Seeds and sport and studies

Same again really: lots of sport and sport so dominating that I can think not of other things, such as the degree I’m doing and the increasingly strange idea that I’m supposed to be creating myself as some kind of writer. Sport which brings pleasure in the here and now. Sport which fills me with satisfaction and the longing for more sport. Monday evening – despite crying “rest!” – I trained and had a game with the university football team. Tuesday, squash. Wednesday, reffed one and then played one, for Law Soc in the Intramural League (scored last goal in a 5-3 win). Thursday, lots more squash and then the two hour sesh with the grown-ups in which I ran my ass off. Friday off, though coulda had a game except girlfriend had invited folks over for dinner. Saturday, reffed. And then Sunday, reffed the morning in Wakefield, the afternoon up at uni, and played five-a-side in the evening. We squeaked out an 8-7 win after being 7-5 down with not long to go. Five-a-side team’s going well. We all got new shirts with our names on the back. Jamie got ‘Donkey Punch’ and I went for ‘del Camino’. Goughy just got ‘Goughy’ and Rich ‘Rich’. Ben, of course, is ‘Benaldinho’.

Sport. Lots of sport. I make that sixteen games of football reffed and played in the last twelve days. Plus four elongated sessions of squash in the midst. Never done so much in my life. And not even aching.

Funny what life becomes.

But today we’ve got a class, and so I turn my mind to uni projects. Two pieces to go, and then I’m a master. Though master of what, I’ve no idea. Master of fulfilling the minimum requirement, perhaps? Master of playing the system?

Something like that.

Two projects, both of my own devising. One, it seems, will be to write a fictionalised account of ‘Discovering Beautiful’. The other, I’m thinking of a project centred around the hippy and beat writers and this idea I have that they represent the culmination of a long lineage that stretches unbroken right back to the first eighteenth century bohemians, in both influence and connection. Such as Walt Whitman, sure, they all dug him – but did you know that he apparently slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with a guy who slept with Allen Ginsberg? And Ginsberg slept with Cassady, and Kerouac slept with Cassady’s wife, and so even by bodily fluid they’re connected. And then Cassady reappeared when Kesey was doing all his Merry Prankster stuff and the hippies got born – connections there to Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and The Grateful Dead and the whole San Fran acid summer of love thing – but then the whole thing just sort of disappeared. At least, that’s my idea. Where hippy and beat writers now? Where bohemian movements, etcetera? Well I guess one answer is, sure, you can’t see movements so much when you’re in the midst of them – or can you? – but more than that I think they got done. And so one might suggest the flowers have died, or they went underground – were bulbs – hibernating till the time comes once more. But what I’m thinking is actually the whole lineage just changed into something that’s quite difficult to see, precisely because it looks once more like the normal world. The bohemians started off with a yearning to be different. They despised the bourgeoisie and yahooed them in restaurants and did mad weird things to piss them off. They got naked and drank absinthe and defined themselves by what they didn’t want to be. A lot of it was a reaction and a fight with the status quo – but perhaps now people have realised that there’s no need for that, that any fight you have is really a fight within yourself, and that peace and harmony with all is the higher path at the end of the day. All the hedonism and drugs and drink and free love too were perhaps realised as being of a ‘lower path’, something juvenile and driven by psychological imbalance and unhappiness, and maybe what people came to crave rather than mad expression and ideas of freedom that didn’t really work was balance and maturity and happiness. Even in the living persons of Ken Kesey and Richard Alpert this was perhaps embodied by one going off to be a peaceful family farmer man and the other embracing spirituality and personal growth and clean living. Perhaps that is where the lineage ended – and perhaps it does continue, in the land-loving, meditating, yoga ashram rainbow gathering connected do-gooding happy and healthy young hippies of today. Sure, people still get whacked – but it’s hard to look up to it in the way that they did back then. Poor old Kerouac with his alcoholism and cirrhosis all bitter and mean and old before his time. Cassady speed freaked and talking non-stop gibberish dead in his mid-forties. Who wants to end like that? So was the path fulfilled in the bodies of people who realised there was nothing left to rebel against? Who broke through into the experience of spirit that K and C so frequently talked about and occasionally dabbled with? Who saw that poverty and struggle weren’t actually necessary, and that one could have material comfort and things without being a slave to them, nor a purely materially-driven creature? Who placed being nice and well-rounded above shaking the system and pissing people off? Is that what happened, as I’ve come to think? Or is it something else?

And in pure terms of literature, did this imagined lineage of Chesterton and Rimbaud and Beaudelaire and Flaubert and Joyce and Pound and Huxley and Whitman and Thoreau and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Burroughs really end with Ken Kesey saying, man, people don’t talk the way they do in books, writing’s sort of pointless? Or did that too continue and change into something difficult to recognise because it looks mostly the same as everything else, on the outside, only the inner is different? Perhaps the spirit of it entering into the mainstream, infusing it, and succeeding finally where the yahoos and antiestablishmentarians failed.

I should look into that.

What thinks you?

My second idea, by the way, I’m not sure I can get away with: it’s the idea that fiction is generally pointless and only exists so that people can fill their brains with words that distract them from their own thoughts. That people read, and they don’t care what they read, so long as the words are not their own. Sitting on the beach lapping up Dan Brown, Maeve Binchy, any old thing – and just repeating in their head a long list of words formatted into paragraphs and therefore no need to actually think. Distraction, of course, is the great preoccupation of our society. Very few people, it seems, have gone beyond it. It’s scary, I guess – terrifying, even. I know. I went there. And perhaps that’s why I am able to have ideas like this – and why when I sit on a train and see people reading newspapers, and read them myself, I believe that all we’re all doing is distracting. Flicking open pages of yesterday’s Metro. Reading the celebrity gossip stories. Somebody’s lost weight. Kerry Katona said this. None of it means anything, it’s again just a selection of words alternate to our own thoughts. Even the so-called important news stories are basically the same. And fiction too.

What purpose? What point? That feeling I had of finishing Salman Rushdie’s Booker of Booker’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ and thinking it ‘meh’. Nothing but a filler of time. And poor old James Joyce’s Ulysses, the ultimate distraction for a large number of eggheads, always only ever going to be a representation of the mind that produced it – and from what I know of Joyce, not a mind one should want to aspire to. Opium mind. Base-level mind. Clever, literary mind, sure. But no real depth.

Oh, how clever to be literary and able to symbolise Indian Independence in the persons of some magic realism youngsters, and to chinwag it all over weird toxin-containing cocktails with other brainy shysters in art galleries and London.

But if I want to know about Indian Independence, I’ll read history. And if I want to know about life, I’ll live it, and explore it, and maybe read the words of others who have done likewise. Personal experience is where it’s at as far as I’m concerned. Personal experience has value.

But fiction? Made-up stories that may or may not contain truth? Not really. Not much. And yet we trumpet it, and the man who stands in a place where the trumpets blare the loudest – academia – is hardly likely to find much support for his perhaps silly ideas.

But I sees what I sees. And what I’m realising is, the problem here is that among our forty thousand students and staff there probably aren’t that many who have seen the beyond, who have sat for days and weeks in the company of their own soul, and who have looked at life with a little bit of depth. Of course, I know I’m still shallow – but I hope you know what I mean. It just sort of dawns on me that it’s no wonder I feel unusual and weird when I think things like that, and look bewildered on the smoking and shopping and getting drunk masses. Much as I think of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, I’m remarkably adept at forgetting it too.

Anyway. Fiction. Pointless. Perhaps possibly. Or not. But an idea.

And the question: why don’t enlightened people write? Why not Buddha nor Jesus nor Amma nor Mother Meera hardly interested at all in their own words when us mere plebs find them so fascinating and trumpetable?

Something in that too. Something revealing.

So those are my ideas. And a third one that springs to mind – to write this second piece – Individual Project, it’s called – as a gonzo piece all about writing ‘Individual Project’. To wrestle and wrangle with the tutors. To play the system the way I want to play it and to report on that. And to reveal the student experience from inside the machine, where all our courses are dressed up as ‘research’ – cos that’s where the funding and validation is – when really it’s just writing and egg-headed academia and it don’t mean much at all. Where the creative writers that these creative writing courses are producing? What the tutors and teachers actually doing? And could Rory get away with that? Indeed, would it be perhaps seen as innovative and literary and clever to do something that sets out to be the opposite, and even perhaps trumpeted itself?

I dunno. I just wanna play football. And get these letters after my name and complete my education. Walk this interesting path right to its end – the path that says, ha! you don’t actually want to be a published writer after all. The path that has seen me chasing agents and getting frustrated and jealous and dreaming dreams and coming to this MA and thinking that would be the start of something – and then seeing week by week that it’s perhaps the end of something, that what I really like is living and typing about it here and caring not a hoot for the destination of these words, just the pure expression. And caring not a hoot, neither, for the making of my living through the painful crafting of words, just dreams of never working at a rubbish job ever again. Getting back to something pure. Not being hung up on making it and trapped and stuck in this material England. Forgetting fame. Able and free to live once more mad adventures and splurge them down in mistake-ridden blog entry and then move on or self-publish occasionally, maybe.

The MA is killing my writing dreams. My writing dreams are dying in the doing of this MA. I wanted this to be a breakthrough and I think I’ve got it. Not in the way that I previously imagined or hoped for, but perhaps in an even greater way. Freedom from the longing and the wanting not in fulfilment but in the true release of desires. I couldn’t ask for more.

And either I’ve typed that paragraph before or I just had a massive déjà vu.

Déjà vu, to me, means you’re in the right place doing the right thing. It’s a sign, and a sign you get, perhaps, when you’re really wondering whether you’re doing the right thing at all. Reassurance. Like finding a black glove or a piece of chocolate used to be for me (you’ll have your own thing). Momma said something about déjà vu but I can’t remember what. Something about it being the…no, it doesn’t click.

But I do believe it’s meaningful. Like they say so in The Matrix. Which I watched this week – watched the whole trilogy – and was pleased to note that I no longer was filled with the fever of thinking, yes! I could be The One too! the way it also used to do, just instead noted the plot holes and the lack of cohesion and focus on action in the latter two films. Though the first, of course, is still excellent and full of what I imagine to be truth (maya and the illusion and the power of the mind and the need to believe and then know and then experience and then be).

But look at me, trumpeting fiction. What irony!

Well, life sure ain’t no consistent and constant and non-contradictory thing.

And maybe given that t’old Matrix has mostly filled me with madness when I’ve watched it before perhaps it isn’t contradictory at all.

Real life, where art thou? Sitting alone on a mountain in Colorado feeling blissful while shaman John thinks of me smiling and teaches me things I find useful and believe in. Is that real life?

