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.

Writing with Raksi

Raksi is pronounced 'Roxy'. The sounds of 'a' and 'o' are difficult here, we try and squash the words into our cumbersome alphabet, just like the Volkswagen Beetle, lime green, in which I learned to drive. It was so small that my knees would keep my ears warm, and it was so rusty that I didn't need a speedometer, I could judge the speed by looking at the road through the holes in the floor.

Raksi. It is Nepali moonshine, typically made by Newari people (the traditional inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley) from rice rather than wheat. Unfortunately, at my house we have a limitless supply, because the landlady makes it, the best Raksi in town, as many will attest. The Newari language came down from Tibet, and is therefore very different to Nepali, which came up from India. My landlady whom, for some reason, we all call Baoju (brother's wife), speaks a kind of language which mixes Nepali and Newari with a kind of Raksi-fuelled life force which makes her much easier to understand than the average well-spoken person, merely through its desire to be understood. Did I mention that she's amazing? I watched her making the Raksi one day, mesmerizing. A cauldron over a wood fire, kept burning with whatever pieces of wood were salvageable. Inside the cauldron, the frothiest slop you can imagine, over which sits a little bowl, over all of which is finally placed lid with a pointy-down part, which collects the condensation and makes the drips slide down to the point, where they can land, drip drip, into the little bowl. All the while, Baoju was tending to the fire, opening up the lid and adding bits of water and whatever else, letting the steam rise up and invade her, causing her to sweat, back into the cauldron, putting herself unmistakably inside the whole distillation process.


I just tried to backspace a full-stop that was without doubt a punctuation error. It took me a moment to realise, after I had resumed typing, that it was still there. So I backspaced over it again, like the truck driver of the apocalypse, but it did not go. Is this really happening? I thought, is punctuation rebelling? Is my writing now taking control, having been neglected for so long, is it deciding to take the laws of grammar and syntax into its Own Hands? Imagine! I was at the peak of my speculative incredulity, when I suddenly realised: that was not a full-stop, but a speck of grit on my screen, placed perfectly. I brushed it away, a little disappointed at the prospect of returning to the mundane world. At least I still have the squiggly red lines that underline everything that is not in American spelling. I've changed so many settings over to UK English, so many times, now I just resign myself, and I think of the squiggly-red-line not as an indication of error, but rather a tribute, perhaps a portal. Although, of course, I must admit, it's a funny shape for a portal.

Down in the Hole

Malaise is the colour of whole-egg mayonnaise,

Last night I made toad in the hole for dinner,

It took me two tries, because I was without a spatula, 

Or anything like it,

And I was working by head-torch, like a miner,

This morning I also made toad in the hole for breakfast,

It is true sometimes that you are what you eat.

They say that the egg is a whole food, they say it contains a vast array of nutrients, everything a baby chicken needs to survive and develop. At the time that they told me this, I found it to be a very strong argument in favour of the egg's nutritional clout. Now, many years later, I wonder if a baby chicken is perhaps not the best candidate to represent my nutritional needs. Sometimes I wonder how much the quality of the lighting affects your susceptibility to arguments. Like those 'before and after' shots where they show overweight people in terrible lighting, and then show them, in nice lighting, sucking in their tummies. It looks convincing the first 30 times you see it. The nice thing about the 'before and after' shot of course, what gives it power, is the narrative. Each photo contains a little 'Once upon a time..... and they lived happily ever after' story, distilled like hard liquor, so that it fits into a single picture frame. 

Now, thanks to the advents/misfortunes of free time, social networking, and a complete saturation in advertising, tactics such as 'before and after' photos are somewhat overwrought, somewhat pathetic.To me, at least, and I have body-image issues too, although they are only very faint voices. And yet these images are still used so much, I see such a mind-boggling amount of these 'before and after' shots, not just tummy-sucking, but more and more of abs, biceps, triceps, made oily and shiny. Is this really successful? I suppose I still know a lot of people who think that the spoon-bending trick is real, what a waste of a great illusion.

Of course, I also have a marching band inside my head. This sometimes makes it very hard to pay attention to anyone at all, but it occurs to me now that if there are voices in your head telling you that you're crap, it helps to have a marching band to drown them out.

Kurt Vonnegut just told me that his number one rule for writing short stories is that you should 'Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time is wasted'. At first, I thought he was talking about the characters, that for instance, you should not write in detail about the 4 hours they spent on facebook. Then I realised that he probably means the reader, that you should not waste the reader's time. Well, if you're reading this because you followed a link on facebook, then you were quite possibly already wasting your time in the first place. So let's continue, I wanted to clarify something.

