A Journeyman's Log

Texans’ reputation (in British humour) is that everything in Texas is bigger than anywhere else. I walked down for supper to Logan’s Roadhouse, the nearest one to the hotel. It was fine, with crackly floors. Each table has a galvanized bucket of unshelled peanuts where Brits might expect bread. Emptied shells are dropped on the floor. I saw no spittoons. As a Brit, I find the portions huge and there are no other vegetables than potato. I had potato soup to start, nice with cheese and bacon. Then thin slices of beef on Texan toast, which was really just white bread toast, next to a heap of mashed potato cradling thick brown gravy in a dip. Not a solitary veg; nothing green, orange, red or yellow. Except in the mini dessert of cheesecake, served in a miniature galvanised bucket, the kid brother of the peanut holder. Apart from dessert the portions are huge, no wonder so many people there were overweight. A South African Feba colleague once joked that when beef is on the BBQ his vegetables are pork. In India I learned: After lunch rest a while, after dinner walk a mile. Which I did, stalking out the Target store for the weekend.

9 October, 2008

No. I’m still travelling both for work and for pleasure. It’s just that this blog is neglected. I repent and promise myself again to get to writing. Taking up from April, the next big journey after the walk round Arundel was to Singapore for my work. Despite the horribly long air journey, I enjoy Singapore. The warm, damp air reminds me of Seychelles, where wife and I spent our earliest married years. We took our firstborn at 9-weeks old and our second son was born there. After the air, that similarities end. Singapore has a reputation for being a controlled society. The end result is a clean, crowded, safe-feeling, prosperous, and–yes–regulated society. A Swedish colleague and I walked from our hotel into town to eat. The traffic flowed, drivers obeyed traffic signals. The pavements were crowded with young people looking healthy, well off and enjoying themselves. We heard that the Christian church in Singapore is thriving. I’m glad that the prosperity is being moderated by spiritual growth. Materialism, like a nuclear reactor, needs moderating with other, spiritual influences to avoid melt down. Local TV was fun. In Thailand once I saw a cooking programme on preparing rats. My stomach turned when I saw a dozen tails hanging over the side of the wok. In Singapore I was caught up with a TV soap whose daily tensions grew in the fertile soil of loves gained and lost, flirtations with dishonesty and manipulation, a son watching his father regret infidelity and longing for his parents to be reconciled. I was sorry to leave.

In 1971 my first extended time outside UK was in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, for 5 months before I returned home to get married. July can be cold at 5,000 feet elevation, so my memories include woodsmoke, jacaranda and the dark silvery song of a nocturnal bird. Bathing one night in the concrete floored bathroom I met a moth with a wingspan of 6-8 inches and curiosity to match. I don’t think my light was shining that brightly.

In May 2007 all I saw of Nairobi was the airport en route to Mombasa, down on the coast. Actually my group was staying north of Mombasa in an ocean-side hotel drenched with seasonal rain. The wind was quite high, the Indian Ocean breakers roaring constantly as they hit the reef edge. My room had mosquito nets, thank goodness, as Mombasa is close to the equator. Surprisingly, the lizards were nearly as bold as the moth.

One afternoon a tribe of monkeys moved across the compound atop the palms. I was amazed to see one leap several metres, landing on a much lower palm branch on his next tree. Clever or stupid? Reckless or finely judged? He made it, so it’s your call.

Old Mombasa was fascinating, even on a rainy late afternoon after a visit toBaraka FM, a station servingboth the Christian and Muslim communities in the name of Jesus Christ. From their offices there’s a great view over the shipping lanes.

8 December, 2007

This last week has brought some Spring-like weather to West Sussex. Sunday last, wife and I drove into Central London to visit oldest son and his wife. We walked though St James Park, with hundreds of others, and enjoyed the sunshine and keen wind. It turns out they had visited Arundel two weeks earlier to walk along the river and through the Duke’s estate, as wife and I reported in our last posting. Saturday night wife and I were at the Black Rabbit with two American friends, with whom we’d just seen Amazing Grace, the film celebrating William Wilberforce’s struggle to outlaw slavery. For wife it was the third meal at the Black Rabbit that week! Multiple dining medal to be struck and passed over, no doubt.

2 April, 2007

Wife and I walked just over 5 miles Sunday afternoon, guided by the GPS. We started at Arundel, West Sussex, parking the car on the road to the Black Rabbit pub, then walking alongside the river Arun to it. The path was pretty muddy. Then on the paved road to South Stoke, beyond which we breasted one hill, then on down to the river bank again. The Duke of Norfolk’s estate is walled, but The Monarch’s Way traverses it from Arundel itself to the gate in the wall where we joined it. The GPS was tracking us quite well, but overlaying the track on a digital map at home showed us walking along the middle of the river just before the climb to the top of the estate. We’re good, but not that good. It was a windy, overcast day, but that section of the South Downs is lovely. We promised ourselves a visit in summer. Light was failing now, but it was an easy walk downhill to Swanbourne Lake. The water fowl were grumbling about things and across the valley some teenage boys competed to be loudest. We needed the compass once, again in woodland; the torch several times as we came down off the Downs; the printed map pretty often. GPS handhelds seem to be fine in open areas but get far less precise in our kind of territory.

10 January, 2007

A couple of gifts for Christmas this year were a hand-held GPS device and a digital map of the South Downs. On Thursday this week, wife, oldest son, youngest son and their wives trusted me to take them on a walk on the edge of the Downs, starting 10 minutes from our home. Starting after lunch on a day overcast with winter cloud we left the car park and the GPS guided us along the planned route–until I missed a left turn. This new toy guided us back to the route after a scrabble through the woods. So far, so good. On the return part of our walk we had to pass through another wood.

