I'm off on the train to Morocco tomorrow, and gonna turn thirty somewhere down there in the north African bop night! Hopefully will have some kind of epiphany or something!
Alex, Matt and I headed to Leicester for a few days over the bank holiday weekend to see Russ and Lesley. We did some Early Music Festival with our favourite recorder player Michala Petri and her ever entertainingly named husband Lars Hannibal, went to see The New Statesman at the sizeable De Montfort Hall theatre, saw 28 Weeks Later at a big out of town Vue, drank almost constantly in various pubs and spent a day traversing a stretch of the canal in Doris.
You can see the view from Doris here...
And see a lock session in this quite long video here...
Just got back from two days in Rome with Michal M. He had headed over for a birthday weekend, and I joined him. It was lovely to be back in the Eternal City. As soon as I arrived on Saturday night, we went out to a gay club on Via Monte Testaccio, this cool clubbing street lined with bars and clubs and packed with people and cars all night. The club was called Alibi, and was fun. Upstairs and downstairs, performances on a stage involving two shirtless men dressed as firemen, two girls in fiery fairy costumes, and a big fat dragged up woman in black leading the show. We took speed and K, and bopped around till late.
An interesting thing about the club was that despite being one of Rome's premier gay clubs, everyone there acted in a very heterosexual manner. You didn't really see many guys dancing with other guys, or kissing each other - instead they danced and gyrated with the girls, like they hadn't worked out how to break the old sexual models yet.
Around 4am, we headed off to an after-hours club, meeting some nice people outside Alibi who had a spliff with us and drove us there. It was quite strange when we got there though. There was no orderly queue to get in; instead you had to crowd at the door and hope that the man standing behind the bouncers scanning the crowd would pick you out and let you in! Insanely unprofessional. We were amazed, but ready to play the game since we did really want to get in. We weren't sure how to behave though - pleadingly and emploringly at the man? Smiling as if you hadn't a care in the world? Cool and laid back as if you didn't give a shit about what he thought? It was quite enough just trying not to gurn, at the time.
After about forty minutes, which seemed about the average waiting time, he let us both in. It was quite a nice club actually; cosy and dark, but with enough room to dance. We randomly bumped into Letizia, who of course we hadn't seen since she stayed in our house at Finsbury Park having her sex change operation done. She seemed well - she couldn't speak a word of English though and we could speak Italian - so we all hugged each other and smiled a lot.
We left around 8am and went into central Rome, to the Forum, where we sat on some steps on the Via Sacra and chatted in the sunlight. The Forum was so quiet and empty of tourists - I really felt the ghost of ancient Rome around us. After that we headed further into town, to the Pantheon. Always an inspiring building, its singular spherical perfection was made more intense and acute in our post-clubbing and drugs tripping state. Each time I looked up, I could feel my soul rushing up from my feet planted so firmly and solidly on the ground, up through my head into the heavenly circle of the oculus up above. It's amazing how the Pantheon does not seek to draw you upwards towards the heavens in the way that the dome in a Christian church does, but instead you feel simultaneously on the ground and up in the sky, heaven and earth brought together, just as inside and outside are so perfectly united by the oculus with its view of the passing clouds.
We sat for a few hours with coffees, visited another building or two, and finally made our way to Tiber Island and as it started to rain sat ourselves down by the river under a big bridge. After a while we were joined in our dry space under the bridge by a trio of homeless people along with a cat who began to gather together their dinner, and nearby a young man joined us under the bridge, sitting sullenly to write in a small notebook he was carrying. I really enjoyed the idea of our three groups, all gathered under the dry bridge to shelter from the Roman drizzle, all of us aware of our shared purpose but also separate from each other with our own tasks and conversations. After an hour or so though, one of the homeless people, the lady with the cat, came over and offered me and Michal a biscuit, and also offered one to the sullen young writer who snarled at her. We gave her a few cigarettes in thanks, and sat and nibbled on our biscuits.
Later, we headed back to the flat, and broke our drug-fast with a midnight pizza out at a local restaurant.
Jamie, Peter, Wesley, Ed, Matt and me have just got back from a splendid week in Italy, down in a little place called Pugnochiuso, in Gargano, Puglia, down in the heel of the boot of Italy. Weather was good, and not too hot; food and wine marvellous; we discovered the joys of drinking limoncello and its strawberry version, fragolini, for breakfast; lots of hysterical moments as we careered through a camped up riot of a holiday!
On Tuesday 28 December, Matt drove us back to London, where we deposited Francis so he could take the train up to Scotland to visit Steve’s parents and spend New Year with Steve and Kate. Meanwhile, Matt, Al and I headed to Luton to catch the plane to Katowice, Poland. Michal and Agata were joining us there for an epic Polish New Year Extravaganza. Michal’s friend Mirek had organised the whole thing – we were heading to the small town of Ustron down by the Czech border in the southwest corner of Poland, for five nights in the Hotel Tulipan.
