Oh, Brave New Mobile World (1)

This is part one of a trilogy, but paradoxically, it is not the beginning. If you are new to this blog, I suggest you go back to read the prelude here first. This isn't a warning to the cocky, it's a word to the wise.

Nomads' Land

Where all paths lead one to roam...

Nomad's Land

When I was traveling on my bicycle, I left each spot unchanged when I moved on. True, the deadwood might have shrunk slightly, the ash in the fireplace might be a different colour, but I tore down , dug up or altered nothing of permanence. The land, however good or imperfect it might have been, was preserved, not destroyed, by my passing presence.

Nomads Land

The saddest thing about the acres of caravans in their parks is not the close proximity to each other, nor even the psychotically-rigid ordering of the rows, but the fact that many of them have had their wheels removed and now sit on concrete blocks. They are, to me, the graveyards of freedom. You ain't goin' nowhere...

Are Nomads mad? No? Are settlers unsettled in the head?

There are three nomads in this tale, two of whom are described below, and the third one is myself.

The difference between those wandering and those housed is that of living on the land, or living in the land. Nomads have very tiny roots, which at any time stretch far away back to places they have stopped at previously which had a special significance. Settlers have massive stumpy roots which dive down deep into the ground beneath their feet. (Hint: this is not a literal truth, it is a metaphor. Do not go around trying to chop peoples' feet off at ground level thinking it will make them free.) Both groups feel suspicion and animosity to the other. The settlers have always assumed that nomads are shifty thieving work-shy troublemakers who should be driven off as soon as possible. The nomads, generally less intolerant of the settlers because they only have to put up with each individual set of quirks and foibles for a short while, can be cavalier when it comes to respecting rights of access or privacy. But, as I say in my motto, nothing lasts for ever. If the place in which you're living gets taken over by deranged control freaks who want to tax you in order to raise enough money to monitor you and protect you from yourself, pack up and go somewhere saner. And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too...

I settled down twice, before settling (thrice). (When I settle three times, it's true). What a frightening thought, I could be living on a Snark. Or, what an exiting though, I could be a Snark.

I settled the first time close to the sea. I had a third share in a small sailing boat in which I could run away and pretend I was still free. I spoke to few who lived around me, and they in their turn said very little to me. I spoke to many people I met on the harbour and abroad, and swapped traveling tales with those who asked about my eccentric bicycle. I was happy for the two years I lived there.

I settled the second time on the flood plains of the Thames, near Reading. The sprawling estate in which I had one small maisonette was built on the site of the airfield where Douglas Bader piled a Bulldog into the ground and lost his legs. Various people walking their dogs in the tame wooded parts thought they might have come across them, but as there was no reward on offer, very few people bothered to press a claim, and anyway, Douglas had his wooden ones.

For the first time in my new way of living, I saw settled people at close-quarters. The man from whom I had bought my house had moved to a slightly bigger house four hundred yards away. I had moved nearly eighty miles and therefore knew nobody. When a gale flattened two of the fence panels at the back of my garden soon after I moved in, I was putting them back up again when the old owner stopped by to see what had gone wrong. As he chatted, another man with a donkey jacket and a flat-cap on his head came by, and said hello to the previous owner. As they chatted briefly, I made an attempt to join in. Flat cap man glanced once at me from the corner of his eye, and said to previous owner, with a jerk of his thumb towards me, "Who's he, then?" Previous owner told him, flat-cap grunted, and continued his conversation. I was not there (I was not their), I did not know how long I would have to live in the place before I was allowed to become their there. Things didn't change much during the three years I stayed there either. Paradoxically, living amongst a crowd, I was more alone than I'd ever been before.

I settled the third time, selling the modern maisonette at the trough of the housing slump, taking the loss and just having enough to buy the rambling and semi-decrepit building I still live in. Unlike the sprawling mass of houses at Woodley, I was now in the middle of nowhere, but, as if to keep me from feeling too adrift, I was still close to some sort of water. Far closer than I ought to have been, it turned out.

