In Spain, my chest, then free from the spoil of creeping hair, slowly sizzled under a mesmeric sun. That night I read Animal Farm twice as cubes of ice melted upon my chest.
In Turkey, I first experienced how persuasive emanating Mosque calls could be. How truly beautiful they could be. The mornings after I witnessed how moving, too.
In England, I travelled in the back of a van with twelve others, in heat reaching forty degrees Celsius, watching faces sweat in air free air, Irish faces flushed with heat and exhaustion, and then the emerging fresh, white teeth, weak to the trigger muscle of smile. My [extended] family on our way to a humble car boot sale. The time lived since is insulted by my inability to be as happy as then.
In Amsterdam, I left the bus from the airport. Within eighty close seconds I was almost knocked down by a car, closely avoided the first tram to have entered my life, had clashed with two bicycles carrying yellow flowers in front baskets, and experienced my first – and what remains my only – offering of drugs. The remaining time spent was not near so insultingly stereotypical.
To adventuring! And the hope of better tales to tell!
[Don’t doubt the fun. Dig in.]
In Portugal, the air is rife with a musk I only encountered once more at four in the morning during the north-eastern Australian winter with a cigarette in my fingers. It comes down from the mountains, rustling among the grapevines, tasting gold from the pores of villagers sweating away their days and knocking softly on the door of your nostrils while you’re sleeping. You can faintly hear the sound, just enough to wake you up, just enough to let you know.
I went to England last year. The streets were icy, every step made muscles burn and every step was necessary. Walking down the streets, the people clung to the walls of buildings and peered from shop windows. The vegetable shops smelt bad because the people who worked there seemed to think the ice from outside would not make their bananas expire. Expired foods were “free”, or possibly “99 pence!” Everything had odd packaging and tasted strangely of rain, yet the history and the filth made it all some kind of magnificent revelry… Every time someone spoke I’d hurry forth and await a single whisper of something in their native tongue, whilst they’d await the dulcet tones of an Australian, hollering in ‘Ozzie’ brogue: “Put another shrimp on the barbie, mate”
To the hope of better tales to tell.