magic lamp

In six hours I am leaving for Heathrow.

This morning in Lily's flat the texture of that first month in London returned to my mind. You know how every little era you live through has its own kind of spirit? As tangible as a smell when you are conscious of it, but very hard to bring to mind just when you want to. If you start something new very suddenly, you are conscious of the change of atmosphere for a few days before you get completely used to breathing it. I felt the is-ness, the now-ness, of that time with all my senses. And today, for a half-hour or so, I got it back, and time collapsed.

There was this Tennyson poem I used to love when I was thirteen or fourteen though I haven't much thought about it since. This girl is writhing around in an agony of anticipation, crushing flowers to her burning breast and whatnot, waiting for a lover to whom she is completely mentally enslaved. She says,

...once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips; as sunlight drinketh dew.

I don't feel like my soul is in my body today. I feel like it is in the custody of the genie that is presiding over my return to Australia. I created this monster myself when I decided to go back, and now it has temporarily taken me over. Don't squirm, it says, a deal's a deal. And now I don't have to perform any more acts of will, I just have to walk through the inevitable steps until it's all effected and done. And when it's done, I will have my self back. At 9:55am on Wednesday 4th October at Charles Kingsford-Smith airport.

And then I'll get to find out if I made a good decision or not.

All my northern hemisphere buddies, goodbye, I love you, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Rug up warm, winter's coming. Goodbye.

westward

Konya is a blaring, dusty, sun-baked city. I've probably been further from the sea in my life, but I've never felt it. It was a rude shock after sleepy Goreme, and my comfort was not augmented by the fact that its citizens observe Ramadan more strictly than any other place I've been. I had to buy fruit and crackers in the supermarket and sneak a hasty lunch in my hotel so as not to give offence. The upside was seeing the relish with which everyone broke fast at the end of the day. As soon as the muezzins so much as clear their throats into the minaret microphones, you can hear the chik of a thousand cigarette lighters flaring as one, and in the restaurants people swoop on tables laid out with all kinds of food that they've been staring longingly at for the past ten or fifteen minutes.

I went to Konya looking for the shrine of Celaleddin Rumi, 12th-century sufi mystic, founder of the mevlevi whirling dervish order, and cracking good poet. It was gorgeous beyond my expectation. The calligraphy decorating the walls was of a curious form I hadn't seen before. The image was symmetrical, with the words written both right to left and left to right. It had a stark use of colour and blocky shapes that reminded me of kabuki masks. Maybe the symmetry made it face-like, I don't know. There were no photos allowed so I sketched my favourite piece on the back of a receipt--I only had time to do half, though, so you have to hold it edgewise to a mirror to see it whole.

That night I went to a dervish 'ceremony'. I gather that performers were professional dancers (one of them, a kid of maybe seven or eight years old, I dubbed The Littlest Dervish) rather than actual practicing mevlevi. It was staged in the airport-like Cultural Centre on the edge of town and it was all a bit pomo and strange, but the whirling was beautiful anyway, and the sufi music wild and ardent, music to dissolve in.

Next day I went to Pamukkale, and thanked the ancient Romans for situating a spa town right next to those travertine pools and then letting it fall into picturesque ruin, making for the perfect day out 700 years later. The sun was shining, the cypresses were doing their spiky broody thing, and my camera sucked it all up. I kind of expected balloons and streamers to fall from the sky, and some guy in a lamé jacket to step up and say, 'Congratulations! You have just taken the billionth photograph of this site!'--but it was as pretty as if nobody had ever seen it before me. I swam in the Hierapolis thermal spring too, with columns and marble blocks submerged in the pool for that lost Atlantis feel. The calciferous water felt very soft on my skin, and tiny bubbles rose up through it, settling on my limbs and fizzing at the surface. It was probably the closest I'll ever get to swimming in champagne.

After a few days in the interior all I really wanted to do was dip a toe in the Aegean and look at Samos across the water (so I can say that I've been to ten countries, but I've seen eleven). When I finally arrived at the beach at Pamucak, I found a little holiday village of bungalows and caravans all planted out with eucalyptus. It looked like a dozen family holidays from my childhood, and a thought shot through me, 'Not yet! It's too soon!' So that's how I realised that I am grieving the loss of Europe. In a week's time I'll be back in Australia, and I hadn't really been giving the matter much attention. But it explained why I had been so shirty with the touts in recent days and so keen to avoid the standard polite questions--'where ya from?' 'where ya going?' And when I finally worked out what was happening in my strange, opaque little brain, it was a relief.