Different people have different ideas of what 'toad in the hole' is. When I refer to it, I mean, getting a slice of bread, cutting a hole out of its centre, frying it, and cracking an egg into the bread-cavity. The result is pan-fried bread with egg filling. It is difficult to flip the new hybrid slice without a spatula, but the flipping is absolutely imperative. The small leftover pieces of bread can also be fried alongside, and either be used as croutons to dip into the yolk, or if you're a cooked-yolk kind of person, you can just eat them whilst you're waiting for everything to cook.

dogs and bells and drills and yells

For the duration of my stay in Kathmandu, the night-times have been marked by the barking of dogs. They bark and bark, and in each of the 7 or 8 places I've lived here, the barking has had a different tone, a different nature. Here, in this place, it is the worst kind of barking, feverish, maddened, distressing. And loud, sometimes the dogs fight literally outside my door. I have no love for these dogs, but I am a short-term guest in this place, their house, so I try and at least remain civil. They, on the other hand, adore me. In spite of my cat-like aloofness, they always try to lick me, jump up on me, follow me around.

I must pull the lock on my bedroom door or else one of the dogs comes into my room and takes things off my floor. She is a spoiled jerk, I caught her in here the other day, and she refused to leave. When I tried to gently push her out of the door, she lay down like an activist at a forest blockade. And when I tried to drag her out by the feet, she started biting me. What a jerk, get out of my goddamned room. I pray that the next house will have a better kind of dog-noise at night time.

Now, one month on, I am in a house which is indeed better for dog-noise. As I type, there is a dog in the distance, barking out a long soliloquy, rich in timbre and rhythm, sweeping up and down its familiar canine tonality. This may have bothered me some time ago, but not these days.

My heart stopped two days ago when I heard that they have begun killing the street dogs in my old neighbourhood, by feeding them poison. Kanchi, Dorje and Punx were always escaping and causing mischief on the streets, the idea of their accidental murder was unbearable, those same three dogs I had so viciously slated in this very blog post. Such a relief when I saw their healthy, noisy faces. Jerks they may be, but lovable all the same.

Here, in my new house, there are other kinds of noise. In the daytime, the construction site next door provides hammering, angle-grinding, etc. Between 5 and 6 in the morning, it's the temple bells, which get rung for a length of time which seems to be increasing each day. It sounds like Shiva and Pravati are screening their calls.

writing with eyes closed.

So I was hoping I would be tired enough to write without really caring, without self-censoring, as they say in theatre. But now I'm not sure if that's really such a good. Idea. Punctuation is beginning to . Disobey my flow.I let my eyes close, , my knees sag together, my spine curve up from bed to pillow-against-wall, how is this position so comfortable? How good is it to type with closed eyes? I have a plan to get out of here, it is too much for me, this place, its demands. I must wake up at six tomorrow, as I did today, pray for water to come out of the tap when I turn the handle. Ride into the English teaching job, then prepare for the private lesson, then go and teach juggling at the British school, then do the private lesson with the gardener, where perhaps we shall revisit rope-climbing techniques, then to circus training in the evening, then to catch my friend before she splits back to the Tarai, then sleep, then up again before the sun.

The only thing that makes it sustainable is the constant newness. In the last month or so, the circus classes have increased from 3 evening sessions per week, to 5 days full time, now 6 days, all at the behest of the refuge manager, and we're racking our brains to find ways to use this time so that we don't destroy the poor students. Digging up old pilates routines and researching this or that thing. Frustrating, then exciting, then frustrating again, it ebbs and flows. Then there's the English teaching, which always threatens to become too much, but still I get just little enough that I can manage to be heavily involved with circus training, just enough to pay my expenses, I will not save money but as long as nothing too dire happens then I will be able to afford to come back to Australia, and rest. Just two months to go.

Here in Kathmandu anything is possible, so long as it's not the thing you're aiming for.  A few months back I had to learn Illustrator in a night, because that's how long I had to draw up a plan for a potential circus school. This week I will teach school kids how to juggle, the gardener how to do a Russian climb, the nanny how to sing English lullabys. Today I did a particularly bad juggling show, completely unrehearsed, for some German flipping tour-group, I did it because one of the Sapana performers told me I had to, and how could I say no to them, they who jump through so many hoops, with so little warning, so that EBT can show the world what a great job they are doing at helping these poor kids. And we the trainers are always the unfortunate messengers. Never mind that you might have had plans for your weekend, for any of your weekends, ever.

Oh, oops, too tired to delete that. I never allow myself to write about how frustrating I find EBT, because I really don't want to put off any potential circus/performing arts teachers from coming and helping out. Especially right now with our super-extended training hours, with a good team of trainers we could make so much progress. Really, it's an amazing project. The opportunity to do a social circus project with kids who are at such a high skill level, who are so eager to learn, and who are above all, just such a great crew, is too good to pass up. Suffering the impulses of those who are in control, but actually have no fucking clue, is just one of those things that one must do from time to time

Good night, dear reader. My eyes snuck open back there somewhere, but now they will close again, until my unruly alarm once more wrenches them open, 8 hours from now.

