[ 18:40 thursday 25 december – all stretton, shropshire ]

sergio lies snoring quietly on the rug in front of the gas fire. bach preludes and fugues scurry from the powerbook’s little speakers. clusters of newly-opened presents dot the floor and tables. mum, dad and granny are in the kitchen fighting with the electric oven which switched itself off halfway through cooking their duck.

i’m here at granny’s house sitting in the armchair that was permanently reserved for grandpa, somewhat in the centre of the room with prime position for the fire and the television. it’s a month since grandpa sat in it for the last time. one morning granny found him unusually difficult to awaken and it turned out he wasn’t breathing. he was ninety-seven years old and the last ten years were a battle with depression, fear and physical decline. i visited just a couple of weeks before his death and found him lucid and calm. when the time came to leave i crouched beside him, clasped his hand and stroked his wispy white hair. in my heart i had a sense it was the last time i’d see him. when dad phoned to tell me he’d died i felt no sadness. i pray that he has found an afterlife filled with the serene mountains he loved to climb so much in life.

it’s been a long time since i wrote. now i break my silence. happy christmas to friends everywhere.

[ 18:20 friday 26 december – ludlow, shropshire ]

supper at granny’s last night was a splendid affair. it felt like we’d returned to the christmases of my childhood, to the time before the air around the dinner table was heavy with grandpa’s joylessness. after sixty-five years’ devotion to him it’s not going to be easy for granny to build a new life as an individual. but after a month it already seems to me that she is talking more lightly and laughing more. she’s a strong lady. i’m sure she enjoyed having us all there.

now sergio and i are here with bear and david, my excellent godparents. we spent this afternoon exploring ludlow in the freezing rain. everywhere are echoes of the former power and importance of this place, perched strategically in the midst of the wild march-lands between england and wales. the church is quite spectacular, a spacious gothic edifice most of whose fabric dates from a refurbishment in the fifteenth century at which point a majestic 135 foot tower was also added. the misericords are smothered with gorgeous carvings of beer barrels, pigs, hanging fowl and other accouterments of mediaeval life.

[ 00:45 wednesday 31 december – shipton street, london ]

back home, typing away to napolitan music. it’s been several years since the words “home” and “london” have been linked for me. ah well, i find myself more adaptable than i expected. the last time i wrote was in july when i was on my way back to stromboli after two weeks staying in warren and ann’s greenwich house. i spent just five days on stromboli, shifting all my belongings to gustl and valerie’s magazzino down by the beach at scalo dei balordi, packing everything into a transportable form and organising for its despatch.

predictably this turned out to be considerably more complex than it had any right to be. on poste italiane’s website i’d found details of a european package delivery service which looked ideal. so on my final full day on stromboli sergio and i lugged all the boxes to the post office in the blazing sun. we filled in all the forms then giuseppe (the most agreeable postmaster in the world; he phones when anything arrives for me) pointed out that the european package service was not available from stromboli. it’s too remote.

oh dear. leaving all the boxes in the post office i embarked on a flurry of research into the options. one possibility was to despatch my boxes from the post office either in lipari or in milazzo. but how i was going to get them that far was not clear. officially there was no outbound courier service operating from stromboli, but mario the pasticciere from bar ingrid had recently taken over responsibility for incoming courier deliveries and suggested i speak to universal parcel service. i phoned and after a few seconds consultation the lady said it would be no problem to collect a consignment from stromboli. she told me the local office was siracusa and they would send a van to pick up my boxes. bearing in mind that it takes at least a day to get from siracusa to stromboli this seemed slightly unlikely, but she insisted it was the case and proceeded to take my order. discussing it afterwards with mario he predicted that the ups office in siracusa would umm and ahh then call the company on lipari that handles all courier deliveries in the eolian islands. this company in turn would ponder awhile then most likely call mario and get him to send my boxes over. this didn’t seem like a watertight system but during my time on stromboli i have learned to trust to fate in such cases.