The other thing I did this week was eat some weird supposedly-psychedelic seeds. It was after squash and me and Simon went walking down past Hyde Park right by where my dad’s first guitar shop was all of twenty-three years ago for fish and chips and then we got talking about things like acid and he was saying his roommate had some coming in the post. My ears usually perk when I hear of LSD, thinking of times I’d read about Richard Alpert’s experiments with it – sounded interesting – and also my own experience all them years ago. Plus, mainly, what it would be like to sit with it and observe it and see if maybe it could be used as a tool or exploring spiritual worlds and doing something useful rather than just giggling and tripping one’s nuts off and seeing weird coloured things. But I hesitate ‘cos it also seems like it might be a step backwards and John always frowned on such things and, anyway, I don’t really feel any sort of attraction for the people that do things like that, they’re not where I want to be but –

I tell Simon about my Wembley trip, when I necked five, and he’s interested in that and shares some of his previous experiences and then also tells me about these seeds he’s got called Hawaiian Baby Woodrose. He says they’re a bit like acid but not quite. He says he’ll give me some if I want and I think, why the hell not? It’s good when people give you stuff – when the things come to you – and that’s how I’d always figured it should be with me if it ever came to acid or peyote or ayuahasca or whatever. Although I did of course buy the iboga (sort of). Anyway…

I go back to his place. Rap some with his roommate who I’ve met a few times (played squash with) and it’s kind of cool to be socialising, and hanging with some young ones who by now have learned a bit of me and think I’m crazy and mad, the things I’ve done – the hitchhiking, the walking through deserts, the beliefs they pick up on ‘cos they just can’t help but notice it, I guess. Something different for the normal hermit recluse that I am. And maybe I could get into that: Leeds, it occurs to me, is beginning to grow on me, and get into me, and guys I’m meeting through sport and bonding with in that way and being sort of the weird older yet still young person on campus and –

Yes, Leeds is beginning to grow on me. And makes me think, what need to go gadding about the world yearning after strangers when true relationship and connection to people and places comes from being there, right?

Anyway, he gives me the seeds. He says standard dose is five but gives me fifteen ‘cos I’ve told him probably standard dose ain’t enough for me. I have this idea that I’m a bit too high already for standard dose. Based on Alpert giving Neem Karoli Baba – Maharaji – a whole shitload of acid and it having no effect on him. And my own dabbles in acid where one tab really just wasn’t enough, plus the iboga too. The idea is that when you’re on the ground these things help you stick your head above the clouds – but what if you’re already above the clouds? Maybe they don’t then do anything? At least, that’s what Alpert found with his Maharaji. And that’s what I found too with these seeds.

The plan was to eat all fifteen one morning when I had a day of not doing anything and then experience them and then fall asleep at night and feel right as rain the next day. No attraction in that whole popping them late at night and staying up wired and then feeling like shit. Except that’s what I ended up doing. Friday night we had dinner and then Ali went out with her friends and I went to bed with a book and thought I’d get some rest. But as I lay there being mellow the thought of the seeds got in my head and it felt like the right time to have a dabble. It was half past nine. I soaked them and scraped off the husk and then ate five. Something nice and easy. Had refereeing the next day, didn’t want to be a basket case.

I ate them. The taste reminded me of some liquor I’d once had but couldn’t quite name. Then I settled back down into bed. My biggest fear was that I’d go mad on them and start running around like a five year old, look for something stupid and crazy to get into on the streets, perhaps naked. It takes a bit of effort to rein these things in when I get giddy. And the whole reason for this, for me, was to maybe try and experience something spiritual, something mystical, and something real and useful and long-lasting. No other purpose besides. Maybe my Wembley acid trip did actually do that for me – as Alpert’s seem to have done for him – or maybe they’re all just symptomatic of a deeper and eventually-satisfied longing for something more, something beyond consensus reality and the standard understanding of the mind and didn’t actually help bring it at all.

In any case, that was what was in my mind, and so I resolved to ignore the external – the bells and whistles and colours and shapes, man – and lie in the dark with my breath and my observations and make the whole thing an internal experience.

But, in the event, my idea of my already being above the clouds and therefore cloud-raising substances wouldn’t work on me proved true. I waited two hours. I felt nothing except mildly queasy. I gave it up and tried to go to sleep, though sleep was fitful. And I didn’t feel exactly good the next day. A big part of me figured I’d just give Simon the other ten seeds back. Another part of me thinks maybe eating the ten seeds now or even getting another five and doing a triple dose could be useful. But given the queasiness, and the sluggishness of the next day, and the very slight ways in which I felt my mind had been altered – nothing useful – I’m not sure there’s much point. That’s the crux, really: that I want my mind to be altered in a useful way. Iboga, I believe, truly did that. But I’m not sure these seeds could. Nor acid, for that matter. Who cares about seeing trippy things, having hallucinations? It’s all just short-term frippery and fun.

I dunno. I guess I’ll give ‘em back. Hard to imagine them doing anything except making me feel slightly sick. Although I do quite enjoy that feeling: it does give the mind a rest, and makes lying in bed in the daytime most pleasurable.

But…sickness is not really what I’m after. Just something trippy in a truly wonderful way. Like the way it was back in Mexico ’99. Natural and happy and good.

Isn’t that what we all want in the end?

Blowing my sexual trumpet

Massive teeth are a real turn on, aren’t they? You know, like Esther Rantzen or Janet Street-Porter. Whenever I see those two on TV, all dribbling and blubbery, man it gets me hot. I think it’s the danger that does it – just imagine a blow job from a set of gnashers like that! And what with women being so strange and volatile anyway…you think it’s all good, she’s slurping away – but in her fiendish mind the remembrance of some cup accidentally and nonchalantly smashed, a bit of washing-up left undone, and – chomp! She’ll bite the old fella clean off. And that’s it, for the rest of your life, bar clever doctor’s surgery – no more John Thomas. You only get one. They never grow back. It’s a miracle, really, that something so fragile and easily detached – something we actually put into the mouths of wild, unpredictable beasts – hardly ever suffers this shuddering fate. You’d think there’d be hundreds and thousands of poor, deflowered men sorrowfully sneaking into cubicles to sit and piss through holes in their pubes. But there aren’t.

I wonder if the queen’s any good at giving head? Or if Kate Middleton’s one of those who gets really wet, really quick, or requires a more prolonged build-up?

Remember old Fergie sucking toes? And Prince Charles fantasising about being a tampon?

We’re all the same deep down.

You know what else turns me on? Boils. I think it’s the fact that I never gave a man a blow job, but would secretly like to. So whenever I get with a girl who’s covered in boils – which happens surprisingly frequently these days – I thank my lucky stars and get stuck in. I love it when they pop in my mouth. To feel the sticky, mucousy juice spurt against the back of my throat. It’s totally an ejaculation. And a lot of these girls, if you time it right, they feel it too. The release. The acceptance of a part of their physical body into mine. They love it. Sometimes I think they’re developing these boils on purpose, just ‘cos they know there’s a guy in the neighbourhood who’s into it. At least, that’s the word on the street. It could be the next big thing.

I was with a hippopotamus friend of mine the other day; she was feeling sad and had a load on her mind and, though I normally like to explore these issues and be a good listener and all that shite I just suddenly asked her if she wanted me to suck her nipples instead. She’s confessed to me before that it really turns her on and I guess I thought doing something pleasurable would be better for her woes than mere talking about it. Plus, we’re good friends and I don’t see no reason why a friend can’t suck another friend’s nipples if that’s what’ll make them feel better.

But, of course, one thing led to another, and we ended up getting naked and rampant round the back of the butchers’ on the high street. She wanted to get on top but I wasn’t having that – I know she’s a reputation for biting guys’ heads off when she gets carried away – so I hit it from behind.

Fat arses are pretty cool once you’ve fought your way through. Hers rippled almost magically and I got well entranced and spacey.

That’s all I really wanted to say today. I know who you are reading this and I know it’s just what you needed to hear at this point in your life. I know you sometimes think I just type nonsense but I wanted to write something serious and meaningful today, and I’m glad I did. I just hope you are able to take my words and put them to good use. Please don’t be like one of those men who look inside gift-horses’ mouths. For all our sakes.

Sport and legs

It’s Monday morning and I’m in need of rest. Luckily for me, I can: nothing on the agenda save a bit of typing. What a week we’ve just had! A week full of sport. A week so full of sport it’s wiped my brain clear of everything that came before. Listen: I refereed six football matches, played two, and also had a marathon three hour session of squash. Don’t know how I made it through. I’m starting to question whether I’m even human.

It all began on Tuesday reffing a game for Brian Deane’s Soccer Academy versus Halifax Town. Nice chap, Brian Deane. Scored the first ever goal in the Premier League nearly twenty years ago. Ought to try and get him down the five-a-side sometime. Though he says his body’s pretty beat now so he gets his fix by helping young lads get into the game. Some of them are on the books of professional clubs. Was a decent, relaxed match, and Brian didn’t give me no stick when I denied his side what was probably a penalty (I had my reasons). And they won anyway.

Me leg went, though, right at the beginning of the match – something in the muscles on the back of the old left swinger. Right from the calf up to the hamstring, and especially at the back of the knee. Was painful, and especially so afterwards. But I soldiered on, and nursed it through Wednesday’s game – Leeds Met women against Liverpool John Moore; most refreshing after the blokes, all giggles and sportsmanship – and then Thursday was the long mad squash session which was due to be followed by only my second played eleven-a-side match in about two years. A long mad two hour session without even a half-time break on the 3G at Weetwood. Lovely match. Quality football. Wise old players spraying it about accurately and thoughtfully. All this young men’s football I’ve been watching – but there’s nothing beats experience.

And, unbelievably, I survived, despite the leg and the squash and then it was to the weekend, and the prospect of five matches in two days. It loomed large and I wasn’t sure it was humanly possible. And maybe it wasn’t. But I did it.

Saturday morning I refereed in the Yorkshire Christian League and then did the students in the afternoon. Leg in serious jeopardy by now. But still Sunday to get through. The morning in Bradford, in a dirty game full of swearing and scuffles in which I gave four yellow cards and one red. A new personal best. Was a real headache and I was willing on the end. A real unpleasant bunch of people. But then the final whistle goes and everyone’s smiles and all those that have been questioning and berating my every decision are suddenly saying, best ref we’ve had all season, and I start thinking that maybe it was fun. Crazy men. Luckily just the students in the afternoon, quiet boys running around happy in the shining sun just gentle banter and plenty smiles. The leg holds up and I’ve a couple of hours rest till five-a-side, and unbelievably I feel fit and strong where even a few weeks back I was huffing and puffing even without injury and a ridiculous amount of sport behind me. Played the game full of pace and passion and we won a real enjoyable match something like 10-6.

