness are really the
strange attractors {sorry, couldn't help myself} around which the reader's attention is
supposed to orbit, mothlike. I'm sure these are the bits that some readers fall in love
with so they decide to swallow the rest. "These attractions, these
evasions, these circular enticements have traced around bodies and sexes, not
boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and
pleasure" (his italics). An intriguing & flirtatious image, and surely
as much about Foucault's own style as about the topic of the book.
Flight to
Budapest delayed. We are in the plane on the tarmac in Madrid, and they tell us that
French air-traffic controllers are striking, and our take-off will be delayed by two
and a half hours. I wish I had brought playing cards. A party atmosphere breaks out on
the plane, and I doze a little across three seats, belt brackets digging into my back,
while the row of Spanish girls in front chirp away excitedly. Later on, during the
flight, the calmer drone of Hungarian dominates as the Latin chicas all sleep.
Get out of Budapest airport around 2.45am. Find the
Wizzair
bus I paid for is nowhere to be seen, no signs,
no staff, no-one answers the phone. Arrive back at flat {two herbs lived, one died}
noticing the city is now actually chilly. Two weeks back it was too hot for just shoes.
Now it's cold enough I need shoes & socks.
September 5th;
Early on deck in bright sunshine I finish Martin's copy of
'Reflections
on the Revolution in France' by Edmund Burke.
The big problem for people reading Burke today is that most of us simply cannot believe
there is an intellectual case for conservatism. Even conservatives themselves tend to prefer
a cheerful anti-intellectualism to trying to justify their view as a set of defensible,
consistent beliefs. Meanwhile, most liberals and left-wingers have so long taken for
granted that liberalism is the very essence of thought, that to think is to be liberal,
that they are often stunned, even indignant, on being told that there is such a thing as a
conservative intellectual position. Deeper still, the engineering/physics metaphor has gone
so deep that most people cannot even recognise something as a
description of society unless it describes a "system". That is to say something dynamically operating on something like mechanical or
electronic logic. This also means describing society - like an engine or physical law -
in terms of desired
outcomes and changes the system can be induced to bring about.
Whereas, in contrast to mechanistic models, Burke persistently describes
society as a kind of growth, like a tree. It might need pruning or supporting, but always
refers both forwards to as yet unborn members of that society and backwards to dead ancestors
who were part of it in the past. The mismatch with free-market liberals like Smith, with
social-contract-will-of-the-people revolutionaries like Rousseau, with mechanistic
utilitarians like Bentham is almost total. Worse than a different theory, Burke is working
with a complete different metaphor. While Rousseau, Smith, Bentham seem to occupy all points
of the modern political spectrum, Burke seems to belong nowhere most people brought up today
can even recognise as a legitimate political position. In the 'Reflections' he
defends rotten boroughs, he defends the established church, he defends hereditary peers in
the House of Lords, he defends the Catholic church in France when he isn't even a Catholic.
I hadn't realised until I read this properly just what a total culture shock this book must
be for someone now who comes to it unprepared. It just doesn't look like anything a
modern could possibly label as political philosophy: something we would now call proper
political philosophy should be something claiming to analyse society as if it was a
natural-science phenomenon like a force-field or a geological trend, and would then use
that analysis to suggest improvements. The shock of Burke is that he upends what is now
the conventional view, that the more powerful and established classes somehow tricked
or bullied their way into power. Burke actually says that the more powerful and established
groups represent whatever it is that enabled that society to slowly improve
to its current state of wealth, justice, and peace, and that that process of improvement
is all about continuity, about taking the past with you into the future. Burke in other
words rails against the revolutionary belief in wiping the slate clean, in trying to go
back to square one to start again. He repeatedly says trying to "build" a new society
from first principles or even radically change an old one is dangerous, is a route to
tyranny, sets a society back rather than moves it forward, and events proved him right.
This book predated by a few months the show trials and mass murders {hundreds of thousands
of French civilians slaughtered: as shocking for people then as the Nazi death camps were
for the 20th century} of the Paris Terrorists, which almost alone among observers at the
time Burke predicted. The dreadful events of the 20th century
are all seen coming here: Lenin, Nazism, Mao, Pol Pot. The society Burke lived in,
Britain, by now one of the only European societies left that has avoided a violent revolution,
constantly surprises observers with its resilence, while fragile France, Russia, Germany,
Spain, repeatedly jumped into great leaps forward, producing periods of apparently
admirable progress, only to lapse repeatedly into violence. Even the US, the current largest
country most like Britain, socially looks increasingly brittle. America's sclerosis &
hysteria compares poorly to Canada or Australia which seem weak at first glance, but far
more integrated beneath that surface. France, in many ways still an admirable, rich
country, has, since the revolution which so appalled Burke, been invaded four times,
been partitioned once, fought to hang on to its overseas empire {with far more anguish and
bloodshed than Britain when we more peacefully relinquished our larger overseas empire},
gone through seven constitutions, came close to a rebel military coup as recently as 1961
and {in my fairly long view} still has not recovered from seizing on Louis XVI's
liberal concessions and using his offer of compromise to overthrow him.
Burke very astutely warns "Kings will
be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle." I
can't think of a phrase which better explains the dedicated ruthlessness of leaders like
Brother Number One of the Khmer Rouge who took as the chief cause of his party's failure
to build a new Cambodia from scratch that they didn't kill enough Cambodians.
Once you see habits like social rank or deference to inherited institutions as nostalgic or
insulting to a free citizen, why should whoever is the ruler be so sentimental as to rely
on anything but raw power to keep his position safe?
