Change of Heart

After my last post on Sunday when Dave and I were in Zagreb I started to think about maybe going to the funeral. It very quickly snowballed and a few hours after my last post I had booked a train out of Zagreb. I left early Monday morning. About 30 hours, a few trains and five countries later I was in France. I would have maybe just made it to the funeral, which was due for Tuesday, though I’d have been wearing shorts and T-shirt, two days away from a shower and a bed. In the end they rescheduled for Thursday. After that I’m going to head back East and find Dave again.

Bye Jim

I met Jim in 2001 on my first day in France. He was the uncle of a friend of my mum, and they had suggested that he could put me up for the first night, just so I could find my feet at the beginning of a three-month trip. I ended up staying for the best part of a week. Jim played bass and sang with a few little bands. It was through Jim that I got my first feel for French culture and language, and the little things, like getting up early and heading out to a bar for an espresso and a roll-up, before you even think about having anything to eat. A whore’s breakfast he called it. Over the following years I would go and stay with Jim for a few days in France and soak up a little bit of the lifestyle he had, going between bars and bistrots that were scattered around the Côte D’Armor countryside where he lived.

Jim was from Govan, and as a teenager in the early sixties he was staring down the barrel of a life spent in the shipyards. Instead he chose to disappear off with his bass to try and make a life from music. He told me how he spent a few years away, just living off of Music in various cities round the world. After a while Glasgow really started to miss him [see footnote], so he booked a plane back to Glasgow. When he arrived at the airport, he asked the taxi driver to take him to Glasgow Central Station. He went into the station, stood and looked round for a short while. Then he went back to the Taxi driver, asked him to take him back to the airport where he booked another flight back out of Glasgow. He didn’t come back for I don’t know how many years…

He was a great guy to be around, always really chilled out but always busy gigging, teaching music or doing the other odds and ends that kept his lifestyle together. He had an interesting philsophy on life.

Often I’m tempted to live a life more like Jim did, to take more chances and follow my heart. Jim was always a sceptical of my career-minded side, he didn’t believe in chasing dollars. Last week I told Jim that I was considering just packing it all in, and just seeing how long I can manage just traveling round the world, working odd jobs and just generally dropping out of the aspirant middle-class lifestyle I find myself in. He replied with

variety is ze spice of LIFE!

Then on the 21st, sent at 6 in the morning, I got a message from him saying:

questions,?,?,?. ect! ect! James

I never got a chance to ask what he meant, he died the next day of a heart attack.

I would really have liked to have gone to the funeral, but it came right as Dave and I headed off to Budapest to start our Eastern European trip. We managed to go 2 full days without any sleep, had a great time in Belgrade, and we’re now in Croatia, 4 capital cities in 48 hours.

I’m sure Jim would have approved.

Footnote: Reading that sentence again I realise I wrote it in French grammar, which is a strange thing to do. In French when you miss something, it’s the thing you miss that is the subject of the verb and you’re the object, not the other way around as in English. I meant that Jim missed Glasgow.

For Whom the Toll’s Bill?

In July last year I went to Illinois. I left Bristol early on a Monday morning. I had already been up all all day and all night on the Sunday. By the time I reached Chicago’s airport, minus a couple of half-hour snatches of non-sleep, I had been awake for 36 hours straight. Reality was a dreamworld to me. The sensible thing to do would have been to get a hotel locally and get some sleep. That’s not what I did though. What I did was hire a car and drive for over 150 miles. My one concession to the ridiculous risk I was taking – driving an automatic for the first time, driving in America for the first time, driving in busier traffic than I’d ever driven in before, first serious drive on the right – was to get satnav. There then followed the hairiest drive of my life, with the satnav guilty for much of the trouble.

First problem was the way interstate driving works in the States. There is no such thing as lane discipline. You just go where you want, overtake on the inside, overtake on the outside, indication optional. Just do what you like basically. Paranoia is the best policy. This suited my mood, as I was near hallucinatory with fatigue. The roads are just packed with behemoths too – massive trucks on the inside and on the outside, front and back. And there’s no space. The lanes are as wide as the vehicles. As you pass your fellow man you could reach out and snatch the cigarettes from their mouths.