there being nothing more to do, i passed the evening getting nostalgically drunk with paolo and a few other friends. as dusk fell sergio and i excused ourselves, careered down the steps from paolo’s terrace, threw ourselves into the sea and swam out a little way, from where we watched the sun dissolve into the golden horizon. the next morning we shifted all the boxes from the post office into maria’s shop on the piazza, where she kindly agreed to keep them until someone turned up to collect them. then it was time to get on the hydrofoil and say goodbye to stromboli for the time being.

for the next two months i stayed on in warren’s house as britain sweltered in absurd temperatures. london was horrible and i felt wretched, but i kept my attention fixed on setting up trampoline and getting some investment together. i also started house hunting. in the meantime the sequence of events proceeded exactly as mario had predicted and after a week he received a call to pick up my boxes and send them over to lipari, from where they were conveyed to siracusa and entered the ups system, arriving creditably intact in greenwich a few days later.

on 18 september sergio and i moved into the house where i sit now. it’s the first floor of a victorian bakery in the no-man’s land between shoreditch and bethnal green, with most of the internal walls knocked down and steps which fold down from the ceiling to lead one to the roof. there’s a fireplace where we burn timber harvested on late-night scavenging missions on local streets. during the day three big windows wash the room with december light, and draw one’s gaze up the long straight road towards haggerston. on sundays the cobbled alleyway below the house becomes an open-air cafe and we find ourselves in the thick of the columbia road flower market. the many diversions of old street, brick lane and kingsland road are a few minutes’ walk from the front door. it is a satisfactory sanctuary. my new address is 36b shipton street, london e2 7ru.

on the first of october trampoline systems limited officially raised its first commercial investment. the total, £127,000, is tiny from the perspective of the venture capital market but it’s twice what we set out to raise and from my working-on-thin-air perspective seems like an amazing sum. craig and i are busy transforming it into magic of various kinds.

then on 23 december, just in time for christmas, a signed license agreement arrived from none other than the british foreign office, our very first clients. they’ll be using trampoline to provide communications and information management for an initiative they’re setting up to create a worldwide partnership of governments, businesses and non-profits involved in renewable energy. there are mountains to climb to make the business a success but this has certainly been a well-augured beginning.

during these months there have been many experiences about which i’ve wanted to write. a street full of steel bands going full tilt the night before notting hill carnival. a party around a fire by the banks of the canal in west london with eric, bobo and roberto. ten days of equinoctial sun and storm on stromboli in october. the turning on of hayle’s christmas lights with anna and adam in cornwall, accompanied by the town’s brass band. the tumultuous anti-bush demonstration in trafalgar square with craig, sergio, kirmo, warren and ann; after which we arrived back slightly late for our housewarming party. and so forth. on each occasion something has held me back from writing. i’m not sure what it was. maybe i was waiting to change in some way.

after writing the paragraphs from bear and david’s on 26 december sergio and i stayed with them one more day. in the afternoon we borrowed mountain bikes and headed out into mortimer forest. it was a beautiful day, crisp cold air with occasional pockets of mist hanging over the trees. the ground was covered with fallen leaves and still muddy from the previous day’s rain. we had a wonderful time skittering along the paths between the trees and zipping up and down hills. i got us rather lost and as the sun was setting i did feel a twinge of anxiety as the forest is large and we were not well prepared for a night in the wilds. however we carried on following our noses and eventually we emerged on a road, about ten miles from where i thought we were. we made it home shortly after sunset, covered in mud from head to foot.

i’ll be seeing in the new year from a crowded dancefloor in the centre of london. to everyone who’s reading this i pray 2004 realises old hopes and brings new dreams.

* : c : *

[ 17:35 wednesday – st john’s college, cambridge ]

sitting on the step of “d” staircase, second court, powerbook on my lap. from time to time a student clipclops across the unlit echoey quadrangle. most are alone and most are carrying a rustling polythene bag, conveying the evening’s groceries back to their rooms. this is a large simple court from the sixteenth century with red-brick ranges rising three storeys, triangular gables capping the upper row of windows. in the middle of the northern range is a tower. on top of this was once an observatory, from which the planet pluto was discovered. or perhaps it was neptune or uranus, one of those icy remote bodies anyway. the observatory was dismantled when it was found the tower was subsiding under its weight. i lived in the tower one summer.

