my writing

Tag: travel

  • Australia

    Claude Levi-Strauss and approaching the Red Centre I “Exploration is not so much a covering of surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape, or a remark overheard may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning.” Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p56…

  • Leaving Shaftesbury for Greece, 1999 : Pages from ‘Odysseos’ Island’,

    p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971…

  • Introduction. &, Meeting Penny : Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    INTRODUCTION The details of Richard’s disappearance filtered through to me slowly. Or perhaps I filtered them slowly. I had lost touch, ceased to keep in touch with him several years before, having run out of patience with his lack of focus, his failure to get on. When getting on, one needs the company of those…

  • Inside the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Aug 21I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space. ‘What…

  • La Balme in 1976 : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday…

  • Return to La Balme: ‘Cycling the Green Meridian’, Day 20

    Day 20: Albi to Coupiac, 56 miles. Return to the hills. Our village revealed. The carved stone buried. Encounter in the café. The wild boy reconsidered. Our house. The one-armed man. The Virgin’s veil. The threshing-machine. Camping by the lake. Pot au feu with the young couple. I wake early. Today I will be at…

  • Albi in 1976: pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Chapter 1: Albi I watch the cream and red train disappear slowly around the long bend. The last I see of Jane is her hand sticking out of the window, her fingers spread out like the ribs of a broken fan. I stare along the empty line until the noise of the train dies away…

  • Return to Albi: Cycling the Green Meridian, Day 19.

    Day 19: Belcastel to Albi, 51miles. The first smile of the South. Dante and tripe. ‘Benveguda en Tarn’. Pink city. Crusade against Christians. A congregation facing hell. The great explorer lost. Diagonals of the Hexagon. The garden restaurant. Burger à point. It is another cold night and I hardly sleep. I’m up, packed and ready…

  • Cycling the Green Meridian: Day 10

    3am thoughts. The savage river dreams. Norse pirates. Theodulph’s oratory. The saint at the abbey. The Apocalypse. The first heretics burned at Orléans. Joan of Arc and visions. Max Jacob. The failure of la Méridienne verte, the success of letterboxes. 3 a.m. Writing, in the cold, unfamiliar light of my new, illuminating pen. The third…

  • Cycling the Green Meridian: 7

    Day 7: St-Ouen to Fleury-Mérogis, 53 miles. The flea market. Reuniting two lovers. Suzanne’s grave. A hectic ride across Paris. Satie’s flat. The undertaker. Erik’s grave. Cultural tourism. Gabrielle. The bell not pressed. Depression in a metal cell. I eat breakfast in the bar. Bright sun outside, washed streets, deep shadows, few people. A bar…