Holi

A rooftop barbecue for Holi, a haven from streets where at any moment coloured powder, balloons or buckets full of water, could fly in your direction. Over there, all of the young Nepali cool kids were sitting and talking. I sat in my little group of Western foreigners, watching them longingly, just as I watched the cool kids 12 years ago in high school, when I was restricted to that small group of nerds concerned principally with science, role-playing and hacky sack. Eventually I summoned the courage to go and sit with them, try and cross that difficult bridge. They weren't unfriendly, but they also weren't about to drop everything and involve me in their conversation. My grasp of Nepali is restricted to the kinds of conversations you don't have when you're kicking back with friends at a party, so I mostly couldn't understand. Someone came with a tray full of what looked like iced coffees, just enough for all of them. I asked one of them what it was.
"It's called bhang, it's what we drink on Holi. Would you like to try some?"

"Sure, thanks!"

"Careful though, it gets you a bit high"

I assumed that this was just a simple mistake, and she meant that it was a bit alcoholic. I've heard people say 'high' to mean 'drunk' before. I didn't think much of it. It was tasty, a little spicy, later, in the kitchen, someone offered me one, and I saw them mixing a thick dark syrup into some yoghurt, adding sugar. I can be pretty slow at times -precisely the reason I don't like weed - and still didn't think much of it, until it was far too late. This is not like being drunk at all, I realised. And what had they called it, 'bhang'? The travellers in Pokhara had talked about drinking 'Bang Lassi' in Varanassi, and getting stoned out of their brains. Of course the pronunciation was different. But this was intense, much too much. I went to find the guy who made it, a lovely Nepali guy who likes to reminisce about his college days in New York, being a typical American college boy.

His eyes widened, "I made it way too strong, I didn't really know what I was doing!"

Holi is a Hindu festival, celebrated in India and Nepal, which is renowned for its epic colour-and-water fights. It's tempting to do a quick Wikipedia search and find out a bit of background information on this festival, but for the sake of ambiguity, I won't. What is Holi actually for? It came up in my conversational English class, and all of those important, respectable hindus had a little discussion and after some disagreement came up with some kind of dubious explanation. Dubious enough that I didn't bother to remember it, something about someone's sacrifice of someone's son. And what is a religious festival without a bit of ambiguity? After all, the pre-Christian god Mithras (along with a bunch of others) was also born of a virgin mother on the 25th of December, and also died and was resurrected, before it was cool. What is certain is that we give each other presents on Christmas, and we throw colour at each other on Holi. Good.

It was 3p.m. and I absolutely had to leave, to seek sanctuary in my own room. I made the bare minimum of obligatory-farewell-conversations, made a cursory attempt to wash the colour from my face, hair, arms, and left. In my state of overwhelming wibbly-ness, it really didn't help that the world had been turned into a Pollock-apocalypse. The aftermath, colour strewn, speckled, spewed over ground, walls and people. People moved around and behaved like real people, but they looked completely out of control. On the way, I encountered all kinds of trials. First there were the European girls in fairy costumes, who thought that I was unfairly clean, and unwilling to listen to my protests and pleadings, forced me to dance around them, under them, twisting and turning in my stoned and ungraceful way to avoid their attacks. I somehow managing to avoid each of their advances, and ran off down the street, fleeing from the fairy girls, it must have been a sight to behold. For the rest of the way I shadowed the older Brahmin-looking types, seeking refuge under their aura of respectability, so long had it taken me to wash the colours off. And then, so close to home, a strange man with wooden movements approached me. He explained to me with no small effort that I would have to buy a ticket to visit historical Patan.

"But I live here,"
"This is....... um....... counter" He ventured, pointing to the ticket booth,
"मा यहाँ बस्छु. पतनमा," I attempted.
He launched into the spiel from the beginning, clearly he had practiced it. Clearly this was going nowhere, but I also had no money on me, and getting home was absolutely top priority. I felt like I had to keep a lid on it, by doing as little interaction as possible, maybe no-one would realised how horribly mashed-up I was. This was a difficult situation, it would be impossible to avoid dangerous amounts of social interaction. Of course it wouldn't have mattered if he'd realised how stoned I was, it probably would have helped, but at the time it was absolutely out of the question that anyone find me out. This was, after all, an accidental bhang lassi situation, I couldn't have them all thinking that I was one of those debauched Western tourists who give us all a bad name, who make it even harder for me to fit in to the strict culture here, who make Nepali men think that it's ok to shamelessly grope Western women on dance floors, and in the street (so my line of thinking proceeded). I was at a loss how to proceed with the ticket-man, when finally, a third person stepped in, and, understanding what I'd been trying to say, put a sticker on my t-shirt. With this, the wooden-man let me pass, and finally I made it, to my room, to shut my door, draw my curtains, and stay in bed for the rest of the day. Sanctuary.

Did you know that Odysseus had gotten almost all the way back to Ithaca, when one of his crew accidentally opened his bag full of god-wind, and blew the ship all the way back to Aeolus' island? The bag itself had been a gift from Aeolus in the first place, so it was an awkward situation, to say the least. I like to remember Odysseus when I'm having a hard time getting home.

I apologise to you, my valued reader, because I don't have time to edit this just now. You'll just have to read it the way it is.