I must have reached some level of fitness. Nice to know that I can do all that and still come home unknackered. You get to an age like thirty-six and you start to think it’s all over. But even Thursday, after squash and with the bad leg, I was outsprinting fit and fast students. So life in the old dog yet. And long may it continue.

And even though I say I’m looking forward to a day off today, and pretty stiff and knackered, I know if I got the call for some squash or a kickabout, I’d be on it. My life is sport these days. Sport and typing. Sport and typing and spending pleasant time at home, alone or with the missus. It’s enough. It’s a good life, for me. My reffing pays my way in the world – rent and bills and food and hobbies – and affords me all the free time I need. Student days are lovely. It’ll be sad when they come to an end. Although just because they come to an end doesn’t mean I have to stop living like this. In fact, I should have more free time when they’re over, and certainly less headaches, as I’ll no longer be squeezing my paisley-shaped brain into the square hole of academia. As long as I can be content with living in the cheapest flat in Leeds and never having more than a tenner spare a week I’ll be good. Only children will scupper that, I suppose.

So that was my week. A week of sport and legs. Now it’s Monday morning and I’m in bed with my tea and gown. I might watch a movie. I might do a bit of uni work. There are crumpets in the cupboard and plenty of bread and cheese and I’ve no reason to go anywhere. In any case, sport’ll be starting again soon – could be the same all over again – and so a day of rest perhaps quite wise. Monday’s the new Sunday. I like these Mondays off, when the world goes to work and leaves me be…

Sure, people are plastic - but your life ain't about them anyway, Mr bee-powered man

And then it all became clear, listening to Frank Zappa sing about Plastic People and thinking, yeah, people are plastic! - and then looking back to just before I first went to Mexico, when I wanted to run around San Diego shopping malls barking at pensioners because they didn't seem real, just robots - that this is what happens when you're ready for some change: just barking at the outside world and thinking it deficient 'cos mistakenly not remembering that it's all just of a reflection of you inside anyways. Ya dig?

In any case, my girlfriend's a mental health professional and when I tell her I'm just a lumbering caveman being powered by a lever-pulling dictator-bee who makes me type and type and type she just smiles and goes to bed with her book. Dig her man! That's Inez. Everything's okay by her. She just says, well if the bee was making you unhappy or do bad things then I'd have cause for concern: but you seem extremely happy; that's what she says.

Bzzzzzzz! ;-)

Doctor Langley

In any case, nothing much happened last week. Apart from, oh yeah, talking to Stevie Jay, and also sharing some lovely emails with long ago Leah, which were healing and nice. But all four of my refereeing games were called off because of the freezing temperatures and apart from squash I did nada. I woke up every day knowing what the next chapter of my book was going to be – and everyday I managed to avoid it. But it’ll happen I’m sure at some point.

I ended the week by watching The Truman Show, which has once again driven me mad. Not the pure, life-changing madness of ’98, when I exited the movie theatre in Wakefield and stood twirling by the roundabout watching the silly little cars go round and round and seeing no more reality in what they were doing than in his made-up world within another made-up world that sent me rocketing just weeks later back into discovery mode and soon led me to Mexico, where everything began. But a kind of madness nonetheless. The madness that whispers, but you can still make it Rory-boy. Look at Truman. Look at what he did. He sailed to edge of his universe and put his life on the line – and that’s what you must do. That’s what Buddha did. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what all those who have realised the depths of their souls have done. But you play it safe with cups and mortgages and reading about celebrities and you know where that road will lead. Remember when you had light? Remember when little boys thought you were holy – and maybe you were? Remember when you were on some path and life made sense? And now you referee and seek to pacify drunks and it’s all such a long way away from those days of yore.

And who’s even typing this stuff anyway? I just feel like I’m taking dictation.

Even that sentence there.

And that one too.

I…I feel like I can’t speak. Every sentence I come to type down I’ve already heard in my head the instant I go to begin. All I’m doing is taking dictation. And then I want to know why. And who it is that’s dictating these thoughts. And what the point of me typing it is. Knowing full well that all those thoughts too are mere dictation.

But dictation by who? By me. But that doesn’t make any sense – for if it is I have no idea how I’m doing it.

What I feel like is there’s a little bug in my brain handling gear sticks and levers and piloting this great lunking machine called Rory who mistakenly thinks he’s got a brain but really all he is is a casing for this lever-pulling bug. And the bug says “type” and the man hands type and I think it’s me. The bug is controlling me. He’s making me type things! And he won’t let me stop.

Maybe I swallowed a bee or something when I was little.

In any case, what the fuck, every word I go to type I’ve already heard several seconds before my fingers reach the keys and I’m playing some impossible game of catch-up, always several words or sentences behind. And the bug is in my head and I’m a lunking fool who’s not what he thinks he is but – what difference does it make anyway? I’m not what I think I am, I am what I think I am – same outcome, same foolish ideas. The I thinks it watched The Truman Show and felt some things and now wants to express them – and the I realises that it’s just a typist for a dictating inside-head bug that is actually the real I – but what I is it? I looking through Rory’s eyes? Eyes elsewhere, looking through…

Yes, gone mad. Gone Truman Show mad. But what sort of mad? What brain-destroying mad is you?

Truman Show. Changed life in ’98. Watched a few times since but no life-changing then. And now watched yesterday and spurs on to think once more about Buddha dreams and this tinpot world where the pinnacle of achievement would be what? Writing stupid TV shows like Eastenders for idiots to stuff themselves with so that they didn’t have to think for half an hour and can go on glugging and fizzing and pissing themselves to sleep? Or trading in the bricks that someone else owns for bricks that bug-powered body can own, like some lumbering, clunking caveman saying, ug, these are my bricks?

Show me something worthwhile in this world and I’ll take it! You lying piece of shit! Show me a man who has truly made something of himself, and not just some self-satisfied grinning oyster who smiles inanities into his wine glass and makes fancy women chortle! Some real man. Some good man. Some deep man. Some realised man. And then I’ll stop being mad and buy nice shoes, like him.

Forty days and forty nights. To put one’s life on the line and sail to the edge of the universe. To boldly go or to turn back to pretend insurance salesman’s job while God and angels rub their hands in glee and laugh at all your sillinesses.

Those are the questions.

But what if Buddha’s a fairly tale? What if there was no wife-leaving prince who sat in forests starving and ultimately penetrating to the depths of his soul? What if everything’s just make-believe and the atheists are right and I’m just a simpleton swallowing charlatans’ lies and –

No. This is entirely too conscious. Thoughts of how it’ll go on blog. Thoughts of being read by Eric and how he’ll tut and say “interminable”. Thoughts of madheads like Eve then reading and chirping in with spaced-out advice. Thoughts of poetry and needing to sound like a good writer ‘cos that’s what I’m supposed to be, even though I’m clearly not. All those thoughts mean I’m not writing for myself, not writing from my heart. Need to write more true, write to God or to Mother Meera or Amma, from whom I hide behind no falseness: only then, really, does my humility and anger come out. Everything else is just pretend. Just the bug trying to wax. Just –

You see: I ponder over that sentence ‘cos three “justs” provide better metre.

But no reason to say any more.

And even all that is just taking dictation.

Who is speaking!? That’s something I’d like to know. Dear God, are you even real? Can you hear me? Do you give a damn for me sitting down here going loony tunes not even knowing if you actually exist? Caught up in tales of yogis and swamis and saints and supposed Messiahs, which no one knows if they’re true or not? Believing things that are important to life but maybe actually just bonkers? Looking round at a world populated by people I don’t aspire to be, but wondering if I’m the one who’s wrong? And then sometimes happy ‘cos I can swing a bat or kick a ball? But sex and the buying of things and any kind of occupation and women and conversation and TV and all the stuff that everyone else does totally unfulfilling? And then saying that and knowing that there’s a word for that, and pills too? And nobody knows the truth of everything except one time something worked for me once and then that thing stopped working and doing the opposite worked – I’m talking spirituality, and then grounding – and now I’ve continued in that and I’m wondering whether to flip again and jettison out, like I did after Wakefield ’98, and never settling, and look what it brought me, something new and wonderful and I walked out of this door and left everything behind would you bring me again to something new and wonderful or would you just leaving me crying and mad and ruing the wasted years ‘cos I was just a foolish wandering madman too old for sleeping under stars and chasing young man’s dreams of enlightenment and God?

Forty days and forty nights – death or glory, that’s what I dream of. Is it true or is it not? Did the founder of reiki really do that going up the mountain thing or is that myth? Is there really a reality to crack on into and should I go for it or is it best to remain here in normal land of Leeds where no one cares about these things – as far as I can tell – and just chug slowly along maybe meditating every now and again – as if I know how to do that – until an old man and mortgage all settled up and then fulfil once again the Indian ideal of youth who finds himself – householder and family man – aged renunciate of the world going once more to meet his maker before dying under tree where the eagles pick his bones. Certainly, seems a better way to go than how we’ve got it mapped in this land of ours.

Ramana, do you hear where I’m coming from? Does any of this make sense to you, oh gentle-eyed gazing one? As you look down at me with infinite patience and perhaps pity.

Or mad storied Babaji, who apparently comes when called upon, but really a bit too far-fetched to be true, don’t you think so Mr Yogananda? And what anyway of the children you supposedly bore and hid, which you’d have to admit would be naughty, right?

Inspiration. Truth. Out there? In here? Direction please. Once it was there – but now it’s not. And the evil dictating bug is just getting madder and madder still, not making sense with these mad typing larks.

Can anybody understand this? Or is even Joyce turning in his grave, despite the non-lack of grammar?

And all those suicidal writers and drunks and junkies and misery-guts – pff! As if I want to be like them. If this degree is teaching me one thing it’s that: that writing is pointless, and chasing publishers is a waste of life, and academicspeak is as devoid of content as managespeak. All them books! All them words! And such a tiny fraction of a dot of a percent of them of any worth.

So much straw huh? What the fuck!

But, still, see it out I must. Seven more months and then freedom. Something will come: maybe a baby, given the caution with which we seek to prevent it (ie, none, ‘cept a diagnosis for polycystic ovary syndrome) or maybe something else. But if the road if blank and free…you can be damn sure I’m gonna walk it. And I will type everything out of me and leave it there as my legacy (am I just mad Kevin Spacey-type endlessly writing mad character like in Seven?) so as to be well and truly free. I don’t know anything. I’m not drunk. Although I did have several cheese sandwiches.