I found, as I explored my station, that the space beneath the suspended floor of what used to be the booking hall had flooded to a depth of a foot or more. Although the water level was three feet beneath the floorboards, there was no damp-proof course in the sleeper walls on which the floor timbers rested, and so they had rotted in several places. As if that wasn't enough, dry-rot and wet-rot had flourished, turning the timbers into dark sponges and shooting up the architraving above the floor level. I could not afford to pay for a builder to come in and make good the damage, so I did it myself. For several months I lived in a house where one room had no floor, just a maze of scaffold planks laid across the sleeper walls, with a mass of mud and clay four feet beneath them. I could not stop the water from coming up through the clay, and so I followed my instincts from years at sea and installed a bilge-pump.

The replacement timbers were almost done and the floor-boards about to go back down again when I slipped as I was stepping across one of the gaps, a timber which was only notched into place turned under my feet, and I crashed down into the mud and dislodged wood. I felt something in my chest crack. I drove up to the hospital, to be told it was a cracked rib, and they didn't do anything for those, not even a strapping. I would have to take it easy. I went back home and found ways of carrying in wood and coal one-handed to keep the fires going. The phone rang as I was sitting in a chair nursing my rib, and a few weeks contract work was offered to me in London, which I took, and pretended I was not in agony as I traveled on the trains or climbed the stairs. The doorbell rang one weekend when I was home, still nursing my rib, and someone was standing there, rather scruffy, saying that he was looking for a few day's work.

"What can you do?" I asked.
"Anything, so long as it doesn't involve killing animals."

Enter nomad number two, Andy the New-age Traveler.

Andy was one of the people you see camping on grassy triangles by the roadside, with a caravan or a coach or a double-decker bus. He had started out with a wooden gypsy caravan he had built himself, living beside it in a tent until it was capable of housing him and his girlfriend. He originally had an old Ferguson tractor with which he towed it around from place to place, but after a while the bug to become free of tax and MoT and fuel bit him, and he got a horse. He, like me, experienced disaster, going down a hill one day when the caravan threatened to over-run the horse and he was forced to swerve it off the road, smashing the frame and his girlfriend's arm. He was now parked up near to where I lived, on a patch of common land, trying to earn the money needed to buy some Ash with which to mend the frame.

I had money from the contract work, and he was willing to help me by doing the things I still couldn't do, such as push a plane along a 12-foot board or swing a pickaxe. As we worked, we listened to music, and talked. I played him Thomas Dolby's Astronauts and Heretics, and he appreciated the aptness of "I Live in a Suitcase", commenting that it was ironic that someone like myself who had traveled around by bicycle and lived beside the road should choose to settle down in a Railway Station. It was almost as if I was saying that this settlement was only temporary, and I was simply waiting for a train that would take me off on my travels again.

Andy was committed to organising the travelers so that they could continue living their nomadic lifestyle without being picked off individually by bailiffs and police and other authorities who were infuriated that someone should be able to live without an address or letterbox or door-knocker. Sadly, he wasn't going to see any of his dreams come to fruition. When his girlfriend left him and refused to let him see her, he killed himself in a black mood of depression. He was buried in the churchyard a few hundred yards from the place where he had last been camping. A prominent member of the village tried to prevent Andy having a space there, but the majority of the village insisted he should lie there. I threw the ritual clod of earth onto the coffin, and attended his wake that night. I sat in the darkness beside the roaring fire while other travelers cooked food and drank drink, and one or two fire-eaters performed. I spoke with his sister, who had traveled down from Berwick for the funeral, (his only relative who attended), and later on, she came home with me and we shared my bed. I should have performed better, but I was still feeling the grief of his passing.

The floor was done, the work came up faster than I had anticipated, the bicycle was set aside when I, Mr. Toad-like, fell in love with motor cars (again), and when I roared up to the Costcutter shop one day in my pride and joy, someone said "I heard you'd moved down here".

Nomad number three, Peter the Artist.

