Snapshot Log II
6/12/19
You know it is already 2 years since I wrote the words to Snapshot Log which turned out to be a record of life 17/11/17 - 6/12/17 as lived by me and the things I got up to. Now today is 6/12/19 and I think I will use this as a start for Snapshot Log II if you like, for want of something better to call it. Another Snapshot then, for however many days I chose to use it, the log that is, will probably go for something like 2 weeks if I have the puff for it and the words keep coming. An update on how things stand. Back at the time of the first Snapshot I was 18 months into this period of my life since pulling the plug on Wisdom Books. An event which saw me walk out of there, that place in Ilford, for the very last time in the middle of 7/16 and by which point the company had ceased to exist. No regrets there, I can tell you.
In the first Snapshot I was doing stuff like swimming, writing up my India notes for my website Traceless Path, doing a writing course at a place called City Lit in Covent Garden, a course which went by the name of Developing Your Writing. Well, just to let you know I'm still doing the swimming and still doing the writing. In fact as I write this I have just come back from my weekly swim at the London Aquatics, today being a Friday which actually as far as my swims go is a little unusual because normally it is Wednesdays when I got for a dip, if dip is the right word, considering it is 30 lengths of swimming in a full size Olympic Pool that we are talking about. Anyway the reason for it being Friday this week for my swim is that I was still playing catch up from last week which saw me have to go all the way up to Newcastle Upon Tyne for the funeral of a member of the family.
So as a consequence last week I had to go on a Friday and now this week as well has seen me do the same thing although of course this week I could have flipped back to a Wednesday if I had wanted to but the fact of the matter was I didn't as I needed a full seven days to recover from my last trip to the pool. Guess at some point in the next week or so I will have flip again a couple of days back or else I could find the final Friday on 20/12 a little too late to get to as by then the kids will have broken up from school and the Aquatics schedule might have changed. That is how things go these days, life being a bit of a run around, but you know I can hardly complain. Here I am at a good few months past 57 years of age and just having little issues of pool swim time-tabling to worry about...I mean, how low key is that?
As far as the writing courses at City Lit are concerned they are still going on, or what I mean by that is I am still taking them. Just finished an 11 week course called Autobiographical Writing and the tutor for that was Nick Barlay. Last year at the same time - Sept end to Dec start - I did another 11 week course with the title of it being Creative Non-Fiction and the tutor was Paul Laffan. A couple of years ago now, as mentioned during writing my first Snapshot, was the Developing Your Writing course I did with Caroline Natzler. So there you go, they have cost me more than a buck or two but I must admit I am pretty happy with the results so far, I mean, can't you see the improvement? Ha! Let's see, now that we are here, the first 11 week course I did came in at £199, that one with Caroline Natzler which began in Sept 2017, the second one I completed, which went through April end - July start 2018, was another 11 week course with a guy by the name of Nick Field and called Ways Into Creative Writing also costing £199. Sept 2018 saw me do the aforementioned Creative Non-Fiction with Paul Laffan, again £199 for 11 weeks, now finally this one which I have recently completed, the one with Nick Barlay, Autobiographical Writing, which came in at £219 for the 11 weeks. This means that over a period of two years the cost of these 11 week courses has gone up by 20 quid which is not too bad when you think about it, I mean if it is a 20 quid hike every couple of years I guess I can live with that. Apart from these four 11 week courses, I also did a 6 week course in late Spring 2019 with Caroline Quinn who was the tutor for that one which was also called Autobiographical Writing and setting me back £119.
7/12/19
So the idea here is...to keep on truckin', to write what I write in this period an' then say so be it, in other words jus' let der fucken words flow whether they be fast or whether they be slow.
Two years now since the 1st Snapshot Log and I guess in many ways in that intervening time it has been more of the same in terms of the things I do in my life. Helping Dawa Dolkar with her work being probably my number one priority, doing my writing number two, having a daily meditation schedule set in place at number three, well not number three actually, as in many respects my meditation schedule is number one, or at least that is what I would like to think it to be.
Meditation is the first thing I do each day after getting up. I walk straight out of our bedroom into the shrine room where I stare out the window for a few minutes whilst breathing in some fresh London air before I set myself to sit. Guess it is a case then, over 3 and a half years into this lifestyle, of having made my bed and now lyin' in it. That is how things are, I am not workin', not pullin' in a wage by way of walkin' out the door every mornin' with some place to go, just getting by on whatever pocket money I get from Dawa Dolkar. Unless I want to go out there and change things for myself I have to make peace with it - this situation - and have no complaints. Not that I do have much in the way of complaints really, as apart from those almost inevitable faint lingering doubts that I might be doing things wrong, I have nothing to really worry about. Anyway those thoughts are almost bound to be there whatever I do, so it is a case of just having to live with them, accommodate them, give them enough space to vent and be done with it. And besides, the choices I have made do mean that after waking up I have time for meditation, time which I truly value.
In many ways I think I could characterise this phase, this period of my life, by way of saying -
The less that is done the more that I do.
Or to put it another way, if you ask the question, "Well hey, what you been doin'?" The answer might well be "Yeah, been busy doin' nuthin'!" By nothing I mean something along the lines of not having a nice job and bringing home the bacon, not getting accepted onto the programme for the first manned mission to Mars, no, nothing in regard to those pursuits. But that means plenty actually in terms of doing things like my own writing about my travels in India, writing about the early period of my life, my meditation and also trips I have made within the UK. As far as all that is concerned, well, I think I have done plenty over the last few years.
Let's see, since the last Snapshot Log I have got my website Traceless Path up an' runnin', chucked a blog on to it called Traceless Trails and then for the majority of this year 2019 I have been immersed in writing up an account of the first 27 years of my life in the form of something called Golden Telescope which is actually big enough to be a book. So yeah, plenty to go at there I think. Oh yeah, there has also been writing up the notes to my last trip to India made at the beginning of the year, notes which take the name South India Diary 2019, so not bad really, not bad at all, whether it all amounts to much in terms of quality however is another matter, but I guess there ain't much I can do about that.
Besides all those aforementioned things there is also the walking, I do plenty of walking, or at least I try to, in fact so much so that I am kind of obsessed in regard to hitting the target of at least 6,000 steps a day on my Samsung Fitness step counter but preferably more, sometimes much more. Poundin' those streets, walkin' the pavements, sometimes as a city slicker right in the middle of town, other times just a local Woodford boy hittin' the back roads an' cut through passages away from the traffic in the simple quest to get from A - B. Guess in many ways you might say I have something of a mathematical relationship to the universe, by that I don't mean anything too complex for anyone else to understand, but more simply the fact that to quite a large degree a certain amount of the activities which I perform during the course of my day to day life have a set of numbers, digits, attached to them.
As well as the steps and that necessity to always hit my daily target, there are my morning meditation sessions in which I still employ the tool of breath countin' so as to provide myself a line to hold onto in terms of object concentration. Breath counts as in the inhalation - exhalation - retention of the air passin' through my body, where a 324 count means approx a 1.5 hour sit, whereas a 108 count might mean something like 30 - 35 mins depending on the speed and depth of the breathing. Similarly with my weekly swimming sessions down at the Aquatics Centre in Stratford Olympic Park my time in the pool is regimented in a way which is given over to numbers. This is due to the fact each session sees me swim 30 lengths of the 50 metre pool, which means it is a 1500 metre swim, or 1.5 km, taking an average of 50-55 mins. Breakin' it down further, from those 30 lengths there will be 24 swum breast stroke and 6 front crawl with lengths 5/9/15/19/25/29 given over to the front crawl and the increased effort on my part which goes with it in order to try to generate more speed.
8/12/19
Guess since having the idea to do this Snapshot Log II I have gone over my notes to Snapshot Log made 2 years ago and here's a funny thing I've found, well not that funny really but to me at least mildly interesting; that 2 years ago I was getting up for meditation sessions around 8 am whereas now it is around 7! Think it has been this time in the morning for a while and that might be because I haven't been burning the midnight oil so much by way of going to bed at 1 am every night like I was back then. Crashing around midnight maybe, oh yeah that’s for sure, but not much later, so that has meant waking up earlier, which I think is a good thing because when it comes to meditation I always find the morning times the best, and in regard to that the earlier the better pretty much suits me fine.
The last week or so I have been finding a little bit of resistance to staying on the button as far as my concentration when meditating is concerned, been almost driftin' off and having to make a real effort to pull myself back again. Think it might be to do with the fact that a week or two ago things were - at least on my level of livin' - pretty busy, such as having a party here at our house which saw a gathering of 27 people. There was a hell of a lot of effort expended in the cleaning, cooking and preparation departments in order to get it right, but at the end of the day I think it was worth it, although in terms of energy maybe there has been a sting in the tail.
So there was the party for the neighbours and then a few days after that the big drive up to Newcastle in order to attend a funeral due to the passing away of Roger "The Dodge" Colling, husband of my dad's cousin Catherine, daughter of his mum's sister, Aunty Mary. Being in his 80’s and living down in South Wales, dad was not up to making the journey himself so it fell to me to go by way of hauling myself up and down the length of the A1 from London. Not that I minded if truth be told, as although it did involve a very early start and a 6 hour car ride before I got to my destination, I do like to get on the road every once in a while and see a bit of the country. Even so there was initially much to see as I set off at 5.30 in the morning when it was still dark and then 2½ hours later at 8 it was still a case of not much happening as far as the light of the day was concerned. Think this might have had something to do with the fact it was a gloomy grey November day in what was pretty much the middle of the dark season, but there you go, not much that could be done about it and in all honesty I don't think it detracted much from my enjoyment of being behind the wheel and burnin' a bit of rubber.
Needless to say there was music on the sound system of my Prius for company, with Van Morrison's new album getting a couple of spins - Three Chords & The Truth - a return to form for Van shall we say, easily his best album in years, with one absolute stone cold classic on it in the form of Dark Night of the Soul. Tremendous stuff and sometimes when I listen to Van when he is on song I pretty much find myself agreeing with every sentiment he cares to express by way of his words and music, which on this album at least has seen him return to a Celtic direction and for me at least it is where Van shines like the sun, especially when he has some good material to play with and on this album he most certainly does. Nice one!
The Dodge was Catherine's husband for over 40 years and actually I remember as a 15 year old boy going to their wedding in 1977, the year of punk, a wedding which took place up in Gosforth, the area of Newcastle in which they lived. At the time it was a big family get together and I was living with my parents, sister and family dog in Beccles in Suffolk, a period of my life which I have chronicled in the Badlands of Beccles section of Golden Telescope. The Dodge had been ill for quite a few years, in fact it was 6 years since I had last seen him which had been at Aunty Mary's funeral, Aunty Mary mother of Catherine who had lived next door to her on Kenton Lane in the Kenton area of Newcastle for over 30 years. At that time The Dodge had just come out of hospital where he had spent 3 months in the ICU of Newcastle Infirmary battling and finally recovering from septicaemia. The struggle had taken a lot out of him and I remember that when I saw him back then he had looked like a changed man, almost dare I say it, like a dead man walkin'.
Well, unfortunately 6 years later that has indeed turned out to be the case, as just over a month or so ago The Dodge was admitted to hospital again with suspected pneumonia but this time he did not have the strength to fight it and just over two weeks later he passed away. So that was the end of The Dodge. As far as I was concerned he was a nice, quiet man with an impressive collection of tropical fish in a couple of tanks in his house, a beautiful back garden where the grass was always blade perfect and a really rather stunning home entertainment system in his lounge which played through a monster pair of speakers. More important than all these things however was the fact The Dodge was a kind, loving husband to Catherine and that as a married couple they spent over 40 very happy years together. Nevertheless certain members of the family never thought much of The Dodge with some of them even calling him the Funky Gibbon, I might have even called him that myself when I was younger, although I have to say I don’t quite remember.
On the road it was dark going up until around 8 or so in the morning. At 6.45 I made a pit stop at Cambridge Services on the M11 where I had coffee, Egg McMuffin and hash brown from a Macdonald’s which besides a Costa was pretty much the only place open in the whole damn building apart from the bogs. Whilst the egg McMuff and hash brown were good, the coffee was pretty crappy, but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad I suppose and anyway, I was soon back on the road again. A few more miles past the services I joined the A1, the road which was to then take me all the way to Newcastle. There was another stop for me at Wetherby Services just past York heading north, where I had a cup of tea at a Costa only to later on have to pull into Durham Services for another pit stop because I was bursting for a piss due to the tea I had drunk back at Wetherby. Part and parcel of being in my late 50’s I guess, the limitations of the body slowly but surely kickin' in by way of my prostrate, or at least that was what I suspected it to be, even though I didn’t have any direct evidence. Even when all these stops were factored into the equation, by 11.30 I was still able to be on Kenton Lane where Catherine lived, which meant the whole trip had taken me almost exactly six hours.
Since the cremation of The Dodge was not until 3 pm and the small gathering of family members at Catherine's was not due to start for another hour or so I took the opportunity of seeking out the hotel I'd booked in the Jesmond area of town which was nearby. Despite the fact it was too early for me to check in - that would not be possible until after 3pm - I wanted to know the route from Kenton as the chances were I would not be going there until it was dark and in the middle of the Newcastle rush hour. It took a few twists and turns along the way but I located the Caledonian Hotel without too much of a problem and from the outside it looked not bad at all, made me more than happy when I reflected on the fact I'd booked a single room there on Booking.com for just 50 quid including breakfast. Can't really do better than that under the circumstances. After checking out the route to the Caledonian I was able to drive back to Kenton Lane feeling pretty sure I would remember the way there in the dark, pleased with myself for being organised enough to do the reconnaissance.
Back on Kenton Lane and just before knocking on Catherine's door I filled up the Prius with fuel at a Tesco Express garage next to a big old pub called the Duke of York which was where the reception after The Dodge's cremation was going to be. Since I was also feeling pretty hungry at this point and I was unsure of what I might get at Catherine's beyond a cup of tea, I took the opportunity to buy myself a Tesco Finest turkey sandwich for 3 quid which I wolfed down in my car in a parking bay on the forecourt. It was very wet weather, it had been wet pretty much the whole way up and on top of that when approaching Newcastle going over the river a thin greyish mist had appeared which pretty much set the tone for what was a very grey, very dark late November day in the far north east of the country where people would soon be gathering to mark the death of The Dodge. Long ago there was that Lindisfarne song -
the fog on the Tyne is mine all mine!
the fog on the Tyne is all mine!
After I rang the bell Catherine welcomed me in and offered me a cup of tea. She didn't think to ask how my journey was and that I had been on the road for six hours in pretty piss poor weather, but she's like that, it just goes with the territory. As far as she was concerned it was as if I'd just popped over from Gateshead on the other side of the River Tyne rather than having driven all the way up from London. No matter, no surprises there for me if truth be told, I was hardly expecting her to be any different and in truth it really didn't matter anyway. I had arrived safely and I would be there with her when it came to getting into the funeral cars to go to the cremation of The Dodge at around 2.30 pm.
Guess it was about an hour later when dad's brother my Uncle Nick and his daughter my cousin Jo turned up. They had driven from South Wales and taken pretty much the same amount of time as I had coming up from London. Like me they were spending the night in Newcastle and then driving back the next day, having booked themselves into the Gosforth Park Hotel just off the A1, a place I had stayed in a couple of times before over the course of the last ten years or so when coming up for the funerals of Uncle Tom and Aunty Mary. Now that the three of us were there we would be the only family members Catherine would have at the service in the Crematorium but she told us there would be plenty of The Dodge's friends and acquaintances who would be coming along. As far as I could tell Catherine was pretty happy that we had all made it up there so as to be with her and there is no doubt it would have made a sad sight if she had just been there on her own with no other family beside her.
In the lounge of Catherine's house I stood and talked with Uncle Nick and Jo for a while, caught up with them as it had been some time since I had last seen them, nearly a couple of years in fact. Nick looked tired as it was a long way up for him and now that he was heading into his late 70’s he was pretty much entering the same territory as my dad was in as far as bodily aches and pains were concerned, the trials and tribulations of physical mortality becoming more apparent. Of course the two of them were a few more years down the road than me but nevertheless I could understand the sentiment when he told me that he felt wiped out. I mean things had gone pretty smoothly for me on the way up, I had obeyed the code of the road and all that, but all the same I knew it would only have taken one or two false moves and I might well have found myself in a different situation. Moves which are age related more than anything else. Taking my eye off the ball by way of making a wrong turn, a mistake when overtaking and things might well have been a different story. The shadows are creepin' in is what I am trying to tell you.