We go ashore for the breakfast which two people said will be served at the
Royal
Yacht Club de Tanger at 8am, though this changes to 11am, and then to never, since
the cafe does not open all day. It is Ramadan, so we must apparently be tactful about
eating and drinking in daylight, though some restaurants are open. Wendy & I explore the
narrow streets of the Medina market bazaar/kazbah area. Wendy's Egyptian Arabic from her
decade in Cairo sounds confident. I have a strange feeling I have seen the bazaar already
in films and books. The pestering from market vendors is much less persuasive, charming,
or fun than I imagined though. We find an Anglican church, built in the 1880s, with gravestones
of folk like 'Lady Barnett'. The church has Moorish decoration inside, the Lord's Prayer
in Arabic on tiles around the altar area, and faces Mecca. Later, alone in the market
I acquire a hanger-on who tries me in English & Spanish before I reply in French, on
which he starts a kind of be-my-friend monologue in French while trailing along beside
me. I'm struck by how boring what he says is, and how utterly uninterested he is in listening
to what I say to him except to latch onto it in an effort to get me to go somewhere with
him, a bit like a low-grade chatbot. Suddenly I realise that he is a mobile version of the
Pub Bore, albeit one who perhaps doesn't drink beer. The explanation I've always seen
before is that this is driven by desperation, yet I've never met people so
seemingly bad at selling, or more likely just unwilling to learn what the tourists they
hope to attract want. Some clear price labels would quadruple the traffic of any of these
shops, so I stop believing
this is about what works, or what they have to do. They're unobservant and uninterested
in what customers like for a reason. The reason is they're focused on making an easy mark-up
on their own terms, one or two fat deals, not in learning how to sell properly.
No wonder my Jewish friends are so
contemptuous of Arabs if this fawning idleness is typical of how they do business.
I'm also struck by how much tat there is in the bazaar, how few of the gorgeous, rich
colours and fabrics I half-expected, but rather masses of tasteless rubbish in clashing
hues and twiddly decoration. The stuff here is very similar to the sickly,
sugary-coloured textiles for sale on the Indian-&-Pakistani-populated Curry Mile in
Rusholme, Manchester.
September 4th;
For over a week now, I've been sleeping up on deck each night, and it is rather wonderful.
After late drinks on the boat last night with Mike, I wander around Gibraltar this
morning and find an Apple shop that says my laptop's latest problem I'm experiencing
here is called a
"kernel
panic". We set sail around lunch for Tangier to catch a tidal
conveyor belt along the north African coast. This time I am wearing the strange little
wrist straps that keep a plastic button pressed into each wrist pulse, also taking two
different sea-sickness remedies, and also eating raw ginger. I feel fairly good on
deck, and Wendy & Martin point out with their sharp eyes how a school of dolphins
{or are they
porpoises?}
are swimming alongside the boat a few inches under the waves.
It feels like they want to guide us, but is rather more
likely that they are like cyclists slipstreaming in the wake of a lorry to gain speed.
Just before dusk we reach Tangier. The Moroccan flag is a yellow pentacle on a red field.
In the part of the port we moor in, fishing boats are tied up to each other,
creating a kind of giant raft of boats roped together. Rather than being double or
triple parked, we are perhaps 12 vessels deep into the harbour, dry dock hidden
behind a thick crowd of other boats. No water or electricity is immediately available
to connect the boat to, and as we move it into place the gear cable snaps inside Martin's
boat's motor, ramming us into another boat. Luckily this only breaks a paddle on the
inflateable dinghy which, hung on the back of our vessel, acts as a giant rubber cushion
saving either boat from serious damage. I volunteer to stay on the boat while Martin &
Wendy go ashore in said dinghy for after-dark drinks at the cafe of the 'Royal
Yacht Club de Tanger' {sic} a couple of hundred yards away from our boat.
September 3rd;
A lazy afternoon to
Gibraltar,
where we sail around the great rock, its top strangely
misted in a big soft cloud sitting on it like a cushion. 45 minutes to go round it
as sun sets among anchored cargo ships out at sea. We dock in the marina right by the runway
where Tornado fighter jets take off and land with much bravura and loudness. As we watch
the runway, Wendy tells me that the Papuan Pidgin phrase for 'helicopter' is 'mixmaster belong Jesus Christ'.
September 2nd;
In Estepone, do more bureaucracy for the new printers, signing and scanning a contract with them,
and find a pharmacy with other interesting anti-motion-sickness remedies. Martin & I meet Wendy &
Nick {who once sailed the Atlantic} in the evening. It's at Nick's nearby home she has been
couch-surfing
for several days. Nick seems concerned by my stories of sea-sickness
until I reassure him I am not coming on the transatlantic trip in this boat Martin & Wendy are doing
in a couple of months. By night the four of us go out for a meal involving lots of sausage, special
ham, and red wine. Wendy is cheerful & confident, with stories from growing up in India,
Papua New Guinea, and Cameroon. She & her brother hiding cigarettes in certain bushes
on the tea plantation so their parents wouldn't know they smoked.... sawing a harpoon down to length
so they could fit the man with it through his shoulder into the car to bush hospital.
September 1st;
We set off in bright sunshine. Martin detects a lobster pot dragging under the boat,
turns off the engine {no wind today either} and goes under with scuba gear and a fearsome-looking
knife to cut the rudder free. I stagger from side to side of the stationary boat as it rocks around.
I vomit over the side into exquisite green-blue water, feeling worse than I have all week.
Martin emerges from under the boat, lobster pot successfully detached, and we set off again. At one
vaguely sickly moment, I see a dolphin, barely twenty feet away, arcing out of choppy sea and back
in again. We pull in five hours later at another
port, the one where we are to meet Wendy. The corner bar facing a row of palm trees and
the sea, right under the blue-painted stucco archway into the marina, buzzes with energy
and good-looking Spanish girls. As the sky darkens I slowly recover from the day's nausea over
lemonade beers and dates wrapped in bacon.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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