[ 22:31 friday 25 february – haggerston road, london ]
last march i spent a few sublime spring days in cornwall. the sky was clear, the air soft and filled with birdsong, the hedgerows bursting with fresh shoots and blossom. i made a small pilgrimage to madron well near penzance where i’d been just once before, more than a decade ago. one feels a sense of magic there. it’s easy to understand why so many people have considered it blessed through the centuries. here’s the film i shot.
: c :
[ 23:41 sunday 9 january – haggerston road ]
on saturday the first of may, a little before seven in the morning, i reached stromboli on the overnight ship from naples. it was a perfect spring morning. the flat sea gleamed like silk. the sky was cloudless. dolphins raced and jumped either side of the ship’s bow as we neared the black triangle of stromboli. i caught one of them in mid-air with my camera.
the ship dropped anchor a few hundred metres off the port, turned and backed slowly until it was close enough to put a couple of lines to the quay. the anchor chain was wound in until the ship was firmly held in position and the ramp started to creak down to meet the quay. i was one of the first off, carrying the big rucksack on my back. i hadn’t slept much on the voyage or the previous night but i was filled with excitement and emotion to be back on the island.
there were many familiar faces in the throng of people waiting on the quay. i was overjoyed to find my friend pasquale, whom i’d thought was in australia. we greeted each other then he got back to his work. i walked up to the malandrino restaurant and had a coffee and pastry with my friend paolo. then he took me down to his house on the rocks in piscita where i’d spent my first winter on stromboli, and which he was generously lending me for the coming week.
alone in the main room, a spacious open cube with white walls and a polished cement floor, i put down my bags and stood still. the familiar sense of arrival and peace swept over me accompanied by the soft breeze passing through the room, the twittering of birds outside and the shushing of the waves on the little black-sand beach below. i organised my belongings, changed into shorts and sandals and walked out onto the terrace to look out over spiaggia lunga and breath the sweet air.
thus began the last day of my old life. i spent the rest of it wandering around the island, catching up with friends, seeking out people i hadn’t seen in a long time, reacquainting myself with beloved places, piecing together what had changed in the six months since my previous visit. the first of may is the “festa dei lavoratori” throughout italy, the workers’ day celebration. on stromboli there’s a big party at the port in front of one of the main restaurants with music and free food and drink for everyone. it’s the last big community celebration before the summer tourist season takes over. i knew lots of my friends would be there but by the evening i felt so tired it was hard to summon much enthusiasm for the walk across the island. i sat reading in my kitchen by the light of a candle, soothed by the waves and flickering flame. but in the end i put on my shoes, extinguished the candle and set out for the port, intending to show my face briefly then return.
the party was already in full swing when i arrived. a couple of hundred islanders were dancing and making merry to a band whilst the air was filled with smoke from a row of big charcoal grills on which meat was being cooked. i collected a glass of wine, spoke to some friends and danced half-heartedly. in my memory the picture of what happened next is that the crowd parted and a smiling young man walked towards me through the middle. i didn’t know him but the family resemblance prompted me to ask “are you matteo sforza, luigi’s brother?”. an hour later we were at the end of fico grande’s ruined old jetty, kissing.
the days that followed were sublime. matteo was working in a shop during the day. in the evening he would come to my house where we would eat dinner, play music, talk and dance. towards the end of the week we took the hydrofoil to lipari together to visit matteo’s older sister anna. the last evening carried the heaviness of everything we were trying to avoid thinking about. all too soon it was time for me to board the hydrofoil to milazzo and watch matteo’s face shrinking to a speck on the quay. i felt numb. matteo had talked of visiting london in october but it seemed distant and unreal.
three weeks later matteo arrived in london with his over-stuffed suitcases. i met him at the airport and led him back joyously to my house in dalston. we haven’t looked back since.
here are the photographs from that enchanted week on stromboli when i met him.