We had a varied cast of characters: me, Matt, Alex, Michal, Agata, Michal’s brother Andre and his wife Justina. Then there was Mirek and his boyfriend Przemek, and their entourage of gay ruffians: Jack, a customs officer who was rather like a Polish version of Graham Norton and who was known as Jackonda (Jack + anaconda) because of his inimitable snake-like dancing style; Kostas, a Ukrainean turned Pole who was there with his Spanish boyfriend Kike; Crrris, like Ken from Barbie and Ken, a veteran of many gyms who insists on spelling his name with 3 Rs; Vitek, a Ukrainean with intense eyes, and his mute (well, very quiet) boyfriend Krysiek; and Darek. There was also a German guy and his Polish boyfriend, who vaguely knew Mirek, but they were only with us infrequently. The German guy was middle aged and very pervy – he spent the first night yabbering on about his grandfather in the First World War while attempting to remove Alex’s t-shirt.
We arrived at Katowice, and Przemek and Michal picked us up from the airport and took us to the local gay bar, Luna, where everyone was gathered. Luna was fun – very primitive by London standards with the walls decked with posters of early nineties computer art and cityscapes such as the twin towers of New York, and a triangular mural made out of CDs arrayed shiny side up. It was very relaxed, with big wooden tables and chairs, and you could buy whole bottles of booze and take them back to the table to share out. I rather like this laid back way of running an establishment.
We headed back around 3am to Mirek’s house – since Mirek had to go in for an hour or two of work that morning – and passed out all around his rather sizeable house. Next day, a minibus arrived to take our slightly hungover group to … the Hotel Tulipan.
The hotel was quite an amusing surprise when we arrived. It was built in the 1960s, as a great big concrete triangle, and looks remarkably dated now, like a great tired, Communist tower block. Elements of it reminded me of the South Bank in London – big expanses of concrete and unhelpful triangular angles everywhere. Inside there was lots of orange, brown and yellow, triangular mirrors and formica tables. It was definitely another world. We all traipsed around the hotel marvelling at the unique look, exclaiming at some detail of furnishing or other, and then unpacked in our rooms.
The only option at this point was the bar. This was in the basement, so we all went there and had a few drinks. It was a few hours till dinner, so people ordered these terrible spongy baguettes with cheese and mushroom from behind the bar, and ate those. Przemek actually ordered about a dozen of them, before realising they tasted like poo. Our holiday deal was that we got breakfast, lunch and dinner all provided, which meant that for the whole stay we didn’t really have to do anything except sit around drinking, chatting and waiting for the next meal to come along.
Dinner was outside that first evening – everyone got to roast sausages on skewers on an open fire while a bunch of people bizarrely dressed as red devils capered about to entertain us, with tribal drumming and setting off fireworks and breathing fire. They also served mulled beer, which was basically hot lager with honey – surprisingly nice. It became quite cold outside and gradually we all drifted back to the bar where, after a few hours, Kostas and Kike decided to plug the CD player they had brought along with them into the amp and speakers in a room adjoining the bar. Loud gay house music ensued, and there was general merriment. Mirek passed around pills, which were duly consumed, and members of our party started taking off their tops and gyrating with each other. The room with the speakers was reasonably concealed from the bar, but it was still fairly evident to other hotel guests that we were not an average bunch of young male travellers. At around 2am, we headed up to someone’s room and carried on making so much noise that by 4am, the hotel actually cut the power to our room.
Next morning, a member of staff from the hotel came to see us over breakfast and explained how they wanted to give us a separate room for New Year’s Eve. Even though it wasn’t yet two nights away, they were already preparing in the light of the noise of the night before. They were very nice to us about it though, they just wanted us to restrict our parties to the room by the bar down in the basement, to avoid keeping the other guests up all night. They continued to be very polite to us, even in our most unreasonable moments. Perhaps this was because we were spending huge amounts of money at the bar, which was where we spent pretty much all of the holiday, or perhaps, as Michal speculated at one point, it was because they thought we were mafia types. At any rate, our arrival at Hotel Tulipan was a mixed blessing for them. We brought a great deal of liveliness and fun to the hotel, but on the other hand we were up till the early hours playing pumping music every single night and we challenged their small town with constant, blatant displays of homosexuality.
The second day saw half of us venture out into Ustron itself, where we wandered around for a while before settling into a bar around a little round table and drinking for a few hours. Being huddled closely around the table made us all talk more freely, and we spent ages telling dirty sexual anecdotes and Matt kept learning rude phrases in Polish to scare the waitress with. We tried out tongue twisters in English, Polish, Ukrainian and Spanish, recited the Lord’s Prayer in all these languages and finally looked in wonder as an utterly drunk old man at a nearby table suddenly stood up, staggered towards us, asked us where we were going, and then apparently pissed his trousers before wandering out of the bar.
On the way back to the hotel, we picked up some Russian champagne (or ‘Shampan’) from the shop, which was rather disgusting, but only 3.99 zloty (70p) a bottle. We had a bottle with dinner.
