Magic.

Words come bidden, unbidden, words written.
A conversation I had the other day:

"I've been reading your blog"

"I can't write it anymore. I was thinking of stopping it and starting a new one, later. I mean, it was always hard, seemingly impossible, that sinking feeling always there when I pressed the publish button, but I had Nepal! And I always worried about how I was only writing mundane things about my everyday normal life - less electricity, more hills - but now I realise that that was the point! To try and capture the mundane, yes, I find it annoying when people use the phrase 'third world problems' all the time, as though people in the third world don't get pissed off when their facebook stops working without explanation, yes, to capture that, she helped me to see it too, the counterpoint of mundane and magical. But now I'm in Melbourne, working a regular job,"

"Well, write about that. Being back in Melbourne, missing Nepal."

"I've already written two blog posts about that."

"Well. Just write something else then."

Now, a-sudden, a breeze blows through, mind alive in motionless body. Melbourne! The dance! Yesterday I went to drinks, a work-thing, on day three of the new job. I'm teaching English now, with many other English teachers, all travellers, all of the birds come home to roost. We all wear ironed shirts, nice skirts, adequate footwear. The great Reg Bolton said that one of the best things about the circus industry was that you don't have to wear shoes at work. This was once a cute line, now it is a heaven-sent truth. They, the other English teachers, have been in Melbourne for some time now, working in that same place, Impact English, for two years or three. I was quietly incredulous at the thought of staying in the same job for so long. But then, that's what people do, isn't it? That's what is expected, I suddenly realised why I never get jobs from my CV. It is not an ancient curse, as I'd suspected, the CV just reveals the fact that I will probably only stay for 6 months, less, if the job is crap.

I decided to leave the work-thing-drinks early, the ciders were too easy to drink, too expensive to buy. Decorum preserved, mystery maintained, off and away, on my bicycle into the cold Antarctic headwind. Part wanted to go home, another part wanted to drink, to dance, all of the things. In an act of self-discipline, I swung my bike homewards. At that point, a great gust of icewind hit me, bringing myself and my bike to a standstill. I reconsidered the options. As I pushed forward again, a man in a beanie came out of the darkness and bent my ear, a hirsute man like myself, a writer from New Zealand, with an excellent name, Benjamin Weaver. He wanted to get involved, to do spoken-word gigs, to partake of Melbourne's much-lauded underground art scene. He was nice, I sensed in him so much good-will and hopefulness. Rosy-cheeked, I told him that I could have helped him, once. I used to be in the loop, no, I used to Be the loop. Now, no, I couldn't really help, can't even bring myself to be a part of that dance anymore. We walked and talked on many things, Mr. Weaver and I. Two polar bears, discussing language and freedom under the night sky.

Strangely, my conversation with him led me to an old bar, where I once worked. The same old piano, red velvet curtains, the same Paris-style crepe pan which I used to love twiddling out crepes on. Inside, a group of artists had come together to share stories, and talk about their process. One of the artists recognised me, invited me to join them. As I sat and listened, a mortal fear overtook me. What if they ask me to talk? They would hear it in my voice, see it in my face, they would know. I could talk about all of the explorations, process vs. product, the role of audience, the marbling of real and imaginary, blah blah, it would be obvious to everyone that the fire had gone out. I heard one of them talking about creating worlds on stage - something which I myself have said countless times - and I thought they sounded like a moron. Was this self-loathing? As I listened, I honestly couldn't say why it was that they were doing it. If I talked, they would see that I would rather do a simple, good job, than go through all of  the self-indulgent anguish of being an artist. Or would I? Suddenly, like a vision, an old friend from Brisbane appeared. I made good my escape, to eat a second dinner, and seek refuge in rice paper rolls and reminiscence.

Later on, back in the bar, I tried to explain to my artist friend why I had disappeared suddenly. It turns out that these are the same things which everyone goes through, the same icy headwind. Some choose to continue down the artist's path, some choose to go back to Uni and become a school teacher. I didn't know whether to feel disappointed or relieved.