I also played a game of chess on the way home – a real one, mind. I think that upset the balance of my brain. It was my first game since I quite the internet thing after taking the iboga last June – no, that hasn’t made me mad – and although I thought doing it in the real world would be okay I don’t think it was. I felt a bit sick afterwards. My head was swimming and it all seemed really pointless. Male youths talking quack quack h2-h4 Sicilian this and that, thoroughly serious and also good. One minute games with pieces flying like crazy. But what of life, hunh? Just robots and machines memorising patterns and then playing them out over and over to increase personal numbers and all really much more quickly and neatly organised by Rory’s own (TM) chess program which I mentioned last year and which goes: are you better than me? Then you win. Am I better than you? Then I win. And no need for pointless formalities of shuffling pieces around and staring at board and ultimately making either foolish or brainy moves: conclusion exactly the same.

Goddamn, if I type for a million years I will never run out of things to say!

And to think how little I say in the real life, and how little confidence I have in the words there I utter; it’s a funny old game.

But what was I saying?

Oh yeah: Truman Show. Gotta go pee. It’s made me mad. Or I’m already mad. Or I’m busting out. Or there’s truth in it after all. Or I’m just a mad-typing fool. Or there really is a bug in my head.

If only Janette still read me, she’d have some drugs to prescribe, laugh out loud.

But: no, no: you’d have to prove yourself first before I followed your approach, Doctor Langley. What’s that? Yes? You’ve walked in my shoes a thousand miles and know exactly what I’m feeling? And you’re well-balanced and blissful and can laugh even more than I can, which is a hell of a lot as it goes. Well then, sure, I’ll take your medicine, having studied your life and looked into the depths of your soul and eyes. I’ll trust that. I’ll take it you know what you’re talking about.

But…Doctor Langley?

Yes.

Are you out there? Are you human? What’s your number? Can I come visit you?

Doctor Langley?

Doctor Langley?

The last time I hitched across Mexico (Part One)

Sunday 12th February 2012, 15:28

When Stevie and I were talking the other day he went on at great lengths about how awesome my journal used to be. What he meant specifically was the stage encompassing my days as a lost mad car-crashing drunk, a hitch-hiker, and a stunt cowboy. They were pretty good days, I suppose. I think what he most liked about those days was that I was really doing things, searching for answers, screwing up and sometimes finding goodness, and relating it with absolute honesty. He contrasts this with what followed, my blissful spiritual days, in which I lived a life that couldn’t really be written about, being as it was all internal and groovy. “Everyday is the best day ever” – that was basically all I had to say, over and over again. Plus a million other mad things besides.

He looks back on those early days with fondness.

I guess I do too.

Not so much that I was doing anything great – because I wasn’t – but because I was actually doing something, and actually living, and everything that I lived was real and tangible and true. When I fucked up, I felt it. And when I yearned, I yearned from the bottom of my heart. I was a young man discovering the world and himself and there was such an innocence about it, and such a directness also. One road. One mind. One path.

And then when the spirituality came in it felt like I got split in ten different ways.

There was what was happening in the external world: the places my body went, the people it encountered.

There was the idea that there were signs that should be followed.

There were the interpretations of the things that happened, trying to give everything meaning.

There was the yearning for something indefinable – yet trying to define it nonetheless.

And there was trying to work out what I was, and sometimes grandly declaring that, thinking that’s what I should do, and sometimes falling into delusion because of it.

There was the universal mystery and the stumblings of a mind that was working at untangling it.

There were many things I didn’t understand, though I tried to. Crashing cars and being drunk and feeling either good and bad is easy to understand. Mysticism less so. Sometimes I got it right, sometimes I got it wrong.

There was the idea that everything I was living was all an illusion anyway, that nothing was real, it was all some ‘divine set-up’.

There was trying to follow destiny, and balancing that with ‘creating your own reality’.

And, perhaps biggest of all, there was the trying to be something that I wanted to be – the idea of “faking it till you make it” – of going beyond past limitations. Trying to be something got tiring. All before that, I just was what I was, and I related that. Suddenly you’re neither who you are, nor who you want to be, and you’re wrestling with ideas of whether you’re living from your ego or your soul while all the time wondering if anything’s real, and before you know it you’ve gone schizophrenic.

There are many ways in which I went mad, and this was one of them.

Sometimes I think I want to write a book about those years – the sequel to Discovering Beautiful, detailing the spiritual madness and the eventual journey into grounding – but I have no idea how I would do it. The simple driving linearity of a journey along a road and a journey towards goodness has gone, replaced by a narrative that, like my mind, divides into ten pieces and I haven’t a clue which thread to follow. Even something so simple as what actually happened gets confused by what I think should have happened.

Life got so whacked. I may have been a mess back before all that – but at least I what I was was real. Now I squeeze myself into ideas of what I should be – grounded, normal, earning money, staying in one place, part of a romantic relationship, lust-denying, non-criminal – and the schizophrenia remains.

But, at the same time, I’ve seen the complexity of my own being and I know there’s not just one way it could be. I is many things. I is all of the above, and more.

Though that’s not what I wanted to talk about: what I wanted to talk about was Stevie’s nostalgia for a journal in which I actually did things. Leah, also, has pointed to this recently, when saying my reffing blog was the best thing I’d written in a long time, and it makes me wonder…

Because the problem is, I don’t really do anything. I live a simple happy life which revolves around typing and reading and playing squash and refereeing football and chatting pleasantly with my girlfriend, and that’s about it. There are no problems or dramas. And doing things requires an interaction with the world and the world, for me, has lost its appeal. Back in the old days I was very much a part of the world and I wanted to explore it and there wasn’t a part of it that irked me – but now there is.

The world, on the whole, is mostly pretty difficult to tolerate. Interacting with Leeds and getting out into it and ‘doing things’ I would find most challenging. The people don’t interest me and the things they do don’t interest me, and many of the things they call fun just give me a headache. Drinking, smoking, shopping, clubs, drama. It’s all stuff I avoid and there you have another cause for schizophrenia – ‘cos I’m pretending to be a part of this world when really I can’t stand it.

But this isn’t about moaning. Or talking about things I don’t like. Like I say, life is groovy and I like the way I’ve got it set up. This is about tackling that question of doing things, and about satisfying the part of me that still likes a good adventure.

And also the paradox of how the one time in the last few years I actually was out there in the world doing cool things I didn’t even write about it. I’m talking when I hitch-hiked across Mexico in 2009. Which is what I’m going to write about now. So.

I’d been living in Oxford the second half of 2008 with my girlfriend and her mum. It was an all right time but once I’d got the first draft of my book finished and then Christmas was done I knew Oxford wouldn’t hold me. It’s a nice place, don’t get me wrong, but a town more suited to a jazz-loving professor with elbow patches than someone like me. So when Perlilly flew to Egypt for New Years with her dad and her sisters I loaded up my backpack and stuck out my thumb for London. I was a month away from turning thirty-three and basically penniless and planless once again.

Which was sort of exciting, and mad.

I went to some friends’ house in Camden but they were all out. I waited until midnight and no one came home. What I didn’t I know was they were all off skiing. It got cold and I had no idea what I was doing. I walked to the train station in the early hours and fare-dodged a train to Gatwick and slept at the airport. And then the next morning I realised I was quite close to another friend’s house and I called and it rang and rang and just as I was about to hang up his mum answered and said though my friend wasn’t there I should go over and have some lunch, so I did.

I stayed with them a week. It was pretty awesome. But then my friend turned up and was an ass to me and I left.

In the meantime I sold my laptop to his brother-in-law, and sold my camera on eBay, and I had about three-hundred-and-fifty quid. They were about my last remaning possessions. I moved then to London, and found two jobs – one doing furniture removals and one trading on sports matches – and my girlfriend and I found a flat together in Newington Green. We moved in at the end of February and by April we had broken up. I was pretty devastated by that.

There were wranglings over the flat. I won’t go into it but it wasn’t very pleasant. In a nutshell, she wanted to stay and I didn’t want to leave. Two months flat-hunting and crashing on couches in London is not a nice way to spend your time and I didn’t want to face it again. Plus, I was quite enjoying my life. But then, out of the blue, I lost my job at the gambling place and when an old friend from many years past messaged me later that same day asking if I wanted to go to Peru, I instantly said yes.

I let my ex have the flat. I moved out and crashed on couches and readied myself for Peru. I was gonna get me back on the road.

Life, however, kind of got in the way. One thing was I had to wait for this little operation on a mucocele I had on my lip. It’s basically a blocked saliva gland that creates a weird little balloon of fluid that eventually pops and then the whole thing starts over again. Another thing was the visit of a couple of friends from overseas which I wanted to hang around for. My Peru-bound friend was looking to fly down there in June and I thought I could make it. A week or so before departure date I was doing a volunteer drug study in a hospital in Croydon – lovely time, earning around fifteen hundred quid in the process – and I came within minutes of buying a ticket, but it went. And then, suddenly, the ticket prices all went mad and it was like nine hundred pounds and there wasn’t a chance in hell I was ever gonna spend that much on a plane ticket unless it was a round-the-world. I searched and searched and all the reasonably priced tickets were gone. I let go of Peru.

In the process of trying to get to Peru, however, I’d started to think about Mexico again. Plane tickets to Cancun were inexpensive – charter flights could be found for as little as two hundred pounds – and I’d considered the option of flying there and heading down to Peru overland. The more I thought about Mexico the more I liked the feel of it. When I headed back to London after my hospital stay posters for Mexico were everywhere and my mind was made up. I bought a ticket to Cozumel for two-hundred-and-forty-three quid and on July 17th, 2009 I went.

I must add, though, that I had a whole heap of indecision about this – and it was an indecision I found almost crippling. Hadn’t I been trying for years to stay put and be normal? Wasn’t this just another case of ‘running away’, as people were always trying to get me to admit? But I’d tried the normal thing for a long time and it hung on me like a shirt that just didn’t fit. And the running away thing didn’t hold true either – for what was there to run away from? And wasn’t it always really a ‘running to’ anyways?

Still, I wrestled with the questions for a time and slept some more weeks on my friends’ couches. I tried to find the good in London and see if I could be like other people. And I deeply examined my nature and my history and to try and work out what I was. Ultimately, it led to a good conversation with a girl I know in which I expressed all my stuff and came to the conclusion that jetting off to distant places for little apparent reason was kind of what I was all about, my nature. Though it took a final fateful I Ching reading – good old I Ching, never lets me down – to get me to buy that ticket.

The chapter I tossed was ‘The Wanderer’.