After dinner, we all carried on drinking at the bar and once again Kostas and Kike plugged in the CD player and the house music came pumping forth. This time, there was a challenge to our supremacy of the small room. A German family came in along with one of the hotel receptionists, demanding that their music get an airing as well as ours. A massive argument ensued between the German mother and our party, with the receptionist bringing up the topic of our group’s homosexuality. She argued that we were being too difficult, that none of them had ever met “gay people” before; at one point she asked Michal how he had got so many gay men together – “did you find each other on the internet?!”
There was a compromise, and the CD player was given over to Germanic 1980s pop for an hour or so. We actually got on quite well with the German woman’s two daughters, who were embarrassed by their mother’s behaviour. One of them was a rather pretty dark haired girl, her older sister was somewhat odder. She was blonde and was wearing so much foundation that her whole face glowed an eerie pink in the UV light of our side room. Vitek commented: “She look like piece of shit. Really. She look like Marilyn Monroe, dug from grave!”
A bit harsh, maybe, but there was a misogynistic side to many of our gay Polish friends, which me and Michal worked hard to counteract. We actually met the blonde girl the next morning in town, and her face looked even more terrifying by day. So much makeup that I actually wondered if she’d suffered from some sort of scarring and was covering it up.
Matt was chatting to another German, Patrick, who’d come across from a neighbouring hotel – Hotel Magnolia – with his friends. Apparently, word had got around about the group of party people in Hotel Tulipan and they’d come over to check it out. They came back on subsequent nights, along with others.
It was a heavy night. Matt and I went back to our room and made a lot of mess, and then I got up around five in the morning and spent several hours with Przemek and Mirek drinking vodka spiced with speed and chatting about this and that. Mirek and I then went down to breakfast with Agata, and then Agata and I woke up Michal with a spliff. We all sat out in the hall outside our rooms, drinking, and Michal and I went to annoy Alex. He was lying in bed, looking rough. Most impressively, he had lost his memory, there were a few scrapings of shit on his bedsheets, and his trousers were soaking wet with piss. Only the Gods of Silesia shall ever know what happened to him that night.
Michal, Agata and I then wandered into Ustron for a pleasant bit of walking and shopping. We visited a little bakery and had tea and ponczek – Polish doughnut – and a strange cream tube thing which I can’t remember the name of. It was really nice, and reminded me of time we spent together back when I used to visit Michal and Agata in Lodz four or five years ago.
I finally got to sleep that afternoon, and then we got up and dressed for dinner. This was New Year’s Eve night, and everyone was specially dressed up. Down in the bar, we all applauded as each of us entered the room with a new outfit. Agata was particularly stunning and everyone insisted on having their pictures taken with her. A band had been hired to accompany dinner – a rather glamorous local outfit with keyboards, brass instruments and a sexy female vocalist. They opened the night with an instrumental version of My Way, and then played on and off all through the night, as dinner was served and new courses brought out on every hour from 8pm till 5am in classic Polish style.
The band and the evening’s entertainment was compered by a man from the hotel dressed as a devil, for some reason, and there were traditional Polish songs involving all the guests doing the conga, a young couple who performed showy and somewhat pretentious ball room dancing (the boy was about 14 and wearing too much makeup) and lots of crazy dancing from our party. I found myself spinning lots of enthusiastic middle aged Polish women around the dance floor while their dour husbands sat at the table knocking back vodka. People were up and dancing until the early hours – the Polish technique of serving huge amounts of food throughout the night makes this quite plausible. The crowning dish was an entire joint of pork for each guest, which unfortunately most of our group was too pilled up to be able to eat!
As the main New Year’s party drew to a close and the last hotel guests drifted upstairs to bed, we returned to our underground room by the bar and carried on dancing like the chemical party robots we were. Michal and I left Crrris, Kostas and Kike down there around 7am and left to have a spliff and walk round town. We walked up the road towards the mountains, chatting mainly about Polish Catholic priests and the joys of atheism. When we got back around 9am, the three party robots were still pumping out music downstairs, even as hotel guests were getting up for breakfast. We were forced to cut their music off and have a mild argument about reasonable behaviour in the circumstances. Michal’s brother and his wife were up eating breakfast at this point, and seemed amused by the state we were all in.
New Year’s Day was a sleeping in day. That evening our side room was taken over for an official disco – the DJs were a pair of green cheque suited, moustachioed, sweaty Polish guys who played enjoyable and slightly outdated pop and dance. We were all dancing enthusiastically as usual, and some of the party were gyrating rather suggestively at various points. This prompted one of the DJs to comment – in Polish, and quite reasonably I thought – “now for our next song these two gentlemen are going to remove their trousers”. Jackonda was outraged by this slur and stormed up to them, shouting at them to apologise. They were quite rude back, so he marched, or minced, upstairs to reception and made a formal written complaint, getting a manager out of bed (it was 3am) to come and apologise over the microphone that “they did not wish to discriminate against gay people and were sorry for what they said”. I was in hysterics – I think it was one of the funniest exchanges I have ever witnessed in a clubbing situation - and I wasn't on drugs that night so was able to keep track of things. The manager was actually quite good tempered about it all, as she’d been enjoying our stay in the hotel, and was all up for progressive, cosmopolitan influences.