This is perhaps the last blog post for "Old things, New things". I'll keep writing in the same sort of way - I don't know how to do otherwise - but probably in a different blog. I've run out of old diaries for now, there are more, in some box, who knows where. Thank you for reading, thank you everyone who told me you like it. It helped.

And then there was this

One week back. sitting in the kitchen, glass of wine, laptop in hand. Melbourne. Today a memory came back to me, my old landlord in Kathmandu, who would pump water from the well at around 6 every morning, so that we could have our showers, wash our dishes, flush our toilets. He called this, and many of the other things he did, 'duty'.

"What did you do today, Mangal-Dai?"
"My duty."

He was always adorned with either a smile, or a shrewd business-like face. He never talked about being a famous painter, and you would never have known. This image floated to me from so far away, it feels someone else's memory. Where has it all gone?  के भयो? Even the handy little transliteration button, that allows me to write in Sanskrit sometimes, this has stopped working. I must copy a word from somewhere else and paste it, such great lengths to write two words. I considered whether it might be easier to hand-write it and take a photo. But I have no pen at hand, just some chalk

This is Nepal, it's still inside me, the image of a key, being lowered from a third-storey window. Lowered by a lady who has tied the key to a piece of string, and has tied that string to another piece of string, and that one to another again, and on and on until at last it is long enough to let her friend through the front door. I read back over the old blogs, remembering all that time spent fretting over them, the mundane drivel, the pointlessness. And now, when I read them, I remember just how meaningful, how purposeful the act of drinking a glass of water can be. So, rather than mince words, I will write what I am trying to say.

Malaai Nepalle samjhayo. The grammar is not perfect, it never is. Nor is the spelling, but it's almost right. It could be translated to 'I miss Nepal'. It could also be translated to, 'By me, Nepal is remembered'. Or even,  'Nepal is understood by me'. These translations are all valid. 

The meaning though, well that just is what it is.

home is ware(the)house(is)

I am minding a room in a warehouse. It is small and cold, this room, and it feels more like home than any of the rooms I've lived in for a long time. It is waxing midnight, and outside, now and then, the boomgates go down, and the bell goes 'ding ding' for a really long time. About the same length of time as the bells that the people outside my house used to ring at 5 in the morning. Until three days ago, when I left Nepal.

Yes, the bells ring at the wrong time, and they are mechanically timed. And the cars don't talk here. I miss their obnoxious honking voices. It is almost midnight but I can still hear them driving around, just the sound of tyres on smooth road, no bumps. It is a sound like wind or surf, but with a distinctly human shape. More than ten years ago, I was in a physics lecture, and the lecturer explained about static friction and dynamic friction. He was a man called Max, and he liked to talk about how stupid we probably all were. You see, static friction is that thing which makes it hard to move a stationary object along a surface, and dynamic friction is that thing which resists the motion of a sliding object, causing it to decelerate. He told us that a wheel, a tyre on a car for instance, could only roll because of static friction. When rolling, the point on the wheel that is in contact with the surface is, actually, stationary. Everywhere else on the wheel is moving, except for that point. In a geometrically perfect model, that point would be infinitely small, and it would be stationary for an infinitely short time. Max drew a very lovely diagram of the whole thing, and then told us that we were probably too stupid to understand. I didn't stay in that course for very long.

If a wheel was light enough, it could probably roll along the surface of water.

I've been back for two days, and I've become one of those interminable "when I was in Nepal" people. Really, it's a way of validating the experience, proving that it really happened. I lived there for almost a year, and now I'm back in Melbourne and everything is so different and strange, and yet it feels so normal. There are no barking dogs, no goats or monkeys. Even though I would decline, I wish someone would offer to polish my shoes.

Meanwhile, back in Nepal, the deadline for the new constitution has passed, the constituent assembly did not complete their homework, and so now the government will have to either resign or ignore the supreme court. For a government to ignore its own legal system is brazen, even upon the matter of an extension, and it doesn't seem like the general public has enough love for the Nepali government to let it slide. Static friction. I think they've gone for a "we're going to have one last extension to finish the damn thing and then we promise we'll resign" option. Things are likely to get hairy.