Still, I was hedging my bets: if I didn’t like being there I could use the return portion in a week’s time and say I’d given it a go and it was no longer me.

And all that’s just to say, wow, I had a lot of indecision and uncertainty about taking that trip – weeks and weeks of it, and it was torture – and that even as I left London I was by no means sure it was the right thing to do. Doing the right thing had become so important to me. I hated the idea of getting it wrong again.

Crippling, it is, that level of self-questioning. Just do the thing man! That’s what I’d say now. And more too: just spend the money and go to Peru! The money don’t matter anyway.

But, like I say, that’s what I’d say now.

And, of course, it all worked out. Mexico was good for me, and the trip seems almost pre-ordained in quite a few ways.

Although maybe Peru would’ve seemed pre-ordained too.

Anyways, that’s the background – the boring bit – the non-eventful story of what led me from dwelling quietly in Oxford to making myself homeless to a brief dalliance with London to finally quitting it all and getting on that plane.

It was cold the morning I woke up in that last Camden dawn. Grey and drizzling, though July. The tube and the sad train down to the airport. And then eight or ten hours later – still only lunchtime – I climbed down the steps after a lovingly-stewarded Thomson flight with good food and good movies and Cozumel was HOT. The air steamed. The sweat leapt out of me instantly. I almost cried to be back on that Mexican soil. And the adventure began.

Ah, Mexico! Nine years away and now I was back – and a whole new part of that glorious country too, finally going to check out fabled Mayan pyramids and dig things I’d first heard about from the lips of lovely Dave Shapiro all the way back in destinous San Diego days of December ’98. The Yucatan! The steaming jungle! Temples and Palenque and all those groovy legends of old!

Yes, I was happy to be back. Back to being a wondering, eyes wide open youth. A simple little backpack – and the baking hot jungle sun – and the whole country – the whole continent, man – lying in wait. I walked out of that airport. I had no luggage to wait for. I strolled past taxis and buses and I hit the road forthwith. What better way to greet a country than that? Just stroll on out and see what’s around the corner. There’s always a thumb to take you where you need to go.

But thumbing, even, wasn’t in my mind this day: I just wanted to walk. The town was only a mile or two and I figured I’d amble it. The sun was beating and I could feel it shrivelling my brain – but when Rory’s in a new land, Rory wants to get it on. No standing by the road. No waiting for buses. Just walk. Plenty of time for all those other shenanigans later.

Travel. Freedom. Openness. Adventure. Instantly, it’s all coming back to me. I feel like I can talk to anyone. I feel flooded with possibilities. Let’s see what Cozumel has to offer. Let’s enquire into the price of renting a scooter. Let’s dig the map and consider sleeping out in jungle Mayan ruins or finding a deserted beach. Let’s baulk at the price of scooter hire and hotels and decide there’s nothing actually in Cozumel anyway and think about getting out of here. Small island, too separated from great Mexico. We need to be on the mainland, that’s what we need.

I spy a girl the girl who was sitting behind me on the plane. We hadn’t talked then but now we’re travelling we’re all good friends and I can just chat and ask her what she’s doing. Just chat and ask! After several months of cowering London frightenedness skulking unsure around strangers.

I mention Tulum; she says she’s meeting her brother on the mainland and he’s going to drive her down there. She says I can get a ride. Wicked, I say. And then we’re on the ferry in the Caribbean while a live band plays really quite excellent Santana Samba Pa Ti and looking down at the water which sparkles gold and blue and the sky is blue and the sun is gold and there’s so much light in this chilled-out Mexican afternoon just minutes, it feels like – just a turn of the page – from the dirty grey concrete of a wet and trodden London where heads look down and faces scowl and

Just minutes, man: that’s all it is.

Even two hundred pounds is just a bunch of minutes, wow.

Isn’t life wonderful?

And so that’s Mexico, and we’re back, and all thoughts of weeks and months – and maybe even years – of uncertainty are vanished and vanquished in the beauty of Mexican sun where of course everything is perfect. We land in Playa del Carmen, which is really just a big tourist gringo town for drinkers and such – but even that’s perfect and while we wait for her brother to appear we lounge shoes off on the beach and squeeze toes into sand and look out at the water and still the sun beats down and still it’s only lunchtime.

Wow indeed.

Brother arrives: his car’s broken down, we’ll have to get the bus. I frown inside at already having to pay fares when I thought I’d got a free ride – only brought about eighteen hundred quid and maybe I’m there for the long haul, a year or three and wind up in Tierra del Fuego living with the Indians or marrying someone en route – but turns out it’s only like three dollars to Tulum. And in we get, into what’s actually a really swish little air-conditioned minivan, and pretty instantly this fifty-year-old American woman starts talking to me and she’s friendly and nice and she gives me the lowdown on Tulum.

No, she says, I shouldn’t think you’ll be able to camp there.

Oh? My friend Dave says when he went it was just hippies on the beach strumming guitars and campfires and stuff. I thought you could camp anywhere in Mexico on beaches?

Well this one’s all hotels now, things have changed. Private beaches. Security and stuff.

Hm, I say, and she tells me about where she lives, and I say, well what about there? You think if I walked down the beach there I could camp up for the night?

And she says I’m not sure but why don’t you come and have a look and see what you think? And then: oh, I’ll tell you what, why don’t you just stay at mine? It’s a lovely place and we’ve room and I’ve got this friend with me I’m sure you’ll like and –

There you go: not two hours off the plane and already the magic has begun. Beautiful Mexico. Lovely Americans. And the wonders of the unseen glorious hand that swoops upon travellers and places them in places magnifique. Isn’t it grand?

Five days I stayed with her. Five wonderful days. Her place was right on the beach in a private little enclosure with swimming pool and coconut trees and a coral reef too. Iguanas hung out by the restaurant. We ate guacamole by the pool and I fell asleep in the sand. We snorkelled – my first ever snorkelling – and saw big-ass turtles and a manta ray and fish. And she was all spiritual and New Agey – just like I used to be – and there was lots to talk about there too.

I’d left London, actually, having just been to see Derren Brown. I was obsessed with the man and had come to look at many of my New Age beliefs through the filter of his ideas. I’d decided most of it was bobbins and I needed to be a little bit more discriminatory with things. Most of the things I’d experienced and labelled ‘divine’ he seemed able to replicate without any need for the supernatural: even things I’d witnessed in the presence of people like Amma and John Milton and Mother Meera.

So I was a little bit on guard with this lady, and when she told me that she did a therapy based around muscle-testing and would I like to give it a try I suppose I was in a pretty cynical frame of mind. Her and her friend seemed a little bit spacey. But it would be interesting to give it a go with an objective mind.

She did her thing. She lifted and moved different parts of my body and asked questions and eventually came down to some conclusions. She said I had issues around relationships that stemmed from things that had happened around certain ages. It all added up, of course – well, we can make anything add up if we want to – but more than that, it was the emotions I felt. It was powerful. I really felt something move. I was sceptical and pooh-poohing it – but I couldn’t deny that what she had done had touched me deep down. Something had shifted and come to the surface. And I felt it for hours afterwards.

And I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been a bit premature in embracing Derren Brown’s scepticism so whole-heartedly.

So that was the trip off to a good start. Meanwhile at her house I’d read a book on the Mayan pyramids and decided I didn’t really feel drawn to Chichen Itza but Palenque looked wonderful. Also, I’d figured that unless something major happened to change my mind that return plane ticket of mine would be going in the bin. I began to plot a route: there was the direct way to Palenque, which would take a day or two, or there was the alternate route down through Belize and Guatemala, which didn’t seem that far out of the way. Although, as it turned out, it ended up taking me about five weeks to get there.

I started out by checking out Tulum. Dusty Tulum the town and then the Tulum of the once hippy beach that was now indeed all private hotels. But still quite ramshackle in places – one ‘resort’ of cabañas I wandered into seemed abandoned and I’m pretty sure I could have snuck into a bed. In the end I found a bit of beach in front of a genuinely abandoned ex-restaurant and settled down in my sleeping bag there. I fell asleep early and then when I woke up it was dark and the stars were out.

My mind got blown.

There were billions of them.

I could have cried, lying there on that beach alone with the softly crashing waves and the soup of stars up above my head, just out of arm’s reach. Nine years in England – and in one second, in one inch of sky, I’d seen more stars on the beach of Tulum than in all my time there. What a sky! What beauty and magic and wonder.

I don’t think I slept much that night. I lay there looking at the stars and thinking about the dark and being amazed. And then at some point it started bucketing down with rain and I grabbed my things and raced for cover under the ex-restaurant palapa roof. I slept on the platform uncomfortable and looking nervously around for guards and scuttled out of there pretty early. Even on the beach, in fact, I hadn’t slept well – not just for looking at the stars, but also because I was nervous about sleeping out in the open and being somewhere where I shouldn’t be. This was one thing that was different about this trip: back in my youth I could have slept anywhere, and always slept good. I slept in a vacant lot in Los Angeles and in a town square in Wyoming. I slept by railroad tracks and by roads and behind truckstops and in gardens. Even in places like that I would wake up in daylight and stick my head out of the tent to see sometimes other human beings milling around and say mornin’. But by the time of this trip, I’d lost it. Though maybe it’s ‘cos I was always sleeping outside, without a tent. I just felt nervous, that’s all I know, like I was constantly worrying that someone was gonna clonk me on the head. Annoying, that. Growing older, maybe. Anyways…

Tulum. Nothing there. No desire for their ruins – tourist ruins – and, like a visitor from The New World on a tour of European cathedrals should always be, I was ever mindful of not getting ‘templed out’. There were Mayan temples everywhere: you’d go nuts if you wanted to see them all. Instead I pointed myself north, for Coba, and made it by thumb.

The ruins were closing by the time I got there. If I remember rightly, there was a pyramid there that was the tallest, or one of the tallest, in all the Yucatan (and maybe the world). In any case, the guys wouldn’t let me in and I decided to see if I could sneak around the back and maybe spend the night. I found a path. I waded into the jungle. It was proper and thick and spooky. I wasn’t sure but I waded on. I found some smaller buildings that had been exploded by trees – ancient Mayan bricks in the roots uncared for, unrestored – and I figured I was on the right track. But I was sweatily hacking away and also had no idea where I was, or if I was getting closer at all. And then I saw these bulbous cocoons or nests hanging down from some branches looking like lanterns made out of chocolate. They were big and weird. I crept in for a closer look. And that’s when I felt something bite me.