Most of us stayed up that night, dancing till 7am or thereabouts, before a hideous breakfast and 10am bus ride away from Hotel Tulipan and back to Mirek’s house near Katowice. We coped with our tiredness and hangovers by lounging round his house drinking, playing with an enormous rubber dildo (waving it in people’s faces, mainly) and singing along to Chicago and Moulin Rouge. By mid afternoon, Michal, Matt, Alex and I met up with Ema at the airport and we all flew back to London for a two-day hangover-comedown experience.
I'm back at my weblog, after a long absence, to report on our adventures over the holiday season. Francis is over from Zimbabwe now for a two-year working holiday, and me and Alex took him down to the new house in Devon for Christmas. The new house is lovely - well designed and comfortable. There are two main rooms, both well heated and a pleasing shape, and since it is a bungalow, the rest of the house is on the same floor! This is such an innovation, and we've all got used to being free from the tyranny of stairs very rapidly. The alpacas are now all around the house, instead of being at a separate farm, and there is an office outbuilding where Rachel and Chas can walk up to work every morning. The farm cat that lives in one of the barns had five cute little kittens just before Christmas, all nestled between two bales of straw.
We ate a lot, the usual roast meat extravaganza where Rachel prepared goose on Christmas Eve, a turkey on Christmas Day and a ham on Boxing Day. We enjoyed being comfortable in the new house, watching lots of films - including the entire extended Lord of the Rings trilogy - and quaffing lots of booze. Matt came to visit from Boxing Day onwards. On Monday we had our scary neighbours round for tea - the Old Couple from down the road and the Goat Man and his Goat Wife, who make lovely goat's cheese next door and look rather like kindly trolls.
Josh, Al and I went to Blackboys for a D&D weekend with Adam and Henry! It was a fabulous act of wanton escapism. The heroes visited the Plain of Ida, by Tempus' House of the Valient, on the outer plane of Ysgard, plummeting off the earth bergs of the top layer down to the volcanoes of Muspelheim and then underground to the third layer, Nidavellir, where they found their way through a portal to the Plane of Shadow back to Faerun. They emerged near Myth Drannor and then had fun defeating the plans of the Cult of the Dragon and their nefarious attempts to corrupt the city's ancient mythal.
It was a full house, what with Kayla's mother visiting, so the five of us played down in the garage. This made it even more exciting, since we were able to actively live a Weezer song over the weekend:
I've got my Dungeon Master's Guide,
I've got a 12-sided die,
I've got Kitty Pryde,
and Nightcrawler too,
waiting there for me,
Yes I do, I do!
In the garage I feel safe!
No one cares about my ways.
In the garage,
Where I belong,
No one hears me sing this song.
In the garage...
Matt and I took Josh on a fantastic long weekend to Rome. Josh had a school project to write looking at the meanings of first and second century Roman architecture and was there to take lots of pictures. I was there for archaeology, espresso and ice cream.
While Josh had seen the city before, Matt and I had not, and we were pretty bowled over by this great city. The sheer density of notable architecture and archaeology is astounding; at every turn the ghost of Renaissance and Ancient Rome rises up before you like a startling apparition. And yet the city is so alive, even in the hot quiet month of August when we visited there was a dirty, bustling noisiness on the roads, a hectic vitality to everything.
We did a lot of sightseeing and walking in three days. We spent half a day tramping up and down the forum in the blazing sun, and Josh and I went up on the Palatine Hill as well. We stumbled upon the spectacular eighteenth century Trevi Fountain lit up at night, admired the outside of the Colosseum, and were struck dumb by the perfect calm hemispherical interior of the Pantheon. We drank Jamaica Blue Mountain espressos from the excellent Tazza d'Oro Caffè, ate soul quenching fruity gelati and drank beer lightly but enthusiastically. We stayed in a lovely hotel – Hotel Columbia on Via del Viminale –which had a roof balcony on which to take our breakfast in the bright early morning sunshine. We went on a lot of late evening walks - it was always hot enough to stroll in shorts and t-shirt, even in the early hours of the morning. We met up with Matt's friend Leonardo, who gave us an Italian perspective on things.
A particular highlight for me was when Josh and I wandered down to the narrow old streets around the Campo dei Fiori and the Ghetto, by the Tiber River. We stumbled on the Theatre and Porticus of Pompey the Great and found our way across the river to Tiber Island where stalls and events around the edges of the island were in full swing to celebrate a national holiday. We went back to the hotel to get Matt and Leonardo, who had been at a beach, and we all spent an hour or so at this very pleasant outdoor club at the head of the island.