Yesterday I had a quick look around Ephesus. I was kind of ruins-ed out, and the crowds were stupefying--my memory of Curates Street is a sensation of trying to swim up a waterfall. But I was walking down streets that St Paul and St John and maybe even Mary herself once walked, and I finally saw the point of the apostles writing those letters to the people of this or that city: I felt like I was in a nerve centre of the ancient world, a place where important things used to happen. I skipped the supposed House of Mary, though, and spent the afternoon in the nearby village of Sirince. As it turns out, the lady is said to have spent her last years here, and if so, she chose well. It's just a little patchwork of Ottoman-style houses and cobbled streets in pretty green hills. A kind of Turkish Orvieto. Jam, fruit wine and olive oil, the products of the orchards that surround the town, are on sale in every second market stall. It was good. Energising. It made me really still, and I hadn't been still for a long time.

And today was the eight-hour bus ride back to Istanbul. I like Turkish buses, because they give you tea and biscuits and towelettes in foil packets, and they stop for a food, fag and facilities break every couple of hours (mmmm. 4 a.m. kebab, anyone?). And when they stop, there's no dithering around. Everybody dashes out, sucks up whatever nutrients or stimulants they have been hanging out for, buys a gift box of sweets for whomever they're going to visit, and bolts for the bus again. If somebody gets back late and finds the bus already gone, which happens quite frequently, they just strike out for the nearest corner where they can intercept it. They wave an arm, the bus slows to a trotting pace, the door is flung open and they jump on. And then you get more tea and towelettes.

The best, best, best surprise was the ferry across the Sea of Marmara tonight. I love car ferries. It always feels kind of fantastical to me, that you can drive a car or a bus onto a boat and just keep going forward as if it were the most normal thing in the world. I slung my elbows over the port side and watched the moon making a trail across the water, with the lights of Istanbul all around. Tomorrow I fly out. It was a nice treat before I left, the boat and the night and the fat full moon.

goreme gozleme

A perfect, orange crescent moon hangs above the Blue Mosque, harmonising with the warm glow of the lights that circle the minarets and spell out the message 'Dunya ahiretin Tarlasidir': sow in this world, reap in paradise. Before electricity they used to write these Ramadan messages in hundreds of little oil lamps suspended between the minarets, and I imagine they gave off a similar yellow-orange glow. Islam's crescent originated here in Istanbul, when the goddess Hecate was credited with thwarting an attempted seige by Philip of Macedon in 340BC*, and to show their gratitude the Istanbullus took her symbol as their standard. Tonight, in a moment of confusion, I read that sliver of moon unconsciously as both the thing itself and the symbol that has been made of it, and it feels like the old gods and the new are blessing this place, and all of us in it.

In my last two days in Istanbul I walked through the streets of the bazaar district cracking the freshest pistachios I've ever tasted, scattering their shells. I had a kip in the emerald grass of the Suleymaniye Mosque courtyard, then wrapped up my hair, stepped out of my shoes, and went inside. The deep carpet under your bare feet and the dome covering you from above make mosques feel so clean and open but so enveloping. In the Suleymaniye I knelt down for a moment to get a better photo of some detail or other, sat back naturally on my ankles, and instantly felt that I could have stayed there in that attitude all day. I remembered a Turkish girl's account of a visit to this mosque during Ramadan, the spellbinding sense of time suspended, the way she found herself swaying to the rhythm of the chanted prayers, as if 'no false note, no discordant gesture was possible.' I've been reading for three years about this city, about the training of the eunuchs and concubines and jannisaries at the Seraglio, about the political forment that focussed around the rival teams of charioteers in the Byzantine hippodrome (an odd prefiguring of football hooliganism, maybe), about the debauched tastes and murderous plots of the emperors, empresses and sultans. But that half hour in the Suleymaniye Camii, in a travel-tired, belly-troubled stupour (come on--of course I have the runs) was the closest I came to the dreamy city I have found in books.