Happy Holi.

Part of an old letter I never sent (because just now I have nothing new to write)

If only I had something to tell you.
The pauses between our words tonight were long and numerous. During these pauses we looked not at each other, but at the fire. All the things we wanted and needed to say to each other passed silently from our eyes and into the fire. The ashes describe everything we truly feel and desire in a language that no-one will ever understand.

It has been such a long time since I last saw you. I kept wondering if it was really you, and not some impostor in a mask. The train makes skeptical noises as I write this. Sunday train, now arriving at Heatherdale. The perfect night sky is vandalised by billboards, talking about cars. Or streetlights, pretending to be stars.

Shiva Ratri

This Monday is lord Shiva's birthday, you know, Shiva the destroyer. We will go to Pashupati temple, to witness the strange festivities.

The Sadhus will be there, they will have walked a very long way to give Shiva some milk.

They walk all the time.

There is something so simple and beautiful and comical about the milk. There are a lot of other things they do, but the milk is the thing which sticks in my mind. I ask people about Shiva Ratri often, it's intriguing because everyone has something different to say about it. Most of the younger people talk about how it's the day when everyone smokes ganja.

I have trouble writing the word 'ganja' instead of 'weed' or 'grass', it just seems so, I don't know. Such a range of names are available for this innocuous herb, each name defines the speaker of the name more than the herb itself. Marijuana, every syllable pronounced with care, comes with the image of a man in a suit, holding the offending item at arms length. Ganja comes with dreadlocks, the sound of Bob Marley, devotion not only to the drug but to the culture. But that's the word they use here in Nepal. It's in the lonely planet phrasebook and everything. गाँजा.

The older generation just say that it's Shiva's birthday, and talk about the milk and the other things, other people say that it's a day when a lot of tourists go to Pashupati to look at sadhus and get stoned.

Two friends have just left, returned to Germany to get on with things. It feels like a significant loss to our little friendship circle, those two who were up for anything. A late night walk home and here they are with another friend, sitting high above the ground, in the earth-chomping part of an earth mover, somehow they had convinced the driver to take them for a spin. There is one of them, at the Newari new year's (which falls in November) celebrations, commando-crawling at a snail's pace across the stage behind a traditional Nepali singer, in front of hundreds of Nepali revellers.

It is sad that they are gone, sad and inevitable. We all have other plans. Some of us must continue our studies, some have plans to do travelling puppet shows across America in caravans led by donkeys. I must go back to Australia and see my new nephew/niece, witness my family's encroach into this new territory, the new generation.

Two more weeks, less, in this media art collective and then it's off again to a new house. Hopeully this one I can stay in for longer than a month. It is in the Newari part of town, old stonework and woodwork, intricately carved into many shapes, some religious, some whimsical. Narrow roads built long before the idea of cars, the houses' grey stone walls looming up and marginalising the sky, and then opening without warning, to reveal temples, shrines, other oddments. A real Indiana Jones style place. The owners of my flat are really friendly, they don't talk much English, they make their own Raksi (Nepali moonshine), and their son's band has a rehearsal room downstairs. It will be great to have a change, to be forced to speak more Nepali, and spend less time in those parts of Kathmandu which are becoming increasingly infested with Western Christians. To my Christian friends, I'm sorry. I've just deleted a large tirade against Christians in Nepal because if I have a problem with others zealously imposing their poorly-corroborated beliefs upon people who are in no need of them, then I would do well to keep my own views under my hat. The turbulent river of pro/anti Christian debate is hard to avoid these days, and anyway, it seems futile to argue with logic about something which resides in faith.

Awkward silence. How to bring this back to a suitable conclusion, how to tie it together? Shiva Ratri, sadhus, old men on the bus who touch their hand to forehead, chest, forehead, chest, forehead, and so on, as we drive past a certain shrine. Buddhist monks with iPhones. The unconfident, bespectacled, and comb-overed man in my conversational English class, who talked about being a guerilla fighter for the Maoists and helping to overthrow the royal family, his stories completely at odds with his appearance, only his small, focussed, granite eyes, giving weight to his words. This place is changing, we can all see it, we are all excited, and at least a little bit scared.

Fire and Oxygen.

Time to put up the last journal entry from those Brunswick warehouse times. It's really difficult to put up this stuff without editing. But that is sort of the point, and besides, I don't like forewords.

FUCK! Driving me fucking mental and you’re not even doing anything! Anger mixed in with embarrassment.

Ah, a last touch of high-drama, to do with my favourite journal star. Looking back to that night, last night, it feels like I was possessed, that was not me. And yet, those feelings were so clear, I can still taste them. Without punctuation, this is what happened inside my head.