The closer it got to 2.30 the more nervous I became that the hearse and funeral cars might not arrive on time and that we would be late for our appointment at the Crematorium, but as it turned out I needn't have worried, sure enough by 2.35 the cars had arrived with the coffin of The Dodge in the back of the lead limo surrounded by wreaths and flowers. We all bundled into the limo behind it - Catherine, Uncle Nick, Jo, myself and a girl by the name of Victoria who was Catherine's god daughter and a girl, or woman I should say, as she was 28, whom I never heard anyone ever mention before. Not that it was really my business to know anyway, at the end of the day I was just a distant relative of Catherine who lived at the other end of the country, someone whom she had appointed as executor of her will a few years ago. Nuthin’ more than that. I had no idea what the day to day circumstances of the lives of Catherine and The Dodge had been like all the way up in Newcastle, the place where they had lived all their married life. So Victoria joined Catherine and the three of us in the limo as well before we began the crawl up Kenton Lane behind the hearse and then through some other decidedly dreary outskirts of Newcastle on the way to the crematorium.
It really was a dark, wet late November day with a chilly wind blowing in off the North Sea thrown in just for good measure, and I couldn't help thinking to myself that The Dodge must indeed have been a true Geordie as the weather conditions were perfectly set up for him. You really could not have had things more typical for that time of year up in the North East and all on the day when people were gathering to say their final goodbyes. Turned out I sat in the front of seat of our limo next to the driver, who was an ex-policeman doing this kind of work freelance style so as to earn a bit of pocket money. He told me the funeral director was an old friend of his and if he ever needed extra hands he would give him a call to see if he was available to do a pick up or drop either to a church or crematorium. That was the deal so there he was, sitting behind the wheel and taking us all to Newcastle Crematorium for the cremation of The Dodge.
Our driver was actually quite a nice guy and he went into the ins and outs with me of what was involved in being a driver of a funeral limo, the main one being that you had to get your head around the fact you were driving a car which was at least twice the length of a normal one, if not more, and which therefore threw up issues of manoeuvrability from time to time which were essential to get to grips with. There was also the fact work could be somewhat seasonal and that the beginning of winter time usually saw a spike in terms of people kicking it, especially the old, as if they had somehow decided to throw in the towel, take a pass on the gruelling ordeal of getting through another cold, dark winter in Newcastle where night seemed to be perpetual. Certainly it looked like we were now hitting one of those periods as when we drew into the grounds of the Newcastle Crematorium it was pretty packed with funeral cars and people dressed in black, many with pale, grim faces. Our driver told us while we waited for our parking slot to become available that the crematorium had two chapels - east and west - and that when they were going full tilt they could each do eight cremations a day which was pretty much the maximum when you considered each slot was 45 minutes. Then there was all the extra time either side of each slot to be factored in so as to get all the punters in and out of the chapels. Two chapels, eight cremations, a total of sixteen burns a day when things were busy and certainly on that day for The Dodge - 27/11/19 - it looked like it was indeed choc a block.
The Dodge had worked for the Inland Revenue in Newcastle all his life where they had huge offices and there was no doubt that quite a considerable number of his old work colleagues had come along to pay their respects that afternoon. Standing at the end of the front row of the chapel next to Uncle Nick I joked with him that it was no wonder it took so long to get a tax return processed when so many from the Rev were there, having downed tools and got the afternoon off in order to say goodbye to an old work mate. At least I tried to joke with Uncle Nick about it, but the problem was I had to whisper it as we were in the chapel and since he is hard of hearing I don't think he quite got what it was I was going on about, despite the fact I was whispering as close as I could into his ear, an ear which had a hearing aid clipped to the back of it. It really is most frustrating when you have wise crack but can't quite get it out by way of maximum delivery because once the opportunity has slipped on by it has gone forever.
The service itself was conducted by a female vicar, being simple and efficient with a tribute to The Dodge at the heart of it which had been written by Catherine and pretty much did what it said on the tin as far as confirming what a happy marriage they had enjoyed together, that she had loved every minute of it and The Dodge would be remembered by her forever. At the end of the day you can’t really say fairer than that now can you? Thankfully there were no hymns to be sung, something which I always find excruciating as most of them are distinctly odd, written by people who should have had their heads examined. There was just a simple recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the end of the service, throughout which both me and Uncle Nick remained completely silent, not even mustering an Amen between us. Oh well, guess that says something but the prayer is only of significance if you happen to be a Christian, if not, then what exactly is it? No worries, I certainly didn't mind, I just didn't have the inclination to open my mouth because the energy of belief in that particular instance just wasn't there.
One thing I would like to note however was that as the Lord's Prayer was being recited by everyone in the chapel, or least nearly everyone, I gazed upon The Dodge's coffin placed on the slab underneath the chapel cross. And I did feel in some strange way that he was indeed being looked after by some hidden inexplicable power, that he was in a sense going back home after being sent down to Earth to do whatever it was he'd had to do. If that was not much more at the end of the day than just being a faithful, reliable companion to Catherine and processing countless tax queries by way of the work he did then so what? It was a post which had required filling, The Dodge had been the man to do it, and by all accounts he’d done it well.
Got to say the best part of the service for me was the end when AC/DC's Rock 'n' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution was played over the Crematorium sound system, it being of course the final track from their monster multi-million selling album Back in Black from 1980. Catherine later told me The Dodge had wanted a bit of AC/DC played at his funeral and that she and a friend had chosen that particular track because it didn't have any swearing on it. It is possible that she might have missed a trick or two in regard to this as there are in fact remarkably few AC/DC tracks which have swearing on them and that if they had wanted to give The Dodge an edgier send off they could have easily gone for Hells Bells, Sin City, Highway to Hell or Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be. Fact of the matter is however that subtlety and humour are not high on Catherine's radar at the best of times, so it was what is was and in all honesty it was still more than good enough. Yes, in the circumstances it was really great to have a blast of AC/DC and to hear the sandpaper rasp of lead Brian Johnston as he sang the song, a man who just so happened to be a Geordie himself, in fact before becoming lead singer of AC/DC he had fronted a hard rocking band by the name of Geordie back in the 1970’s.
Catherine dealt efficiently with the greeting of the mourners as we stood in the doorway of the Crematorium when everyone made their way out after us, not forgetting to mention there was a reception back at the Duke of York on Kenton Lane which they were all invited to. By the time we were back in the funeral limo to be taken to the reception over in Kenton it was just coming up to 4 pm. It was already beginning to get dark, with there being no let up in any shape or form in the gloomy wet weather, being a misty, murky Newcastle day if ever there was one. On the way back I once again talked with our driver and he happened to mention he had been to see an AC/DC tribute act not so long ago in Newcastle and that they'd brought the house down. A tribute band by the name of Livewire, which as AC/DC tribute bands are concerned is a reasonable enough name since it references one of their early songs from their mid 70’s T.N.T. album, but still not as good as AB/CD which in my book has to be the best name for an AC/DC tribute band ever, even better than Accest DC.
The reception for the passing of The Dodge was in a function room on the first floor of the Duke of York on Kenton Lane where a rather extensive buffet was provided for people to get stuck into and get stuck into it they most certainly did. Alcohol had to be paid for which was fair enough and the little bar in the function room was soon doing pretty good business as people took the opportunity to quench their thirst before heading up to fill their plates with food from the buffet. I sat a table with Uncle Nick and Jo, pretty close to Catherine who was busy the whole time talking to people coming up to offer her their condolences. Interestingly Uncle Nick and I got into conversation with Catherine's next door neighbour, a woman in her early 30’s who was originally from Dover which of course was right at the other end of the country. She lived with her female partner and she was a lecturer in sports injuries at Newcastle University having moved to Newcastle from Liverpool where she'd worked in the physio dept of Liverpool Football Club. Therefore she was able to name drop with confidence quite a few famous footballers which pretty much impressed me and Uncle Nick, who could only come back at her by going on about Emlyn Hughes, a player I doubted she had ever heard of. Whilst Uncle Nick got more and more engrossed in his conversation with the sports lecturer, I was able to have a chat with his daughter, my cousin Jo, who I hadn't seen that much of over the last few years, being glad of the opportunity to catch up with her about family news, such as it was.
Guess it was around 5.30 -5.45 that I thought it might be a good idea to take a break from the reception in order to go and check myself into The Caledonian Hotel over in Jesmond. So I left everyone to it, saying I would be back in an hour or so as I wanted to get checked in and changed out of my black suit. Got to admit I was pretty glad I'd made that reconnaissance trip earlier in the day as it was now dark and still raining when I pulled out of the car park of the Duke of York in my Prius. There was a considerable amount of traffic on the roads which involved more than one or two pokey little junctions which were probably not a problem if you were a local, but not so if you were a new kid in town like me. No matter, it was no great shakes and there were no great dramas, so I made it over to The Caledonian in something like 10 - 15 minutes parking up behind it in what I took to be the hotel car park.
Checking in turned out to be pretty damn simple once reception had located my reference on Booking.com but when I got to my room I couldn't get the key card to work, in other words I couldn't open the fucking door. This was a bummer as I had my case with me so had to trundle it all the way back down to reception, something which involved going down a couple of long corridors with endless amounts of rooms off them and then down a flight of stairs. The guy on reception was almost inclined not to believe me when I told him my key card didn't work, however when he came back up with me and tried it himself he did at least agree that I wasn't bullshitting and that there was indeed something wrong with it. He let me in my room with a master and apologised for the inconvenience, saying he would be back soon with a new key for me and sure enough 5 minutes later he reappeared with one which was OK.
Once inside my room I got changed out of my black suit and into a pair of black Levi's and a blue shirt I'd bought the other week from Next, also changing my shoes for a black pair of cushion soled Sketchers, all of which made me feel a whole lot better and loads more comfortable. The day had gone pretty well so far, but as I stood there unpacking my bits and pieces, one or two waves of tiredness washed over me and I thought to myself I would be glad once I was back in my room later that evening so as to be able to lie down on my bed and crash out. The time spent in my room sorting all this out was a little over 10 minutes and just as I was getting in my Prius to drive to the Duke of York Uncle Nick called me on my mobile to check where I was by way of saying, "Hey kiddo, where are you?" Obviously I told him I'd just checked into The Caledonian and was now heading back over to the reception in the pub.
Strange sometimes, when you arrive in a new place and you find yourself making the same trip from A to B or from B to A in reverse, suddenly feeling that you think you know it pretty well, even though you don't really have a clue. Anyway that was how it felt to me as I made my way back to Kenton Lane from Jesmond, with the various roads and mini-roundabouts having a familiarity about them which felt as if I'd lived in Newcastle all of my life. I liked that sensation as a matter of fact, it is like a little vacation highly compressed, time out somewhere different, which on another level is also a place where you do exactly the same as what you usually do, namely pushing yourself along from here to there with all the little pinch points in between thrown in for good measure.
By the time I got back to the Duke of York the reception in the function room was winding down, there being only a couple of tables left with people sitting around them. Catherine was still sitting at her table in the far corner of the room surrounded by a bunch of people who I'd never spoken to in my life before. I didn't see much point in going over to join her so I went and sat instead with Uncle Nick and Jo. They were at another table listening to an ex-colleagues of The Dodge's tell everyone how utterly shocked and saddened she was that he'd died so suddenly. It was one of those situations where she was drinking a large glass of chilled white wine and obviously beginning to get a bit pissed and emotional as she knocked it back, closer and closer to turning on the waterworks. She went on more and more about The Dodge, how she had only been chatting with him a couple of weeks ago, that they'd been making plans for some kind of office reunion only now that was something they were never going to have, or at least not with The Dodge in attendance. I just sat there pretty much in total silence, nodding my head in sympathy from time to time as she carried on. There was quite literally nothing that I could say to her and in fact the main thing on my mind was that I was now feeling hungry. Although I had taken a small plate of food from the buffet it hadn't been much, a cold buffet in the middle of winter when up in the depths of a dark wet Newcastle was not really my idea of fun. In my mind I was now running through the various takeaway options as possibilities for me to try later in the evening, Chinese or fish & chips, sooner rather than later if at all possible, but definitely not kebab!
It was after another 20 minutes, with this pissed up woman still mourning the passing of The Dodge and now getting quite heavy, that Uncle Nick turned to Jo and told her that he really needed to get back to the Gosforth Park Hotel and lie down as he was feeling absolutely knackered. It transpired that he had been to see Cardiff play Stoke in the Championship the night before and was now paying the price for it in a big way after his early morning start to get up to Newcastle. When they began to discuss about getting a taxi I told them that I would take them, if truth be told it was a perfect opportunity for me to get out of there and away from this woman who was slowly but surely beginning to get on my nerves. She was now talking about The Dodge as if he had been some kind of heroic knight just returned from the Crusades, rather than a quiet unspoken pen pusher for the Rev who had hardly ventured out of Newcastle in the whole of his life. Well, what to do? These kind of things, sudden deaths of people supposedly before their time, can shock you and I think that is what must have been happening to her.
Uncle Nick and Jo were happy enough to let me take them back to their hotel so I told Catherine I would call in at her house on Kenton Lane after I'd performed this little service as it looked like the reception in the function room was soon going to be winding up and that there would be no one there once I'd returned from the Gosforth Park Hotel. After punching the postcode for the hotel into my Prius sat-nav we were soon on our way, the weather was still pretty bad, plenty of rain around which served to make things slightly more tricky. Due to the fact it was unfamiliar driving I managed to make a wrong turn at some point, despite the fact I had the directions on the screen in front of me, which by way of consequence made me feel pretty stupid. No matter, it was hardly the end of the world and we were soon on the right track again. Dropping off Uncle Nick and Jo outside the entrance to the Gosforth Park, I said goodbye to them and drove on through the car park, but not before punching in the postcode for Catherine's on Kenton Lane, as there was no way I would remember my way back, even if in the cold light of day it might have been pretty damn simple.
Just after 7.30 or so I found myself back in Catherine's where she was sitting in the front room with her best friend Heather whose daughter just so happened to be Victoria, Catherine's god daughter. Over a cup of coffee I did my best to make conversation with them but I guess I was running out of juice and it was a bit of an uphill struggle if truth be told. By 8.15 I was ready to get out of there, back to The Caledonian in Jesmond and some downtime of my own by way of getting something to eat and watching a bit of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Catherine seemed to be perfectly fine, the main topic of conversation between the three of them being about booking tickets to go and see Aladdin, the Christmas pantomime at the Newcastle Playhouse. In some respects it was as if The Dodge had never been there, although that is an exaggeration of course, and the fact of the matter was Catherine was probably in a state of shock from the whole episode of him having so suddenly passed away. But the point is that she was fine when I said it was time for me to go and I think she'd pretty much had enough of me by that stage as well, so was therefore more than happy to say goodnight and get me out the door after wishing me a safe journey back home the following day. So that was it, I had done my duty and now I was free to go. Back to The Caledonian then it was for me, on that little journey from Kenton to Jesmond, which was all so strangely familiar to me by now. To once again pull my Prius into the car park down a back lane behind the hotel, where I then stuck a note in the windscreen confirming the car belonged to one of the guests and was therefore exempt from any possible parking tickets which it might have got at that time of the evening.
Getting out of the car I decided there was not much point in heading back up to my room as it was still the case that I had to resolve my food situation. Despite the fact it was still raining, harder than ever in fact, I walked the streets of Jesmond until I found something which fitted the bill as far as my stomach was concerned. Lo and behold, who would have thought it, I only ended up getting a Chinese takeaway didn't I? A vegetable fried rice from a place called Acorn and once I got it back to my room pretty damn tasty it was too, with there also being plenty of it. Guess if there had been a fish and chip shop around I would have gone for that but it looked like I was in the wrong part of town so a meal from Acorn was the best I could come up with. In the end it more than did the trick and it got me out of the rain as well, which by that point was coming down harder than ever, a perfect end to a dark November day in Newcastle which I would always remember. Well, not so sure about that, but the basic fact of the matter was that I was now happy enough to step through the entrance of The Caledonian and hide away for the rest of the evening in my room.
My vegetable fried rice was eaten whilst sitting on my single bed watching I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, getting a blast of that jungle heat from Australia courtesy of Ant and Dec. By the end of the meal and the end of the show I was only good for a little light reading from the book I'd brought up with me and which I had recently borrowed from my local library in Woodford Green. This just so happened to be Nothing is Real by the rock journalist David Hepworth and unsurprisingly the subject of the book was music, pretty much anything from The Beatles onwards and very enjoyable it was too, full of rock trivia which is just up my street. My single bed was actually quite large, so sleep was no problem, guess I just flaked out after the rigours of the day and with a belly full of fried rice, nothing too surprising about that. Been there done it a thousand times before and when on the road it just goes with the territory.
Woke up early the next morning well before 6, but was happy to lie there and doze before finally hauling myself out of the sack to take a morning shower before heading down to the dining room for breakfast. Full English with a couple of cups of coffee and a couple of glasses of orange juice thrown into the mix as well meant that by the end of it I was good to go. I went back up to my room to get all my stuff together before stepping out into what was another dark, wet November day in Newcastle with the drive straight back down the A1 to London for me to forward to. And yes, in a way I was looking forward to it. It was another chance for me to play some of my favourite music at decent volume and catch glimpses of this country I have been living in for the last 57 years as I drove on by in my 10 year old Prius.