After a stiff ascent into it we were faced with a four-way junction and less light, even though most trees were bare of leaves. Not quite trusting this new intrument, we decided on a path that proved to be the wrong one. Unlike at the previous correction, we seemed to go deeper and deeper into the wood and get less and less help from the GPS. Our planned route is the blue line and our actual track is the red one. As light faded totally we headed due south towards the major road we could hear. Then youngest son and I hoofed it along this road back to the car park, leaving the rest of the party to find their way to the nearest hostelry, where we joined them later. Resolved: a) to take a traditional compass on future walks; b) to take a torch; c) to learn how to use aforementioned GPS; d) to avoid woodland paths after dark.

30 December, 2006

I hadn’t heard of Noida before hearing that I’d be staying there for a week in November. The overnight from London to Delhi was enough to let me sleep most of the way from the airport to Noida’s YMCA, so it was a surprise to wake up on arriving at a new, empty facility–both the city and the Y, as it’s affectionately known.

Greater Noida has a five-year plan to fulfil the dream of a former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a woman whose village home was Noida. The greater city rises from a dusty plain of sandy soil, is linked to Delhi by a fine highway, is growing, but has acres of empty plots and dozens of empty high-rise buildings. Crossing the road was hazardous, not for the volume of traffic, but for the locals’ habit of using both sides of the dual carriageway as single carriage roads; there are rules for roundabouts (circles), I expect, but it was hard to predict how any one vehicle would move round the large roundabout that lay between the Y, the pizza house and the Internet cafe. Lorry drivers apart, most did attempt to steer round pedestrians, though some motor cyclists thought it fun to buzz the feckless, just like WWII fighter pilots or modern-day Israeli jets over Beirut. 

The Internet cafe was three floors up and provided an hour’s access to the world for Rupees15, US$0.30 or £0.17. The pizza house was bright, loud, hot and sold good value, piping hot food. At the end of this stretch of road, to the right, lies a village of labourers; no electricity that we could see, but the road was lit to highest standards with high-pressure sodium lamps. Just before 10 PM, walking back along this road I tried (and failed) to compute and compare the nightly cost of lighting the road with the daily hire of the truck-load of labourers returning to their temporary village. Their main fuel is the hand-crafted, pizza-shaped cowpats neatly laid in lines to dry. The air left one smelling of the smoke; the street lights shone on, oblivious to emptiness or global warming.

4 December, 2006

What a year! Busy isn’t the word. I hope to write some more very soon! See you.

4 November, 2006

So, here I am with six weeks of the seven nearly done. Tomorrow, Friday, is the last for this week. Then, six more trips to the far side of Brighton; six more greetings for the team of radiologists; six more goodbyes. And the rest? Rest, I think. Yes, sleep and being able to get up in the morning feeling refreshed. Maybe my brain will hurry up, the right words come out first time. “Follow what your body tells you,” they said. In contrast with the worst possibilities detailed in the cancer centre’s introductory green pamphlet, it’s only creeping tiredness that marks this out as my course of radiotherapy. And I’m grateful. Other people I’ve seen have told their stories of fatigue, discomfort, hourly awakenings through endless nights. I’m grateful. Yesterday was my birthday. Faced with a couple of business sessions over the weekend, I took a day off to conserve some energy. In Brighton I bought a couple of pairs of shoes that fit my broad feet. Bought some CDs: Emma Johnson for my wife, Jimi Hendrix and Radio Tarifa for me. For family reasons there’s a huge hole in my knowledge of popular music in the 1970s and 80s. Only Hendrix’s bouffant hair was familiar before I listened to the first CD. By evening, the summer warmth and light breeze granted the wife and me dinner alfresco in the walled garden of a Sussex pub a few miles from where youngest son and new daughter-in-law married a month before. A great evening and a refreshing day of energy conservation.

Week two of this seven-week routine of daily radiotherapy. Between my home and the centre there’s just a little green space, then multiple villages, now bloated to become a connurbation. Brighton and Hove have separate railway stations, but now are one recently-appointed city. This week the schools are empty, children and teachers enjoying a break after the Spring Bank Holiday, which used to be the gently wandering Whitsun break, until the rigours of modernisation nailed it to the last-Monday-in-May slot. That means traffic is light and I get to the centre early. Given the chance the crew irradiate me early and send me off into the early summer morning with a bit more time for the work awaiting me at the office. The X-ray machine is massive. I lie on a hard table, head and feet on half-stocks to keep them steady. Using gentle green lasers that delineate the cross-point around which this massive device rotates, the team adjust, poke, stroke and ensure my three tatoos line up with the laser lines. Then a series of numbers relating to where the table is, I guess. They work to a tolerance of 5mm. For a brain tumour it would be 1mm. “Everything’s OK!” Out they go, closing a wooden gate across the entrance corridor. Then a short series of whistling alarms, a brief tense silence, and a medium-strength buzz as the X-rays flow out of the machine’s head and into my body. Twelve seconds, as measured by my pulse; a second twelve into the right side of the pelvis. The machine rotates until the head is over my stomach. Twelve more into my front. More rotation. Then a couple of twelves into my left side. Silence. Then one of the team returns, switches on the lights and moves the hard, healing table into open space, so I can get up, dress myself and get out. No sensation at all, but clenching muscles as the buzzes begin. No side effects, yet. Just a daily prayer that this machine will do its job, be owned by God and used to heal. Five more weeks to go.