Here, though, no such problems. Someone tells me that Australia's prime minister is on shaky ground, and that the previous prime minister might come back, but it is hard to care when life is so quiet and predictable. One politician goes, another one comes, neither of them are particularly inspiring. The holes in the ground get bigger, the people and wildlife above the holes get pushed away and cut out. The things get more expensive, the economy grows, and then it will diminish again.

three days left

Our visas are expiring, we are all leaving Kathmandu, back to Scotland, America, Norway, Germany, Australia. I walked with my friend to the airport shuttle bus this morning, at the small hour of morning when the bandha has not quite set in, and people rush around shopping and doing the necessary things before all momentum is halted.

The word bandha, meaning 'close' or 'obstruct', is used for a kind of enforced mass-strike,  where no businesses are allowed to open and no vehicles are allowed on the roads (not even bicycles). And people walk around waving flags for whichever political party or organisation was responsible for it, or using their sticks and threats to make sure no-one breaks the bandha by, say, opening up their little grocery store. Now that the deadline for the new constitution approaches, the bandhas are coming in thick and fast, as everyone wants their piece of the pie. 

The whole thing just seems especially stupid, since I've just returned from a week in a beautiful village called Archale, where the 'Nepal bandha' was just a kind of distant murmur, only causing trouble for people who were trying to get a bus somewhere. Emma and I were there for a week, running a week of shadow-puppetry and theatre workshops in a little school. I wrote to someone about it recently, here is part of that letter.

(the journey there took about 6 hours, most of which we spent on the roof of the bus)


We wound up and down, round mountainsides and through valleys and little towns, ducking under branches whilst butterflies and swallows danced around us. The air is so clean out there, the water so clear, it's as though all of the country's pollution has been concentrated into one city, such a joy to escape. 

We arrived, burned and bruised, a quick chiya at the bus station in shanti bazaar, and then one last push, a 30 minute walk up the hill with unnecessarily heavy bags. I would have packed lightly, if only I'd known it would be so hot, it would not rain, and there would be little time for reading, writing and the like. Up and up we walked, until at last we reached Archale, a quiet place with no dogs. Red and clay and straw coloured were the houses, green green were the trees, the sky was a vast rich blue and the sun added a subtle bleach to everything.

Every house had buffaloes, cows, goats, or chooks. There were supposedly about 400-500 people in the village, but it was so spread out that it felt like much fewer. We'd long since heard about the river, I probably even talked to you about it when you were here, so excited I was about it. On that first day, we met with the principal, outlined our plan for the week of workshops, made timetables, met our host families, put our things down, did all of those necessary things with as much haste as possible, and then made straight for the river. It was a short walk around the mountain, over the bridge, past the mill, and hopping up the rocks, and there it was the little paradise. I made that journey almost every morning, the cold, clean water more than made up for lack of coffee. I didn't miss coffee at all, cloudy and vague and headache-prone as its absence made me. 


I drank in the silence greedily. I would wake around 6 or 7, drink chiya, go to the river, come back to the house for breakfast, and then by 9 or 10 walk down to the school. There were 6 classes a day, from 10am. until 4p.m. and the children were aged from 3 until about 10 years old, although age categorization is not so strictly adhered to. We had a lot of work to do, when we realised what we were up against. We sadly dropped the youngest class, and cancelled the idea of doing a big show for the village. It was enough just to get the 5 classes a day to play games in the hot sun(the classrooms were tiny), draw animals, make shadow puppets out of them, and then play with them.