But before all that I made a quick detour into the centre of town in order to go to the HMV in the Eldon Square Shopping Centre in order to buy a bunch of CDs which my sister had requested for her Christmas present. Strange fact is that there is currently no HMV in Central London, not unless that is you include its cut price subsidiary Fopp, which I do go into from time to time, however I knew there was or used to be a decent HMV in Newcastle. Turned out I was right on the money, it was still there and also pretty well stocked with lots of special offers if you made multiple purchases. After spending 15 - 20 mins browsing through the racks, I walked out with 6 CDs for 30 quid with music from the likes of Madness, Simple Minds and Tears for Fears which in my mind at least was a bargain if ever there was one, as long as the 80’s were your bag. People can keep vinyl as far as I am concerned, and as far as streaming goes you can forget it, I am going to stick with CDs for as long as I can and because they are so out of fashion at the moment many of them are as cheap as chips, cheaper even. Far better value than anything else on the market when it comes to how you consume music. So after this brief but fruitful visit to HMV it was job done, time to head out of town and get back on the A1 direction south for some serious long distance road driving.
Funny thing was that the Eldon Square car park was a pay and display but that didn't stop me from experiencing some degree of confusion when I made my way out of there and kept seeing signs saying Don't Forget to Check Out with a picture of a car on them. Had I missed a trick somewhere? What could it possibly mean I wondered, as surely being a pay and display it was pretty straight forward in that I had indeed paid and displayed. Uncomfortable visions of getting slapped with some inexplicable fine a few weeks later reared up in my mind as I made my way out of Jesmond and Kenton to get on the road back down South. An unpleasant surprise dropping through my letterbox one cold morning which would have me ranting, raving and swearing. So it should be no shock to learn that when I took a pit stop once again in Wetherby Services I searched Newcastle Parking on Google to see just what it all might mean. I then found to my relief it simply referred to those punters who might wish to pay by card, with greater flexibility offered by way of charging you for the exact amount of time you stayed so long as you registered your number plate on arrival and then remembered to check out. No worries then, I had done the right thing after all, so I could sit back and enjoy my late morning cup of tea and slice of cake from Costa, despite the fact it cost an arm and a leg.
It was not until I got past Newark on the A1 going back down South that the rain finally stopped and the skies cleared. By then I had the newly remixed and re-mastered edition of Monster by R.E.M. on the Prius sound system, which in many ways I think is their best album, despite the fact it was seen as being a bit of a car crash at the time of its release back in 1994, but that was probably because it was their follow up to Automatic for the People, their most successful record by some distance. Once I'd made my final pit stop, Peterborough Services where I had a Veggie Meal at Macdonald's and which I have to say was not as good as what I was expecting, I bombed back down the rest of the A1 before hitting the A14 / M11 stretch at Cambridge where the traffic built up, mainly due to the fact they have what seem to be almost permanent road works that have literally gone on for years and years. Guess it was between Cambridge and Stansted that I had to deal with one or two waves of fatigue and tiredness which rolled over me, coming up from all the driving I'd done over the last couple of days. Thankfully the waters didn't get choppy enough for me to take my eye off the ball and prevent me from arriving safely back in Woodford by around 4.30 in the afternoon. So there we go, job done and farewell to The Dodge!
9/12/19
Glad I got that writing of the Newcastle trip done. It was a long journey there and back and it looks like it took a lot of words describing it, coming in at just under 14 pages in my notepad. Guess I needed to write it as it is the main thing I have done these last few weeks, main thing travel-wise that is. So now we are well into December with all the deluded craziness which usually comes along at this time of year, in other words it is the build up to Christmas. It is also the time of year for us gearing up for another trip to India and in regard to that we just got our PAPs through today via email from Delhi. This was a nice surprise and more than a little funny as it had just been the other day when we were wondering how our PAP applications were coming along and that usually we get an email from the Tibet Bureau on receipt of our forms, but that this year so far we had got nothing and then - son of a gun, lo and behold - the arrival of the email this morning answered this question for us. Now what, I might hear you say, is a PAP exactly? Well PAP stands for Protected Area Permit and since Bylakuppe, the Tibetan settlement in South India where we're going, is deemed a protected area, a permit is required if you wish to visit and stay there. If you go there without a permit and are then stopped by the local police you might find yourself in a sticky situation and at the very least you will be asked to leave the settlement immediately.
Now it just so happens the last couple of years I have not been stopped even once but you know how it is, that it would be Sod's Law if I went without getting a permit only to get pulled over and questioned as to just what I was doing there. As far as South India is concerned all the Tibetan settlements are in protected areas and you therefore run a bit of a risk of getting chucked out of them if you don't bother to apply for a PAP. So like I mentioned we did our applications this year a couple of months ago because it is usually a good idea to do it at least 4 months before you are due to go as it can easily take up to 3 months for them to get processed. Just so happens this time around things have gone a lot quicker than usual, as apart from a bit of a black hole in terms of getting any initial response, this year has seen us receive our PAPs in well under two months. This is definitely a bit of a record as Indian bureaucracy is usually pretty slow, although saying that it does more often than not eventually deliver the goods, you just have to be patient, that's all.
As far as our regular Indian visa applications are concerned we are due to go down to VFS Global on Goswell Street in the Barbican part of London on Wednesday as we have made online appointments to submit them then. The way things work with an Indian visa is that you do the application online, print it off and also make an appointment application so as to take the printed form down with you, along with photos and passport to get it processed. All of this is unnecessary if you are applying for an E Visa of course but for various reasons this year this is something we are not doing. Once all the stuff has been handed into the folks at VFS Global - who are the agents for the Indian High Commission in London - it is then really just a question of waiting a couple of days before being notified that all the gumbo is ready for you to pick up and that hopefully your visas will have been granted. Well I say hopefully but really it has never been a problem so far and god knows we have had a few of them over the years, visas that is, but all the same it is usually with feelings of relief and satisfaction that I open up the envelopes containing our passports whilst still close to the pick-up point in VFS to see that everything is in good order.
This year things are slightly different in that Dawa Dolkar is applying for a 5 year visa, something which she has never done before, but we know a few people who have and come up trumps. In theory all should be OK but you never really know if there is going to be a spanner in the works until you get down there. As for me I am just going for a straight down the middle 6 months multiple entry tourist visa which should be pretty straightforward. Now the reason I am going for just a 6 months visa is that my passport runs out at the end of next year so going for anything longer is bound to be a problem if the visa is of longer duration than the validity of my passport. Otherwise I would have gone for a one year E Visa at the drop of a hat, as it would have been both simpler and cheaper for me to do, but I can't. Guess what I'll do in the summer of 2020 is apply for a new passport and then once I have got that apply for a 5 year Indian visa myself if all goes well with Dawa Dolkar's, something of course which we will soon find out in the next few days.
Got to admit that one of my disappointments over the course of the last couple of years is that our long term Woodford neighbours in Frating Crescent, Nicky & Tim, have moved out after relocating to a bungalow in a village just outside of Salisbury in Wiltshire. The people who bought their place, 18 Frating Crescent whilst we are number 17, are a young couple with two small kids, a boy and a girl. Now from time to time I have to say we do get a certain amount of noise pollution emanating from their premises, not so much by way of loud music or anything like that, but more from noise created as a result of their attempts at DIY. Sometimes I have to make a real effort to compose myself and not let it drag me into a deep pit of hatred and contempt for them. Their DIY can at times involve a hell of a lot of banging, sanding, scratching, moving and thumping which goes on for what feels like fucking ages so that by the end of it I am almost tearing my hair out with anger and frustration. Not so good then for a meditator whose main aim is peace of mind! Guess I'm falling short, falling at the first hurdle and all that, but it really is an incredibly irritating situation. Don't get me wrong, they are a friendly enough couple, but I guess they don't make any effort to be anything more than that, not that they have to, as it is clear they are completely absorbed in their own little world with their little squawkers who are obviously the centre of their universe.
If they have a big DIY job they are getting their teeth stuck into they often call upon the services of someone who I think is the woman's father although I might be wrong about that. For a time when he made his presence known to me by way of the noise he was making I called him, to myself of course, not to anyone else, The Drill an' Bang Man, but now the more it has gone on and subsequently worn me down over the course of time, I have simplified it to Shitface. When that blue Escort of his comes trundling down Frating Crescent in the mornings then I know for sure that Shitface is going to be on the scene for at least the next couple of hours seemingly with the express intention of making my life a misery. Now I know full well that as a wanna be yogi who can prattle on for hours an' hours about meditation by way of the 3rd Eye and all the rest of it, to react to this kind of situation in such a manner is a little bit of a disaster, but there you have it. The best I can say is that it is a work in progress as to opening up the love in my heart towards the whole stinkin' lot of them, wherever it might be, the love that is.
There you go then, trouble in paradise, not everything in my world is funny ha ha and absolutely wonderful as when guys like Shitface come along they can leave me badly exposed. It goes without saying that my own DIY skills are almost negligible, so when I hear him get his tools out and plug one or two of them in I know only too well I am going to be in for one of those sessions which will test me to the point of setting me off on a trajectory from which there is no dignified return. It's out to get you, you see, the world is out to get you, to get me, the truth will always come through and that means for guys like me it has to be a stone cold certainty that in some shape or form a sticky end awaits. Wish so much I could raise my game in respect to all this, see this man not as Shitface but as a loving father doing his level best to improve the lives of his darling daughter and grand children, to lend them a helping hand by way of putting his DIY skills to damn good use. In comparison to that just what kind of helping hand do I have to offer? Really, I have to reign myself in at times, gather myself, find some composure, to put out the fires and step away from a scene of out of control thinking. Again, let's just say it is a work in progress then and leave it at that.
10/12/19
And so it goes with the meditation, sometimes it is like wadin' through the fog -
didn't get started
didn't come close
must have taken
a lethal dose
of sleepy weep
from outta
the weed garden
- guess it might be the dark mornings I just don't know, but the simple fact of the matter is I've been finding it a struggle to stay on target, to keep my concentration and not nod off, as if I am in India but without the heat. Jus' gotta keep pluggin' away I guess, there ain't much else for it because it's what I do. It would be hard to imagine not beginning my day with meditation, it is what I need to stay on track, only lately it is as if the track isn't there. Never mind, keep on truckin', make my way through the mist zone until all becomes clear again. From time to time I do attempt to project mind outta body so as to turn back and reflect upon the figure who is sittin' there on my chair in front of the shrine and doin' the meditation, maybe once in a while askin' the question, just what exactly is he hopin' for by doin' what he does? It's all in the energy, all in the Om, the raisin' of the kundalini-shakti to rest upon high an' keep it there, an' for that if truth be told, you don't need no religion, jus' a guidin' hand from the Universal One to point you in the right direction.
In the light of what I wrote last night about how easy it is for me to generate negative thoughts about people who do things which basically I don't want them to do - like a bit of bang-bang, saw-saw, knock fuckin' knock DIY every once in a while -it is probably a good idea if I concentrate on openin' my heart chakra - the Anahata of the unstruck sound - and let in a little bit more love into my life, otherwise this whole deal of my current incarnation might end up a rather sad affair. I see it there floatin' in the space in front of me, the lotus symbol of the heart and the secret lake which lies beneath, where all your wishes can be fulfilled if you can only find your way there. The 16 petalled flower, deep crimson blue beckoning me within, to let me wash away the hatred and disgust I can sometimes feel for my fellow man.
In that regard it is probably not a good idea for me to listen to Van Morrison because on his latest album, the really rather excellent Three Chords & The Truth, there is a track on it called You Don't Understand with lyrics which go -
Can't trust human nature
Can't trust human nature
No matter what you do
Human nature can't be trusted
Human nature can't be true
- pretty hard hittin' stuff from The Man but I'm afraid the way he sings the words can only leave me feelin' that he is absolutely spot on, bang in the middle of hittin' the target. So I have to work on that, move away from the negative, away from the dark and into the light.
"Wheel of the un-struck sound" - "lotus of the heart" - "twelve spoke centre" - Anahata : the seat of transcendental consciousness. Opening my heart to that a little bit might be a good idea.
Just as when I wrote Snapshot Log two years ago, back end of '17, it is now pretty much the middle of the dark season, short days in other words with the sun never climbing high in the sky even when it is clear, remaining low on the horizon before it soon disappears. Getting up around 7 for my meditation means it is still almost dark, almost but not quite because as the shrine room faces east, there is always a thin band of light and sometimes some stunningly beautiful skies as well, skies emblazoned in colours of sunrise pink an' orange. Sittin' in meditation means seeing or being in the transition zone from dark to light and it is a process which I have to say I feel lucky to be part of. Just to be able to sit there on my cushion and hammer away at my DIY psychologizin', just to try and get a grip on what makes me tick, is pretty much all I can ask for if truth be told. Even more so if I am feeling fit for it by way of my body being relaxed after having slept well. If all that is in order it is then just a simple question of gettin' on with the show by way of countin' the breath and observing all associated perceptions an’ sensations that come along with the process of respiration. That and also generating that incredible white light energy which is to be had by way of resting awareness upon 3rd Eye, oh yes, nearly forgot to mention that!
Think I might have said before about the fact that the last few days have seen me struggle to stay on the button when it comes to maintaining attention, and in that regard it is not so much a problem of being taken off the ball by way of distracting thoughts, but more a case of simply being unable to properly wake up, to stay awake and not doze off. Guess it might be pointing to the fact I am not getting enough sleep, but the thing is I usually wake up before 6 and then lie there in bed in some kind of twilight zone for at least an hour or so before getting up, think they call it dozin'! When I am lying there I am not feeling tired at all, my mind is more or less clear as a bell, but then when I get up to meditate the mist comes down after 15-20 minutes and I find my concentration slippin'. Most fuckin' frustrating I can tell you. Think the best thing is to simply put it down to a phase I am going through and that after a while - however long or short - I will shake it off, come out of it, or however else you might wish to describe it.
11/12/19
Weird kind of dream just before I woke up this morning and in many respects I think it set the tone for the rest of the day. First of all before the dream I woke up last night around 4 am and soon was wide awake, so much so that I couldn't lie down but had to sit up in bed until I eventually felt tired enough to lie back down again after a lot of deep breathing. Lay down and then the next thing I knew I had this dream before waking up suddenly at 7.15 am. In the dream I was driving my Prius down an off-road track which suddenly came to a dead end by the edge of a little stream. Getting out of my car I knew I had to climb back up so as to see how to find my way out, but when I got up close to the bank I saw to my consternation it was a lot higher than what it appeared to be from a distance and that to get up it was not going to be easy. After a long time walking along the bottom I failed to find any part which wasn't at least 8 - 10 feet high and that when I tried to get any kind of foothold the earth just crumbled away sending me back to the bottom again. It was when the certainty dawned upon me that I was completely trapped and unable to find a way out that I suddenly woke up. Strange one, I think you could say!
On with the day then and today was the day that Dawa Dolkar and I had booked our appointment with VFS Global in Goswell Street up the road from Barbican station in order to hand in our Indian visa applications. Earlier on as we made our way into town by way of walking down to Woodford station in order to catch the Central Line, the weather was bright and sunny, a pleasant change from the day before which had been a misty, dark and wet November day that seemed like it was over before it had even begun. The tube journey was a simple ride which saw us change at Liverpool Street onto the Metropolitan and Circle line for a couple of stops so as to get off at Barbican station. Then it was a simple case of walking up the road until we got to Goswell Street. All went well as far as this part of the deal was concerned and we were in good time for our appointments which were at 12 noon / 12.15.
Unfortunately things went wrong very quickly as soon as we entered the VFS Global building in order to collect our appointment tokens. The problem was that after we handed in our paperwork to the African gentleman behind the token counter he took a look at our applications and told us we would have to go away and do them again. This was because we had filled in a couple of sections incorrectly, something which I have to say we have never done before, always getting it pretty much spot on. Our mistake had been that when stating our nationality on the form we had put British Subject rather United Kingdom which meant that it was wrong. It had to be United Kingdom otherwise the whole thing would fuck up and your application would get rejected. To say this was something of a shock and disappointment is really a little bit of an understatement as in my book at least it was borderline disastrous. Since there were no computers available and the days of the Internet Cafe are now long gone, the only option was for us to make the journey back to Woodford in order to do our applications all over again. Our appointments were at 12 and 12.15, however the man behind the counter told us that as long as we got back by 4 on that day our appointments would still be valid. It really did take a lot of effort on my part to shake off feelings of bitter disbelief over the fact that we were suddenly in this kind of situation, but we would gain nothing more by standing there trying to convince ourselves there was some other way around it.
Feeling foolish and more than a little sick over having made such a basic fundamental error - something for which I blamed myself as it had been me who had filled out the forms - we walked out of the building and back down Goswell Street towards Barbican station. There was no point in thinking about it too much as the whole logic of the thing would only do our heads in, I mean was it or was it not a fact that we were indeed British subjects? On the way there earlier on I had noticed a sign in the window of a local newsagents just along from VFS stating that they could do Indian visa applications and print them up for you as well, so just for the sake of it we called in to enquire how much they would charge us. We soon walked out again however when they quoted us a figure of 25 quid per application which was preposterous when we could just go back home and do it all again for nothing. There was no point in blowing 50 precious quid with those guys, it was better to go through the pain and the time involved in making that return journey to Woodford and getting things sorted at home.