I first knew Peter when I was a teenager living in Hawkhurst. At the bottom of Station Road, on which we lived, (how uncanny, that recurrence of road-names), was a tall rambling gothic-style building with spindly balconies and turrets with windows from which I was sure ghostly eyes gazed out over the nearby row of more ordinary terraced houses. In the last one of these terraces, in the shadow of Castle Macabre, lived my best friend, with his brothers and sister, a dog with puppies, a television (which we didn't have), and his mother, who wore jumpers, short skirts and black woolen tights, an ensemble that still makes me rev up from tickover. Peter the artist was her lover. He made papier-mache caricature figures, a sort of fore-runner of the Spitting-Image puppets. Now, he was living near to me, still looking young and healthy despite the years which had gone by. I asked how he was doing, and found that he had given up art as a commercial venture, and instead was teaching art at an expensive school. And he was living in a yurt. (Yes, some of you have just gone "Oh a Yurt, isn't that what the ..", and I know you want me to gabble out the coincidence here but you're just going to have to wait for it.) He had chosen this path because he had become fed up with everyman beating a path to his door to stuff through it envelopes with bills, demands to submit personal details (again) to the electoral register, begging letters from banks asking him to borrow money, and he had up and decamped, and then, encamped. (Put out the trash, and then put out the trash).

And here it was that last week, reading the post about the mongol hordes, I had felt an eerie prickling on the back of my head as all the hairs stood up and I had the thought that there is something in the room with me, that there is something in the bottom left-hand corner of my mind saying "please sir, I know, I know, ask me sir", and that strange sensation of presque-vu that rippled through me, back through the Pookah post to the brief clip from the film when a Mr Wilson goes to the library to look up the definition of the word Pookah, and reads on the page in front of him "A pookah is a large, often invisible spirit, often taking the form of an animal to those who see him, given to mischievous and sometimes practical jokes, and how are you tonight, Mr Wilson?", and although it was the same sort of feeling, I'm not called Wilson, so what else was recently in my mind? (Please sir, please sir, it's yurt, sir).

And I remembered that a Yurt was the wood and felt tent in which the Mongols lived, a structure both robust enough to keep out the bitter desert weather and at the same time light enough to be dismantled and carried around on a horse to wherever else it was that the nomadic raiding tribes were going to make their base for a while. And I remembered Peter the artist and his yurt, and realised that history was repeating itself. The yurt was back again, (The yurt was back again...)

"Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat again the mistakes of History." George Santayana said something like that, the phrase has been twisted about somewhat by its stay in my own warped mind these many years, but the gist is correct.

It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time. The yurt is back in style again. There are raiders on binary horses coming back from the east. (Barak Obama, saviour of the western world, has just ordered a review into the threat of cyber-attack from the east. Digital arrows go whistling by).

I know that I have only given one example of the unsettled behaviour of settlers, and yes, flat-cap man was probably the most extreme example of bad-behaviour that one is likely to come across, but I don't want to catalog the faults of settlers, because there are too many of them around here who might recognise me, and they know where I live. I love my cats, and I have heard the story of a neighbourly dispute in the next village which turned sour and ended with a woman going out to her back garden one morning to find that her six pet rabbits had been strangled, gutted, skinned, and strung up on the fence. I would rather say that I have always found it easier to talk to strangers when they are nomads, and that I have always found the settlers around me to be a little stranger than I would have liked them to be. People who stay in one place for too long seem to undergo a change; they develop a defensive attitude and a suspicion of anyone who "doesn't come from round here", and I am worried that I too might be held fast to the not-so-waterlogged clay beneath me by horrible thick roots. I might have to chop them, because should I ever have to choose between fighting a bitter war against a rabbit-skinning settler and moving to somewhere less prickly, I would get up and go. My ass would be laden, my arse would be moving, if I was heading northwards my r's would be rolling.

And finally, back to the Brave New Mobile World, and another little sign which has also just begun to make sense to me. Say hello to Youtube. Say goodbye to the shelves full of video cases, the video recorder itself, the scribbled writing on the labels and possibly the notebook for the pathologically tidy recording of on which recorded tape the desired title may be found, and at what index number. I want to play you a piece of music, or show you a video, because it adds more to the post than two hundred words could do. Before Youtube, what could I have done? Invited you round a few at a time to sit in front of the television, mailed out the video tape to you one at a time like a chain letter? Done without it? The world is a richer place for getting our collections out of our homes and into shared access, not a poorer one.

I ought to play "I live in a suitcase" for you, in memory of Andy the New-age Traveler, but there are some pieces of music which I cannot listen to without feeling all the old emotions and pain and turmoil welling up again, and that song is one such piece. Instead, from the same album, here is another one, much more cheerful, triumphant, and because it records the smashing down of a wall, and the re-emergence of the east just as appropriate, if not more so.

For Andy Koch, still missed.



(And I'm still waiting for the right train to come along.)