She’s fallen asleep I can barely keep my eyes open maybe if I announce that I’m going to bed she will follow no that didn’t work never mind I’ll get an early night and do some good training tomorrow go to sleep go to sleep how long have I been lying here surely the movie has finished by now she must be sleeping in Y’s bed I bet he’s stoked about that I saw the way he turned when I walked into the kitchen the way he had been holding her go away nasty thoughts fuck right off Y and X are good friends my friends they would never but I saw what I saw oh troubled mind just let me sleep I just want to sleep why do I need her next to me just to sleep she doesn’t need me at all for nothing I don’t want her to need me I don’t want to stop being crazy about her either Fuck surely the film’s over now maybe if I get some water then I can go past and look into the room put my mind at ease oh I’m so angry I just want to sleep now will I achieve anything if I live my life according to the patterns of a girl like that I can’t believe I would think that Y would what is wrong with my head there they are both asleep don’t worry about me guys have a nice sleep over I’ll just wander around awake all night waiting for insanity to set in what if this chair accidentally fell over oops too hard felt good though how do I get her out of my head I gotta get myself outta her bed oh now they’re awake I’m going to sleep in my own bed I’m so sick of this shit now everyone’s all worried and I know the more I try to explain the worse it will get

 

I would like to throw this book in the ocean, or set fire to it, or both. I could seal it in a large watertight container, so that it could burn and sink at the same time. How long could it burn for before it ran out of oxygen? She is my oxygen, what a shame I’m on fire

I miss her, the possum that scratches and scratches up in my roof. That makes those unbelievably strange noises. Fur so soft, inviting, but get too close and you’ll get scratched to bits by those tree-faring claws. Dark eyes, like someone has taken to reality with a hole-puncher. I tried to talk to her sometimes, thoughts and feelings, but she just looked in silence, a look that would make Shakespeare stutter. She wasn’t concerned with the affairs of humans. Not this human at least.

Is this how the book ends, with a fizzling dramatic climax, and no tangible conclusion? Perfect really, in a couple of weeks I’ll be walking down Newcastle streets with X, see page 1. The only difference will be the position of the Earth in relation to the sun. And of course, 6 months worth of bizarre memories from a particularly turbulent year. 2009. Year of babies, break-ups, art, music, love, pain, savings, inspiration, business, festivals, devising, dividing, and writing. Mostly writing about, or to, one special strange young powerful girl. So here’s to you, all of the other people who make up my world and barely get a mention. I could never have hoped to meet and/or make friends with so many amazing people. I’m learning.

The end

Writer's block.

Here in Kathmandu I bounce from room to room, one month here, one weekend there, another month somewhere else. This month, I am staying at Sattya, a media arts collective. They have poetry slams, they show documentaries on their rooftop cinema, and they have workshops in multimedia sorts of things, like photography and stop-motion animation. It's close to living the dream, staying here, except that I am an impostor. I don't do multimedia art. I used to play with 3D animations when I was a teenager, but it was my brother who had the flair, and the patience. In those days, we had talked about making an animated TV series, my brother and I. First it was going to be inspired by those things which we saw in our mind's eye: robots and castles and knights upon flying ostriches, you know. It was a wonderful abstract story, from what I remember. And then we talked about making Musashi, based on that book by Yoshikawa, the classic tale of self-mastery. I liked to make my brother's 3D creatures move, dance around, but whenever I found an obstacle that seemed unnecessarily difficult to overcome, of which there were so many in that program, I would give up. And then there was my brother, staring intensely into the computer. All of those little polygons, thousands of them joined together just so, I would see him day after day going through, finding the polygons that had gotten twisted up, untwisting them, tesselating them where necessary, zooming in in in, and then after a week of this I would see that he had made one... really... nice... hand. I am a performance artist with my foundation in circus training and puppetry, whose best work is always improvised, never to be seen again. I am someone who avoids taking photos because everyone else's photos are so much better. What am I doing in a multimedia arts collective?

Aah! It's all falling apart! What is that intangible thing that holds it all together? That glue beyond grammar and syntax? How does anyone even write anything? It has no purpose, it's just noise, noise in your head! Noise in my head which I translate into writing and then you read it and it becomes noise in your head! What is this thing, this so-called writing? It's not like I don't have anything to write about! Being in love with someone who is far away, being in a foreign country which is itself bound up in mystery, magic, and violence, living in a community arts collective, teaching circus to freakin' human-trafficking rescuees, for crying out loud! But these words, what do they do? Will they make me stronger, you wiser? No. Are they new, original? No - Yes, insofar as every moment and action is in someway unique - but no. I write and write, I have written so many things in here, what has come of it? I can feel my muscles tensing and untensing while I type. I am uncomfortable here, for some reason. Settling in, perhaps, or it could be to do with the fact that I'm not really able to settle, always moving on, chased off by the dogs of my own invention. I feel so out of place all the time! Triceps twitching, tired from pushups, from lifting people, spotting their backflips, in movement at least I feel comfortable, at home.