There was a damn thing that looked like a big brown flying ant on my side. Man, the fucker hurt! And then – another on my ear! And one on my neck! Motherfucker: another of the little bastards had chomped down on my leg. I remembered me and my friend Richard getting attacked by hornets in Frickley Park when we were conkering boys and a vision then of how we had run. And a flash of the way into the unknown jungle, perhaps down miles of steaminger and ever-thickening deadend paths, and the knowledge of the coming night, and a flash of the way I had come. All this happened in a microsecond. And the answer was clear.

Run!

Bite bite bite bite – and run. No sense fighting them off. No point swishing or swatting or hiding or protecting – just run the fuck away from there.

I ran. I sprinted down the path. I gave up on squatting in Mayan temple nighttime ruin dreams for one day and got myself back to safety. The little buggers didn’t follow me. My ear and neck and side and leg did throb. They’d gone numb. But it hurt too.

Fuck ‘em.

There was a lake there by Coba. There was an alligator in the lake and I went and checked him out. There was a little pool too, and I had a soak and laughed at my predicament. Some Australians came over and had a soak and we befriended. They found out I was just gonna sleep outside and they invited me to use their hotel room floor. They were doing the Palenque and San Cristobal route too. Nice folk.

We sat outside their hotel room in the evening and watched the dozens of gecko lizards race around the walls chomping up bugs. Yet more cool things I’d never seen before, in a lifetime of cool things.

In the morning I went to Coba and climbed the well high ruins, and meditated some on the pyramid steps and felt something groovy. I saw the girl from Cozumel there and her brother. It was hot and I’m not really sure what I did after that, or where I stayed. Perhaps I just left and got on the road down to Belize, had my one night on the roof of a half-built house in a town by a big lake I can’t remember the name of where I wandered the square and ate a couple of tacos and marvelled at how pleasant and sweet everything was, all those nighttime Mexican families out in the humidity not forcing their children to go to bed at six or seven p.m. like they do in England. Not keeping them inside. Promenading and stuff like that.

Nighttime Mexican families and the gentle freedom of the little brown children. Nice.

And then when I got to the border of Belize I did a weird thing in that I didn’t get any Belizean money. It just seemed like a bit of a hassle and I couldn’t be bothered. I figured I’d get some on the other side – but when I got to the other side there was nothing there. Just scraggly fields and a road. I walked along and there weren’t even any cars. I looked down and on a scrap of paper I read the words “push yourself” (or something like that) and my mind flashed back to all those weeks and months when I was living on trust in American and Europe and India. I thought, okay, let’s do that again – let’s cross this whole little Belize without changing any money, and just trusting that food will come – and if it don’t, well it’ll only be two or three days and we can manage that. I resolved to do it. In my heart, I said, okay. And then my belly got hungry and I looked down the long empty road and I said, are you mad? I want some food NOW.

But belly, I said, relax, relax. Okay, maybe we’ll get some money when we get to a town and we can eat. But you know you can survive quite happily for two or three days without food.

Belly don’t like it so much – but what to do anyway? Weren’t nothing around. And down that road we tromped.

A car approaches. I stick out my thumb. The car stops and in I get and it’s this lovely sweet Mexican family just going on ramshackle adventures ‘cos they felt like driving to Belize even though they’ve got like this terrible map and they don’t know where they’re going. Dad and mum in the front being jovial and fun. And two boys in the back, and pretty soon they want to play games and we all get to teasing and joshing and they even start tickling me, the groovy little tykes. Lovely family. Funny little car. Awesome Mexican holidaymakers.

And by the window Belize flashes by and Belize is suddenly really very different to Mexico. The houses are on stilts and painted pink and blue and they’re mostly pretty shambolic. It seems kinda poor, does Belize. And a wee bit scary too: tall gangly blackmen wander about with machetes hanging by their sides, their eyes lolling vacant like Haitian voodoo zombies. I wouldn’t want to be out there at night with them. Even the change of roadsigns from Spanish into English feels weird. Mexico seems like a long way away. I feel like we’ve landed on some creepy Caribbean island where once whiteman’s slaves have been left alone to scrabble in the post-apocalyptic dirt and hack each other to pieces.

Which is maybe kinda harsh.

Anyways, we drive on gawking and then when we reach a small fly-bitten town Mexican daddy says they want to get something to eat. They get out of the car and we cross the deserted street and head to this weird shack of a restaurant. The whole place has the feel of an abandoned seventies holiday camp, the ghosts of once youthful gleeful faces echoing in empty swinging doors and broken windows and screens.

I say I’ll wait outside, I’m not hungry.

But daddy insists and in we go. He orders food and he orders food for everyone, including me. A plate arrives and I’m thankful. And – aha! – although I’ve got no Belizean dollars I realise that given as these guys are Mexican I can pay them with my pesos.

I tell him that’s what I’ll do when we get back to the car. But daddy’s not having any of it.

The food is good and I’m starting to wonder, does that magic of trust still work after all?

And back on the road we go, and back once more through poor old forgotten Belize. The north of the country really is a little bit sad – at least materialistically – but also, actually, in feeling too. You can be poor and happy, sure. But I don’t think these guys were. It’s like joy just upped and left.

Still, we find a little bit of it: we’re cruising down that weird highway when we spy a big sign saying something like ‘Japanese Open Day’ and we pull in at this shack where a bunch of Japanese are educating the locals about their culture. How weird is that! Turns out they’re here doing volunteer work and they’ve taken the day to share their homeland. There’s Japanese music and some displays of martial arts and getting your name writ in Japanese and even loads of food. I have a bit but I’m too stuffed from lunch.

Lovely Japanese. It’s a sweet little stop off.

And then we go through a big city, where the Mexicans think they might stay, but it’s Orange Tree Town (or something) and it’s grim and don’t feel so nice. The Mexicans look around like timid stupid Americans in sweet Mexico and they keep on driving. They don’t know where they’re going but they’re having their fun.

They drop me off in Belize City and when they go I give the boys an Everton football shirt each that I’d brought for that express purpose.

I walk to the edge of the city and stand by a funky, dilapidated cemetery with English names and maybe English bones in the ground too. Belize used to belong to the English, I gather. Though apparently the Guatemalans think it’s theirs and show it so on their maps and in schoolbooks. Probably they’d take it but their guns ain’t as big as ours. Such is the way our world was built.

I get picked up by a trucker. His truck is huge but he’s only about five feet tall and maybe not even fourteen. At least, that’s the way it looks to me. The truck roars and splurts and farts and suddenly Belize becomes beautiful. All the way down to Belize City it was dusty and grim – but then you hang a right and next thing you know everything’s green and verdant and you’re pointing at mountains and there are trees and rivers and it’s lush beyond belief. The houses get nicer and it’s a whole different world. This Belize is about as beautiful as any place I’ve ever been.

He drops me off. A police chief picks me up. He’s happy and gay and raps on in an English patois I can barely understand. He reminds me of Eddie Murphy pretending to be an African in Trading Places. He finds out I’m thirty-three and says, a-ha, Jesus’s age when he died – and he’s the first of many to say this and I think perhaps it means something (turns out it doesn’t). He leaves me not long before sunset and standing in green and beautiful country I start to think about sleeping when an American in a pick-up swoops me up and it’s a lovely man called Dan.

Dan’s just landed. Dan comes here pretty often to volunteer at a deaf community and school set up by the Amish. He tells me all about it and I really admire what he does. He takes his turn off and I say, so where would you think would be a good spot to camp for the night? and he says, well why don’t you stay with me?

I do. It’s amazing. It’s a beautiful little house with a sweet bedroom and a fan above the bed and clean, freshly-made sheets. There’s an en suite bathroom and, boy, do I need a shower. I’ve been on the beach in Tulum, and on the Australian’s floor, and then on that roof in Bacalar (I’ve looked it up since that earlier paragraph). I’ve been on the road too, several hundred miles. In a nutshell, I’m dirty.

Dan has to go to a meeting but he says, help yourself to what’s in the fridge, and I snack and shower and I’m lovely and clean and the place we’re in is beautiful.

Later, he comes back from his meeting with a plate of dinner for me and I eat again. Three meals and not a once have I asked for anything.

The magic continues.

The next day Dan’s due to go to the Amish church service – it’s a Sunday – and he asks if I’d like to go too. I do, I say: what an opportunity. And after a yummy breakfast we go.

Wow! Dig those Amish: they’ve come here from Europe via the States and Mexico and maybe further down in South America and they’re here now all white and German-speaking in the middle of black and Spanish Caribbean Belize. They’ve bought a whole bunch of land and they’ve worked their asses off to get it productive. The country is poor but these guys aren’t. They’ve sweated and toiled and now they’re supplying the entire population with milk and dairy and whole little towns have grown up around their endeavour. They’re good folk. They work hard. The women sit in their bonnets on the right and the men wear braces and have funky little beards and I sit with them on the left. They’re friendly and inquisitive and Dan’s hooked it up for me to eat lunch with them. And off we go into an Amish families house. The places this thumb’ll take you.

I was real struck by that lunch. The simplicity with which they lived, for one: just bare rooms and plastic chairs and no decorations or fripperies, real basic stuff. I guess they had about six kids and I couldn’t get over how amazing they were. There was one guy about seventeen and he was so straight and manly and good. He was unlike any other teenager I’d ever met. His interest was cows, I guess, and working real hard. I felt like as I talked with him I had to keep in check my whole experience of the world, because I knew he had no concept of it. I’ve never met anyone so innocent in all my life. And how conscious I became of all the things I knew: of drunkenness and blow jobs and fucking women up the arse and consumerist town centres. Of whooping wild in cars and expressing all my dumb little thoughts. Of gadding about from country to country and all the things I’d seen. Of chasing God and riches and fame and the X Factor and Simon Cowell and watching Snuff Box and movies and titties and porn and every little thing that’s on the internet. All of those things and about a billion more besides were in my brain – and not a single one of them was in his: I could see it when he blinked. I really had to keep a lid on my tongue – for his innocence was beautiful and I didn’t want to do a thing to spoil it.

Wow, that people live like that, so distant and different from the modern world. I don’t think there’s anyway I could do it myself – but hats off to them for staying true to what they believe is right and good. They seemed like happy people. And that’s what counts when all’s said and done.

We lunched. We talked. And then it was time for Dan to put me back on the road. I had not far to go and I made it the border with Guatemala and, irony of ironies, there was an exit charge and I had not the money to pay it. I’d made it all that way without spending a dime and, without begging or telling anyone I was without dosh – the rules of faith – my body had been fed. I’d accomplished my goal and now I was stuck there. I’d have to hitch back to the last biggest town and find a bank that would change pesos or pounds. Scuppered.