The tolls were my problem. Coming South out of Chicago you have to pay a toll every few miles. There’s one in the photo below. The way they work is that most are reserved for regular users who are subscribed. They can drive straight through without slowing down. At the very far left of the picture there are reg’lar old cash tolls, the ones I had to use.

The satnav kept telling me to get all the way to the left. It made sense most of the time too, because the roads would keep forking and joining, and I needed to keep to the right lanes. Time and time again though I found myself all the way on the left when I needed to be 7 lanes over on the right to get through the cash toll. In this fast moving traffic and in this dreamlike state. On one occasion I remember a sudden tired confusion because of only having two pedals under my feet. I knew the big one on the left was the brake, I knew it, but there was a sudden doubt. I could picture myself a moment away from wilfully hammering on the accelerator and going through a queue of traffic at 100mph. Of course when the time came I automatically braked like a good motorist.

I was terrified witless now, and doing everything I could to focus my attention on what I was doing. Everything seemed so unreal though because I was so far beyond tired. I thought of the Simpsons moment where Homer falls asleep at the wheel and his car turns into a bed.

Things improved when I found a radio station that was playing a song by The Police. I’m not a particular fan, but at this moment it was nice to have something familiar with me. I jacked up the volume and started singing at the top of my lungs. This worked well to tie me back into reality. The song ended and was replaced by another Police song and I was pleased. I had a crutch that was going to get me through this journey. For more than a hundred miles, this strange radio station played nothing but the greatest hits of Sting and The Police without word of explanation.

On one of the Toll navigations, with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in my ears, I saw that it was impossible. There was no way I was going to be able to scream across all the lanes to get to the cash toll. So I simply sailed through one of the subscriber lanes. I expected sirens and flashing lights and for someone to shoot out my tires but nothing happened. Sting and I carried on to our destination. As we got further out of the city, I was getting more and more tired but the roads got progressively easier to manage and things stayed at about the same level of difficulty. I got where I was going in one piece. When I dropped off the hire car, not a word was said about my toll indiscretion.

I forgot about the whole episode until today, when Illinois automotive justice caught up with me in the form of a £23.87 fine.

Aggro

A good weekend was had by all. Most meals were consumed outside, and this is surely the sign of a good weekend. On Friday a bunch of us had a barbecue on the downs, but a massive electrical storm had us take refuge at the Coach and Horses pub.

At first we were sat at the left-hand side of patio, as you see it in this photo. On the other side were a group of guys. They were mostly of the big, muscly and tattooed variety. They looked no strangers to trouble, but they didn’t look like bad guys. Just the kind of guys that it might be just a little too easy to get the wrong side of. One of their number was having trouble controlling himself. He looked young, late teens or early twenties, where everyone else seemed to be in their thirties. Every couple of minutes he would find himself on the verge of a fight with one of his friends and there would be a confrontation that he would end up backing down from. Inbetween squaring off with his friends, he would look over at us, hunting for some minor infraction from our group that would justify intervention.

Before anything happened though, it really started to pour, and our group went inside, where the other guys stayed under cover on the other side of the patio.

We’d had a few more drinks inside when Phil and I decided to make ourselves a couple of roll-ups to smoke on the patio. The moment we stepped outside to smoke, the young guy started on us.

“You look like a couple of benders” said he.

“Don’t listen to him, he’s a nightmare” said a bag of tattooed muscle, in a friendly manner

I was immediately wrong-footed by this. The first problem was that I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to respond. His comment hadn’t offended me. I didn’t really care one way or another if he thought Phil and I were a pair of benders. I knew I had to say something, but I didn’t know if I should act offended, because his comment was intended to offend. I didn’t know whether to look at the guy trying to start on us or his friend trying to reassure us that he was all mouth and just to ignore him. He even smacked the guy on the side of his face with the back of his hand to prove his point.