I just finished a great book, actually the transcript of a great lecture, called "The concept of home". In it the writer/speaker stated that having been a journalist for so many years has allowed her now to write without being precious. To paraphrase, she said something like "I believe in writer's block no more than I believe in hairdresser's block". One of my goals when I came back here was to write for at least one hour every day. An interesting challenge during load-shedding times, where the power cuts are currently up to 14-hours per day and rumoured to rise before the Winter's out. Writing with a pen, in the cold, by candle-light seems unnecessarily difficult when I can wait until a later time, sit in comfort, let words pour from ten fingers dancing, spider-like. Now I'm beginning to think I need to get a writing job to cure this sporadic writer's block. File or Fail. At any rate, it would be a funny story, writing for some magazine in Nepal, in English, for the bizarre ex-pat community (they look so formal, normal, they drink so much!). I have just heard that they are looking for writers at ECS, I might go and apply. The only problem is that I've already got too many jobs, each of which comes with its own impudent demands on my free-time: lesson-plan, do the stretches, write a god-damned report about the things I already said every week for five months! 

But, at least I have this good old blog, which perhaps 20-30 people read, some regularly, a cozy cabaret audience, enough people for me to try and craft each post into something vaguely noteworthy - vaguely coherent at least - but not too many that I have to worry too much about it. At one time I'd thought it would be lovely if I got heaps of followers, random comments from parking inspectors in Estonia, etc. but now I'm glad that no-one makes too much of a fuss. Thank you, dear readers, for reading these uncertain acts of word-arranging.

Gorkhaland

I don't have those famous naked-dreams, maybe because nakedness doesn't bother me overly much. Instead I get stabbed. It has happened twice in my memory, both times by Nepali men. The first time, when I was here last, I was dreaming that a one-eyed man caught me stowed away in the back of his truck. Earlier that day, I had seen a one-eyed man on the street corner, no patch or fake eye, just a strange fleshy pocket, mesmerising in its grotesqueness and simplicity. In the dream, whilst I was trying to explain, in a light-hearted way, why I was hiding amidst his tarped cargo, he rudely stabbed me mid-sentence, expressionlessly, like he wasn't even listening. This time, in one of last night's dreams, I was merely waiting for a meal at a restaurant, and a mullet-haired man came upstairs and stabbed me without warning or explanation. I woke up, not shaken, nor frightened, but irritated, because I'd seen it coming but hadn't been able to get out of the way, for all the people milling around. "People!" I thought, "Always milling about, completely oblivious to the fact that I'm in a rush to get somewhere!"

Maybe it's the Gurkha-mythology that is so abundant here, the famous Gurkha soldiers and their curved khukuri knives, there is not a day that does not contain some mention of them. The circus company I train has been asked to perform at the Gurkha ball, and so I was trying to find out the dates, and instead I found an article about Bishnu Shrestha.

It happened about 5 months ago. Bishnu was a Gurkha who was returning to India, on voluntary retirement, when his train was hijacked by 40 thieves (I kid you not). The whole thing played out in true action movie style, he sat quietly by while the robbers - armed with swords, knives and guns - took his wallet and belongings, along with the other passengers. But then they began to strip an 18-year-old girl nearby, in front of her parents, their intentions unmistakable. She called for help, and Bishnu the Gurkha stood up, and pulled out his khukuri. Apparently, "taking control of the leader", presumably using him as a shield, he killed 3 robbers and injured another 8 before the remainder fled. According to one article, he himself was surprised that so many of them fled, commenting that maybe they thought he had more Gurkha friends on the train. Maybe it was the force of mythology, and the curved knife so renowned for decapitation.

I asked an ex-Gurkha officer once, why it is that the Gurkhas have this reputation, that precedes them, mythologises them? He told me that it was something about Nepali people, that they are by and large the most lovely, patient, and friendly people you could hope to come across. But there is this thing, what I now call the bubbling pool of rage. I have seen it quite often, the snap, from the calm exterior, someone will just, without warning, completely lose their shit. I've never seen it directed at me, or at any sober foreigner for that matter, and I've never witnessed a stabbing. But it is scary. Is it insensitive to write this? I don't mean to portray Nepali people in a negative light, especially when I have had such a positive experience here, and of course generalisations are by nature massively flawed, but for the sake of the story, and the myth, let us imagine that beneath everyone's calm, collected surface, lies a seething pool of violent rage. Is it thinner for some, less structurally sound?

And another old one: Crash landing

Eyes wired open. Too many energy drinks, that one didn’t seem to work, let’s try another shall we? How many now? There was a man who was made up of rubber bands, high tensile wire and other such things. Essentially, a ticking time-bomb of potential energy. He spoke like a machine gun, but that’s enough about him for now, I don’t want to paint a bad picture of such a good egg.

We were asked, and we said yes. It seemed ridiculous, as naked bodies flailed through uneven, scrubby bush-filled ground, in the middle of the night. Be careful though not to smile on camera, as our Corinthian helmets, bandaged heads, ex-military parachutes and towering wigs were holding us hostage. We agreed to this, I laughed to myself, as flies crammed into gaps in my bandages, Myer Christmas sale, to get to the syrupy fake-blood that cakes my face. Later I discovered that they like real blood even more, as I scratched at the welts and rashes that covered my legs. Never really thought about the whole hayfever thing.

