THE ODYSSEY

early june: arrived @ london heathrow. afternoon. am happily communicating with the people in the same language i learned as a small child. two weeks of asking for things in english, being responded to in english, and actually getting what i asked for was sheer bliss.

i have a lot of good friends in england and in scotland. i made a few more good friends in the short time i was there. i will not soon forget any of them. the kindness flowed like a fine single malt scotch and i drank it up in spades. i was surrounded by record collections vast and impressive at the homes i visited (except at jonnie’s parents’ house in norwich). needless to say much of the conversations i had with these fine folks was centered on music: always a favorite topic of mine, as those of you who know me know very well.

first stop brighton. the weather was perfect on the first day and rained on the 2nd. i found the alley where the mod guy and girl, in a brief escape from the mods vs. rockers riot, shagged up against the wall in that movie Quadrophenia (quintessential mod flick from some 25 years ago). although the scene wasn’t the most poignant of love scenes ever created on film, it seems a fitting locale considering the characters were sleeping under bridges and on the beach and thus had no access to private domains for such rendezvous. ahem, anyways, so that was fun. my hosts in brighton, martin & lina, were nothing short of gracious and lovely. i hope to repay the kindness someday.

next stop: london. my hosts there, jo and matt, were also most kind and fun to hang with. they live in swanky notting hill. the visit started out well at an afternoon DJ gig matt was doing between bands at the Macbeth that went on late into the evening. many drinks were consumed. good to catch up with my peeps across the pond.

next stop: essex. specifically, bumbles green, nazeing (what a name, eh? wow! doesn’t get much more english than that!). helen came to collect me at tottenham hale and we drove down to essex to where she lives with her folks. they have a lovely country home with some horses in a field next door and lots of clean air. it pretty much drizzled the whole time. we walked around some woods and gabbed and had a nice visit. helen has traveled a lot on her own all over the world and so proved a valuable source of information for me as she has visited many of the places i’m visiting. i hope to have as good adventures as she’s had on hers. poor helen didn’t sleep the night i was there and so couldn’t really hang out the next day. got the train back to london, back to matt and jo’s, and hung out there for a day or so until it was time to catch a train northeast. met up with sonja, the friend i’d made in koh tao, for a drink and a bite. was good to catch up with her too and we swapped stories about thailand and she very nearly arranged for me to appear (vocally if not physically) on Big Brother. i was meant to call in and be interviewed about Big Brother. as it turns out, i was not needed. shame that my fifteen minutes of fame were so short lived – non-existent, actually.

next stop: norwich. what can one say about norwich? one thing that i can say is that some of the nicest people on the planet live there. i was met at the station by julie and jonnie (in the rain), who took me to paul’s nice & comfy house where we were staying, and then julie and i wandered through the olde worlde castle and the town, stopping for drinks every so often. the occasion for my visit to norwich was in honor of julie and jonnie’s 1st wedding anniversary. jonnie’s family were throwing a party for this auspicious occasion and i was invited to attend. our host paul was a real saint, showing me and the greens the time of our lives while visiting. of course many many pints were consumed and much laughter and shenanigans ensued. the party at the parents’ was a success and i met some of the nicest people there – many parents and relations, all sweet and kind. naturally, after the more sedate “adult” party, we youngsters retreated to the pub yet again for another round of “civilized” behavior (eg, moderately heavy drinking). best pub ever: the Fat Cat. hands down. great beer selection and mellow vibe. voted best in england last year, so says our informative host. best part of this place? it’s stumbling distance to paul’s house. how easy was that? a little too easy, i reckon. no complaints, no sir. never a complaint. moment of hilarity: ordering late night nosh delivery from the kebab place. i was made to place the order and the poor guy on the receiving end of my slurry request could not decipher my amurrican accent and so the order had to be translated by one with a more articulate (eg, proper english) voice. so much for thinking i speak english as a first language! the next day a street fair was happening on the street where paul’s record shop is located. in fact, it was sorta all around the town, but mostly concentrated around that particular area. the sun was shining and people were generally in good spirits. lots of hippies, jugglers, painted faced children and regular weirdos wandering around shopping for the odd stuff folks generally consume at such events. paul and his friends set up gigantic speakers outside his shop and blasted music all the live-long day into the street. genius. there were dozens of people dancing in the street and having just the best time. how can you really go wrong with HOURS of great reggae and dub both live and recorded blaring away down the sunny street? you cannot. this is what i believe. unfortunately, the cops showed up and shut things down around 6 but that was OK and the festive mood continued loooong into the night, at least as far as my friends and i were concerned. the next day… ouch! sleep deprivation and a properly pickled liver were beginning to get the best of me. said farewell to julie and jonnie in the morning, a sad moment indeed, and i still had several hours of downtime before catching the plane to scotland. i left my stuff at the record shop (thanks yet again to my super awesome host & super new superfriend paul – save the trees! the campaign continues…) and after a bit of wandering and looking up at the clouds and daydreaming, crashed out on the grass in the sunshine until time to leave. bid sir paul a fond farewell, and got a cab with a crackpot taxi driver (ex royal army or whatever – a real nutjob who fears nothing and who was quite proud to announce to me that he’d defied death by mugging not once but twice by armed hoodlums. golly, i sure wouldn’t want to get on THAT guy’s bad side!) to the airport and was on my way north. had my first successful phone conversation with the USA from norwich, with becca and kevin at home. lovely to hear their voices and catch up a bit on things back in san francisco. seems all is well but for the sad news of the passing of my dear friend lori’s mother. ***please note: a moment of silence for lori and her family. my thoughts are with you, sugarpop.