Guess it was fortunate that the weather was good, the tubes were relatively quiet and that our applications had not been later in the day, as we had plenty of time to get back to Woodford and re-do them. There was no real fear or panic, just a smouldering irritation. We knew what the mistake had been and that the time involved in doing new applications and printing them off would not be that great and therefore getting back down to VFS before the deadline of 4 pm would not be a problem. When we got back home the mail had arrived and I noticed that a CD I had ordered from Amazon had been delivered, a copy of Hits Back by The Clash, a double CD at a price of just £4.98, something which as far as I was concerned was unbelievably good value, especially as I had recently been getting into The Clash again in quite a big way after finally getting around to playingmy copy of The Story of The Clash Vol. 1, another double CD, which I had picked up for a couple of quid in an Oxfam on Wanstead High Street a couple of months ago. Seeing the package on the door mat cheered me up quite a bit as I knew that if I had the chance I would definitely be giving it a spin later on in the day. Clash City Rockers, Career Opportunities, (Working for the ) Clampdown, This is Radio Clash, these were just a few of my favourites and they were all there on Hits Back. Once we had made ourselves a cup of tea we sat down at the laptop and made our new applications before printing them up after checking them thoroughly for any potential mistakes, as obviously the last thing we wanted was any repeat situations occurring back down at VFS. By this point it was just gone 1.15 which was pretty good going, still leaving just under 3 hours to get down to Goswell Street, so after a hurried lunch of reheated stir fried vegetables from the night before which we each had in a couple of wraps, we were ready to head back down into town.
The weather was now not so bright, the day had clouded over somewhat and if anything it felt colder even though it had been fresh and clear in the morning. Thankfully the tube was still not that busy so we were back down to the Barbican with that single change at Liverpool Street in pretty good time, in fact we were back at VFS at just gone 2 pm, this time collecting our tokens without any problem after the African gentleman gave us the thumbs up. We had been pretty lucky in fact, as just before reaching VFS it had started to rain, so by getting under cover again we had avoided a soaking. Guess we each must have waited around 30 - 40 minutes before the numbers on our appointment tickets came up on the screen instructing us to make our way to the booths as indicated, in order for our applications to be processed. Funny thing was that there was some information missing on the applications we had printed up at home, which meant they had to be reprinted by the counter staff at VFS, again something which had never happened before and we’d had the same printer for donkeys years, a cheap HP Inkjet which had always managed to do the job for us. Somehow this time on each of our forms a whole section was missing even though we had filled that section out online, this meant we had to wait a while for the staff to sort this for us by way of reprinting our application forms in full. Guess we should be thankful they at least did that and didn't simply send us away again, telling us we would have to do it ourselves, as that really would have been a shitstorm of a situation stage and completely takin’ the biscuit.
Strange one nevertheless, one or two little obstacles this time around in regard to our applications for our Indian visas. It was then that Dawa Dolkar told me astrologically it was a very bad day element-wise, well at least it was according to a handy little Tibetan astrology app she had on her phone, so maybe that had something to do with the situation. For me at least, the funny thing was that I hadn't been intending to get a paper visa at all but an E Visa instead, because it was half the price and a whole lot less hassle in terms of applying for one. The problem was that Indian E Visa limits had recently changed. Earlier this year I had got a 60 day Indian E Visa which had been perfect when you bear in mind I was staying there for 6 weeks, but now they had changed it so that an E Visa was either for only 30 days or for one full year. The problem with that for me was my passport was running out in 2020 before my E Visa expired and which meant I wouldn't be able to get one unless I applied for a new passport. Since paper visas were still available for 6 months duration that was the reason why I had gone for a paper one, paying pretty much twice the price - in the form of £126 - as what I would have done for an E Visa. Anyway there was little that could be done about it, nothing at all in fact, it was what it was and at least once my forms had been reprinted I was finally in a position to have my debit card charged for the payment, to get my application in process and ready to be sent over to the Indian High Commission.
By 3.30 we were out of VFS and even treated ourselves to a coffee at a Costa on the way back to Barbican station, a Costa at a crossroads on the way to Old Street, where Dawa Dolkar had a black Americano and I had a Flat White, a rare event for us indeed. Not only that, we also picked up a couple of bags of spinach from a Tesco Express so that by the end of the walk back to the tube we were pretty much sorted and I could finally look forward to a blast of Hits Back by The Clash when we got home. On the tube heading back I brought to mind those words of Ramana Maharshi in regard to guru devotion, that when good things come along the average disciple thanked the guru but when bad things occurred they more or less looked at the guru and shook their fists. This where they went wrong he said, because whatever comes your way in life should be taken as a blessing, as a teaching from the most high upon high, as the grace of the guru and to be never rejected as unwanted. There you go then, still a long way to get to the point where there is nothing left to learn, because there is no doubt that at certain times today the quality of thoughts I was generating about the whole damn deal I had cut from life became more than a little rank.
12/12/19
Guess in total I have written quite a bit of stuff these last couple of years, what when tidying up all my other stuff from times gone by is also taken into consideration. Let's have a re-cap, a little memory trip down the lane and see, what have we got? Well, of course there is all the material on my website Traceless Path which is mainly comprised of all my trips to India, guess in many ways it is a work in progress in that I still go back from time to time and update it because there is always room for improvement. In between that and what I have been working on for easily the best part of the last 12 months - Golden Telescope - which catalogues the progress, or lack of it, of my life from the years 1962 - 1988, there have also been the pieces I have done for my writing courses at City Lit, which number around 20 in total and which I have saved in a folder on my laptop called City Litters. There are also write ups of some journeys I made into East Anglia which I have clubbed together and called Flat and then finally over 2 years ago there was the first Snapshot Log which all this is now a carry on from, or not so much a carry on as an update, another report so to speak, on the state of play in my life as seen from a snapshot moment in time.
It all adds up to quite a lot, whether it is any good or not is of course another matter and besides the point really, as the main thing is that it is something which I enjoy doing. It has provided me with an activity with which to take up my time as I slowly but surely whittle away whatever days are left remaining to me whilst on this earth. Of course I do worry that it might all be little more that a useless waste of energy, only symptomatic of a pathetic hiding away due to a chronic inability to get to grips with some of the more important things in life - whatever they might happen to be - but I'm afraid that the dye has been cast and it is too late to turn back now. Not that I want to, because I do enjoy it, it gives me a sense of release, a safety valve to unscrew, where I can vent whatever frustrations are building up inside me due to the complexities of mah psychology.
14/12/19
Busy doin' nuthin', jus’ runnin' to stand still. Really does seem that sometimes words like that hit pretty close to the mark. Basic fact of the matter is that over three and a half years since pullin' the plug on Wisdom Books, I have often felt I have never been more busy, even though I am not doing an actual job as such, certainly not anything which is on the radar as far as the tax authorities are concerned or anything like that. The time in my days seems to get filled pretty quickly. Maybe it is the change in lifestyle, the fact that I can have more time in the mornings to meditate, an activity which somehow always pushes the day along. It means we often don't sit down for morning coffee until 9 or 9.30 am which is pretty late considering it is our first drink of the day. Then whatever happens after that - the making of our fresh fruit morning smoothie for example - eats up more time as well, so that before I know it, it feels like I am already halfway through the day.
Just been coming to the end of editing the first Snapshot Log which I wrote a couple of years ago, in fact I was looking at it just a few days or a week ago for the first time in ages and it was that which inspired me to write this work of genius - Snapshot Log II. Been looking at it and seeing beyond any shadow of a doubt it is weak in places, that it is strictly for private consumption, that there would be no way in hell anyone else would be remotely interested in reading it. Oh well, it is a realisation at least, if not a particularly great one. It does at times make me question why it is I bother to write anything - am I seeking some sort of validation, some kind of justification for simply being a human on planet Earth? Or is it merely that release valve, a safety check, a means of getting something off my chest so that it doesn't brew to the point of stewing into something bad and being a cause of pain? I write to get it out of me, this stuff inside. It is a process, a thought jumble deconstruction and I hope that by doing so it makes some kind of sense. In many ways, now that I have got started, it is a compulsion, an addiction, something which I find hard to stop, even though I know that in the context of it ever finding a wider audience there is no hope for me.
15/12/19
And so the show goes on. Another day, another morning meditation. Face of the guru somewhere on the periphery of my landscape but to be honest too much thought-junk today for me to ever break on through to higher ground. And it goes like that, quite often in fact. The weather is clear so maybe a walk is in order, all the more so since I didn't walk yesterday and it is supposed to be getting wetter later in the week, which means this might just be the window. Talking of weeks it is just over a week to go to Xmas. Am I excited? Positively not. Think it was a few years ago that I said it should be changed to a maximum of just once in every three years or even better, banned all together. The way it currently stands it is obvious that it comes around insanely too often, any spiritual, meaningful, or dare I say it religious element, has been squeezed out of it years ago by the big fist of capitalism so that it is now more dementedly deluded than it has ever been. So anyway, a walk today might be what I need, so as to clear this ole head o' mine. Fact of the matter is that on the whole I keep it up - the walking that is - do plenty of it and so I do feel relatively fit as a consequence.
Time to write, time to hit the ground runnin', so hard sometimes to get back on the case, circumstances of life overtake me an' leave me standin' in the dust tracks once again, wanderin' where it all went and other such things like that. Nearly up to 10 days in on this Snapshot Log II and the general happenings of my life when compared to two years ago and the first Snapshot have remained more or less the same, but just for the sake of it I will list them out, but not in any kind of order -
Meditation / Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi / Takin' a yearly flight out to India / Tiruvannamalai / Bylakuppe / Weekly swim / Frequent Walks - usually down to South Woodford to post packages for Dawa Dolkar and to buy groceries / Borrowing books from Redbridge Libraries and usually reading them, that is sticking with the ones I borrow until I get to the end / Buying CDs / Writing / Working for Dawa Dolkar in regard to responding to emails and other such business.
These are the main things then, oh yes there are the writing courses at City Lit as well and in regard to those I have just finished my latest one earlier this month. Pretty good it was too, better than what I initially thought it was going to be, as by the end of it I had read out quite a few of my pieces in class which is always handy for keeping me on my toes. My City Lit course classes this time around, this autumn of 2019, often saw me often take a walk after they were over, a walk which began on Keeley Street in Covent Garden which is where the City Lit building is located, all the way across to Liverpool Street Station. Let's think, let's see, let's map it out -
Keeley Street / Kingsway / Lincoln's Inn Fields / Mary Ward / Holborn / Chancery Lane / Holborn Viaduct / Patermoster Square / St. Paul's / Cheapside / Milk Street / Gresham Street / St. Lawrence Jewry / Guildhall / Basinghall Street / Masons Avenue / Coleman Street / Great Bell Alley / Moorgate / Telegraph Street / Copthall Avenue / Austin Friars / Austin Friars Passage / Great Winchester Street / Old Broad Street / London Wall / Old Broad Street / Liverpool Street Station
So that is the route, the temple tumble which is a freak street rumble in the middle of the afternoon old London City style west through to east. Now it might surprise you to know that you can do this walk in well under an hour. For my last course at City Lit my classes were on a Monday from 12.30 - 2.30 which meant by the time it was over and I had taken that obligatory but vital piss in the bogs of the City Lit building, I was more than ready to get some serious street walkin' under my belt.
When I reach the end of Keeley Street it is a question of waiting for the lights to turn green so as to get across Kingsway safely and in one piece, then it is a short walk down the other side of Kingsway before taking a sharp left at the corner of an LSE building and from there step into the green space of Lincoln's Inn Fields. If it is dry, if I am hungry and if I have food and drink with me, I might take a seat there for 5 or 10 minutes in order to have lunch, as usually by that time of day, after all the mental energy expended in paying attention as much as possible to what was going on in my writing class, I do find that I am feeling pretty hungry.
Now in regard to the scene at Lincoln's Inn Fields it is also often the case that when I go to my class I will get off the tube at Chancery Lane so as to walk up Holborn and then through the fields. Usually, around the time I have been going in for this last series of classes, which I guess is around midday, there have been quite a few people sitting on the benches there eating hot food served up on large paper plates. They get it from a Hari Krishna food stand which is parked on a junction within a complex of lanes running through and around the LSE where a devotee dishes out plates of hot vegggie food for free, to what is usually quite a long line of people - office workers, students, construction workers - until all the food is all gone. Hari Ram, Hari, Hari. Dana or giving, is what Buddhists call it, whilst for Hindus it goes by the name of punya and seva if you’re Sikh. On the reverse dial, my nearly three o'clock swing back towards the City, the Hari Krishna stand and man are long gone because the free food has been dished up a long a time ago, all merit making done for the day, the leaving of the people feeling satisfied now over. Well, I guess I miss out on all that, the free food that is, also the dana, the punya, the seva, the giving, but what to do? I walk by the light of a shining moon that is my own personal astrology, which means I can only take up what it is I come across.
So anyway, let's get back on track, back to the walk and once my eating is done - usually a homemade cheese sandwich accompanied possibly by a small flask of tea - it is on with the show, on with the story, and a walk across the Fields of Lincoln's Inn until I get to a little cut through known as Mary Ward which takes me onto Holborn. On Holborn it is just a simple question of heading due east, straight line walkin' and takin' me past a Doughnut Time, an M&S where a large man who sells the Big Issue stands outside, Chancery Lane tube station, Macdonald’s, Hatton Garden on the opposite side of the street, all the way down to Holborn Viaduct which takes me over Farringdon Street past the City Thameslink station and further on up to the Old Bailey.
Just so happens that a couple of times this autumn season I have walked past the Old Bailey when there were large gatherings of people outside it. This has been all to do with the trial of a guy called Tommy Robinson, an anti-Islam British nationalist who had some pretty mean looking followers rolling up to the show so as to give him support. Union Jacks, St. George flags, football style chantin', faces full of anger and arms with tattoos, all served to give off that unmistakable feeling there was no point whatsoever in engagin' in any kinda conversation with them. Minds set, alien as the enemy, pullin' up of the drawbridge, accumulated rage of keepin' to their own and the deep paranoia of even thinkin' about reachin' out to hold the hands of those who are different. Oh well, what to do? Well, in my case what I did was walk straight past them, walk past without really breakin' step as men and women stood there in the street outside the court and chanted -
Oh Tommy, Tommy
Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy Robinson!
Twisted their own faces they did, and chanted his name. Football, fascist, crazy, racist, whatever; it all went down on a bright sunny London afternoon until it faded into a distant echo. That was my Bailey buzz on the cross city swing back on a couple of occasions, but more often than not the Old Bailey is a lot quieter, a momentous pile of brick, inside of which lies the dishin' out of the justice Britannia style with those scales hopefully tipped to stay in balance.
Before St. Paul's tube station I take a cut thru' onto Patermoster Square close to the cathedral of the saint and usually busy with tourists, but I never stop to hang around, if anything I make it quicker, jus' to roll along. Not to bump into any of those gawkers on their phones, takin' snaps after pollutin' up the place with the cheap flights they came in on, an' what must be their pig ignorance over the state of our planet on an ecological level where the unmistakable fact is that the clock is tickin'. Behind St Paul's there are usually a couple of heavy duty looking homeless people rolled up in sleeping bags outside the station where I walk to take the crossing when the lights go green and find myself on Cheapside. This is the point where I know I'm City bound as the landscape changes and the skyline fills up with all manner of buildings coming into view as built by the world of success, fellowship and finance.
On Cheapside I walk past another Doughnut Time plus a Starbucks and branch of Ryman until I take a left onto the shadow strewn Milk Street which has a Metro Bank on the corner of it. Milk Street is a short street, maybe once there were cows there for the milk, but if that was so they are now no more. Walking to the end of Milk Street it is then simply a question of crossing the road, which happens to be Gresham Street, in order to enter the large open space in front of the Guildhall, an ancient part of London if ever there was one. Guildhall is the spot where the Roman Guildhall used to be nearly 2,000 years ago and traced along the perimeter of the square is the outline of what would have been a Roman amphitheatre right there from the time of the way back when. A place where blood would have been spilt as gladiators fought on that spot which now lies way beneath the ground I stand on as I walk through to get across to the other side. Blood drawn in fights against each other man to man, or in fights against wild animals to the death, but now all just empty echoes in whitewashed rituals and the remoteness of stone.
So this is the City, into which I now tread ever deeper by way of coming out the other side of the Guildhall and onto Basinghall Street, crossing over for the express purpose of taking a dive down Masons Avenue. Hidden City cut through, past the pub close to the end of Masons full of men in suits enjoying an afternoon drink whilst talking ten to the dozen in regard to their deals about to go through. At the end of Masons I cross over Coleman Street where the cut through continues but now under the name of Great Bell Alley, a shorter dissection of the City cheese this one because before I know it I’m on Moorgate. Soon I'm up to my old tricks again by way of crossing straight over Moorgate onto the very narrow Telegraph Street which has a Fuller's pub by the name of The Telegraph and a funky barbers too at the end of another lane which runs onto it. A barbers by the name of Re-Style.