: c :
[ 10:15 monday 30 august – livonsaari, finland ]
i’m thirty feet above the ground in a treehouse woven between three pine trees. this has been my home since i arrived with kirmo and tim on friday night.
the house is a tangle of ropes, beams and platforms which has evolved around the angles and conjunctions of the branches. it’s roughly pentagonal in plan with a diameter of twelve feet or so. one corner is sheltered by a tarpaulin roof but other than that the structure is open to the elements. the mid-morning sun casts flickering shadows across my keyboard as it filters through the tree canopy. from the front there’s a view over recently-harvested grain fields, forests and smooth grey rock outcrops.
reaching the platform involves a climb of twenty feet up a slender oak before crossing to a pine to ascend a further ten feet. i suffer from a fear of heights so my first few ascents and descents found me clinging in mortal terror to each bough. stepping across from one tree to the other required an act of particular determination. but as i grew familiar with the location of each foothold and how i needed to move to get from one to the next my fear gradually became more manageable.
five years ago tim clubbed together with nine friends to buy sixty-five hectares of land here on the island of livonsaari in finland’s south western archipelago. several of them have built houses, settled here permanently and started families. there’s now a full-time community of 13 adults and 8 children. one of them farms the fields. two of them can build and repair just about anything. at the centre of the community there’s a communal house and a wood-fired sauna. tim started building the tree house in the first year and has added to it each summer. yesterday we carried some windows from an old pig shed and hoisted them up to the platform. two of them are already fitted and as i write tim is hammering a third into place. eventually he plans to enclose the roofed corner so the tree house can be used for brief visits in winter.
on saturday night the community’s wood-fired sauna was lit, a lengthy process undertaken about a dozen times each year. the stove must be lit and kept fed with wood for six hours before it’s ready to use. there’s no chimney so the hot fumes fill the sauna cabin. when the last wood has been consumed vents are opened to let clean air in and the sauna begins. we were amongst twenty-odd people roasting in the sauna, sitting wrapped in towels on the terrace and singing songs around a bonfire. after our first spell in the sauna kirmo, tim and i walked down the track to the shore and threw ourselves into the baltic. the water was surprisingly cold and the bottom was slimy black mud. this was more than compensated for by the electro-illuminescent plankton which sparkled in the water as we swam and left a milky fizz behind us.
it’s three days since i touched running water, saw a mirror or used a mobile phone. i’m mostly wearing mostly the same clothes i arrived in. the night air is chilly so we remain fully dressed in our sleeping bags. our meals have been cooked alternately on a small paraffin stove and a steel brazier burning small branches. an escape of this kind works wonders an soft, urbanised, over-networked creature like myself.
: c :
[ 13:43 monday 11 january – isla gran roque, venezuela ]
it only takes half an hour to walk here from the village, squelching through the soft mud which borders the mangrove-fringed lagoons. but nobody comes here. in spite of its proximity to habitation the cove feels marvellously wild.
i’m perched on a heap of bleached coral, shaded from the searing intensity of the sun by a beneficent mangrove. the atlantic rollers have piled dead corals of all kinds into a steep ridge around this small semircular bay. to my left the craggy cactus-speckled mass which forms the backbone of gran roque rises out of the turquoise sea. before me a dozen gulls slowly orbit two guano-covered islets. behind me the mangroves and lagoons stretch to the airstrip at the south-eastern tip of the island. three pelicans bob lazily in the water. every so often one of them rises laboriously into the air before folding its wings back and plummeting into the water to gulp at a fish.
it seems like a lifetime ago that i was bouncing along the road from caracas in the bus on new year’s eve. later that evening adrien and walked down the dual carriageway from playa grande into catia la mar on a hunch we’d find some excitement there. we weren’t disappointed. having dined at a street-corner stall surrounded by soldiers and police we struck off from the main thoroughfare to explore the narrow residential backstreets. each street, barely two metres wide, was lined with small one or two-storey dwellings mostly fronted with yards sporting elaborate nativity scenes. the residents of one street had clubbed together to decorate it with arches of christmas lights along its length. families were sitting on chairs on the street in front of their houses and milling about. children were dressed in their sunday best.
it felt somewhat taboo for us to be there but the atmosphere was friendly. as usual i trusted to smiling and randomly greeting people as a recipe to ward off any trouble. eventually we came out into a larger road running between two big social housing projects. here we came upon an enormous sound system set up in the middle of the street playing salsa. we got some strange looks but after a few minutes were invited to sit at the side of the road with the organisers and buy some beer, to which we happily acceded. this was followed by invitations to purchase marijuana and cocaine which seemed a less good idea so we judiciously declined.
we continued to rove the streets. every few minutes someone would come up to us and warn us it was dangerous for us to be out. the US state department accords caracas the distinction of having the world’s highest murder rate. there are a hundred and fifty killings each week, mostly gun-related. travellers need to keep their wits about them but i’ve been in places which felt a lot more perilous. most of the people we encountered were charming.