the college bell chimes the quarter. a gaggle of youths lurches past joking and laughing. the stars are clear overhead, a few wisps of cloud.

yesterday was the first anniversary of michael’s death. on the underground, arriving back from berlin, i looked over someone’s shoulder at a magazine and after a while realised the face i was staring at was michael’s. not the face i knew but a face of fifty years earlier with black slicked-back hair and smooth skin and less laughter. the photo was one of four. another was the queen mother, another was john thaw, an actor famous for playing a television detective, i cannot remember who the final one was. the title at the top of the page was “those we have lost in 2002”, the magazine was “the week”. how strange, i thought, that they have chosen michael, a man whose name was not familiar to many and whose face was known by hardly anyone. nonetheless i felt like pointing to the little picture and shouting to the carriage: look, look here, this was a great man.

i came up here to cambridge today to speak with ray jobling, the senior tutor, and catherine twilley, the development officer. it’s always a pleasure to visit and catch up. plus i hope to get a small article about trampoline in the alumni newsletter.

: *

[ 00:16 monday 26 november – via carrozieri alla posta, napoli ]

i write from an enormous room on the top floor of a crumbling eighteenth-century palazzo, behind the architecture school in the centre of town, tended by two grand napolitan ladies who appear to be equally ancient. there is no heating so i rely upon layers of heavy bedclothes to keep the chill night air at bay. adjoining my bedroom is a still huger salon, crammed with mismatched furniture. i am here as a result of a tip from my friend gabriele in palermo. otherwise i should probably have ended up somewhere sensible and ordinary.

it is almost exactly a decade since i last stayed in this city. the former occasion, in the middle of december 1991, was also my very first foray into italy. at that time i was studying at cambridge and managing a choir composed of my fellow choral scholars from st john’s college. financed by the banco di napoli and the british council we flew over here, gave a ticket-only charity performance in the british consulate, then a proper concert in the chiesa santa chiara in front of an audience of about 4000. after a self-indulgent programme comprising most of my favourite repertoire (josquin, gombert, poulenc, stravinsky…) we encored with mel torme’s “christmas song”. to my chagrin the crowd left us in little doubt which part of the programme they appreciated. the front two rows were composed entirely of diplomats and politicians and on this occasions at least their feelings were entirely representative of the wider population. afterwards the british ambassador took me to dinner with barone barracca who showed us his collection of antique guns. slightly overwhelming for a fresh-faced undergraduate.

despite all this i came away thinking napoli rather an ugly city, wondering why people made such a song and dance about it.

i travelled over from stromboli last wednesday determined to return with a codice fiscale, the tax registration one needs in order to open a bank account, subscribe to a phone service, view billing information online, buy a packet of crisps, &c. i first tried to obtain one in milano last summer but after a couple of weeks circulating between half a dozen offices in different parts of town, invariably closed at whatever time i chanced to arrive, i gave up. this time, despite another campaign of iterative misinformation, i persisted and am now the proud possessor of a smudged computer print-out bearing the precious chain of figures and letters.

during the struggle i have become completely intoxicated with napoli. for most of my life i have acknowledged myself a devout ruralist, viewing cities as splendidly diverting places in short bursts but essentially dehumanising and awful. now my credentials are in tatters. somehow this place has cast a spell on me. there is a precipitous excitement on the streets, a vividness and immediacy of living. it is an unruly, messy, passionate place. the narrow winding canyons of back-streets, decorated everywhere with washing, are continually interrupted by sumptuous obelisks and churches. law is something which emerges from a kind of wild consensus, all that is prescribed from above is contemptuously ignored. when an entire population takes this stance it is difficult for any authority to prevail. napoli is the triumphant example of a city sprung from humanity in all its shades, not from mechanism or rational organisation. nobody would ever plan napoli. it is a dangerous place, corrupt, decadent. dark and light elements are so tightly intertwined here that they cannot be disentangled. the city is a vast mega-celled organism; breathing, seathing, pulsing with an intelligence of the seasons of man and earth.