I walked back from the border then to the dusty little town of [something or other]. I sat there for a bit and then I heard this awesome singing coming from somewhere over in the fields. A guitar accompanied it and it felt so soulful and even spiritual. I figured I might as well go check it out. I tromped off through the mud and wind my way through shacks and then I came to a small group of maybe ten people sitting on makeshift benches under a lean-to. At the front a man played guitar and a woman sang. They welcomed me in. It was a kind of church I guess.

More songs. Some talking. And plenty of smiles. They prayed and I figured they were evangelical Christians or something and it was all okay with me. There was a good vibe about the place. Although I can’t say I dug it when they got to the end and the head honchos got everyone standing up and started ‘slaying them in the spirit’ or whatever it’s called. There was one young girl who wasn’t going down. She was looking at me and I really felt for her. I smiled at her and conveyed something along the lines of ‘this is all crazy’. The more she wasn’t going down, the more they prayed and shoved and slayed. Eventually, she went. She cried and shuddered and there you have it: the power of the Lord. But they didn’t try it on with me.

Oh, but before that they got me up to the front and gave me the microphone and asked me to tell my story (in Spanish) which I did sweetly and humbly and surprised myself with my sentences. And then when it was all done I asked if I could play the guitar and introduced a vibe of my own, strumming my mellow little instrumental lullabies and, after cajoling, singing them my tender version of ‘All You Need Is Love’.

The couple whose house it was invited me for dinner and said I could sleep in their hammock and when all else had gone we retired inside for beautiful papusas and beans. The mother fed me good and the funny thing was that the TV blared unwatched and they didn’t really talk about Jesus much, as though it was a switch they’d turned off. They asked me what I was doing and the guy said, what are you doing out here walking in strange lands at your age, shouldn’t you go home and find a wife? Like the laughing Eddie Murphy police chief and his Jesus death pronouncements, he was the first of many to say something like that too. I wondered if it meant anything and I guess I decided that it did…

The shack was a single L-shaped room and eventually they went round the corner to bed and I climbed into a swinging hammock where the kitchen table had been. An interesting twist to things. A fun way to spend an evening. In the morning we ate eggs and beans and papusas and they sent me on my way with love.

Isn’t it beautiful, the way we’re all so kind and sweet?

Town. Bank. Money. Hitch to the border. Enter Guatemala. Change my leftover Belizean dollars for Guatemalan Quetzales. Count out about four dollars fifty worth. And then enter Guatemala and a dusty town where the men where cowboy hats and the children call you “gringo”. Hey, I say, that’s not very nice – and, in any case, I’m not a gringo, I’m English, no soy Americano. But to them all I am is just a gringo and inside I feel all indignant and pigeon-holed – and then I realise, wow, this is like a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of one percent of what so much of the world has to deal with on a daily basis, that ain’t so nice.

Plus, in Guatemala they have mobile phone adverts where one of the tariffs is called the Gringo Tariff anyways – international calls, I guess, to the folks up north – and so perhaps it’s not such a bad word in their ears.

Guatemala. Ramshackle and not like Mexico at all. And nowhere to change money and so onto Flores where I believe there will be. I get on a bus. It scuttles and bounces along the road – and then somewhere down the track I spy a lake out the window and think, wow, that looks beautiful, and spontaneously hop off. I find an old track and amble down it, down the backs of houses. In the lake girls and women scrub their clothes and one of the girls lends me soap and I scrub mine too: when in Rome and all that. I walk further along the lake until I’m out of sight of everything and then I sit down and dig. It’s quiet and lovely and beautiful and out over the waters I do look.

I sleep that night right on the jungle floor. I wanted to get into my sleeping bag but it’s too hot. Instead I lay on it with my shirt off out in the open and still I’m dripping with sweat. I don’t sleep much: all around me bugs and lizards and maybe snakes and mad spiders scuttle and shudder in the leaves. It’s another test of faith, sleeping out like that, knowing what that jungle contains. The next day I go exploring through it and there are spiders as big as my hand and they don’t look so sweet. I got lost on that hike trying to circumnavigate the lake and spent four hours hacking through the branches of trees that seemed to be closing in around me. I had no idea where I was – but I knew I was nowhere near where I thought I was. The jungle can be kind of scary like that, when the trees are crowding in around you and squeezing you in like sardines in a can and you don’t know where the trail is and the branches and vines become pretty much impassable.

But I got my way out – well, duh – and I looked back and thought, well that was fun. I made my way back to the road, and bought two cheap avocados and a stack of tortillas, and I thumbed my way to Flores, which is where all backpackers in Guatemala go.

On the way there I passed a sign for Tikal: for apparently amazing Mayan jungle ruins. I thought about it and I thought, nah, Palenque’ll do me. What am I gonna find there anyway? And when I later found out there was a fifteen dollar entrance charge, I was glad. You can’t see it all.

And Flores. Dubious. Rubbish. There was nothing there to commend it, no matter what the guide books might say. It might be an island city of sort of interesting in that regard but really all it was was a bunch of gringos walking around in rubble. I spent a fruitless two hours trying to find a place to change money. I checked out the hostel but even though the beds were dirt cheap I couldn’t afford them. I sought escape by walking out over the bridge – out past my first sight of one of Guatemala’s fabled gun-toting Pizza Hut guards – but then I just ended up in this weird spooky place that didn’t feel right at all. It was dark and scary. More guards with guns and no gringos or even streetlights. I kept on walking hoping for a secluded roof somewhere but the vibe just got worse and worse. It started to feel unwise. So I sat in a proper downhome cafeteria – just a tarpaulin, really – and ate some tortillas and eggs and I headed back to Flores. I crept into the hostel and spent the night on one of their concrete benches. Poor night of sleep again. Not a pleasant memory.

The next day, I hit the road. I had to find cash and I couldn’t believe how difficult it was proving. I set off hitching, and hitching set me right. No longer tromping in grim northern Guatemala concrete – I was moving. I got a good long ride going south and by mid-afternoon I’d made nearly the whole length of the country. The land was getting more beautiful and less dusty. We got up into the mountains. Lush and green where bananas grew and Indians sold them by the side of the road. My final ride was a well-off guy in a nice car who sped me right across Guatemala City on the maddest and most horrible highway of my life: trucks and buses were flying in from all angles; every two hundred yards there seemed to be an exit or an entry and the cars roared on in and across and I just know they had to have accidents a plenty. But not on the night I rode that road: my driver was good. He took me all the way to Antigua, the old ancient capital of the whole Spanish thing. It was small and chill and I found a hostel bed and slept good.

But even there I couldn’t change my pounds or use my bank card. Luckily I found a kindly English man who would do me an exchange. Those few days of scrimping through Guatemala eking out my four dollars were not so fun. Who’da thought finding a home for your pounds or pesos would be so tough? But it’s dollars in that part of the world – that’s one thing I learned.

Another thing I learned was: spend your money if you’ve got it. Sure, it’d been nice to experience the still-there magic of providence and trust during my little experiment in Belize, but more than that there was something else to learn. For instance, why suffer when you’ve got nearly two grand in the bank? And why hoard for some unknown future when you’re supposed to be trusting anyways? I had plenty enough for the near future – and enough is enough. Sure, I didn’t know how long I’d be away – but we could cross that bridge when we came to it. Eighteen hundred quid, man! That was triple what I’d lived on in my last two years in the States.

More than any of that, though, there was the realisation that I just didn’t need to be doing that anymore. Sure, I could put myself out there, and live on trust, and watch amazed as day after day tortillas and beans miraculously came my way – but what point in that when you’ve proved it already? Did I need to learn that lesson? No: I’d learned it plenty and I’d learned it good. I’d reminded myself, in Belize, that it was still there, and I should have been satisfied with that. No point re-doing old lessons when you know full well you’ve mastered them true. Instead, new lessons to be learned.

Like: stop being so tight. Like: take care of yourself and spend a little dosh. Like: if you’re going to have a holiday, there ain’t no shame in enjoying it – and certainly no requirement to live like a tramp. And, biggest of all: the realisation that when I slept good, in a place where I wasn’t afraid of snakes or club-wielding bandits, I felt much better the next day. A pattern had arisen that wasn’t too difficult to see: good night’s sleep, happy and fun day; cheap night’s sleep, grumpiness and misery.

So I resolved to splash the cash a little. I started paying for hotel rooms and hostel rooms and in need of a rest I stayed in Antigua a number of days and enjoyed the comfort immensely. In any case, it was marvellously cheap and the six dollar bed included an immense breakfast buffet of fruit and bread and cereal and potatoes and eggs and tortillas and every other thing imaginable.

I read ‘Eat Pray Love’ there and dug it loads. Lucky woman. She sort of inspired me.

Though I can’t remember how.

In any case: good lesson for someone like me.

Splash out. Ain’t no glory in living poor. And ain’t no need when you’ve got it anyways.

Though I can’t say I always lived by that in the weeks and months that followed.

Anyways, it was on from Antigua and via lovely Lake Atitlan – forget the name of the town I stayed: it was the hippy one with all the massage places – to weirdly end up in Quetzaltenango, sort of guided there by my coin and little messages I believed I was picking up on. Xela, they call it, for short (that’s pronounced Shay-la) and it was first mentioned to me by this English bloke in the hostel in Antigua (which is pronounced An-tee-gwa, by the way). He’d been doing some volunteer teaching there and I thought maybe I could stumble into something like that. He said he liked it and the way he said it sort of struck me. In any case, my rides took me there, no matter which way I tried to go, and I figured it was worth a try. Though when I landed on the outskirts of town in the dark Guatemalan night and it seemed as dirty and dusty and menacing as the place outside Flores had been, I wondered what the hell I was doing. I walked into the centre resolving all the way to leave first thing in the morning. But slowly those dark and dirty outskirts turned into something a bit more picturesque and colonial, and suddenly I emerged into the wide-open town square with large grand buildings and a big crowd gathered excited around a display of gymnasts or BMXers – I can’t remember what – and it seemed okay. It seemed young and friendly and safe and I decided to saunter into the crowd and see what was what.

I ended up sauntering right up to this American lady with her two daughters. After a bit I struck up some conversation and asked them if they knew of a place to stay. They said they did and we chatted while we walked to it. They were Utah and they were lovely and nice. And then we all introduced ourselves and I got kind of stopped in my tracks. They were called Alison and Hannah and Coco.

That was weird. It doesn’t sound weird now but it was weird at the time. All the way from maybe a month or so before leaving England I’d been seeing the word “coco” everywhere I went and it always struck me as meaning something. It’s not very often something like this happens but when it does it’s sort of obvious and undeniable, even if it sounds totally bonkers from the outside. But to me, however, it was clear – and the frequency that it happened, and the feeling that it gave me, convinced me that it just had to mean something. Even when I got to Mexico and right down through Belize and Guatemala I’d kept on seeing it and being puzzled and frustrated by its mystery. And then here was this young girl introducing herself as Coco and in that instant my mind stopped.