We came home to our different families each day, beaten, welcomed by the most delicious chiya. Most evenings I would drink chiya and then drink water and just stare out to the mountains in silence, a common pastime in the village. Most people would wake at around 4:30, so there was not much going on at night time. It was a Brahmin village, which meant that no-one was supposed to eat meat or drink alcohol. Lucy, a girl from the UK who had been volunteering as an art teacher there for some time, told us about how people would sneak down to shanti bazaar to get drunk, or have clandestine night time chicken-slaughterings. The night I arrived back in Kathmandu, I found myself at that private party where I juggled with the circus kids (this, by the way, was so lovely), in front of a table heavily laden with different meats, and found myself voracious for it after a week of dal bhat. I am so impressed with highly-active vegetarians, it's hard to get what you need.

I still don't know the names of my host family, only the daughter, Ambika, who teaches at the school. Whenever I asked them their names, they would just say 'mother' or 'father' or 'sister'. Names in general were hard, they're just not used so often here. We had a lot of trouble initially, playing 'name jump' with the younger ones. The most popular game by far was 'fire on the mountain', which was unfortunate after a few days of the heat, and with a headache, I would have much preferred grandmother's footsteps.

What else? I could not stand up straight anywhere. I banged my head several times a day, dazed as I was, and had to constantly stretch out my back from all of the stooping. Most of the time when I walked around outside the village, I would come across people with baskets ridiculously laden with grass and leaves and other such things. Sometimes they resembled nothing so much as walking trees, and yet, seeing their expressions, I realised that I was the strange one, the great lumbering whitey, clambering up and down the steep-paths, too used to flatness, whilst they stepped deftly, like mountain goats, from purchase to purchase, unheeding of the giant weights on their backs.


Back in Kathmandu, we are in day 3 of the worst bandha I've experienced. The effect of coming back from the village to this has been profound. Today people are hot, bored, and subdued, but yesterday was bad. Ambulances and media vehicles were stopped on threat of violence from excited mobs. As I walked, I saw several people forced to get off their bicycles and let the air out of their tyres. Men with sticks yelling at the daughter of the family who run my favourite grocery store. They waved their sticks and yelled at the poor girl until she closed the shop down, after which they marched on with self-satisfied smiles. I wanted to scream at them, "What are you doing, and why? Do you even know?"

In three days, I will fly back to a more developed city. How developed? Problems are more developed, as is the general notion that everything's ok. I will miss Kathmandu, the ramshackle kingdom that is too untidy and disorganised to be anything but honest.

Buddha's birthday, natural disasters, devastating beauty, etc.

I have started many blog posts in recent times, only to stop halfway through, put off by the sheer inanity of them. There is a purgatory of blog-post-drafts piling up, but I cannot bring myself to fix or finish them.

So now, for better or worse, I'm just going to go back to writing whatever crap and then pressing that orange button labelled 'publish'. So they say, publish or perish. I just wanted to let you know, in case you were hoping that I would end this constant obsession with the mundane, and write instead about the many-coloured chimaera, the dancing, farting and honking beauty of Nepal, the mountains which mock the clouds, the smells which defy all comparison, the rich mythology, the threats which lurk like feet under the curtain, political-instability, the great earthquake, the collective rage of a country which has, as an emblem, two crossed crescent-curved knife. My late grandmother could have told you what crossed knives means. Anyway, I will not write about these things, they're still cooking. Forewarned is forearmed.

My newish phone, the HTC Wildfire, has some interesting features. It stores up all of the alarms you've ever set, in case you'd like to use them again. I once had an afternoon nap, and used the alarm to ensure my nap would fall within the recommended bounds of the power-nap(15-30 minutes), so that I would wake up feeling empowered, rather than claggy-mouthed and groggy, as is sometimes the case. I forgot to disable that alarm for so long that ultimately I grew to love it. Now, every Monday afternoon at 3:47 my phone patiently chimes away until I stop it. It is a welcome reminder of just how different each quarter-to-four-on-Monday is from the last.