A narrow street, which takes this pavement walker, pack on my back, around the side of Copthall Avenue where another little opening leads me into Austin Friars. Ancient feel again and probably the name descends from when it was all part of a monastery in its own grounds before the Dissolution, before that Henry VIII punch up of the Church otherwise known as the Reformation. What remains for me now is another circuit of narrow paths and passages, a church too, and then in the middle opposite it, Austin Friars Passage, a walkway track dark as dark can be within the heart of the cheese centre. This takes me onto Great Winchester Street where vents of the offices blast out warm air which in the cold days of Winter is really most welcome, very nice to feel on body and face as I walk to the end and take a left onto Old Broad Street for what is only a little while before I get to London Wall, a busy City road which has the sky high Heron Tower at one end and the dark citadel that is the Museum of London at the other on Barbican ground. London Wall requires one to wait until the lights turn green before I can dare to cross it as it is always busy with vehicles swinging this way and that and where not to obey the rules at this juncture would be just plain stupid.
Over the London Wall and it is back on Old Broad Street again but now on the home run to Liverpool Street Station with plenty of places suddenly appearing from which to buy food; Itsu, Wasabi, Honest Burger and a pub on the corner called The Cumberland to name but just a few. Past the pub is an open square and steps leading up to the train station which I walk up quick before disappearing from view. Now it is just a simple question of going deep down into the tube in order to catch the Central Line eastbound final destination Epping so I can get off at Woodford and make my way up Snakes Lane West before cutting through to Frating Crescent. So that is the walk I do from time to time in writing course season, my walk from City Lit on Keeley Street in Covent Garden right into the heart of The City before I finish up at that people pumpin’ organ which is the most mighty Liverpool Street Station.
16/12/19
The city walk I do from City Lit when I have a writing course on the go is a good one, there are other walks but that is one of my favourites because it cuts right through, like a knife through cheese, the big City centre in delicious mystery crumble.
Now the visa scenario from the other day played itself out in a way which I guess could be classified as reasonably acceptable. For me possibly better than acceptable due to the fact I got a one year Indian visa when I had only applied for six months, so there you go, sometimes things turn out to be a bit of a bonus, not that I think I need a year visa but then again you never know. As for Dawa Dolkar things were less good but still I suppose just about OK. This was because she applied for a five year Indian visa and in the process forked out £346 quid in the hope of getting one, but she only ended up with one which is going to last her two years taking her up to Dec 2021. This means the split works out at something like £170 for a year's worth of Indian visa as opposed to the £126 quid for the one year visa which I got, so she is £44 to the bad per year on the whole damn deal. That was the risk she was taking I guess, in that the Indian High Commission is under no obligation to pass on a 5 year visa to her and in this instance decided that 2 years for her would be enough. No point in trying to get them to change their minds, it is what it is, simple as that and at least it means she will not have to go through the hassle next year of having to apply for another one. Guess if they had given her a three year visa she would have felt a whole lot better in at least then things would have been even. Luck of the draw is what you might call it, some people strike lucky when they apply and others don't, believe me there is no rhyme, no reason.
Now after picking up the docs on the afternoon of Friday 13/12 I decided that instead of walking straight back down Goswell Street to the Barbican tube station I would do a longer walk in the form of a cut through that part of town to Liverpool Street Station. Couple of reasons I guess for doing this, one to get my daily steps in and two because I actually like the walk and the streets it takes me down. Crossing Old Street and continuing down Goswell Street in the direction of the Barbican I suddenly took a right to make my way down Fann Street which at the end of it took me across Golden Lane so that I could then walk through a little park which has the Giddy Up coffee shack in the corner, all in the shadow of the Barbican and its surrounding buildings. Down a narrow lane and now on Whitecross Street I walked across to the other side and on this occasion nearly dived into Waitrose to buy a snack but at the last minute resisted the temptation because nothing really sprang to mind as regards to what exactly I would have liked to eat, but I guess the fact I even had the thought meant a hunger seed had been sown.
At the end of where the Waitrose is, or behind it to be more exact, is Lambs Passage which I walk through so as to get onto Chiswell Street which then goes down to Finsbury Square. Now whilst on Chiswell Street there is a Tesco Metro so I took a look in there in order to see if there was anything I fancied. Well, they had sold out of their cheese twists on their bakery counter which maybe wasn’t too surprising since it was now late on a Friday afternoon, but nevertheless if there had been any cheese twists in the tray I would have got myself one as a twist would have done nicely and only cost me a quid or possibly less, but there were none so that was another option down the drain as far as getting a snack was concerned. On past Finsbury Square is Sun Street, off which I take a right down Wilson Street and cross over half way down in order to cut into Whitecross Place which in turns leads into Broadgate Circle lying just before Liverpool Street Station. Good view of all the buildings at this point, very good view indeed of the amazing cityscape which changes constantly, never ceases to fill me with wonder and which weirdly I knew before most of it was ever there, as it is a point of fact that I worked on Worship Street in the City way back in 1984.
Late December dark light spread into the neon makes it all look fantastic but I soon walk away from it by way of heading down into Liverpool Street Station where I am so damn hungry I actually stop at a Petite France next to a West Cornwall Pasty Company booth and an ATM Coffee Bar. From the Petite France I buy myself a mozzarella, tomato and basil baguette and eat it on the busy concourse whilst looking up at the departure board, wondering just what it would be like to there and then get on a train to Norwich. Probably pretty boring actually as you would not be able to see very much out of the windows due to it being dark, but all the same the thought was there for a little while as I chomped my way through what was a very indifferent baguette before walking down into the tube. From there I decided to get the Metropolitan Line to Mile End and change onto the Central Line there rather than going straight down to it in the depths of Liverpool Street. This was mainly because I knew at that time on a Friday the Central Line would be crowded to the point of it being little more than a sardine can on a tube shooting its way into the dark with everyone hoping to come out safely the other side. So there we go, that was my walk to Liverpool Street from VFS Global on Goswell Street, a walk which if you are feeling speedy can be done in little over 20 minutes.
17/12/19
Another grey day, a wet one as well. Been thinking about the positive and negative - solar & lunar, black & white - and come to the conclusion that the tendency of my mind is always to incline towards the dark, the entropy of the fallin' apart. Does that make me a follower of Siva The Destroyer? I don't know, as to have these thoughts, inclinations, emotional responses or whatever else it is you might wish to call them, brings into the frame the possibility that I might be evil. In fact it is almost certainly true that some people would see it that way. Why is it things are as they are then? I don't know, but I feel it is true, not the evil part - that is too Biblical, moral, judgemental - but the shade side, the dark, the Alpha negative, which despite a long time tryin', I just can't seem to shake off.
Why? Well to land on the dark side of the moon equation just seems to come naturally, or maybe it is not so tilted that way, maybe it is an indifference to the fate of my fellow man, in that if they go down certain lines, pursue particular courses of action, then the results might be inevitable from an objective point of view. If that is so, then the positive or negative end in the light of that inevitability, is of no consequence and therefore should be treated with indifference. No tears of joy, no tears of sorrow, just a detachment in the same way the sun shines down from high in the sky without a care for anyone. Some people might be under that sun swimming in a pool of clear water deep within the Hollywood Hills, whilst others might be crawling through the desert with parched throats an' dyin' slowly of thirst. To the sun they are one and the same as not for the merest fraction of a millisecond will it ever stop shining with the same intensity - well at least not in the course of this particular cycle of time - yet the last thing we would ever do is hate the sun, shake our fists at it or call it bad. In fact our relationship with the sun over the many centuries of our existence, stretching back thousands of years, has been one of worship. We love our sun, especially in the dark days of winter if you happen to be livin' on the north half of the planet - hemisphere that is - when its presence can sometimes be rare and therefore its occasional appearance most welcome. So much so that it is worth folding our hands in supplication and offering a silent prayer to.
So that is it, more like indifference is closer to what I'm getting at when I use these limited means at my disposal to express my state of mind. Not negative in the sense of wishing harm on anyone - god forbid I hope I would never do that, at least not consciously or consistently - just that there is a silence I feel in the face of what will become when certain paths are taken. Recently we saw on the news what happened when people got too close to active volcanoes, they can sometimes erupt, and then the results of such eruptions might be inevitable. Don’t dabble, don't stir the pot, don't walk around feeling you are a god because there will always be something which will bring you back down to earth or even worse put you under it. That is closer to what I'm tryin' to get at; keep things simple, tread lightly, don't allow outward projections of mind to dominate, especially if they get to the point where you convince yourself that all happiness lies in the ceaseless accumulation of objects rather than from looking within.
Took a trip into town today ostensibly to look for Christmas presents and more or less succeeded in the end, although the end came sooner than I would probably have wanted due to the fact it was raining and I didn't have an umbrella, which meant I had to take a dive into Holborn tube when I had been planning to walk all the way back to Liverpool Street Station. Yes that's right, you know the deal, across Kingsway, Lincoln's Inn Fields, down Holborn and all that, slowly but surely cutting into the big cheese of the City of London, guarded as it is by gryphons on all relevant roads and bridges.
First port of call after making it in on the Central Line as far as Tottenham Court Road, was Milroy's Whiskey Shop just off the corner of Soho Square, where once I stepped inside, I was looking a nice blended whiskey for my dad. Ended up with a bottle of Great King Street: Artist's Blend bottled exclusively for Milroy's by Compass Box and, so I was assured, an absolute sniff at just £44.95. Well it was pricey I know, but I think it was better than the bottle of Ballantine's I had bought from Sainsbury's which I hadn't been feeling easy about giving as a present to my father, I mean surely I could do better than that after all he has given me down through the years? Getting a bottle from Milroy's therefore made it feel a bit more special, Great King Street being a blend you are not going find anywhere else and after having splashed the cash on it, I have to say I felt a whole lot better and was already look forward to giving it to him for Christmas.
After Milroy's I went to Foyles on Charing Cross Road in order to look at books as possible gifts, but I'm afraid to say all I did was look, failing to find anything. Think the thing which pissed me off was that all of a sudden they had none of their usual Buy 1 Get 1 Half Price offers which meant that whatever I would have ended up with would have cost me the full fuckin' whack. Checked out the Buddhism section for a little while, since business in the form of Buddhist book distribution had been the name of the game for me during my 27 years at Wisdom Books. Not much had changed when I got there to take a look and if anything the older names - D.T. Suzuki / Alan Watts - seemed to be more prominent than ever, despite the fact that stuff from the both of them has been around for ages. Even when I first got into Buddhism back in the 1980’s Suzuki and Watts were regarded as almost old hat, yet here we are now on the cusp of 2020 and seemingly they are more popular than ever. Not sure what that says about contemporary Buddhist writers unable to successfully break through, to take the baton and move the whole thing on a few paces from those guys, or in other words have something original to say. Other than stuff from those two, there was the usual overpriced regurgitation of recycled material by the two main Buddhist publishers, namely Wisdom Publications and Shambhala Publications, plus a fair selection of books by the Dalai Lama and the very popular American Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron, but that was pretty much it.
Once I got out of Foyles I paid a visit to Fopp on the corner of Earlham Street and Shaftesbury Avenue right on the edge of Covent Garden. Fopp is one of the few places in Central London where it is still possible to walk in off the street and buy a CD because all the other shops are long gone. My reason for going there was to get a CD for my sister as she had wanted a bunch of them for her Christmas present. I had already got a nice selection for her - from a HMV up in Newcastle Upon Tyne - and I was just looking for one or two more to finish off. Now it is a fact that I still buy CDs myself so I know Fopp pretty well, having been there on countless occasions in the past when on my walks in and around town, where more often than not I will pick up something. There are always some pretty good deals, although I have noticed recently that CDs have been starting to go up in price, no doubt because not so many of them are being produced these days and so the unit costs for the manufacturers are probably going up.
What I eventually ended up with this time around was a compilation of David Bowie instrumentals for £7, stuff mainly off his Low and Heroes albums and it is definitely not going to be something which she has already got so I am hoping she will be pretty chuffed. "Ooh look at this, something by Bowie that I haven't got!" That was it as far as this particular visit to Fopp was concerned, nothing was bought for me in other words, although I have to confess I had been hoping to pick a few re-mastered Simple Minds CDs released this year on the Edsel label, namely Neon Lights, Cry and Black & White 050505 but they didn't have any copies of them in stock. They are now currently in my shopping basket on Amazon coming in at around 8 quid fifty a copy and no doubt in the next couple of days I will press the button and go to checkout. They look pretty good, re-mastered versions of albums originally released 15-20 years ago along with some extra tracks thrown in as a bonus, too good for me to resist in other words, more material to add to my Simple Minds collection, which I have to say has been bolstered considerably over the last 10 years or so since the release of their Graffiti Soul album saw me get back into them.
On Earlham Street after leaving Fopp it was raining pretty hard, and I guess it was at that point I decided there wasn't much point in spending the next hour or so walking to the City and making my way to Liverpool Street, that I might as well just go to Holborn and call it quits. Anyway, I needed to get to South Woodford in order to pick up some bits and pieces for our evening meal tonight from Sainsbury’s so it seemed to make perfect sense to pull the plug. No fun in walking in the rain if I am not properly equipped, I have learnt that from numerous occasions in the past and the fact of the matter is that this time around I didn't have a decent waterproof jacket with me. Down Earlham Street and across Seven Dials into the heart of Covent Garden, I was happy in the knowledge that I had a decent bottle of whiskey for dad in my back pack slung over my shoulder and I also had a CD for my sister as well. The mission had been a modest success, probably more than that actually, the only bummer about it had been the weather but there was nothing I could do about that. At the end of Earlham Street I went across Endell Street to get onto Parker Street after taking a little cut through just before Drury Lane, then once on Parker Street it was a simple question of walking straight down until ending up right on Kingsway, more or less. Then it was just a quick walk up to the pedestrian crossing at the Kingsway intersection with High Holborn before diving into the station and back down to the underground.
Energy for meditation is best in the mornings for me, been saying this for years an' years an' years now but still I will say it again, just in case you might wondering. Later in the day my juices run out or at least take on shapes unfamiliar which I sometimes don't know how to deal with when I try to sit and stay on the button, sometimes I do if I find the right posture but more often I don't and yes, I guess on some level that does worry me. If what I think I got is real then surely it should be with me all the time and not subject to the it comes it goes kinda scenario that still keeps playin'. Rough and tumble of life in many ways I guess, tryin' my best to keep the meditation going, high alive in the light of risin' kundalini shakti an' all that, but the flip side of the coin, when I am away from the brightness, is that I can be almost crawlin' through the shadows, energy low too early in the day to be in any way respectable for those who might wish to call themselves a yogi.
Just the way it is, I'm callin' it out as it happens and when it happens then I find myself just needing to relax by way of watching TV or doing something like this - the tap, tap of words - with some music on in the background, in this case In the City of Angels by Simple Minds, a rather good live album of theirs which came out earlier this year and which I currently can't stop playin'. Now, here's a question, is it cool to come out and say I like Simple Minds? Probably not, at least in the eyes of those in the know. Their time has long, long come an' gone, if in fact it was ever there, but all the same I find myself lovin' them more and more as the years go by, not just their old stuff but new stuff too. Their last studio album Walk Between Worlds was particularly good, a number of tracks from which are featured on this recent live effort. By the way it was astounding value on Amazon, at just £9.99 for 4 x CDs housed in a hardback book of photographs taken during the show. Guess it all started for me with New Gold Dream 81 82 83 84 when it comes to Simple Minds, although to be honest I was into them way before that, going right back to Chelsea Girl off their Life in a Day album which came out in 1979. But New Gold Dream 81 82 83 84 was the big one, too big maybe, because for many that was as good as it got for them and not long after that they were considered to be more than a little bit naff, especially when Sparkle in the Rain and Once Upon a Time came along.
18/12/19
It was a walk I hadn't done in a while but today is the day I did it and it felt good to be back down there. Well of course in the context of this Snapshot Log series of writings it can only be Leytonstone High Road that I am talking about. It is over two years since I did my first one, which involved getting off the Central Line at Leytonstone and then walking down to Stratford and this time around it was all very familiar, as I guess I have now done this walk around a dozen times or so since that first day back in Dec 2017. As I have just been tidying up the writings with regard to Snapshot Log, in which those first couple of walks were recorded, I thought it would be good to get back down there at some point during the course of this latest Snapshot and today just happened to be the day that I did so.
Yesterday the weather was wet and cloudy, today it was dry and clear, and here is the precise reason why I decided to make the walk today, because there was a white sun in the sky and the arc of the high road followed it all the way down to Stratford. You can call it an intuition of lay lines if you wish, but on this occasion that white winter sun shinin’ down upon East London felt more beautiful, more precious than anything else on Earth. Guess you just had to have been there to appreciate it without simply thinking it borderline ridiculous, but the fact of the matter is that it was both beautiful and oh so precious by way of giving one the raw simplicity of appreciating the presence of our star, undisputable provider of all life on Earth and on whatever else might be out there in our Solar System.