I checked into my hostel. I pulled out my journal. Just that day I had written in it some more about the mystery of Coco and how I was convinced I was going to meet someone of that name – but who the hell is called Coco these days anyway? – and now it had happened. Writing it now, it seems so inconsequential. And yet, at the time, I was flabbergasted – and the effect it had on me was dramatic. Instantly, everything was in place: the uncertainty of leaving England; of choosing Mexico over Peru; of the timing of everything; of, even, rushing through Belize when I’d kind of thought that maybe I should have stayed longer, given how beautiful it was. But all moments of the previous days and months had led me to Xela, and to that town square meeting with Coco and her mum, and suddenly the whole weird mess of it made sense. If this meeting was right, then everything had to be right. And being right – being in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing – has become of paramount importance to my life.

Coco was the sign that everything was okay. Very clever, bringing it all together like that. And all those headaches of questioning and doubt just fell away. And for the first time I accepted that trip and the rightness of it.

I stayed in Xela then for about a month. Magic things happened and though I tried to leave two or three times I was always drawn back by the feeling in my heart. Xela is not especially pretty or touristic – but there’s something about the place that made me and several other people I talked to fall in love with it. I still can’t put my finger on it. But it was real.

I spent my first few days in Xela sleeping in an old man’s shed on a hill high above town. I’d found him through a volunteer place and agreed to help him build some things. I did a bit of work but my heart wasn’t in it. Also, I got sick from some bad street food and spent a day or two shitting like a pissing cow. Puking, also, This was one of the times I tried to leave, but I ended up coming back.

I enrolled then on a course in a Spanish school where they put you up with a family and you have long intense lessons every day. I splashed the cash – though it wasn’t much to speak of. It was a really cool thing to do – and my Spanish came on in leaps and bounds.

Somewhere in there, also, I discovered Las Georginas, the hot springs about ten miles away. They’re at the end of a long mountain road and though developed, really beautiful and chill. The waters range from hot to scorching and are clear and pure. You can take a bottle to the source where it trickles down the rock at the back of the main pool and it tastes like hot lemonade. There’s so much water the pools are swimming pool size and getting on for four or five feet deep.

There are also little bungalows there where you can spend the night and I splashed the cash again. All the staff go home and you’re basically alone there with the whole place to yourself. I think there was one other couple when I stayed but I didn’t see them that night. I retired early and made a fire – they provide wood and candles and kindling – and fell asleep in front of it. And then maybe around midnight I went out and stood in the pools under the bright full moon in the crisp and cool still mountain air. I don’t know why, I looked down at those dark pools in the cold night and thought they must be cold by now too, like a bath that has been left unattended. But they weren’t. I slipped into the main pool and it was even hotter now, in comparison to the night. Me alone under the full moon up the side of a Guatemalan mountain bathing naked in my own private hot spring. It don’t get much better than that. I loved Las Georginas.

I went there three times, I think. The third time was a week or so before I left Xela, heading up there with a group of other Spanish students from the school. On the bus ride over I’d chatted with this Irish girl and I sort of took a shine to her. I liked her face and I liked the things she said and the way she said them. I liked her body, too, when I saw it in her bikini. We chatted on and off in the pools and I told her I was going to stay the night again. She said she’d like to do that but she had class in the morning. I said, I bet you can change it if you ask the guy. She asked the guy. He changed it for her. She stayed.

We soaked in the pools and then we went to the bungalow. I made a fire and we sat in front of it, digging. I lent back against the bed and she sat herself in front of me, leaning her back against my chest. I put my arms around her. The fire blazed. And the caressing began, and we kissed.

She said the next day that the evening had been “perfect”. It don’t, I suppose, get much better than that. Que romantico! She was a tremendous lover and I think I was too.

But as for specifics – well I think I’ll wait for the book…

Four weeks I stayed in Xela. Three escape attempts – but I always came back. By the end of it the city had me hooked – and I still don’t know why, it wasn’t like I really did anything. I learned my Spanish. I meandered around the town. I bought tortillas and this awesome bread I found. I went nearly every lunchtime and ate a big chocolate ice cream from the vendor in the town square. And I slept early and had naps and strummed a borrowed guitar and that was pretty much it. The feeling Xela gave me makes no rational sense. But when it came time to leave, I struggled to pull myself away. I think I fell in love with that city. Or, at least, I think Xela filled me love. It must be built on one of those fabled ‘energy centres’ the Earth’s supposed to possess: some sort of global heart chakra. I don’t know, but it’s a wonderful place, and it ain’t just me that thinks so, for plenty of the gringos I met were going back year after year after year. To that dusty dark town where dogs are always barking and bombs are forever going off in the street (they’re really firecrackers). Where nothing much happens. Where there are still armed guards outside the McDonald’s. But it’s got it’s little something, does Xela.

Still, a man’s got to move – and I moved.

I got a ride out of there with a father and his daughter. We chatted and I was sure the daughter had just said something about her mother dying. I didn’t quite catch it, and it didn’t seem possible because she was chatting so openly and freely and smiling and things like that. But she said something again and I asked her and she confirmed what I had thought: si, yes, the mother had died three days ago and maybe they’d just buried her or maybe it was the day before. I couldn’t believe it, that this girl of maybe sixteen and her father had just gone through something like that and now here they were chatting amiably and picking up hitchhikers. That’s very sad, I said, and she looked sad for a moment and agreed, but it was mostly as though they were in total acceptance of it and perhaps believed things that I believe, that people go when it’s their time to go and it’s all good and perfect and they’re in a better place anyways. Except, I believe those things, but I’m not sure if I can really live them – but these people…it was emanating from their bones. It made me think of the whole Mexican thing and The Day of The Dead and how they’re supposed to be much more accepting and embracing of death than we are. Well, it is one of the few certainties in everybody’s life, right? But back here in England we just get traumatised and weird, unable to speak, unable to deal with the emotions that we’re feeling. These people were like…wow, it wasn’t that they had turned their backs on their mother, they were just operating on a whole different level with regards to death. Sure, it was sad – but the life must go on, and one still has to make the best of it, still has responsibility for one’s own happiness in each and every moment. They seemed so close, these two. They had each other still, and I guess for that they were grateful. And there they were, picking me up and enquiring happily into my piddling little life. Astounding.

Another ride took me to a town called La Democracia, where he had to stop to pick something up. I sat waiting in the bed of his pick-up and, I swear, I’ve never been in a town with so many incredibly beautiful women. And by women, I guess I mean girls. They lolled lazily in hammocks draping bare brown legs over the sides and looking at me with deep and passionate soulful eyes. They were perfectly formed. Perfect hair. And they oozed languid sex, and smouldered. They just rocked in their hammocks and stared. They were like the maidens of some province Asterix goes to, so perfectly drawn and curvaceous and hot. Nowhere in Guatemala did girls look like this. I don’t know how I kept myself from leaping out of that pick-up and chasing them.

And then back on the road. Down a canyon with terrifying cliffs and drops. The guys on the back of the pick-up point down off the side of the road and there’s a spot with maybe twenty white crosses. Bus, they say, forty-three people dead. Ay ay ay…

I exit Guatemala at La Mesilla. Ever since I’d begun my trip I’d been hung up on the name Cuauhtémoc and knowing that that’s where the road entered once more into Mexico – Cuidad Cuauhtémoc – I’d aimed myself for it. I just had a feeling, I guess – call it a sign. And for that reason I’d wound up at Atitlan, and in Xela, and met Coco, and spent that lovely exquisite night with that Irish girl, and felt all that love, and everything else besides. All ‘cos Cuauhtémoc spoke to me. And all because I followed.

Now I’m in Chiapas. The scenery is gorgeous: green and mountainous and expansive and pure. It feels differently already from Guatemala – and Guatemala – the south of Guatemala – had been awesome. Been Mexico’s where my heart is, and Mexico has that something special.

I take a late night bus to San Cristobal de las Casas and walk to a campsite where no one’s on duty and sleep under an unoccupied caravan in my sleeping bag sniffing pines. San Cristobal is nice, and touristy, and well-to-do, and looks a bit like Antigua, and there’s not really anything there for a guy like me. After a few hours, I’m done, and I head on out to the highway and start thumbing my way for Palenque, some six weeks after I could have got there.

Palenque, I wrote about here. It’s basically more or less true. The only things I would want to change are these: that the free gratis bus ride donation came later, when I was with Yair and we were on our way back to San Cristobal; that the line about me and the Mexican girl misunderstanding each other is purely that, not any sort of euphemism; and the time-frame has been changed. I was there, I think, three nights, and the timeframe was this: day one, I got there too late to get in and so I checked into that hotel and met the Mexican girl and bought her dinner; day two, we attempted to sunrise sneak in but didn’t make it, and as it says I just wandered on in later anyways (same so far); day three, I left Palenque and tried to hitch north, towards Villahermosa, but couldn’t for the life of me get a ride, so hitched south instead, to Agua Azul, where I went walking and swimming and met a couple of Spanish girls who were on their way to Palenque and decided to head back there with them. They stayed in town but I wanted to go back to my hotel and ended up getting caught in an enormous rainstorm that soaked me more thoroughly than if I’d taken a dip in the sea; day four, I found a big bag of beads under the bed that belonged to the Mexican girl and spent time drying my clothes and then tried once to hitch Villahermosa, but waited two hours for nothing and then I gave up and I checked my facebook and there was a message from Dave there giving instructions about spending the night in Palenque. I said, right! and I marched back to Palenque and that’s when I snuck in and hacked my way through the jungle and had my awesome time on top of the temple dancing in the rain and watching the lightning roar in the monkey-howling jungle all night.

Day Five, I forgot all about Villahermosa and turned myself south. I had that big bag of beads and, knowing that the girl lived in San Cristobal and traded in the square, I figured I might as well try and get them back to her. Also, I was being haunted by a vision of a bridge over a river that I’d passed where I thought I might be able to build a raft and give floating a try instead of thumbing for a bit. And, also, it was just clear that Life didn’t want me to go north for some reason, given that I’d spent something like four or five fruitless hours in total pointing that way, when I always every other time got picked up quick sharp.

Anyways, that’s Guatemala and Palenque and the reason why I about-faced – and that’s also a pretty good place to stop it, I think. I really didn’t think I’d write so much. Eleven thousand words and I’m not even sure anything of depth! But, ya know, we got to fill in the blanks.

To be continued some other time, amigo.

Hasta luego!