Just over a week ago, my love-from-afar came to visit me. She left today, and now I find myself looking for her everywhere. About her arrival I was forewarned, but not forearmed. How to prepare for the surreal power of it? A figure bursting out of a picture frame, and into the real world. Words disentangling themselves from the soft glow of laptop screen, and finding sweet voice. Real fingers, real toes, real beauty! At first I struggled to keep my cool, almost to the point of being cold, until I found my bearings. I took her to all of the places I go: the office, the cafe, the circus-training, the places I like to eat, the refuge, and all of the pathways in between. Everywhere we went, she just marvelled at everything, the buildings, the people, the dogs, and I remembered. Strange that it has become mundane to me now, and stranger still that I like it, the mundaneness. Gosh but I miss her though.

Now that I remember the magic, I try to hold them both together, the banality and the wonder, two conflicting notions here in the land of paradox, where it is simultaneously the year 2012 and 2069, where people can contain the abovementioned pool of rage alongside a demeanor of genuine compassion and warmth. Where, on the same day as the country celebrates the birth of Buddha, a flash flood kills dozens of people and whisks away countless homes.

Oh, one last thing. In my last post I mentioned the chariot which was being built on the side of the road. Well, shortly after writing that, I caught them, the builders. They were all dressed in regular clothes, jeans, some with glasses, just as though they'd all been walking past and decided to help. On the rarest of impulses, I took some pictures. I thought I should show you one.

They just kept adding and adding to it, until in the end, it resembled nothing so much as a 7-storey Christmas tree on giant wooden wheels. Then people pulled it around town for a few days, for a festival known as Machhendranath. Then they took it apart again.

That's all,

Love Ivan

2069, year of movement

The first day of 2069 began with a phone call. Ring, Ring. I lay in bed, contemplating the phone call, who could be calling. Ring Ring. Wondering whether I should answer it, ring ring, thinking about how pleasant the ring tone on my phone is, how unobtrusive and tuneful. My first fancy phone after so many years of having the cheapest phone possible, with a kind of misguided pride. One of the things I like about this new phone is the brand name: HTC Wildfire. A fitting name for a spaceship, wildfire, but for a phone it's ridiculous, and also implies unpredictability and hazard.

Eventually the ringing stopped, but curiosity got me out of bed to check whose call I missed. The previous night I'd made plans to go to Bhaktapur and see the great chariots being pulled, a kind of tug-of-war challenge to see who can pull the chariot back to their village. Once again, this could be completely incorrect, this explanation was pieced together from many different people, each with their own version. Many people told me that every year someone dies in this chariot-pulling event. In the night-time, when I heard this from behind my drunken shroud, I was really interested in having a look, but this morning the world had become sharp-edged, each noise startlingly acute, each step made with exceeding care. It was not a day to schlep across town just to watch someone get unnecessarily crushed by a towering wooden chariot.

They have been building one of the chariots near my place. The ingredients lie there by the side of the road, wooden wheels the size of dinner tables, long planks of timber, piles of willow-branches which lie soaking in a pool of water. It's a bit like freeway roadworks. I never catch anyone actually doing anything, but every time I walk past, a little bit more has been done.

Last year, New Year's Eve took me by surprise. We had been warned about the one in April, but last November on the final day of Tihar, the festival of lights, my friends and I chanced upon an epic party at durbar square. We danced with the locals, watched bizarre performances on the outdoor stage. All of a sudden, someone started ringing a giant bell and everyone begain shouting  'Happy New Year!'. My initial thought was that they were even more drunk than I'd suspected. I realised much later, that this was the Newari calendar, Newars are the traditional ethnic group of Kathmandu valley, there are a huge number of Newari families, and the Newari culture is still going strong in places like Patan, where I live.

Two months later, a more familiar New Year's Eve, this time I was back in Australia, at a different kind of festival, Woodford. I was at the time completely head over heels and falling into a kind of love which is proving surprisingly strong, startlingly durable. I had all but turned on that cliche of love, that eulogized, mythologized, commodified love. I was starting to agree with my friend who'd had the rug pulled out from under him, after years of love and devotion had made him forget that rugs can move. There, on the park-bench across the road from the Evelyn, he and I shared a longneck, whilst he spoke in his sure-footed way. On that night so many years ago, he debunked love. As I recall, the ground trembled a little as he spoke.