I visited the Seraglio, all impressive state pavilions and warrens of lavish private quarters, and it made the palaces of France look squat, mean and unlivable by comparison. I talked for half an hour with a tile merchant in the Grand Bazaar. he told me that the best tiles, from Izmir, contain 85% quartz. Their white has the blue-white translucency of an eye. Only one artisan in the world can fashion this material into actual vessels, as opposed to flat tiles, and he turns out 30 or 40 desirable articles a year. Each colour must be fired seperately, and every vase, bowl or tile takes seventy days to produce. The Seraglio, along with many of the finer mosques, is fairly coated with the stuff. I found those hypnotically-patterned rooms more impressive than all the apricot-sized diamonds and rubies in the royal treasury. Not that I'd turn one of those down if it was offered to me in the spirit of friendship, obviously.

Last night I took a night bus to Cappadocia. We tried to watch the Premiership League on the in-bus telly, but the signal kept flickering out. It would cut to black for a few crucial minutes, and when the signal came back the stadium would be wildly celebrating a goal, or some player would be up-yoursing the ref over some disagreement we hadn't see. We slept, kind of, stopped at Ankara for a 4 am kebab (no thanks) and in the morning we were in another world. There were the salt lakes of Western Anatolia (those so delicate but so intense colours! I remember them, oddly, from the country around the salt lakes of West Australia. The lemon yellow, apple green, flossy pink, god knows where these colours come from) and then the fairy chimneys and soft, ripply dovecotes of volcanic ash that everyone knows from postcards.

I arrived in Goreme, had a shower, a swim in the hotel pool, and the best breakfast I've yet had in Turkey (which is really saying something) and then, well, napped all afternoon actually. At seven o'clock I scrambled up to sunset ridge to see what I'd been ignoring all day. Turned out, I'd been napping in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Towers upon towers, squat and slender, soft-serve-whipped ridges of whitest rock, a million pinks and greens in the escarpment to the east, and to the south a lone mountain changing from purple to blue to deeper blue as the sun does its disappearing act. Call me Lady Muck. Hand me a ripe, glowing fig and let me weigh it in my palm a minute while I look out over some landscape of unearthly gorgeousness and noncholantly bargain down the price of my dinner. Because that's how I roll. Until the holiday ends, anyway.

*Istanbul has seen many seiges, most of them not successful but a few spectacularly so. The Byzantines held out for a long time against the navies of Mehmet II by the simple but ingenious means of stringing a chain across the entrance of the Golden Horn just above water level. He trumped them, and thus converted Istanbul to Ottoman rule, by greasing 10 kilometres of road with pig fat and hauling his warships overland to a relatively undefended point beyond the chain. This patch of earth and water has always been a much contested and desired place.

istanbul night train

It's going to have to be a series of rushed impressions, but in any case, that's how it felt when I was doing it.

utrecht and amsterdam

Church tower ringing out full-on baroque tunes, glissandoes and all, every quarter hour. Reefs of bikes in every open space, some with plastic foliage wrapped around the handlebars to make it easier to pick out your own rust bucket from the mass at the end of the day. Jolly superimpositions of architectural styles in the houses flanking the canals, somehow managing to show each to advantage. Hanging out with Eefje, a housemate of mine from ten years back. She reflects on what a scatterbrain she thinks she used to be. All I can think is how marvellous it is that she has somehow kept all her good qualities from the age of eighteen and added that calm knowingness that we all assume we'll have by our late twenties but rarely attain to.

berlin

The three days I allowed for it completely inadequate. Bauhaus museum--mmm, utopian desklamps. Checkpoint Charlie museum--many of the exhibits dating back to pre-1989, present tense references to Stasi and snipers. But oh, the glorious escapes! Home-made light aircraft, one-man submarines, girlfriends folded neatly into suitcases, a lot of fast talking. Hurray for ingenuity in the face of despotism. A punk-metal balcony barbecue party with my German friend Kiki, everyone very sanguine and polite as metalheads usually are, trundling out their best English for me on a lazy Sunday night.

venice

A week-long stop with the Zambonis, knocking about from Dolomites to Biennale to beach house to take our minds off how long it might be before we see each other next. Gorging on tuna carpaccio, ricotta cake, grinning, saying how it's a hard life. I do a little leaking from the eyes. Turns out, every time you move to a new place you meet new people to miss. Well it was worth it.