This didn’t deter the guy though. He hit out with a few other comments suggesting that he would very much enjoy a fight with me and Phil. Phil found his tongue before I did.

“We’re not big guys, what are you picking on us for? Why not try it on with one of them?”, pointing to a row of his massive friends.

“Here Les, this one’s a bender and he wants to kiss you” says the guy, about me. I’m still not really in the spirit of the whole thing, a bit bewildered. I just mumbled something like:

“Yeah… a bender… want to kiss him…”

At this point our relationship to the other guy took a turn for the worse. He was either being friendly in an aggressive way or aggressive in a friendly way, and it was only a matter of time before we rubbed him up the wrong way.

The young guy bounced a 5p off Phil’s head from point-blank range. I missed this, only seeing a 5p hit the ground next to my feet, not understanding why at the time.

“You want to wind him in mate”, said Phil to the up-till-now friendly guy.

He didn’t like this.

“What do you mean I’ve got to wind him in?”

“We’re just trying to enjoy our cigarettes in peace, we don’t deserve this” says Phil

Phil and the previously matey guy are now squaring up to each other. At this point I finally started to feel a bit of adrenaline, and with it anger.

“You can go and smoke your fucking cigarettes over there” says he to Phil, pointing away from the bar. All the other guys in this group were standing by watching this, not saying anything, but waiting to see how it all panned out.

Neither Phil, nor the bigger guy were for backing down, and it genuinely seemed like an all-on-two kicking was inevitable. At this point, belatedly and inspired by Phil’s solo display of bravery, my nuts arrived and my voice with it. If I was going to get a tanking for doing absolutely nothing, I wasn’t going to be squealing for mercy.

I felt the little rager demon in me that almost never comes out. I can’t fight, but I can bellow my head off, and it confuses people into thinking I can fight. It was last used on a train in Barcelona to good effect about a year ago, and it must have been about the year 2000 the time before that.

We all stood there, no-one saying anything. Phil and I finished our cigarettes, but it seemed that we shouldn’t leave straight away. It just felt that if we did that we were going feel knuckles or worse raining down as we turned our backs. So we just stayed standing there.

“It’s just a laugh mate” says the big guy, returning to a bit more of a friendly mode.

“Well I don’t feel like I’m in on the fucking joke” I heard myself say.

Some friendly banter then started to emerge. The tension seemed to break and we each shook the big guy’s hand, the three of us saying there was no problem, no hard feelings, that sort of crap. We went back into the pub, and had some more drinks. Adrenaline stayed high though, because I knew we still had to walk through them to leave the pub.

When we did leave, nothing happened, nothing was said and we walked on. As we got further away from the pub and the risks of a confrontation diminished to zero, my bravery increased. I increasingly awarded myself a hero’s role in the affair, and chose to keep alive the memories of my anger, and my readiness to snap at the next provocation. I let the memories of the fear and my shaking limbs subside.

Maybe I should ask Phil to narrate his own version.

Yeah, we almost got ourselves into a scrap on Friday. I squared up to a guy twice my size. Robin smoked a cigarette and said he wanted to kiss him.

P.S. I also heard a cracking line yesterday. A guy selling the big issue was raging at a girl busking because she was on his patch. In the exchange, she shouted at him “Why don’t you get a squat!” in the same way that someone might have shouted “Why don’t you get a job!”. She had a squat, so why couldn’t he get one? It revealed a class conflict I never knew existed.

Yeah! why don’t you occupy someone else’s property in a quasi-legal manner you leech!?

Google

A google search for “robin bruce” currently has me as the number two result. It is a long-term ambition to dislodge Robin Bruce the sofa-making company as the number one result. I’m almost there now, though I was hoping that it would be for something meaningful that I’d get up the rankings. Robin Bruce result number two is me trolling a BBC journo’s blog using my own name. You can’t have everything I suppose. So, the question is, where are you in a google search for your name?

(rules: has to be your first name or a commonly accepted shortening thereof. So, “Neil MacEwen” is acceptable, Macca is not, “Dave MacLeod” is acceptable, unyans is not)