"Ivan. Love is bunk."

And after slipping from rug to rug, I was inclined to agree with him. But as intangible and uncertain as it is, it cannot be denied or debunked. Not for long, at least. And now here we are, on Friday the 13th of April, 2012, and also the 1st of Baisakh, 2069. Every New Year's Eve has been different, this last one just last night situated around a kitchen table with the landlord's family and friends, drinking raksi and singing raucously, the New Year's Days have all been similar in their softness, their slowness. A gentle approach to a year, a door slowly opening. When a year is as action-packed as these last few have been, it pays to take at least a day to tread lightly.

the tiger's whiskers

Wild haired man, coated in a thin layer of dust, t-shirt the colour of dust, trousers dust-coloured. Hair styled by the dust, into a permanent electric shock. The striking contrast of the white shiny technology in his hands, something like an iPhone. We, the circus students and I, were over here, by the pipal tree, traditional meeting place. He was over there, by the little shanty-shop, a familiar tarp-and-bamboo-pole kind of place, selling a weird assortment of items. Stationary could be bought there, and biscuits too. Also, no doubt, Chahi Kahi, or whatever it's called - the tobacco which is neither smoked, nor chewed, but slipped underlip. My German and Scandinavian friends are crazy about the stuff. The wild-haired man was filming my juggling with his white shiny device. When I noticed, I turned my back to the camera, he circled and I turned, and so we danced, what a charming moment, his friends were all laughing, but I noticed that the circus kids were beginning to get uncomfortable, so I stopped. Wild haired man approached me, with a smile, and a knife in his hand. I looked questioningly at his smiling, childlike face, and back down to the knife in his hand. A kind of kitchen knife, I thought maybe he didn't realise that the cutting part was pointed directly at me. Yes, he realised. He wanted me to keep juggling. "Or what, you'll stab me?", I asked, trying to maintain the humour of the situation, so that I wouldn't start shaking. He just kept telling me to juggle, kept pointing the knife at me, with that maddening smile. I fixed on the smile, smiled back, for the first time thankful for the super-polite Nepali taught to me by my lovely teacher. "Enough, brother, I'm finished." I told him. And again, bhayo bhaai, siddhiyo, siddhiyo.  What happened? There was no climax, this situation just stretched out for an impossibly long time - although in reality it was probably only 5 minutes - me smiling at him, putting away my juggling balls, himself smiling at me, knife in hand, making stabbing motions, in case I didn't know what it was for.

I couldn't tell you how or why, but he went back to his friends, still looking back over at me occasionally and making little knife-stabbing gestures and smiling.

Less than two months left in Nepal. Time to bring in all of the heart's moments, the anecdotes and the realisations, and to try and form something out of them. A souvenir of Nepal, made out of interesting moments. Now that the end is in sight, the heart is lighter, the things which were frustrating are now funny. This could also be something to do with not being broke, or something to do with the return of sunshine. The salad days.

The other day, whilst I was walking through the labyrinthine alleys of old Patan, I saw an old lady lean out of the third floor window, and lower a key on a long piece of string, to the young lady waiting on the street below. As I got closer, I noticed that it was not one piece of string but many small pieces of string tied together. Indeed, this seemed like a perfect analogy for Nepal. It is incredibly difficult to find a long piece of string, but you can have all of the small pieces of string you like, so long as you have the time and patience to tie them together. If you get too attached to the idea of a nice, smooth, long piece of string, then Kathmandu will drive you absolutely mental.

Once you see past the unnecessary obstacles, the lack of materials, reliability, authentic information, you start to see that in some ways, the chaotic nature of this place grants a certain freedom unheard of in the places we know. Why, you could find some tarp and some old pieces of bamboo, build a little shop on the side of the road, and style yourself as a small-business retail manager!

Tomorrow, I will try and get some handstand chairs made up, To get something made out of wood here should be cheap and easy, as carpenter's shops are everywhere. All the same, I will remember about the string.