final stop: edinburgh. was met by shirley at the airport. bused to musselburgh where she lives with tony and their 3-year old daughter, lily. spent a relaxing and infinitely more subdued and less debaucherous time at their place, though not dull by any stretch of the imagination. like with my friends back in england, there was lots of talk about good music and taking little strolls down memory lane. i somehow managed to spend a bundle on records (why on earth was i buying records? i can’t carry them in my backpack? clearly am not the sharpest knife in the drawer) which i then had to mail home. i reckon it was worth it because i got some real gems for a fraction of what they’d cost back in san francisco, if you could find them at all. anyroad, so edinburgh was sunny most of the time too and so we drove out to take a tour of a whiskey distillery. fascinating stuff, whiskey making. not unlike wine making, generally speaking. the wine that i made never tasted as good as the single malt scotch from the distillery, however. spent a relaxing rest of the time with tony and shirley chatting, drinking wine and watching “this is england”, a film = social commentary, more or less, results of margaret thatcher’s reign a the time = about young skinheads in the early 80s (yo maggie! what happened there?). actually, i’d seen the film before at matt & jo’s place earlier, so it was my second viewing. i liked it slightly better the second time watching it, but hold firm that some of the scenes were simply not believable and this fact detracted from the movie on the whole. still, a pretty good interpretation of how things were for misguided youths in thatcher’s england in the early 80s.

back to london on the train we were held up by BANDITS!!! no, not really. we were, however, delayed by a fire on the train ahead of ours and so had to sit in berwick for an hour with the A/C off. it was stuffy as hell in there so i tuned out and turned on the iPod. fortunately the train wasn’t very crowded…at least until the train with the problem cleared out its passengers and let them all on board our train. then it was crowded. very crowded. it sucked, people. let me tell you. i got to london, got the tube to a small burg called osterly which is near heathrow, and spent another mostly sleepless night in a weird hotel/motel place twenty miles from anything. my flight to cairo was at 6 am and so i was up and outta there by 3:30. OUCH! that was painful too. still, it all worked out fine and i got a taxi (why is it that taxi drivers have to YELL in your ear at 3:30 in the morning? it is beyond comprehension, but a reality nonetheless) and then the flight to cairo via rome. since i departed from terminal 2 i did not have to deal with the largess of the new and, some say unnervingly disorganized, terminal 5. phew! farewell to the UK…for now. i will return to my english rose (props to paul weller for borrowed…ahem, stolen…lyrics) someday again soon. it’s never BORING, SYDNEY!

coming soon to a monitor near you: egypt. guess what songs keep going through my head? yup, you guessed it: ‘fire in cairo’ and ‘egypt egypt, and yeah there is also ‘dance cleopata’ by ska hero prince buster. oh dear me…i’m in trouble if i sing these tunes aloud on the streets of cairo, although probably not as potentially disastrous to my physical health as if i were to sing ‘killing an arab’. heh. don’t even talk about ‘walk like an egyptian’ because that’s just lame. ciao for now, my pretties!!! xoxo.

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