Matt and I took a long weekend in Stockholm visiting his friends through KPMG, Linda and Anders. We flew out on Wednesday and returned the following Monday. Stockholm is a really interesting city. It's incredibly clean and impeccably well run. You can go swimming or fishing in the very heart of the city, the public transport all works perfectly, and the streets are spacious and uncrowded. Most of the city is very pleasing to the eye, there is just one block of streets that was demolished in the 1960s on the machine age urgings of Le Corbusier when he visited Stockholm and replaced with a load of concrete which now looks like Croydon town centre. It is rather too quiet and peaceful, lacking the dirty crowded buzz and soul of London, but you can see that it is a model of city planning by any standards.
Linda's mother has a summer house out on the archipelago around Stockholm and we went out there for one day and night. This was a lovely old wooden house that looked like a Swiss alpine cottage, on a little island which you had to take a boat to. Linda and Anders took us, and also another couple they knew, Alexander and Karolina. Karolina is Polish and Alexander is half Polish, half Swedish.
We met various members of Linda's family and ate gravadlax and played on the enormous trampoline they happened to have by the house. We also went swimming in the Baltic Sea around the island. It was very warm and brackish, with very little salinity. It tasted almost sweet in fact, and made swimming a lot more fun than in the North Sea. We all drank Pimms, cava and wine, had a lovely dinner, and then later when it got dark, we sat with Karolina, Alexander, Linda and Anders out on the rocks by the lapping water and got rather stoned on a spliff. In my stoned state I had one of those moments of clarity where I felt very keenly the similarities between us all and how profoundly easy cross-cultural communication can sometimes be. Differences arising out of our different countries, governments, languages and cultures all suddenly seemed very trivial compared to a shared appreciation of listening to the sea washing up against the rock below us as we sat in the darkness.
The next day, Friday, we took the ferry back into Stockholm and that evening Linda and Anders had a party at their flat, followed by a bout of clubbing somewhere in town. The club was like the haunt of a Scandinavian James Bond, with cool leather sofas and 1970s wooden screens and a laid back groovy atmosphere. It was mostly sitting and talking space, only a little bit of the club was actually given over to dancing.
On Saturday, we took ourselves to town to watch the Pride parade, which was happening in Stockholm that weekend. This was big and fun, though a bit splintered into floats representing various interests, rather than being more like a united carnival in the manner of Brighton Pride. There was a float for the bears, and one an S&M float, on which people dressed as monks waved spiky crosses and leather clad women whipped hairy men's backs. Unlike all the other floats, the S&M one looked really miserable and seemed to take their dark image quite seriously. After the parade we went to the rather expensive park party that followed, and ran around chatting to lots of random people, drinking beer and listening to various bands on the stage. We enjoyed one band called Pay TV, who were a runner up in the Swedish Eurovision entries. They are a bit like Ex-Girl, robotic and ironic with regular guitars, crazy costumes, and songs like Trendy Discotheque: "We wear very very very very trendy shoes..."
On Sunday, we wandered around town shopping, visited the Modern Art Museum, and then went to Alexander and Karolina's flat in the suburbs to eat some lovely pizza they homemade that evening. They fed us some Zubrowka vodka mixed with apple juice before we headed back over to Linda and Anders' flat for our last night.
On Monday, we wandered around town some more, bought some clothes and got ourselves some Swedish alcohol, punsch, which they drink warm with pea soup apparently. Should be interesting to try.
I have returned after a glorious week in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, visiting the Brothers Smith.
Andy, Jim and I took the plane from Gatwick to Kyiv on Friday morning. Everything went pretty smoothly and we were soon on board our Ukraine International Airlines jet, eating some kind of strange dish of squidgy meatballs and rice followed by squidgy gym mat chocolate foam pudding washed down with a can of beer. Jamie was waiting for us at the airport and after a celebratory arrival beer, we all took a car to Kyiv itself to their flat. Rob and Jamie’s flat is nice – bashed in and spacious with lots of pictures and postcards all over the walls.
The Ukraine looks in certain respects similar to Poland, but much rougher around the edges, much more like a Third World country. Kyiv, which apparently is home to three million people, is a sprawling mix of tower blocks of varying quality, building works and cranes, broad squares, wide boulevards and monumental architecture. The streets are quite rough and dusty, and at this time of year, with bright sunshine most days, they feel like the laid back streets of southern countries, occupied by cheap markets and little kiosks selling cigarettes, beer, drinks and other bits and pieces. There aren’t really any bars or restaurants except for a few catering to those with more western tastes. You can just buy beer in bottles at pretty much any time of day or night from one of these kiosks and then stand around drinking on the street. All of the city’s older tower blocks have centrally controlled water and heating, so that the heating comes on in September and turns off again in March, and the entire city’s hot water has been turned off for two weeks during the time we are here. Apparently, they are cleaning out the system or something. Pretty amazing that they can just turn off an entire city’s hot water like that. The newer blocks of flats have their own boilers and are not subject to the whims of central control, but we are all stuck with cold showers for now.