We arrived at midnight, and left as the sun was high over the trees. They in the other car, they awoke just in time to narrowly avoid a crash, life and death can be such frivolous things. Nothing so dire in our car, just the endless traffic jam, the enraged driver, the heat and the sticky itchy feeling.

We are making a story about freedom, escape from ennui, empowerment through choice, namely the choice to throw oneself off a building.

Today we lie on couches, catching precious moments of sleep before the next ridiculous misadventure. We sleep, we recover. This old house is now an infirmary for heart, mind, ankle. I will go in there, try my hand at sleeping, along with the rest of them. I will surely need strength for the next leg.

All just a memory now, that itchy sticky feeling, now just the dull pain of over-scratched ankles. Why do they love to bite into my ankles? Is the blood nicer there? So many more misadventures crammed into two days, one-and-a-half, three, numbers melt in the hot sun.

We were all naked together, midnight and we couldn’t see anything, so it didn’t matter, it was just normal. Natural. Then we came home, beaten. It was still Thursday. How? Off to Laverton, a drive under fire as a barrage of shock revelations rained down.

 - Our convoy was stretched as fast-in-front slow-behind style

 - They took the wrong turn

 - Giant mats came loose and fell out of our ute, somewhere back there

 - We can’t go back for them, Colby doesn’t have a license

 - Now we’re on the wrong road

 - What if someone had an accident?

 - We’ve got to go back there, but in a different car

 - We’re lost

 - What if someone got hurt?

 - Driving without a license, I’d better take over

We never found the mats, no sign of an accident, either. Weary limbs landed at Laverton, an abandoned traffic control tower. Two crash mats left, no time to worry, we’re losing sunlight. At last, we arrived at the crucial moment. Jump. Naked. Our rubber-band man was in top gear. Giant Scotch thistles, we were asked to jump over them (naked), but by this point we knew how to handle our directors. Since that moment when the giant silent Adonis sat hidden in the canola field, lobbing big rocks like mortar shells at startled cameramen. Now it was fun, and what’s more, we were almost there. The last shoot of the long long Thursday.

Old journal entry: Income, Outcome

Income, Outcome

Dental adventure. Here I sit in a waiting room, a sound reminiscent of power tools carries through the walls. My teeth have always been good to me, but I have not always been so good to them. I can’t remember how long ago it was when I last had my teeth checked. 17 years? I remember being told that my teeth were very good. I was surprised at the time, since I hadn’t been taking very good care of them. At that time I decided that my teeth must be indestructible, and I would not ever need to return to one of those places. Power tools. Will they renovate my face?

Income. Outcome. Words rain down like monsoon. Exterminator? I don’t even know ‘er!

And there I was, flailing in the grips of wordlessness, making noise on paper. It felt like the end, like I would never write again. And then, later that night, as I lay in bed, I realized that in fact I contain all stories. All I had to do was think about the story, rather than the words, and everything else gets taken care of.

A window frame is a fine thing. The glass inside it is made of sand.

Everything

Well it’s only a paper moon, hanging over a cardboard sea, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you just fucking believed in me

I was on my way home, as usual. But… when I passed that store called “ Parties, Balloons, Anything”, I noticed something I had never seen before. Under the street sandwich-board sign, the one with all of the helium balloons hanging upwards from it, there was a hole in the ground. I approached cautiously. When I was right up close to it, I noticed a faint light coming from it. Going down on all fours, I looked into the hole. It seemed to stretch on forever and what’s more, there was a faint music coming from in. Carnival music “Oom-pa-pa Oom-pa-pa Oom-pa-pa” The hole, which was really more of a tunnel, was bedecked with fairy lights, which of course explained the faint light.

As I looked closer, my head crept further into the tunnel. The smell of party poppers. Suddenly, I felt my head being pulled, as if it were a champagne cork.

POP!

My head whooshed through the hole, my body flapping along behind it like a streamer. As I slowed I tumbled tumble tumbled to a stop, to find myself sitting in a barber’s chair. Not your usual average kind of barber’s chair, this one stretched way up high. This of course meant that the barber had to stand on stilts. As he cut his own hair, mine grew longer.

Why I suck at auditions.

“The idea for this commercial is that you are a busker, doing amazing tricks on the street, but everyone is watching someone nearby, who is eating a hamburger,” Said the agent.

“So I’ve basically got to be less interesting than a hamburger”

The casting lady responded to this with awkward silence.

“You’ll be engaging children at the tennis, wearing a ballboy costume. The most important thing is that you are good with children.”

“Oh, I love kids. Couldn’t eat a whole one.”

A stifled giggle from the other auditionee. Silence from the casting lady.

Ivan, this is you from the future!

Yes, I have a red pencil now. Otherwise, despite several minor epiphanies, I’m pretty much the same. Do you want some advice? Hmm. Be brave, say what you feel. Don’t hang around somewhere when it’s time to go. Oh and, er, I love you.