Walking out of Leytonstone tube station I noted the names of a few places I might have missed from before, might have missed but just can't be sure. Olympic Fish 'n' Chips next door to 7 Star Traders, a 24 hour shop if ever there was one, pit stop for the wicked, stacked high with racks of vegetables outside on the pavement, a burst of colour from out of the winter grey. Nature's Choice was across the road from it, on the same side as the Golden Hand Hair Salon with St. John's Church on the corner. All these places were on Church Lane the narrow street which takes you from the station onto the High Road and which is a somewhat wider expanse, giving that sensation of being on a meridian curve, high rises of the city standing on the horizon in the far distance to the south-west.
Most of the places I walked past seemed pretty familiar although there was a new Polish grocery store by the name of Grosik which looked like it had just opened up. Grosik in big red letters, quite nicely done actually and if appearances are anything to go by it might end up doing pretty good business. If you are feeling hungry you can always try Bombay Kebab, KeraSpice or Oven East, all of which are in close proximity to each other on the stretch of the road just down from Leytonstone Fire Station. Or you could pop into The Titanic for a quick bite of something fishy, chippy. A couple of hair salons made an appearance by way of Beauty Angels and Mr Tee before another East European eating house by the name of Sofra Hasjane which was close to Bansal Plumbers Merchants and Admo German Kitchens. If Mr Tee didn't do it for you as far as your hair was concerned there was always Fred the Blade a little bit further down, close to Percy Ingels, an East London bakery decked out in its usual bright green and orange colours with lots of cakes on display in the window such as slices of pink Tottenham and next to that was a shop called Karmawala.
At the junction with Cann Hall Road lay the Asado Steak House which I guess has been open for the last 6 months or so, opposite to private houses where in the garden of one of them flew an Irish flag with the word Celtic written on it. On this stretch of the road which was now getting pretty close to Maryland station, there was a Harvest Energy garage on the other side to the one I was walking on and next to the Harvest stood PMP Stores which would have only needed a single letter added to its name to become PIMP Stores. Sorry, that’s the kinda thing which makes me laugh, call it purile, call it foolish, call it dumb, but there you have it. There were a couple more shops, such as Janson Wines, a kebab house by the name of Pitta Maria and a Polish Londek Supermarket which looked like it was now permanently closed for business, so might be a good thing for the brand new Grosik further on back up the high road.
Over on the other side of Maryland on my approach to Stratford was the distinctly Romanian White Goose Bistro next to a place called Thai Pie. Just further along from these was a house which was the property of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi and which reminded me of Our Mary of Lourdes, a church back on up the road past Leytonstone and on one of my other walks, one I sometimes take from Woodford to Wanstead, then swinging into Cambridge Heath on which it is located. Soon I was outside the Stratford Centre, looking into the window of Maggy's Slots, an amusements full of fruit machines and with one or two people inside sitting on stools and playing them. By this point I was pretty hungry as it was coming up to two in the afternoon and I hadn't eaten any lunch, so I took my place in the queue in front one of the street food stalls just before the centre entrance. When it came to my turn I ordered a medium size falafel wrap for £3 and very nice it was too as I sat there stuffing it into my mouth whilst sitting on a wooden seat in the wide open space in front of a big, empty church.
19/12/19
It's the London light of shadows which gets me thinking about its brick history repeated again and again as I take to my walking and in regard to that you can call it a simple case of keeping fit, call it an addiction if you wish, because I can't seem to stop doing it, being a compulsion which will probably only stop when my body tells me.
Today the decision which I have to make is where to get off on the tube in order to cut into the cheese of the City. Bethnal Green to take a stroll of East End consequence down the high road to Liverpool Street in order to be right in the thick of it, or Tottenham Court Road so as to do an West / East swing back, which now that I think about it is probably what I will do. But then again I miss the spice and beers, the ever so slightly upside down Englishness of the 21st century East End which I get from walking down the high street of Bethnal Green. If I went for that I would take a left turn close to the end of it onto Brick Lane, bohemian an’ bagel salt beef intensity, stickers of style upon the lampposts until I cut thru' onto Hanbury Street and at the bottom cross Commercial Street onto Lamb Street alongside Spitalfields Market, before walking over the wide square with Roman lying ruins beneath so as to get onto Bishopsgate. So that is my dilemma, but really it is not a bad position to be in when all is said an' done, so I ain't complainin' and will embrace the consequence of whatever the decision is that I make.
This is the time of year I should be poking my head inside one or two churches on my way through the City but I don't seem to have been able to do so yet. Maybe today, but also equally, maybe not. What would I be looking for once I was inside? Head bent in redemption, forgive me for my sins by way of Exodus and Genesis? Words of scripture imploring me to do better. All in an atmosphere sunk in the depths of big city shadow which are cast so deep at this time of year in the December dark light. Intoxicating really, so yeah, might well indeed fancy a bit of that if the mood takes me.
Woke up again in the middle of the night but what is the middle exactly? 4 am, will that do? Hope so because that was the time it was for me today. This time I thought as I lay there that I really had no option but to concentrate on my breath which I did by way of breathing deeply. There is no doubt mind rides on the breath and that if my breathing is calm and deep, my thoughts slow down as a consequence. It has to be like that otherwise they would have run me ragged, those thoughts, that night thinking, stuff risin’ to the surface and projecting outwards. All of which is useless, a never ending show. Got to go in, onto the heart mile an’ keep walkin’. Got to open that heart flower in the middle of my chest, be deep within the rise an' fall, feel those sensations as the breath stream makes its way into my lungs, through rest of my body before being pumped right out again. Feel the weight of my heart, feel those air pipes, move within the depths of both of them to slow my thoughts right down and eventually go back to sleep. And believe it or not in the context of last night this is more or less exactly what happened!
In the tunnel now between Stratford and Mile End and I have made the decision to get off at Bethnal Green. East End smash show is what it is gonna be for me after all, to approach from a distance before walking right into the heart of the big cheese City of London. You know by the time I had walked to Liverpool Street I noticed there were a couple of mistakes I made in the notes I took from my walk the other day when I came across from City Lit in Covent Garden to Liverpool Street Station. It is not ATM Coffee but AMT, which might make all the difference, and where next to it the place I got that decidedly average mozzarella baguette is Delite de France and not whatever it was I wrote before.
Dark afternoon skies, heavy clouds threatening rain. Half Light London as we plough our way further into December before coming smack into that horrible wall otherwise known as Christmas in a few days time. Past Liverpool Street it was Old Broad Street until another wall, London Wall, then over yet again back to Broad Street until Great Winchester into which I slipped to walk to the bottom of it and dive into the little known Austin Friars which on this afternoon in question was really most very dark and more than a little fantastic.
bendin' down to pick a little piece of black from the sky
dark matter is perhaps what you could call it
northern hemisphere winter scene however
is my preferred description of the weather
This is the heart of the cut through, the one which takes me from Liverpool Street to St. Paul's in what seems like no time at all. Now, past Telegraph Street over Moorgate and in the depths of Great Bell Alley was The Gable which, like The Telegraph a Fuller's pub on Telegraph Street, was a place which sold alcohol and on this last dark Thursday in the final week before Christmas was doing very good business. It was packed with people standing at the bar and sitting at tables, tall pints of lager and glasses of wine in front of them along with lots of excited chatter. It was the same thing on Masons Lane both outside and inside the Shepherd Neame Old Dr Butler's Head which had oak barrels propped up for punters to place their pints on and have a smoky conversation in one of the oldest looking half hidden shadow City establishments you are ever likely to see.
The dark rain clouds which had been brooding in the skies above me for quite a while finally burst apart and so brought my walk to an end at St. Paul's where I had to dive down onto the Central Line westbound for a couple of stops before getting off at Tottenham Court Road. Once I got out of there it was still raining hard and I had not brought my waterproof jacket with me which left me feeling that once again I had missed a trick. The purpose of my walk was to go down to Fopp and now that the heavens had opened it was important for me to do so in the shortest possible time. This meant me taking a cut through round the back of the Church of St. Giles and through a dark alley which for once wasn't stinking of piss, then down the alley onto Stacey Street which took me round the side of the Odeon on Shaftesbury Avenue and then it was just a jump across the road to Fopp.
Now I have to be honest with you and admit the thing I was looking for was a compilation from The Stranglers called Peaches which of course was one of their early hit singles way back in the golden age of punk in 1977. It just so happened to be a fact that I have been looking to update my collection of music by The Stranglers for a little while now by way of buying one of their cheapo Greatest Hits. I had seen Peaches on Amazon for around the 4 or 5 quid mark so I thought it was a chance worth taking to go down to Fopp and see if they had a copy for about the same price. Admittedly Fopp can sometimes be a bit hit and miss in this regard and there was a chance I would walk away with nothing, but all the same when the walking I’d done was factored into the equation it was a risk worth taking. The impetus for going to get it today - as well as just being a thing I could hang on to so as to justify my walking around town for the umpteenth time - was the fact that last night my old friend Thomas Deilecke had called me from Berlin. We had a long conversation which was mainly about India and the fact that he had just booked tickets to go out there in October 2020 which meant it would be the first time he would be going back in over 30 years.
We touched on other things as well though during the course of our little chat, and one of those things was that he told me that he had recently seen The Stranglers play a show in Berlin and how great he thought they were, really great as a matter fact. Guess his comments spurred me on to go there today, down to Fopp to see if they had Peaches and to get a decent walk under my belt in the process of so doing. Of course when I do these walks in town it helps if I have a reason for making the journey, no matter how slight that reason might be, pathetic even, and which in this instance was indeed pretty slender. Something as flimsy as Peaches was all I needed to set out beating a path through the streets of London and now over 12,000 steps later here I am on the Central Line east of Stratford heading back home and tapping these notes into my phone. Glad to say the story had a happy ending this time around as Fopp had a copy of Peaches and it was mine all mine after I'd handed over the princely sum of 5 quid to the man behind the counter. It was more than a bit of a bargain, but then again as mentioned before, plenty of CDs are as cheap as chips at the moment since they have been seemingly consigned to oblivion, cheaper than chips even.
21/12/19
The stresses and strains of life! Lately in the depths of the night if I happen to wake up I have been diving deep into my heart chakra, or at least that is what I think I have been doing but in reality who knows? No easy task but the key is to hold onto the breath - prana - feel it and follow it into the regions of my chest and lungs. Think it might be the most appropriate place to concentrate on when I'm prone horizontal. Ajna for sure is my number one priority as far chakras are concerned when I am sitting in the shrine room in meditation, energy elevation an' all that, but during the time when most people are asleep it feels better for me to dive into the heart, if I can that is. It is important to take deep breaths, draw the air of the night down into my lungs and follow it through to the point where it is pushed back out again. Inhabit the heart regions, open up the love red crimson flower, the ever beating pulsation of what it is and which ticks on deep inside of me.
Thoughts can be kept in abeyance as long as the will is there, as soon as that sense of focus is lost sight of then it is a different story, but if the predominant area of concentration remains the breath it can take you places you never thought you would get to, all of a sudden you find yourself in a half dream state which is bathed in a night / daylight so peculiar to those early hours. Previously I have either got up or sat up in bed to meditate with pillows stacked behind me, but somehow it feels the thing I should be doing now is meditating whilst lying down. In many ways it is the path of least resistance, the easy way if you wish and it is low stakes too, because if I fall asleep then so what? I'm in bed anyway and isn't that what you're supposed to do?
The main thing for me as I step out on this new way of practice, is to be determined enough to push those thoughts aside, or rather not push them as that implies force, but rather make a resolve that when I have woken up at whatever time it might happen to be - 3.30 or 4.00 am - I concentrate on the deep pull of breath down into my lungs, deep breaths so as to pacify, and just as equally to concentrate on the breath trail once it has been pushed back out again. On the edge of exhalation there might be some retention of breath, the sticking around of the air element and this is an opportunity to observe how it mixes with the mind. The point of all this is to try to make all parts of day and night opportunities for meditation when I get the chance. Of course if I don't happen to wake up at all that is also fine as it means I will have been asleep and therefore resting both body and mind, only in a different way to the meditation I do when in the position of prone horizontal. Hope I can carry on with it, keep it up so to speak, not take my eye off the ball by way of falling for the content of those swirling thought patterns, letting them take me here and there with no real clue as to what is behind them, which is often shallow breathing - short breaths, heat breaths - where the consciousness behind them is only minimally aware.
Got to move myself away from all that. When I wake up in the night I have to go in, immediately start to breathe deeply and follow those breaths so as to quiet down my thinking. If I don't do that I'm lost, stuck in a perpetual cycle of non-resolution, so I have to keep focused, allow the breathing to take me on a journey. Since I am flat horizontal either on my back or on my left side / right side it is also the case that the centre of awareness is lower too, not so much 3rd Eye territory in other words. More in the vicinity of the heart, chest lands, within the realms of heart and lungs then, which is fine, vital even. It is running on now, the time I have that is, and to undo the knot of the heart is still a task to be undertaken. To open up, to see from different points of view, hopefully I am slowly beginning the process, the journey, however you might wish to describe it.
You know I don't know or think I'll ever get a grip on properly describing myself by way of words. Not as if the situation overwhelms me or anything like that, more like it flows over me but then maybe that is the same thing, although one thing I do know is that at the moment I am feeling the pre-Christmas pressure. It comes along every year and this time is no different. Managed at least over the last few days to write down some of the London walks I do. Oh yes, that reminds me, last night whilst lying prone horizontal in the middle of the night trying to concentrate on my deep breathing I remembered a segment from one of my regular City walks and it went something like what you see below.
It is all about finding a place of refuge and in that regard I remembered from the other day the walk I made into town from Bethnal Green, the one where I ended up buying a copy of Peaches in Fopp for only 5 quid. During that walk I went through the busyness of Spitalfields, Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street Station, where by the way I had to dive down to the toilets to take a quick piss. This a hell of a lot easier to do these days since they abolished the previous 20p or 50p charge you had to pay in order to use them. Yes, those fucking machines and turnstiles used to make me sick, just the sight of them, cruel barriers they were before I was finally able to pull it out and feel the relief flow through me from what flowed outta me. Coming back out of the bogs and then the station, I found myself on Old Broad Street where things were still pretty crowded, a middle of the week day in the heart of the City and all that. Guess the time must have been 1.15 - 1.30 in the afternoon so it was lunch hour and therefore full of office people, drones and high rollers along with punks like me who scarcely merit a mention. Walked into the midst of them and got pulled along with the flow across the busy London Wall so as to continue on Old Broad Street before suddenly taking a sharp right onto Great Winchester.
At this point the crowds of people which I had been part of simply faded away. It was then I realised that having a little bit of knowledge as to what was what within the geography of the City cheese could pay big dividends, because from out of all that madness it was now as if I was more or less in solitude.
back street walkin'
is what I'm talkin'
empty pavements
on which to pound
city cheese stalkin’
down to the ground
Think in many ways it was a similar experience to what happens with breathing meditation, where if I hold awareness on my breath those thoughts fade away, like I'm in a solitary empty place, one of refuge, just like walking down Austin Friars Passage after that Great Winchester cut through, away from the madness, away from the crowds. Things falling away, getting to that solitary place. I can do it physically, can do it mentally, just takes a bit of know-how that's all, and a bit of effort. Well anyway, that at least was how it felt for me, it was nice to get that glimpse of the place I'd found when out on my City street walkin', where I can almost disappear but still be there. So there you go, that was my revelation. Make sense?
Thought I might write a piece called the Geography of Ramana Maharshi which basically will list all the places Ramana Maharshi lived and spent time in during the course of his life. In terms of villages, towns, cities, there are only three - Tiruchuzhi, Madurai and Tiruvannamalai - then within the context of the last one there are a number of locations in which he stayed until he moved to what became Ramanasramam in 1922. It might useful to see them all in black and white, those places where the Master was, as while they are within the pages of his biographies they sometimes don't seem to stand out as much as they might. For my own sense of reference I might spend some time listing them out with a few words of explanation beneath each one so as to make things clearer, but then again maybe it is just that I haven't read the right biography of him yet, and that indeed the information is already out there clear as day.
Nerves been stretched these last few days due to wi-fi problems, nothing it seems can bring on the stress quite so effectively as the Internet going down. Lights blinkin', reception on and off, pop up box which says "No Internet Access", all are sure fire ways of getting my heart pumpin' and feeling like I'm tipping off the end of the world. Really don't know what to do apart from call Virgin Media, wait for ages on the line with rap music coming into my ear, before finally getting through to someone out in India whilst grappling with the desire to scream in frustration, to twist my face and shake my fist at the gods for bringing this down upon me. Guess you could say that it gets to me and has me cornered in next to no time at all. The perils of modern living no doubt, perils which countless millions of others on the planet would give everything they had for, but which still threaten to sink me when they happen. Dunno what to do, just live with it I guess until they find a solution, the wi-fi that is, or maybe possibly make efforts to find another provider who doesn’t have the same faults with their service.