In the flat, Jamie cooked some food and we all started drinking. Beer is extremely cheap here, at about the equivalent of 30p a bottle. You can also get this slightly sweet but rather nice champagne for not much more than that. After a few hours of drinking and chatting, Jamie and Rob took us out for a night time walk around Kyiv. We strolled past the amazing golden domes and blue and white walls and towers of the cruciform St Sophia Cathedral, and took the funicular railway down the hill from here to the edge of the old town, and then walked to some kind of late night expat bar, where we got more drunk, and Jim, Jamie and Rob spent about an hour explaining to a Ukrainian guy that they were from Wales rather than England, drawing parallels between the Ukraine and Wales and comparing the USSR to Great Britain, which I thought was a little excessive.
On Saturday we got up quite late, and then all headed out to the nearby market to buy lots of food, mainly cheese! The food market was in a big hall like a railway arch, and the room was piled high with attractive mounds of vegetables and fruit. There were also lots of cool looking sausages, large lumps of yellow cheese and all kinds of random products derived from fish. We had a beer while we were there, with some of the local nibbles designed to go with beer: paprika crisps, cheese crisps, these surprisingly tasty ‘salmon’ crisps cut into long flat rectangular pieces and sold in a box, little shredded bits of dried shrimp which are a bit like pork scratching but much more fishy, and these sticks of fibrous cheese which smell like a cow’s foot but taste weirdly nice, kind of smoky and cheesy, you peel off strips of cheese and eat them.
After a delicious dinner, we were taken to Shevchenko Opera House to see La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, a complex tale of a woman in Venice who loves a man who already loves the wife of the head of the Inquisition and who is lusted after by some scheming Inquisition spy who devises various plots to blacken her mother’s good name. Luckily there was an English translation in the brochure so we were able to work out what on earth was going on, but it was a convoluted plot by any standards. Though the whole thing was four and a half hours long, there were pleasing breaks after each act and these made the opera quite manageable. We drank a bottle of champagne in each break, and admired the lavish gold walls and chandeliers of the opera house. The opera house was glorious to look at. It spanned about six floors and was very tall and thin, so the seats were stacked up over many levels, looking steeply down to the stage rather than being set back We were up in the gods, by the roof, perched by the rail at the front, with a great view that plummeted down to the stage and the pit. The acoustics seemed to be really good, with the sound bellowing up to us. The production had over a hundred people dressed in all manner of fabulous Renaissance costumes prancing around and singing. It was all rather marvellous.
After the performance we went back to the flat to eat and prepare for a psy trance night out on an island in the middle of the Dnipro river which runs through the city. The river that runs through Kyiv is quite vast, with some large islands nestled together in the middle. Various bridges join the main city to the islands, which are mostly forested and are bordered by lovely sandy beaches. We took a car to one of the bridges, then walked over it and through the island forests till a winding track took us to the trance party.
The music was very loud indeed, pounding out of the speakers into a small crowd of dancers, while other people gathered nearby around fires. It was around two or three in the morning when we arrived, so within a few hours of dancing it began to get light. We all took a little acid. It was soon turning into a bright sunny morning as we milled around, went for walks in the wood, wandered over to the river nearby to contemplate its stillness, or carried on dancing. As it got hotter the crowd thinned out to the hardcore dancers and the ground became increasingly dry, our pounding feet throwing up big clouds of dust as we whirled like dervishes in the hot sun. Cheap beer sold from a nearby tent fortified us while the talkative acid led us into enjoyable loud political arguments and realisations of the shared psychic unity of humankind.
By midday, Rob had taken over playing at the decks as the organisers attempted to dismantle them around him, I was still hopping up and down like some kind of psychedelic puppet, Andy and Jamie had decided to go swimming and were attempting to traverse the surprisingly wide river, and Jim was sitting under the trees wondering if it had all gone too far. There followed a long walk back across the island in the burning sun to the bridge, where Jamie made us devour multiple choc ices, before we crossed the bridge and caught a car home. We all passed out there. I had a freezing shower first.
We woke up later that evening and got up to watch the Portugal v Greece world cup game, before passing out again.
On Monday, we wandered through Kyiv to Andriyiviskiy market which has lots of arts and crafts, painted eggs, spiky wooden maces, bad paintings, Manchester United t-shirts and so on. On Tuesday, we all hired two boats and went rowing down on the river, pausing to lie on one of the island beaches and swim, drinking lots of beer and taking acid again. The acid gave me a profound sense of the implacable immensity of the river stretching out around us. I sometimes forget how much better psychedelics are when you spend time outdoors, in natural environments, than when you are boxed inside by walls and ceilings. And how good holidays are when rivers run through them.
We took the boats back around half seven, staggered away from them, and plonked ourselves on some chairs and tables in a clearing with some beer to drink and some roasted sunflower seeds to nibble, talking rubbish till it got dark. When we finally made it home, we carried on talking till it got light, the conversation mainly dwelling on various dirty topics, such as the fresh, ‘amateur’ appeal of Bulgarian porn, whether or not shitting in someone’s mouth could be considered a valid sexual act, and the need for humorous facial expressions in porn actors.