sofia
A day spent in the station and in the fast food restaurant shanty town across the road, waiting for my night train to Istanbul. Everything extravagantly run down, old women suck on their few remaining teeth, young studs slouch in cafes wearing outfits the Zoolander costume department would have rejected as credibility-stretching. I try to teach myself cyrillic, but I keep getting my algebra symbols mixed up. Advertising billboards urgently trying to tell me something, without success. Bulgarian keeps turning into Italian in my ears, must be tired.

balkan express

Not your gaslit dining car, flirting with secret agents kind of a deal. More of a conversations through the wall, passive smoking in your sleep, inexplicable draughts thing. But still! My very own sleeper compartment, night light, fold down bed, sink in corner. Read about the fall of Constantinople, tried to memorise some Turkish phrases.

istanbul

Muezzins do a loudspeaker call and response between the mosques of Sultanahmet. Poor old Aya Sofia all scaffolded up, Muslim calligraphy retained, Christian mosaics restored, looking in its hybrid state as it never looked when it was a consecrated plaee of worship. The hippodrome reduced to a few sad stumps--a raw obelisk that was stripped of its figured bronze plates in the fourth crusade; the trucated column that used to be three intertwined snakes--Mahmet the conqueror broke the jawbone off one of them on his way into town to show everyone who was boss. The imperial cistern, a resounding subterranean space, carp swimming around the ankles of dozens of gorgeous columns. I order a Turkish coffee, find I have to chew every mouthful before swallowing, it grates my stomach all day. An old woman with fine eyes, scarfed head and skull-motif Von Dutch t-shirt reads me a very rosy and non-specific future in the dregs of my cup. After dark the Sultanahmet district becomes a big street party, the nightly kiss-off to the Ramadan fast. The Istanbullus pile out of over-packed cars to find a spot on the grass in the mosque gardens and eat corn on the cob, kebab, a strange gooey toffee sold on sticks. I go about unnoticed in the crush, except by the odd guy who steps out in front of me to unfurl a carpet, calls me lady, asks well if I don't need a carpet then what do I need? A beer, an internet connection, and some sleep, in that order. I'm easily satisfied, really.

craic addict

The weather in Ireland is great. It switches at ten-minute intervals between sunny, cloudy and rainy. The rain's not so bad--it's just vertical mist, really. By the time you've stuggled into your mac, which in my case is a large piece of cling wrap with a head hole that was given me free with a ferry ticket--it's switched back to sun again. There are places on earth where you'd feel rather silly setting out for a day's walk under a bruised and spitting sky, but here it's just a waiting game.

My first stop was Doolin, a one-street town on a bleak and marvellous stretch of the Atlantic coast, where the thin soil and its carpet of turf often gives way to naked rock. The Cliffs of Moher rise 200 metres out of the sea to the south, and to the north-east, the three Aran islands sit low and flat on the water. I went out to the smallest, Inisheer. It is so densely criss-crossed with stone walls it looks like the locals have just piled up all the loose rocks to keep from tripping over them. I walked to a church so old it is now sunk up to its arches in the surrounding earth, and to a sacred well; I stained my fingers picking blackberries; had a pee in a seaside cave with only an off-shore seal colony as my witnesses. I hope. I also eavesdropped on a couple of jaunting car drivers who were having a long conversation in Gaelic. That night I went to a couple of pubs in Doolin to hear some Irish music. The best was produced by four old guys sitting around a booth, picking up one or another of the instruments on the table--bodhran, fiddle, tin whistle, flute, guitar--as the song dictated, or sometimes just singing in English or Irish.

The next day I set out very early for a walk along the Cliffs of Moher. I had a hand-drawn map given to me by a man in the pub who told me it would be an unforgettable experience. He wasn't wrong. Did I mention those cliffs are 200 metres high? Yeah. Well. The path was a ribbon of yellowy-silver trodden-down grass that insinuated itself along the edge of the cliff, on the outside of the fenceline. For a long while I thought that was awesome. I was in one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, savage, bright green deep grey, with the gulls riding the currents around my feet. I was scrambling up and down hillocks of turf so thick and soft it was like a green pelt, scaling rogue bits of fence, and jumping across little streams--well, the tops of waterfalls really. Then I thought, no one will ever believe I did this, I'd better take a photo. Thus:



If you look carefully you can see that the grass stops being horizontal and starts being vertical about a trainer sole's length from where my toes stop. It hadn't bothered me to see that with my own eyes, but when I saw it through the viewfinder I was struck with the sudden and unwelcome conviction that I. Was about. To die. I edged along for maybe another kilometre, gibbering softly to myself, until I came to a point where the path ahead of me had collapsed. There was a neat hole, about fifty centimetres across, where ground should have been. On my landward side there were three strands of rusty barbed wire separating me from a bog and a herd of belligerent-looking cows. I considered the jump. I contemplated the fence. I chose the fence. Hiking my knee up toward my left ear, I managed to get one leg over the wire. Then, folding up like an extremely complicated and terrified clotheshorse, I gymnasticised myself over to safety. I struck out through the field, angry cows be damned, until I found a road where I thumbed it back into Doolin. I sat down in the first pub I could find and put a load of hot food into the strange hollow where my insides should have been, and picked up three mars bars for a chaser. I only intended to buy one, but I absent-mindedly managed to buy it three times. Which says something about the role of chocolate in a crisis. And then I caught the bus to Killarney.

Killarney's the tourist hub of Kerry, a supernaturally lush corner of the south-west of the country, and it seemed kind of tame to me after the wind-scoured County Clare. Mind you, I stuck to the flat land for the most part. Lakeside strolls. A little cycling, with stops for coffee and scones. Nice things. Touristy things. Things that weren't likely to see me plunging to a splattery death. I saw two grey herons and two eagles (that is to say, about a seventh of the eagle population, so I think I was pretty lucky), and some bambi-cute red deer. I later met, leaning on a scythe in a field, an old man who in his park ranger days had done a lot to protect them. He told me all about rangering, and about his niece in Melbourne, which he'd heard was quite a cosmopolitan city, but he couldn't live there because he was acclimatised to Ireland, though he was aware that Seasonal Affective Disorder was a serious affliction for some, and in America they prescribed special mirrors with lights around the edge. He offered to teach me to scythe too, claiming it was excellent for the back muscles, but I had a Dublin train to catch. Plus, he was very possibly mad as a brush, and was wielding a blade as long as my forearm that he claimed was sharp enough to shave with.

He was nice though, as was the farmer in the next field over who marvelled that pretty girls should always be hiding their eyes behind sunglasses, as were the musicians in that pub in Doolin, who gave me their cards and offered me a lift back to the hostel. There's still something about Irish people that I can't quite put my finger on. Something remote behind the affability. It's not so true of the younger people, I guess, but with a lot of people over about forty it's there. Not hostility or falseness or anything like that. Just--something apart. It's like a child of Lir gazing out at you through a swan's eye. And tomorrow I leave, so I'm not going to get to the bottom of it now. Next time, maybe. Maybe never.

the wild swans at bray

I know, I know, I'm sorry. So, since last time I updated, I have: finished my summer work (hurrah); turned 28 (no comment); been to see the Dali exhibition at the Tate Modern with Flavio (did you know that Dali and Disney collaborated on a short film? I didn't. It was abandoned in Disney's lifetime because it was too controversial, then finished with the help of Dali's sketches a couple of years ago. It looks like... well, it looks like a collaboration between Disney and Dali.); seen, admired and stayed in Lil's new apartment; and got bit by bedbugs in a cheap hotel (Gross. Swelling and lesions. I must be a backpacker again).

I'm in Ireland now, staying with Nik, of somanystuff comments fame. We went south of Dublin on the weekend, following the coast, took a walk from Bray to Greystones. The terrain was kind of an Irish (greyer, flatter, more haystacks) Cinque Terre. We saw dozens of white swans in a peaceful bay, doing a complicated Esther Williams synchronised swimming routine. We went to Dun Laoghaire and looked out across the bay at Joyce's tower, where stately plump Buck Mulligan harangues poor Dedalus for the whole first chapter of Ulysses. But it's Dublin itself that has made the biggest impression on me.