santa chiara is just around the corner from me, a massive mediaeval structure flattened during the war by an american bomb intended for the port and rebuilt immediately afterwards with unperturbable hauteur. i look on it with different eyes from those of 1991. walking back from an arabic cafe on piazza bellini (where i had been writing my journal and reading a powerful old history of the jackson presidencies of the 1830s) i entered piazza gesu nuovo to find it thronged with young people; cars and scooters arrayed at crazy angles around the edges, a bonfire blazing on the far side. to many this would appear a scene of urban collapse, a source of fear. such people i would urge to observe the details more closely; to see the intricate maneouvers negotiated between drivers to enable vehicles to come and go, notice how the fire is kept in place with the occasional nudge to avoid damage to surrounding buildings, witness how the crowd manages itself and how rapidly incipient scuffles are subdued. what i see is a celebration of civilisation, not its absense. what is see is a community occupying and using its city in a way i have not witnesses elsewhere. in napoli i feel tremendous optimism.

: cH

[ 16:11 sunday 1 july – number 181 bus between bakewell and sheffield ]

the sun’s shining and the moors stretch to the horizon in all directions, punctuated by limestone crags. i’ve never visited this piece of britain before. for the last couple of days i’ve been staying in the midst of it with mark waddington, who’s running projects in gambia, sierra leone, ghana and camaroon for a charity called village aid. i met mark in the point seven bar in tamale, northern ghana, one night last november and spent a weekend with him, his girlfriend anatu and her son mickey in the mole game reserve.

village aid’s annual meeting took place yesterday in a community hall in bakewell. it was a lively and open-spirited affair, not at all bureaucratic. i have never come across a development organisation so rooted in a single community as is village aid in this small market town. the trustees and members are bound together by a myriad neighbourhood links. from this springs a real sense of shared endeavour.

anatu was there, as was saeed, who runs village aid’s tamale office and whose wedding i attended. it was surreal to be with them again in such different surroundings.

there has been another small miracle. my canon digital camera was stolen from the mandela development centre in tamale back in november. i did not expect to see it again but as i write it is in a bag beside me. someone tried to sell it to a friend of saeed’s a couple of months ago. it still had some of the photos i took at his wedding, which were recognised and word got back to him. after some delicate to-ing and fro-ing he was able to recover it and this afternoon it came back into my hands.

long-term readers may recall that this is not the first time the camera and i have parted company and been improbably reunited. within a couple of hours of acquiring it in 1999 i left it on the underground in london. it was picked up by a group of surfers from perth, australia, who took it on holiday with them to cornwall and handed it in to the lost property office a month later with 25 photos depicting their various exploits and a note wishing me well.

it’s not a particularly good camera and i haven’t exactly looked after it well. but somehow we seem destined to remain together.

: cH

[ 20:58 sunday 25 march – gate 4 , glasgow airport , glasgow ]

yes i know . weeks go by with nairy a peep from the wanderer and suddenly here is a slew of despatches .

perhaps it’s documenter’s block . it took a while to re-acclimatise to london and by that time there was such a backlog of things to write about that i didn’t know where to start . so i put it off , and with each passing day the bulk of material grew yet harder to chip into .

it took a completely unforeseen event (becoming imprisoned in glasgow) to break the deadlock . a kind of descriptive enema .

my flight has been called for boarding .

[ 22:56 – stansted express , platform 1c , london stansted airport ]

uneventful flight . i dozed .

i’ve walked about twenty miles today , up in the hills . it was fabulous . after breakfast in the hostel’s dining room , all carved mahogany and baroque plasterwork , i went straight out and found a footpath heading upwards . this is what i’d come for . but it wasn’t long before i hit a gate with notices urging walkers not to proceed any further for fear of spreading foot and mouth .

i stood there for a while , weighing my conscience , before opening the gate and proceeding (it was only a request , after all) . soon i was in open moorland , patched with bracken . the vista over loch lomond and the islands broadened around me . a little snow began to fall . a few sheep were dotted about munching but i didn’t pass near any of them .

over the crest of the hill the path entered pine forest , through which i continued until the trees ended and i found myself looking out over a wide expanse of the firth of clyde . my way was blocked by another gate festooned with warning notices .

again i pondered . i could either turn round and head back the way i’d come . or … looking at my map i could continue down to the firth , walk along to the little town of helensburgh , then follow a road cutting back through the hills to arden on the shore of loch lomond , not far from the hostel .