On Wednesday we got up quite late, had a big lunch, took ourselves to the market to buy lots more food, mostly cheese but also these rather fetching dangling lengths of walnut pieces threaded on pieces of string and covered in sweet red jelly, and then wandered round town buying cheap CDs from various music shops and stalls. We popped into an American style happy consumer mall and sampled Ukrainian fast food too. Jamie introduced us to some kind of non-alcoholic fermented bread drink, like coke but utterly disgusting.
On Thursday, we went to the marvellous Lavra Monastery, which began back in the eleventh century when various monks lived in underground caves. As they grew in number, they built a church and then a cathedral, and over the centuries it grew to an enormous complex of glittering golden domes and monastic buildings. It is still inhabited by over fifty monks and is the centre of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. All very impressive and golden. The site includes the Museum of the Microminiature, a slightly absurd but amazing exhibition of works by a Russian artist, Nikolai Siadristy, whose creations are so small you have to look through microscopes to view them. They include a tiny chess set placed on the head of a nail, a flea shod with golden shoes, the world’s smallest book and a tiny ship, the ropes which make up the rigging of this boat being 400 times finer than a human hair.
On Friday we ran around buying things frantically to take back to London and prove that we had been in other realms. I mainly took back cheese and Ukrainian sausage.
It has been a good week and has refreshed me on many levels. Now I just have to adjust to the harsh reality of beer not costing 25p a bottle…
Matt, Alex and I joined Russ and Lesley for a sunny weekend on their narrow boat in Leicestershire. We dashed from work to St Pancras station to catch trains northwards and Lesley picked us up and took us to Market Harborough, where they are based these days. That night we went to their local pub, which was very local indeed and somewhat unfriendly at first. However, by midnight they had closed the curtains and a small gang of us were drinking and talking for a good few hours after closing time. This was generally what we found during the weekend: the people of rural Leicestershire didn't initially take well to our foolish coloured hair and London clothes, being a Daily Mail and Telegraph reading lot in the main, but once you persisted they turned out to be very warm and friendly.
Saturday, we took Doris (their narrow boat) along the canal from one pub to another, stopping to look at the Foxton locks, an amazing staircase of ten locks rising steeply up a hill. The locks had been bypassed by an inclined plane lift, built in 1900 to carry barges and narrow boats up and down the hill more swiftly and efficiently than the ten locks, but it was closed in 1911 and dismantled. The Foxton Inclined Plane Museum chronicles this and the Foxton Inclined Plane Trust is out to rebuild the lift, having received and squandered various grants to do so. They are a bunch of crazy industrial enthusiasts if there ever were any, devoted to reconstructing something that was completely dismantled and sold for scrap under eighty years ago. I can't see it being worth the effort, given that there isn't enough traffic on this section of the canal to warrant it. Still, I got a nice mug from the museum shop and we watched a video they had playing on the wall that bizarrely chronicled this local man's obsession with building elaborate models of 1920s orchestras, with little players whose arms moved in and out or up and down depending on the instrument. This man also did the voiceover on the video and had a wonderfully flat, monotonous voice that seemed to suit the whole endeavour rather well: 'Well, this one took me five years to build...'
We kept stopping for drinks and having nice pints of quality bitter, at agreeable northern prices. Then in the evening, we drove into Leicester to one of the big nights of the Leicester Early Music Festival, which runs through May and June. In a rather magnificent Saint Mary de Castro church we listened to Michala Petri, a Danish recorder player and one of the finest in the world, accompanied by her scarily named husband Lars Hannibal on the lute and basso continuo. I've never really thought about listening to 'recorder music' before, but it has to be said, this was very good indeed. They played Baroque pieces, things like Corelli, Bach and Vivaldi, and her skill with the recorder was just incredible. At times she was like a babbling brook or a trilling bird, such was her skill with the instrument, and at the end she even did a kind of party piece, where she hummed and played at the same time, thus singing her own harmony to her playing. The church was full of marvellous bearded, white haired early music enthusiasts. It was a good thing to go to.
After the concert, we went for an Indian meal back in Market Harborough, then to bed. On Sunday, we boated again for much of the day, enjoying more sunshine than on Saturday and ending up rather red and mildly burnt. Lesley started running around and getting excited with reading our horoscopes, while Russ tried to calm her down by admonishing her to peel the potatoes. Me and Matt were lying on the roof of the narrow boat, while Alex was at the tiller with Russ, Lesley was reading these horoscope entries and trying to work out what our 'special stones' were as Russ kept saying: 'Potatoes, Lesley! Potatoes!'
Around three or four in the afternoon, we set off back to London on the train, to the rather less idyllic charms of the city. Thoroughly enjoyable weekend.