It is all there then; the diving into the depths in the middle of the night trying to trace the course of the air moving in an' outta me; the City street walkin'; the finding of the secret place within; the bangin' of my head against the wall of wi-fi.
23/12/19
Down in Wales now and this time it is for Christmas. Different scene and by the sea, or more or less, as when I say sea I mean the Bristol Channel. This morning I was up by 7.10 and on the cushion by 7.20 to do a straight 216 which took me through to just gone 8.35, so, over an hour and 20 minutes. Ramana Maharshi picture on the mantelpiece above the electric fire in the lounge providing me with silent guidance. Concentration came and went as it always does to greater or lesser degrees, but on the whole my energy was good with no falling back into the land of head nod by way of being too damn tired. After meditation I washed and brushed my teeth before changing clothes and taking walk outside which saw me go to the end of the lane and then down through the Kymin to get to the seafront and Penarth pier.
Down on the front there were clear December skies with a low sun blazing to the south, its precious golden rays shimmering on the water with the islands of Flatholm and Steepholm lying out in the middle of the channel. There was no one else on the pier after I had said hello to a man who quickly departed, so I stood on the end of it with my eyes closed facing that sun, feeling that the same energy which empowers our star is also within me. Felt the wind brush across my face as I looked down onto the beach below where a couple of solitary walkers were on the shore line taking advantage of the fact the tide was out and the flat sands exposed, brown sands of channel mud rather than the golden sands you get further down the coast on the beaches of the Gower west of Swansea. Walking back off the pier it was then just a case of going through Alexandra Park to get to the shops in town and to buy a packet of Taste the Difference Colombian coffee from Sainsbury's which cost me £3.70. There was a long queue of people outside one of the butchers as it was turkey collecting time, other meats too no doubt, spirit of Christmas and all that, although I can't say I felt it much, maybe a little bit but nothing more, maybe it is my age and the fact the magic might never come round for me again.
24/12/19
Been in Wales a couple of days now and there has been a bit of meditation and a bit of walking in amongst all the juggling which has to be done at this time of year with regard to people who fall within the orbit of my family circumference. I'm still keeping up the deep breathing in the dark of the night, as it is in the early hours when I usually wake up. Deep breaths to pull down the air into my lungs sittin' pretty within my chest cavity, then hopefully the awareness which follows in the trail of that breath attention will provide keys to the doorway into the lands of my heart. To see the lotus blossom, crimson vermilion floating in the skies above the secret lake, where all dreams might possibly come true and where the innermost secret tree stands ready to fulfil whatever wishes you might desire.
Today has been windy, sometimes wet but not very cold, Winters are just not the same anymore. Some beautiful skies were hinted at but they never quite materialized, all the same it was good in places when the weather was dry. I do wonder just how much I am unaware of things and I think that my unawareness might too much if truth be told, but what to do about it apart from keep pluggin' away to make things better?
29/12/19
Xmas in Wales is now over, more or less runnin' on empty by the end of it as well. Just got to ask the question; why is it I have the karma to have the parents I have? Obviously the answer lies in there somewhere, but it feels like it must be buried deep and it would be extremely complicated to pull out in any understandable shape or form so as to learn any lessons from it. Well, besides the trials and tribulations which go with having to stay a few days with family members who I would sometimes like to splice through with an axe, the best part of my days down in South Wales were the early mornings.
It was good that I was able to keep to my meditation schedule because the flat in Penarth is quiet and conducive to sitting in silence for an hour or so each morning. This meant my meditation sessions went something like this - Mon 23/12 - up just gone 7 o'clock for a 216 which took approx 70 minutes. Since when I finished Dawa Dolkar was still in bed, deep in the land of nod, at a time which I guess was something like 8.30, I took a walk down to Penarth seafront. The great thing about staying in the flat in Penarth is that it is centrally located, which means you can get pretty much to anywhere in town in no time at all when going out on foot.
In this instance it was a case of walking down to the end of the lane outside our block of flats and then through a little park called The Kymin where once on the other side of it I was more or less at the bottom of the hill leading down to Penarth beach. On this first morning back in Penarth the weather was clear and fresh so that by the time I had walked to the end of Penarth pier there was a brilliant golden sun shining over the waters of the Bristol Channel. The words in my mind, whilst looking out upon this golden orb hanging low in the sky to the south in all its cosmic glory, were -
May the light of the precious Buddha's teachings shine forever.
Not quite sure where those words came from, maybe I was thinking like a Buddhist when I said them, but never mind, the scene was beautiful in a nuclear-like prophetic kind of way and it seemed more than appropriate for me to silently mouth them.
Guess I stayed on the end of the pier for 5 or 10 minutes enjoying the view, drinking down the peace and silence for there were very few other people about, before I walked back and continued along Penarth promenade to the other end where lies the building which houses the Penarth Yacht Club. One or two people were out running, coming down the hill from the cliffs at the top of it, looks of serious intent on their faces as they sped past me, Welsh people keeping fit and looking like they meant business. I walked up the hill in the direction of the cliffs before taking a right turn at the top of it which took me down Augusta Place and onto the path which is on what is the old railway line that once ran between Penarth and Sully. It is a path which is popular with dog walkers, where in a town like Penarth there are many, so coming across people carrying plastic bags of dog shit is by no means uncommon whilst their beloved mutts scamper along beside them.
The walk up the path on the old train tracks took me, logically enough I suppose, to Penarth train station which is where the line from Cardiff now ends. Took me to the square in front of it by the name of Station Approach, on which there are such places as The Paramount which is a curry house, Mo's which is also a curry house, Martin's Newsagents, K-Tax Taxis and a wine and craft beer seller called The Bottle Shop. Before reaching the square I walked past a row of garages, at least half a dozen of them by the railway line, which always had cars outside of them either freshly repaired or waiting for the mechanics' attention. Gimber Motors, Bernard Cody are the names of a couple, representing in a tiny way a rare patch of light industry within the boundaries of gentle, pleasant Penarth where to one and all life is never anything less than perfect.
By the time I have either walked through the centre of town or past the library on my way back to the flat, I will have been out for a good 40 minutes or so and I will have clocked up something like 4500 - 5000 steps on my Samsung Health App. Not a bad start to the day then, a mix of meditation and that fresh sea air pulled down into my lungs, all conducted within a spirit of silence. You know the mind chatter never ceases, but you can at least turn down the volume a little bit and allow space for other things to enter; sounds of the birds singing, the soundless sound of the Universal One pulsating from deep within the depths of my heart an’ other stuff like that.
So that was the first morning back in Penarth and I pretty much followed the same pattern on Tuesday 24/12 as well, namely a 216 meditation then a walk down to the seafront and a route back through town along the old railway line. 25/12 was slightly different for it was Xmas Day which meant I did not get out to do my morning walk, whilst as far as meditation went it was just a 108 rather than a 216, probably because time was tight as we all had to get up and be ready to go down to my sister's for Xmas morning at 10 o'clock sharp. That one was different but even so I did manage to have a walk later in the day as it was bright and clear with a winter sun shining in the sky above which had a faint but discernible warmth to it. By 3 pm or so we were ready for a Xmas walk to work off all the Xmas food we had eaten and so we headed off down to Penarth seafront where a very great throng of Penarth people were taking in the fresh sea air and where they were in jolly spirits too due to it being Xmas Day.
30/12/19
So, to continue with the schedule undertaken during my week in Wales, the last two full days of our stay saw a couple of sessions of 216 meditation in the mornings followed by a walk down to the seafront, to the end of the pier, along the promenade to the hill leading up to the cliffs, before taking that right turn at the top and ending up on the old railway path to take me up into town. Those last two walks necessitated the carrying of an umbrella for it was raining on both occasions, quite a bit on Boxing Day and not so bad on the 27th where there was also a hint of mist in the air, more than a hint out to sea in fact, where it was full on fog so that foghorns blew in the middle of the channel from ships plying the routes across the waters to the South Welsh ports and Avonmouth on the other side. And there we have it, the morning routines which saw me through my week in Wales, saw me emerge more or less in one piece from it when all the various encounters and interactions with family members were thrown into the mix as well.
A couple of evenings also saw me take walks up to the top of town and the streets overlooking Cardiff Bay, walks with views where the beatin' heart of the capital city of Wales lay over on the other side of the waters below. Guess it was the morning walks which I liked best, although thinking about it, that might not necessarily be so, as there is a night magic to the streets and lanes of Penarth which makes the place like no other when walking through their dark and empty spaces. But anyway, let's just say for argument's sake that it was indeed the case, my liking best of the morning walks that is, those morning walks when there were very few people around, the town was silent and when sometimes the mist rolled in over the waters of the channel to spice up the atmosphere.
On one of those days I had a chat with a fisherman who was on his own at the end of Penarth pier. He had been there since 5.30 in the morning which meant he had spent well over 2 hours standing there fishing in the dark. He came from Ely in Cardiff but he said that he also had a caravan in St Mary's Well Bay over on the other side of Lavernock Point. He was kitted out to be there in any kind of weather, fishing at the end of the pier come rain or shine, it was in his blood that was for sure, the fishing life was for him, no doubt about that. Cod and whiting were his standard catches in that part of the channel he told me, took them home he did, to cook them up and eat them. During the course of our conversation he told me about the Ranny Pools, a dangerous part of the Channel which lay just beyond Lavernock Point, how he'd got into trouble out there in the fishing boat of his friend, how they'd had to call out the RNLI to pull them out of the pool swirls after their anchor had got stuck there leaving them spinnin' round and round, more than a little out of control.
Sounded dangerous, an example of how things can descend into danger in no time at all, that was how accidents happened and how people lost their lives at sea. From the end of the pier where I was stood as he told me all that, I would hardly have believed it was possible but clearly it did happen, his description was too detailed for it not to have been so, the continuity of progression to his tale too convincingly time lined for it to have all suddenly entered his head by way of an absurd act of his imagination. It was a lesson to me that other lives are lived in Penarth, either by those there or who are just visiting, and that the details of nearly all of them would be something I would never get to know. Their stories, glories, scrapes and tragedies, those steps to redemption in the form of saving grace from who knows where, they were all there for sure, locked in the vocabulary of the unspoken. So that was a story from one of my walks in the mornings down to the pier and beyond. The Ranny Pools, wherever they might be, dangerous currents waiting to devour the unknowing and wash their bodies up days later on the other side of Sully Island.
That final day I stopped near the end of my walk at Training Ground, a small coffee bar by the station and from where I ordered and drank a flat white for £2.60. Sign of the changin' times for Penarth, Training Ground, funky little coffee shack in a cubby hole between two buildings and within that space a couple of young people trying making a go of it. Training as in trains and ground as in coffee I suppose. "Hey, you bean to Training Ground?" Ha, ha, see? It was open 6 days a week to catch commuter traffic comprised of the good people of Penarth who caught the train into Cardiff so as to go about their labours in the big city. Closing each day at 1 pm for the people running it to then go off and do other things such as buy their coffee stock, at least that was the schedule told me by the young man who ran it. He served me up a pretty decent flat white too, which I drank standing at the side of the bar, sheltering beneath scaffold whilst gazing over the square with the curry house The Paramount standing over on the side of it, just like it has done since 1984.
30/12/19
A day of sorting things out. Finally beginning the process of changing providers in regard to our Internet & TV. For years and years we have been with Virgin Media but we're now gonna go with BT. Problems with the wi-fi have brought this on. Too many trips to the router to switch it on and off, so now it is time for something new and this will come in the form of a BT box which will be installed by a BT engineer on 17/1 and all for under half of what we're paying now. That is the plan, that is the hope, for something newer, better, cheaper. Can't say fairer than that now can ya? Whether or not it will cut the mustard is something we will just have to wait an’ see.
Westfield was where we went to get things sorted. Those in-between days of Xmas and New Year meant there were piles of people around but that was to be expected, no surprise that the place was choc a bloc. The clock is ticking for all of us and in places like Westfield in Stratford East London, when it is full with people hungry for more and more from the world of consumerism, you can hear that ticking just a little bit louder. So fuckin' obvious we will all get to the point of no return in a redemptive sense, no I don't mean to sound religious when I say something like that, it is more the case that for anyone with eyes and ears to see and hear, it is clearly something which is not going to be sustainable on a long term basis. Our behaviour our habits our wants and needs just seem to go on and on and on, all of us never coming close to giving up contributing to their proliferation. Throw my hands into the air and walk towards the nearest sunset if that was an experience to be afforded me by way of some kind inexplicable existentialist statement which would make things better.
1/1/20
So this Snapshot continues on into the first day of the new year. Meditation this morning was a 189 after a late night the night before because it was New Year's Eve. Well, what did you expect? Now early evening on the first day and my energy is moderate to low, guess it is just a case of tuning into the overall vibe of things maybe, something like that, people dozy, people in stupor, people low, now that the extended Christmas holiday is nearly over. Talking of holidays, I have been troubled these last few weeks by the imminent arrival of some Aussie relations which to my mind at least has been handled badly from our side of the family. Think a timeline of events might be in order so here goes.
Sometime November I get an email from Christine in Adelaide in South Oz saying that she, her husband Chris and their 10 year old daughter Annabelle were planning on coming over to the UK. They were on a trip to Europe which would go something like -
Copenhagen / Finland - Lapland for Xmas / Paris / London
She was sounding me out, seeing how we were fixed in regard to spare time and space for the London part of their run around. Got to say the email filled me with dread and anxiety. Why? Well, 'coz she was sniffin' for a free stay, but in that regard I knew no way, that was simply gonna be impossible, due to the fact the house is pretty full, what with Thinley Wangchen still holed up in our spare room. People arriving in the middle of winter, well, what a time to descend, just when the energy levels are low, just when the only thing you wanna do is hibernate and get through the whole damn deal in one piece. I also knew they would want to visit mum and dad and the rest of the family down in South Wales which would entail a whole load of stress pulling that off for them. It was a case of the people in Wales, namely my mum, dad and sister behaving badly, because they told me the last thing they wanted was to see the Aussies in any shape or form.
Christine is a cousin of my father, daughter of his Aunty Joan, sister of his father Charles who died a long time ago, a couple of years before I was born. Joan was the youngest of Charles’s siblings who had all emigrated to Australia back in the 1920’s after leaving Whitby in North Yorkshire from which they were never to return. In fact all of Charlie's siblings along with his mother and father made that one way trip, landing in Freemantle in Western Australia before making their way over to the south east tip of the state of Victoria, to the city of Melbourne and Philip Island. In 2010 I travelled to Australia with dad in order for him to see his Aunty Joan for what would turn out to be the last time, as by that point she was well into her 90s and pretty much on her last legs. Good trip that was, just me and dad, flying into Perth for a week staying in the port of Freemantle, before taking the Indian-Pacific train across the vast Nullabor Plain to Adelaide, where during the course of our stay we spent quite a bit of time with Christine, Chris and Annabelle who at that time was still a baby.
First there was an email from Christine in November, then another in December after I'd replied to the email in November and in my reply I set out the score as to what was possible and what was not, then in my second reply, more of the score, as to what was possible and what was not as far as seeing people in the family and accommodation was concerned. My second reply gave her some extensive alternatives in what I thought was a helpful way, but I heard nothing in response to it for a couple of weeks, not a dickey. The long and the short of all this, the what I'm trying to say bit, is that the whole thing has caused me more than a little stress, because for one reason or another within family circles, Christine and Chris are not that popular, no one is jumping up and down on the sofa wild with excitement in anticipation of seeing them that is for sure. I'm not jumping up and down on the sofa either, but I do at least feel a little slack could be cut to them and that we should be just a bit more welcoming if at all possible, but others aren't seeing it that way and want to play hardball. All of which has left me a bit piggy in the middle shall we say, with some mildly troubling dreams creeping in from time to time as well, lurking like phantoms on the horizon and a betraying a certain amount of confusion and angst over what it is that I should do to prevent the whole deal being little more than an embarrassing fiasco.
Funny thing is for various reasons it has made me drill deep into the relationship I have with my father, how much of a dominant force he is in my life and how still at nearly 58 years of age I can in no real way stand up to him and put him in his place when the occasion demands it. And here's the thing, he actually bails me out money-wise quite a lot during the course of a year as well, I mean not bails me out because I go knocking on his door cap in hand or anything like that, but more in the sense that each month I get 400 hundred quid from him to pay my private pension contribution and from that 400 hundred quid I take a little slice for my own expenses which I don't think he knows about, but there you go, let's just keep that secret and quietly move on. On top of that there is the 1500 quid cheque as an Xmas present which I get from him each and every year - by the way Dawa Dolkar gets one too - so for me that is 12 lots of 400 quid which equals £4800 a year, plus a £1500 one off bringing it up to £6300 every twelve months, plus a 100 quid cheque on my birthday. This means I get from dad nearly 6.5 K every year thank you very much, no questions asked. Probably little wonder that I feel way beneath him and no bigger than a mouse when any sign of potential confrontation rears up on the horizon.