Another day, much like the others before it. Drink the coffee, catch the train, feel good, feel bad, dream of things, wait for that thing, that gold-plated opportunity.

Rude awakenings

It is perfectly dark now. This is load shedding. Perfectly dark of except for the laptop screen, which has been recently replaced, giving my cracked old laptop a certain phoenix quality, giving hope that old wounds can certainly be healed, and that eventually I will get off my arse and do those simple things which I had been meaning to do for the longest time. Load shedding. Reliable information is hard to come by, but what I’m told is that Nepal is powered exclusively by hydro-electricity, hence the ample power during monsoon season, and the escalating regime of power cuts which last year went up to 18 hours per day without power during the end of Winter. What I also heard is that Nepal sells power to India, but then miscalculates and has to buy part of it back at an inflated price. Hard to believe, but not impossible. After all, this is Nepal. 

Here we are in Winter time, those who can afford it have generators, which burn petrol, or inverters, which charge great batteries so that when the power goes out, they can still watch tv and use their laptops. What this means is that they use at least twice as much power while it’s on, or they use petrol and create power in a much crappier way, making the whole idea of load shedding sort of redundant. For the people who can afford it, that is, and for those who cannot afford it then load shedding is very effective indeed. I find myself without an inverter, partly because I don’t know if I’ll be staying in this house for much longer. 

Nepal has made me really appreciate the ingenuity of the humble head-torch. I bought a cheap one from a shop the other day, but unfortunately you need to hold the button down to keep it on, making it even more annoying than a regular torch. Determined not to be defeated, I rifled through the darkness and found some sticky tape. Managing at last to wedge something inside the button and cause it to stay on, I triumphantly settled into bed, to read a book which I didn’t particularly like. But then holding the book meant leaving arms exposed to the spitefully cold air, and after continuous attempts at finding a comfortable, warm position, with head torch at correct angle, with book, I finally opted for the release of sleep instead, sleep and dreams. I don’t know what happened to that head-torch, it could be that I flung it from my rooftop in a fit of rage at 4a.m.

Shame, I’d quite like to get back to that book.

I am trying to deal with the cold as best as I can, but it is quite a pain. A stiff upper lip only gets you so far, and when your arms begin to go numb, you begin to feel a little vulnerable, like maybe the problem is a bit bigger than you and your lips. Two weeks ago, I was at the other end of the spectrum, dangerously hot. There, at Woodford folk festival, in a donated tent, my own little solar oven. My initial attempts to move the tent into the shade were kind of shouted down by an ageing hippy. I didn’t even know how to argue with him about it, because I didn’t even know where he came from. I was offered a tent at my friend’s campsite, but no-one said that there would be an ageing hippy with an English accent, turning up a few days into the festival and being absolutely intractable on the matter of tent location. I woke up at 6a.m. to feel myself stewing in my own juices, just like in those old Warner bros. cartoons, where bugs bunny thinks that he’s having a nice hot bath, and then suddenly says, “Mmm, smells delicious, smells like, like… Rabbit stew!!?”

I threw the door of the tent open, blessed relief, I would live another day. I had been back to sleep for perhaps 15 minutes when I felt myself being shaken.

“Hey, mate!” Shake, shake, “Hey, come have a beer!”

 Just then, in that waking-dream state, it was hard to appreciate just how unusual this was. A complete stranger walking past at 6:15a.m. reaching into my tent and physically shaking me awake, so that I would come and have a drink with him. All I knew was that I had absolutely no inclination to follow him.

“Ok mate, I’m right behind you.”

That worked, he stumbled off, and moments later I heard him, from further into the campsite, trying to get someone else to come and drink, someone to keep him from stopping. Luckily, I didn’t have to stay in that tent ever again. That’s another story.

Two weeks later, there I was in Delhi airport, on a 15 hour overnight stopover, stuck in one of my least favourite transit lounges of all time.

I went looking for one of those long comfortable chairs to sleep on. They are highly sought after, prime real estate, but I eventually found a vacant one. It would have been ideal, except for the fact that every twenty minutes, an announcement would come over the speaker system, warning me not to leave my bags unattended. My sleep was broken and harrowed, and I experienced what felt like one non-stop announcement loop which played upon my existing bag-paranoia. This was Delhi, after all, a city that rivals London for the quantity of untrustworthy characters who lurk about. Eventually, I think I must have gotten used to it, for I had been on a fairly good run of sleep when a noisy man came and sat on the bed next to me. When he sensed that I was awake, he smiled congenially,

“Sleepy time, eh?” He laughed.

“Yes. Sleep time,” I said, flatly.

“Everyone is sleepy,” He laughed again.

Who is this guy? I thought. I was too tired for pleasantries, as I ignored him he started talking noisily to his friend sitting nearby. Eventually I got up, picked up my bag and threw them both acid glances. They seemed unfazed.

“You’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

The man’s friend quickly jumped into my seat, and they both promptly went to sleep. I couldn’t help but appreciate that jerk.