Friday evening, we decided not to sleep in our little shelter and headed down to Bournemouth to stay the night there. Bournemouth was interesting, quite like Brighton, but with sandy beaches and a lovely central park area running down through the middle of the town to the beach. We sought out the gay places, which were clustered around a little roundabout called the triangle, and which seemed to number three in total. It was fun, much more intimate and provincial, and the lack of choice meant everyone would move from the pub to the bar to the club at the same time, meaning only one of the three venues was ever full at any given time.
Next morning, we took some breakfast cereal down to the beach and sat on the sands to eat before setting off back to London.
After we'd finished our breakfast and washed up, we drove away from the campsite, pausing to say hello to some forest ponies and swing on a rope swing we found by a stream, to Beaulieu, a village with a kind of cross between a stately home and a theme park. You pay to get in, and then you can visit the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu Abbey, and Palace House, all in these rather nice grounds with benches, gardens, a monorail and even an old-fashioned open-top bus that takes people for short drives around the grounds.
The National Motor Museum, which Matt was keen to see, was actually really enjoyable. I'm not generally interested in cars, but this is mostly very cool old cars, ranging from amazing nineteenth century contraptions built along the lines of horseless carriages, to open-top early twentieth century ones, to the first mass produced cars of the 1930s and onwards. One vehicle was an electric taxi, used in London in the late nineteenth century by a particular company and resembling a big yellow carriage, just without the horse hitched to the front. It was powered with an enormous battery that slid underneath the carriage and which had to be recharged every day. There were other really old 'cars' that were basically engine-powered prams, or bikes, and examples of steam-driven road vehicles before combustion engines made petrol-driven cars feasible in the 1880s.
We took a walk around the remains of Beaulieu Abbey, where some sculptures by Philip Jackson were displayed around the tranquil ruins, all brooding nuns and priests along a papal theme...
Matt and I went to Stansted late on Sunday night, with the strange intention to sleep at the airport for a few hours before getting up at five in the morning to check in for the flight. The airport stretched out around us, bright and echoing, it's grid-roof supported by elegant tree-like columns stretching off all around us. We pitched camp outside a sock shop, stretching out on our towels. I tried to write a poem as bored teenagers zoomed around on really noisy skateboards.
The artificial light and closed shop fronts -
Sock shop Hargreaves, Ponti's Costa -
The distant chatter of three-in-the-morning voices
Footsteps, skateboards, air conditioning.
Hard floor below me, clammy limbs
And battered soul.
The temple stretches out in all directions, vast and improbable,
While its priests, in crisp suits of nylon, trot back and forth preparing for the dawn,
Lord Foster, we salute you.
We were going to take the train to Madrid on the Monday evening, but it was full so we took it on Tuesday evening instead. We spent Monday wandering Barcelona, stumbling across the enchanting pools and palm trees of the Catedral de Barcelona on our rambles and visiting the strange modern concreted Parc de l'Espanya Industrial near Sants-Estació rail station.
Matt and I headed off on our New Forest Camping Adventure on Thursday morning. We picked up a car from the EasyCar place near Edgeware Road, packed loads of things into it, and drove off south towards Hampshire.
We stopped off at Stonehenge on the way and marvelled at the neolithic glory of the toppled stones and at the incredible numbers of tourists who constantly stream through the site.
After a tea, and a run across the field and up two long barrows nearby, we set off again in the car, heading down through the picturesque surroundings of the New Forest with its ponies, gorse bushes and rural pubs. It began to get dark and we started looking around for a campsite. This proved to be a long job, first we looked for one down by the coast but to no avail. Then we headed back up into the forest and found one run by the Forestry Commission, but it was full. Finally, as night came on, we found one nearby in a forest clearing and booked two nights there.
We headed out to the campsite, and found a spot up against some gorse bushes. We spent some time clearing away the pony poo and then got out our stuff. We opened up the new tent (which I had never even looked at before) and began to get nervous. I had got it as a small one or two person tent a few years ago from an army surplus shop, but it was very small indeed. There seemed to be a lack of groundsheets or double layers. Still, we figured we could cope with that. It was as we were putting it up that we realised there appeared to be no door on the thing, so I had a proper read of the instructions and saw the fateful words: 'Warning: this is not actually a tent. This is a shelter for use when fishing.'
Alas, we had an open windbreak, rather than a tent, and it was fast turning into a very cold night. Matt and I are rarely deterred by such things however, so we decided to cook dinner. We made a delicious meal of sausages and beans, with a cup of tea, on our little stove - it tasted so good outdoors! It started to get really cold at this point. We were going to turn our 'shelter' upside down and try to sleep underneath it, though this would have involved sleeping on the grass, but we thought that was probably the route to hypothermia and death. We slept in the car instead, turning on the engine for ten minutes first in an attempt to warm up the interior before we bedded in.
By four or five in the morning, we were absolutely freezing, so we got up around 5.45, brushed our teeth, washed some plates, watched a fabulous crisp bitter cold bright yellow dawn, and then had a lovely breakfast of cereal, tea and pain au chocolat.