The inhabitants of Dublin are urban civility personified: too busy for nosy over-friendliness, but very happy to show you how dialing codes work, or where to get the bus from. There is decent public transport. There are museums with informative plaques and local designers who are nifty with a pintuck. In short, it looks like the most tranquil, ordered modern city you can imagine. Dublin is, nevertheless, and I would stand up and say so in court, completely class-a off-the-deep-end mental. It's got the lunacy of a new money financial centre imposed like a sketch on rice paper over another lunacy so primal it's impossible to define. There's a scream of mingled passion and rage tearing through the white noise of traffic and modems. I don't claim to know why. Maybe it's the very recent collective memory of poverty and civil strife, maybe it's older than all that. Maybe this patch of earth has had this spirit in it since before the first humans arrived here.

On my first day here it struck me so hard I felt I was going to fall over. It was the more disorientating for the fact that I wasn't expecting it and couldn't see any concrete evidence around me for it. The only thing in the posh, polished centre of town to make you realise that you're not in a familiar world is the Gaelic on all the signs. At first it seemed almost perverse to me to bother finding a translation for a street name, for example. I mean, in Paris you don't direct an English speaker to Green Path Street, but to Rue du Chemin Vert. Or why translate simple daily language into Gaelic which appears to have been developed in modern times to supply a gap in the original, ancient language? Like 'As seirbheis' written under 'Out of service' on buses. But the answer is obvious enough once you become aware of the question: this is how you bring a language back from the dead. So every time something is written in Gaelic, you are making a statement. A political statement, yes, but also something more fundamental, to do with where this culture came from and what it values.

Please don't think I'm claiming that modern Irish people are obsessed with past injury or even past glory at the expense of the present. On the evidence of a week's visit, Irish people are obviously individuals like any others, pursuing their daily interests, doing their thing. But there is something rumbling under the streets here that is bigger and older than any individual. No matter how carefully I studied the map, I kept finding myself walking in the opposite direction to the one I had intended, like Alice in the garden. Little children in the street kept calling out disconcerting messages to me: 'What are you doing?' 'Go back!' before their words resolved into baby German or Spanish. People speaking quite clearly and slowly, with a slight Dublin lilt, had to repeat themselves to me, as if their words were being whipped away by a strong wind. By the time I met Nik in the pub at six o'clock, I felt battered and confused. I tried to explain, thinking he'd call me an idiot. He sipped at his pint. 'Well, what do you think the leprechaun is? Was originally, I mean, before the cartoony image of it. Or the banshee? They're shape-shifters, deceivers, they're out to show you that things aren't as they look. There's something here...' But what? 'Buggered if I know, mate. I've sort of just got used to it.'

you want miracles? i give you the g.b.p.

I'm sorry, readers. I've had tried, many times, to sit down and write yez something nice. Fact is I'm kind of bushed. I have to concentrate very hard to make sure I don't walk out of my room without my trousers--I'm that kind of tired. Also, there's not much news. Well let me see, last weekend I hired a bike and cycled along the coast for a bit. The first couple of hours went pretty smoothly, except for a near-death encounter with a disappearing pavement and a sewage services van. Then I stopped at Broad Stairs, a very cute town on a little bay, which was basically one big party. The beach was so jammed with happy bathers and candy-striped windbreaks you couldn't see the sand. I locked my bike up to the pier, called a colleague who had wisely headed straight there that morning, and we had an awesome fish and chip lunch. And a pint. Which was a very clever idea, considering I had a two-hour return ride ahead of me.

On the way back I actually tried to phone the bike shop guy a couple of times and get him to collect me, but the fairy of cardio-vascular exercise mysteriously removed all reception from my phone. I made it, anyway, and I may or may not have wheeled my bike up a hill or two, but that's my business. In the couple of days following I experienced pain in the fundament every time I sat down, stood up or otherwise moved, but it felt rather like the after-effects of a thorough spanking, so that was fun.

Anyway, it's been six weeks, and as I say my attention span extends as far as remembering to dress myself, just, and yet I've just accepted one last week of work at some school in Dorset. I want the cash, see. Every pound I earn will soon be blown a jaunt 'round the Continent, so it's well worth it. Nevertheless, I do feel rather like an ageing Bruce Willis schlepping myself onto the set of Die Hard 4.0. I rarely wish I were a bloke, but I do now just so I could scratch my stubble in a weary sort of way and do one of those 'bring it on' eyebrow-cocking gestures. Yippy-kay-ay.