So in these situations - with the coming of the Aussies, something which he is in no way enthusiastic about due to the fact mum hates their guts for a whole host of reasons I don’t have time to go into - I have to be careful and make sure I don't push too much for things to go in a direction which he very possibly doesn't want them to go. It all adds up to a feeling within of a distinct lack of substance, a kind of vassalage which has come from taking all that bread from him over the years and never really managing to stand on my own feet financially. These things then - incidents, happenings, like the imminent coming to town of the Aussies - only serve to bring such realisations into sharper focus and leave me feeling more than a little bit shit.
Lets overturn these tables, disconnect these cables
Can you tell me where we're heading Senor?
Or something like that, according to Street Legal era Bob Dylan at least. So anyway, this thing which I have just spent the last couple of pages writing about - pretty badly in places as well - is what has mainly been on my mind these last couple of weeks, like a dark cloud brewing before it rolls in like thunder leaving me feeling oh so weary as a consequence.
2/1/20
So here we go, another bout. This thing which has been troubling my mind, rumbling on through these thought willows of mine, this Aussie business, has still got me and won't quite let go. Suggestions flying around from people make me feel like I'm caught in the firing line and all that stuff I wrote yesterday about my relationship with dad just adds to a sense of not quite being on top of things, but at least I'm keeping up my meditation. How many times have I written that or something similar over the years? Quite a lot probably. Wanting to have my cake and eat it might well be the name of the game, performing a delicate balancing act with regard to the people in my life but failing miserably to come out smelling of roses or anywhere close.
Also I'm just losing track a bit at the moment of all the things I need to do with regard to my writing, like what there is still to do in regard to typing, checking, editing of stuff, that kinda deal. Golden Telescope needs to be read through once again, PDFs created for my Traceless Trails stuff and South India 2019 finished off with regard to the reading of it before being double checked one more time. Must be the time of year I guess, just after New Year with the slow recovery from Xmas period indulgence, which means I'm not quite hitting the target with regard to so many things that I want to do.
Meditating at this time of year is what I call meditating in the dark season. Reason being that usually when I start it is only half-light at best, sometimes still dark, although not so much lately as I have been having a few late mornings, or later mornings I should say. This morning for example I didn't get on my chair until 7.55, meditating until 8.58 and yesterday was even later due to the fact it was New Year's Day, don't think I began until 9 or something like that, then went on until 10.10. Name of the game at this particular point in time, like I said it is just the post Xmas sludge with consequent time keeping sluggishness kicking in, but it should soon pass.
So where was I? Oh yes, in the shrine room for meditation, with the slightly open window to let some air in and the lighted the candle in front of the framed photo I have of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. The placing of another one, a smaller photo on the shrine in front of me so as to provide a point of focus within the realms of my meditation practice. There is the Seven Line Prayer which I recite before I start, a prayer to invoke the power of Guru Rinpoche, accompanied by the visualisation of Guru Rinpoche images I have seen and noted at various points in my life and travels over the years, before finishing with a three time recitation of the Guru Rinpoche mantra. And then it is the breath count and all that comes with it. But the light is always there you see, electricity in my brain, bulb illuminated, where the glowing of this inner fuse makes all the difference, makes it easier for me to pull my attention back to the object of meditation when the shadow parade of thoughts come along to knock on me door. Yeah, knock me around a bit maybe, but never to the point where I completely lose sight of the object for any sustained period of time. The light in my brain is too strong for that, the feeling of energy accumulated on the point of pineal too bright, too blissful to ignore, as I sit there and meditate. When in that state there is little else I want to do, just keep it simple and back on the draw, the meditation sleigh ride illuminated by the light of the 3rd Eye, I mean come on, what could really be better than that?
In the half light as the people of Woodford slowly crank up the volume on the another day, I really do find the room I sit in to be a most beautiful place to be. The fact I have the opportunity to sit in the presence of the guru in the form of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi is something I find astoundingly incredible, and yes, I'm speaking the truth there. The guru can appear in many forms but always when the appearance is clear, it is accompanied by a sense of calm and perfect well being. And there is no better way for me to start my day than that.
14/1/19
Final day of this particular Snapshot Log. Yeah I know it is nearly 2 weeks since the last entry but I have simply not had the chance - or space inside my head - to wrap it up, so this one today is going to be it. I'm going to be out and about a bit, but hopefully stuff will get written from various locations, such as home and the South Woodford branch of Redbridge Libraries. Anyway we will see how we go but it is time to put a lid on it, the writing of this Snapshot II in my notebook, and to begin typing it up on my laptop.
Think I was going on about the visit of my Aussie relatives in the last couple entries before this latest one and yeah that saga is still going on in that they are still in the country and I will be meeting up with them again at the weekend. It has kind of been OK I guess, maybe I read too much into things at times, take things too seriously, make things a matter of life and death when it really doesn't have to be so.
The first couple of weeks of 2020 have seen me pretty much doing what I usually do - the walking, the writing, the meditation sitting - along with all those other freak show occurrences which pass through my mind on a daily basis. Still haven't contacted Virgin Media to inform them that I am changing over to BT as far as our TV and Internet is concerned. Going to the wire on that one as the BT engineer is due to come on Friday and fix things up, so Virgin really ought to know that I will soon no longer be one of their customers. Well, no worries, I will call them tomorrow and get them to pull the plug. Fact of the matter is I have been paying through the nose with them for far too long now and so things have to change.
There is also my new iphone which I have been having a lot of fun with and in regard to that the most exciting part of it so far has been downloading and signing up to Spotify which at last has brought me into a whole new dimension in regard to listening to music. For the first couple of days I made do with the free version but the ads on it were seriously irritating so I knocked it on the head and have now signed up to their subscription service at £9.99 a month with the first 3 months free. Since doing that I haven't looked back. Highlights so far have been some latter day Bryan Ferry albums in the form of Alphaville and Avonmore and a whole load of Prince, primarily 21st century material as found on the excellent 37 track Anthology 1995 - 2010. This pretty much covers the best of what Prince came up with in that period and amongst it there is some tremendous stuff which in my book more than solidifies his reputation as a bona fide genius who was taken from us way too soon. Thing about Prince is I think he must have wrote and recorded tracks pretty much every day of his life up in Paisley Park, it was simply what he did, like an ever flowing stream which could have never been made to stop, even if he had wanted to.
One of the things which I have managed to sort out in the first couple of weeks of this new year is the itinerary for the forthcoming visit at the end of April 2020 of my old friend Thomas Deleicke from Berlin. He is known as Toby Ruft within the pages of Tiger Trails and also in one or two other pieces in Om Reflections both as found on my website Traceless Path. There is no doubt I think we have done pretty well over the years in keeping up our friendship since our first fateful meeting in the room we shared in Kopan Monastery, Nepal way back in 1988, October 88 to be exact, well over 30 years ago, 32 actually. We have kept it up and stayed in touch, remained friends over the years after spending a month in Kopan taking an introductory course on Tibetan Buddhism, participants of a course which probably attracted over 100 people from all over the world. After that, well not immediately after, but maybe a month or 6 weeks later, we met back up again in the far south of India, just as we had planned to do when the course was over.
This time it wasn't in Nepal or anywhere hilly like that, but way down south on the sands of Kovalam beach in Kerala right at the bottom of India. From there, after about a week or so of grass smoking and body surfing in the sea, we took a flight from Trivandrum airport across to Colombo in Sri Lanka where we stayed in a YMCA for a few nights before taking a train up to the town of Kandy which lay in the centre of the island. In Kandy we checked out the famous Temple of the Tooth which supposedly houses one of the Buddha's teeth as a precious relic and which attracts many Buddhist pilgrims on a daily basis. After hanging around Kandy for a while we headed out of town to a small meditation centre called Nilambe. We stayed in Nilambe for around 10 days or so, meditating under the instruction of its resident teacher and founder, a Sri Lankan man by the name of Godwin. It was so great, so precious, that I will never forget the time we spent there under the gentle guidance we received from him in the art of meditation. Funnily enough after the relative purity of Nilambe things went a little bit crazy for us as we then ended up in a place called Galle right down in the south west corner of the island where we struck up a relationship with a local grass dealer called Sam who was in the habit of rolling pure marijuana joints in tobacco skins so that they looked like big fat cigars. Soon we were rolling them up and smoking them ourselves as we sat on the ramparts of the old town walls and stared out red eyed over the part of the Arabian Sea where it meets the Indian Ocean, with a shipwreck lying a couple of miles off the coast half sticking out of the water thrown in for good measure.
From Galle we managed to make our way back up the west coast after a pit stop for a couple of nights in the surfers' paradise of Hikkaduwa before finally returning to Colombo and catching a flight back to Trivandrum. Our adventures didn't end there, far from it, we were on too much of a roll by then to ever think of stopping. All our subsequent misdemeanours are to be found in Tiger Trails on Traceless Path so I will leave it at that, suffice to say that by the time we got to say goodbye, somewhere on the streets of Bombay in April 1989, I was carrying a ball of opium around with me in one of my socks. Potentially on the road to ruin but the fact of the matter is that if you are prepared to roll with the punches when you are on that particular path, infinite possibilities might open up for you. By concluding with a statement such as that I will bring this rap full circle by saying that here we are today - me and Thomas - still hanging around together whenever we can and like I said at the beginning of this particular entry, I will be seeing him again at the end of April.
2020 should in fact quite a big year for Thomas as in October he will once again be making the trip out to India, the first time he will have gone back there in over 30 years. This of course is in stark contrast to me when it comes to going to the land of the Om Vibration, as I have been what seems like countless times since that very first trip of mine back in 1988. Clearly not countless because I can in fact count them up if I were so minded to by checking all the visa stamps in my passports and if I did I think we would be looking at a total of at least 25 trips, if not more. And in this regard it is still going on, because in under 3 weeks time me and Dawa Dolkar will be on the plane to Bengaluru once again for another taste of the action, another 5 to 6 weeks down in the heat of South India, and I for one can’t wait!
Not only is Thomas going to India this year he is also coming over to see me in the UK which will be the first time he has been here since staying for a few days in 2015. That was relatively a short visit during which we nevertheless managed to fit in seeing Bob Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall and also a solo show in Henley on Thames performed by Ian McCulloch, lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen. In late 2018 I made a trip across to Berlin for a few days, my first since 2013 when we got to see Bob Dylan twice during a run of three shows he played at a place called the Tempodrom slap bang in the middle of Berlin right next to the Reichstag. During those few days of my 2018 trip we saw a show by Echo and the Bunnymen at the Admiralspalast which was also right in the centre of town and a pretty damn fine concert it was too. So there you go, we meet up and of course we talk, we walk, we eat, we drink, we cycle and then we get to do other things as well.
For this forthcoming visit of his in late April 2020 I have been quick off the mark and already got things planned out, places booked and all the rest of it so as to ensure it is going to be a trip he will have felt was well worth making. Thomas is actually coming over for a week this time around, which is longer than usual as we normally go for something like 3 or 4 days, either me in Berlin or him in London. This time though, like I said, things are different and he is going to be here for longer. There is a reason for that however, which is because we are planning on doing a little tour of North Wales, one of my favourite places to go as far as the UK is concerned. It is somewhere I have visited a number of times over the last few years, having gone up Mount Snowdon on no less than three occasions in the process. The time we spend in North Wales is going to be three days and three nights if all goes to plan and talking of plans it goes something like this - 23rd - 26th April 2 x double rooms at the Premier Inn in Rhyl, bookings which will also include a full English breakfast on each of the three mornings we will be there. Yum, Yum, I’m hungry already!
This means on the morning of the 23rd we will be driving up to North Wales from London to hopefully arrive in Rhyl mid to late afternoon where we will check into the Premier Inn which is right on the seafront. I know that it is on the seafront because I have stayed there before, last year in fact when I did a little trip up to North Wales with Thinley Wangchen. Now Rhyl, it has to be said, is nothing special, in fact in most peoples' book it might be regarded as something of a grade A shithole, although not by me, but the simple fact of the matter is that it has a very good Premier Inn which is considerably cheaper than other Premier Inns in that part of North Wales. Here I am talking about Premier Inns located in places such as Conwy and Llandudno. What people may not realise is that it is very easy to get out of Rhyl and drive along the coast to visit those nicer places, so that means in my book you get a better deal, especially if you don't mind driving which I don't, and if you stay in Rhyl.
So we stay at the Premier Inn in Rhyl which we will use as our base and from there ride along the coast road through Colwyn Bay to Llandudno for a nice meal each evening and other things like that. These other things are going to be a walk together up Mount Snowdon and a day spent checking out some serious castles up in that part of the world, probably Conwy, Carnaervon and Beaumaris if we can fit them all in. These castles were built in the reign of Edward I over 700 years ago, all part of his heavy duty campaign of subjugating the Welsh once and for all, something in which he succeeded. All of them are castles built by Master James of Saint George, brought over from the Kingdom of Savoy for this express purpose and each project was executed with a brutal efficiency on an almost unlimited budget. Sure they were built to police and intimidate the locals, but just as surely there is no doubt they are among the finest examples of medieval castles you are ever likely to see anywhere in the world. So I suppose you just have to take the rough with the smooth when you get to view them within the context of their history.
Finally after our three nights in Rhyl we will then make our way down the west coast of Wales, with possibly a stop off in Harlech to see the castle there thrown in for good measure, before finally ending up in Aberystwyth where we will spend the night at another Premier Inn with another breakfast for each of us also included. All of the bookings have been made and all of them have also been paid for by me, and so as long as nothing untoward happens in the next 3 or 4 months that is what we are going to be doing when Thomas makes his trip over here from Berlin, flying as he is on Ryanair from Berlin Schonenfeld to London Stansted. Plans, dreams, wishes, hopes for the future, the usual deal that keeps us goin’ and yes, a part of me just loves it. And so this second Snapshot is just that, a catch up of all that is going on during a certain period of time before hitting the ejector button to get on out of here, then maybe in a few years come back and do it all again, see what has changed and what has not.
Meditation still rollin' on, it always does, and this morning for example my concentration was bright as a button and a 243 was knocked no problem in something like 70 minutes. The day before however was a different story, don't know what went on there if truth be told, but the simple fact of the matter was that I was struggling. Got up at what I thought was a reasonable time - not too early in other words - but almost as soon as I sat down on the cushion I found it tremendously hard to concentrate. Object kept slippin' outta view as I soon found myself in the lands of head nod, barely able to keep my eyes open, despite the fact it was just the beginning of another day. Eventually I had to call it quits at 162, as it was too much of an effort to carry on without the whole deal going off the rails. Well, sometimes it goes like that, not very often it has to be said, but sometimes, yeah.
So yes it is the home straight now for this particular tale of a Snapshot Log. What was written above, the stuff about me and Thomas and our whole history, was done earlier today in South Woodford library where I was holed up for an hour or so late morning in the reading room, scribbling away like crazy as if my life depended on it. Guess over the last year or so I have used that reading room on numerous occasions in order to write. It is good to get out sometimes, to take a walk of 25 minutes or so and then sit down to write in a different location away from home. I enjoy the walk down there, then the ritual of getting out my pens and writing pad before working intensely in the silence of that reading room for an hour or two. It works I guess, because other people are working too, students mainly, so I always go full tilt, pen racing across the page, fillin' up the spaces as all those thoughts of mine come tumblin' out. It is a process, therapy even, and in truth it feels a pretty pure way of doing it.
Glad I have had the chance today to write a bit more and tie up this particular Snapshot as it had been feeling a bit unfinished. Guess that might have had something to do with the Aussies being in town and the sense that all the way through I have not been getting it right with them, but mixed up with that is a whole load of other family priorities and complications simply beyond my capabilities to either properly or coherently go into. In a way for these last couple of weeks I have been hidin' away from the page, so to speak, as the thought of tryin' to explain all of that stuff has just been a bit too daunting and of course I haven't really done it now either. But things have moved on, as they always do, and in a sense the less you do about things sometimes, the quicker they change into something different.
Today has given me the chance to write about this other stuff which has now come along and replaced what was there before and what was there before might just simply have been too tricky for me to go into and come out the other side of. But writing about North Wales and the prospect of walking up a mountain with my old friend Thomas, as well as embarking on a projected castle tour with him, has put a smile back on my face, as it has been something which I have really enjoyed getting to grips with by way of all the planning and imagining that goes with it. All of that is to come however, first in a couple of weeks there is another India trip to get my teeth into and who knows what will happen when that comes along? Talkin' of India it is only recently that I have managed to finish off writing up my notes to what I did there in 2019, all of which is nearly a year ago now. Guess the reason for that has been the demands on my time made by the Golden Telescope, but anyway just into this new year I was finally able to put a seal on it, close that particular chapter and get ready to open up a new one, another story.
And now it is the same with this - Snapshot Log II - over and out!