i hate covering ground over which i’ve already passed . so over the gate i climbed .

a while later the path rejoined a road . i heard a car approaching from behind . it slowed , drew up beside me , the window whirred down . a round-faced lady addressed me from within : “have ye come from bannoch ?” yes i have “did ye not read the notices ?” yes but i though if i kept to the path and avoided contact with any animals it would be alright . she was very angry and she sounded like she was under a lot of pressure . i apologised and promised i would not ignore any more notices . she drove on .

i felt very ashamed of myself . it seemed to be that my behaviour reeked of a kind of urban selfishness i despise . there isn’t a single known case of foot and mouth being spread by walkers who have had no contact with livestock . but that’s not the point .

it was a long walk and my feet were sore by the time i got back to the hostel . i just had time for a bowl of soup before leaving for bannoch to catch the glasgow train .

soon i shall be back in london . the flat in shoreditch has come on a long way since i moved in . over successive weekends inaki and i disposed of all the carpets , sanded down the floorboards , gave them a couple of coats of varnish , painted the sitting room white and painted the woodwork in the hallway a muddy green (on which our friends are divided) . i hired a van and collected some bits of furniture from mum and dad in gloucestershire . it’s growing into an excellent space to live and work .

my work meanwhile is gaining momentum . but i shall write about that another time .

it’s good to be back a-wandering !

: cH

[ 21:10 saturday 24 march – loch lomond , argyle , scotland ]

as the location tag suggests i have escaped from north glasgow college !

after about three quarters of an hour there was a scraping and a rattling , then the shutter flew upward . a pall of flat glasgow light slopped across the floor and an irritated man bustled across the hall muttering to start jabbing at buttons on the alarm control panel .

i simultaneously swept my things together and stood up , which didn’t work very well . the alarm siren ceased and the man turned to look me up and down . “hoo on ayerth aer ye ?” he asked , incredulous in 100%-proof glaswegian . i started mumbled my explanation . but as soon as i got to the word “london” a glow of understanding suffused his features and it was clear i need say no more . there is no act of stupidity or folly so great that a glaswegian could not imagine a londoner accomplishing it . i was released .

my flight back to london was booked for that evening , but having come all this way it seemed daft to go straight back . so i put my booking back to sunday evening and got the train up to balloch , at the southern tip of loch lomond . from there i walked a few miles up the west side of the loch to a youth hostel occupying a stupendously gothic victorian mansion .

i sit here now in a huge study with a fire crackling in the grate and the wind rustling outside .

i like glasgow a lot . less polite than edinburgh , in which i spent many long weeks nursing a succession of plays during the early years of the electric company . but it is a greater joy to get away from urban civilisation altogether . this place is sublimely peaceful . across the leaden water of the lake are mountains swathed in snow and cloud . it’s gorgeous .

: cH

[ 17:48 friday 23 march – ringford building , north glasgow college , glasgow ]

ummm … i’ve got myself in a bit of a scrape .

i flew up to glasgow on tuesday night to spend a few days filming the six remarkable people involved in the sse’s pilot local programme . this was a mixture of interviews and going out and about .

the final piece was recorded at three this afternoon in the sse headquarters here at north glasgow college . i stayed on and continued with various other bits of work . about twenty minutes ago i was ready to head back into town so i packed up my stuff , locked the room and came downstairs .

somewhat inconveniently , however , there seems to be a steel roller-shutter where the street door was . and all other exits are similarly secured . it seems the building has been closed up for the weekend , with a degree of security becoming to the neighbourhood’s reputation .

now the burglar alarm has started wailing . oh dear .

so here i am , sitting on the floor in the hall with my powerbook on my lap and no means of escape . there’s a coke vending machine the other side of the room so i won’t be short of fluids and sugar if i’m stuck here a day or two .

i’ve called sandra duncan , glasgow co-ordinator for the sse , and explained my predicament . she was kind enough not to laugh whilst i was on the phone . i tried calling the main college office but everyone’s gone home . so sandra’s got onto the police and they’re trying to get hold of someone with a key .

this is all very embarrassing …

: cH