at midnight we found ourselves back at the sound system where deafening barrages of fireworks were erupting from the street and from the windows of the apartment buildings. the pop and crackle of the fireworks was accompanied by the sharper report of pistol fire. this was a little disconcerting but the guns we saw were all pointed reassuringly skyward. adrien and i embraced the sweet old fisherman and the cripple with whom we were standing and wished them a happy year. a pair of heavily intoxicated men approached us shouting “venezuela! venezuela! viva chavez!” to which the sensible response was clearly an enthusiastic repetition of the same cries. a little while later we deemed it prudent to slip away and walk back up the road to playa grande before things got wilder.
at five we were awake and on our way to the airport and the creaky dash eight which was to convey us to los roques. the flight only took half an hour but we landed in a different world. the approach took us over the curlicues of white sand and coral with which the archipelago splatters twenty miles of the turquoise caribbean. we landed at the mangrove-fringed airstrip on gran roque just before nine o’clock in the morning on new year’s day under a perfectly clear sky. descending the steps from the plane the airport consisted of one shed functioning as arrivals office and a second shed raised on stilts which served as the control tower.
at this point i still had no idea how i was going to get to the island of rasky (otherwise spelled rasqui) where matias lived, or indeed where in the archipelago it lay. adrien suggested that i should come with him to the yacht and he and his friends could give me a lift. i was glad of the chance to continue traveling with adrien a little longer so i thanked him and accepted. we set off together into the village which was completely deserted. the mounds of empty beer cans in the scruffy square at its centre testified to the previous night’s jollities. we emerged on the main beach, dropped our bags and stood for some minutes without speaking. after caracas the silence was astonishing, mesmerising. nothing but the lap of the small waves and the plop of diving pelicans.
i was given two cups of coffee (and a blessing) by the manageress of guest house that was slowly creaking into life. after an hour or so adrien and i got a lift on a dinghy which took us out to his yacht on the far side of the anchorage where we found his friends soundly asleep. adrien and four of his friends sailed from marseilles last september on a year-long voyage to cross the atlantic and explore the caribbean. for two weeks adrien had been separated from them to spend christmas in new york. like me he’d hoped to reach los roques for new year but had similarly been thwarted, which is how we met at caracas airport. gradually the crew stirred into life. they’d dancing until dawn and struggled back to the yacht only a couple of hours before our arrival. adrien distributed belated christmas presents over coffee.
the chart revealed that rasky was just a short hop to the east of gran roque. once everyone was sufficiently conscious we raised anchor and got underway. within an hour the water beneath us started to shift hue from deep azure to aquamarine as the depth decreased. ahead of us was a miniscule speck of land with a triangular white structure and a green spatter of mangrove. with a thrill i realised i was looking at rasky. when the water became too shallow to proceed we dropped anchor and four of us transferred to the inflatable tender to row ashore. matias knew i was coming but he didn’t know when so i was able to make a gratifyingly dramatic entrance and catch him by surprise. we became friends when we both lived on stromboli. i hadn’t seen him since he moved to venezuela five years ago. i introduced him to my friends and he introduced me to his wife carolina and their nine-month-old baby estaban. adrien and his friends stayed at anchor off rasky overnight then departed the next morning to explore an archipelago a hundred miles westward. i swam out to the yacht as they were preparing to leave to collect a shirt and wish them bon voyage.
i spent the next five days on rasky letting the intense solitude of the island absorb me. it takes about twenty minutes to walk around its circumference. there’s a live coral reef off the eastern side of the island, super-abundant with aquatic life. matias and his family are the only permanent inhabitants. the white triangle i’d seen is their house, an elemental wooden a-frame with one room downstairs and one room upstairs. at its side is a second a-frame house painted black in which are three guest rooms. energy is provided by two wind generators and three solar panels supplemented by a diesel generator which runs in the evening. water is provided by an osmotic desalination system. it is possible to take a fresh water shower for a couple of hours in the evening from a tube in a shed at the back of a house except the wind complicates this blowing the dribble of water hither and thither. it’s best not to touch the walls while showering as this gives an electric shock. between them matias and carolina are responsible for running the guest house, cooking, cleaning, maintaining the equipment, ferrying guests back and forth and bringing all supplies over from gran roque. seven days each week they work from six in the morning until ten at night. they are rewarded with a life of astonishing beauty.
on rasky the dominant element is the wind. it blows ceaselessly from the east and there is no shelter from it. in the absence of other sound its rush is the main thing you hear. day by day it increases and decreases in force but never for a moment does it slacken to stillness. i became transfixed by it, conscious of every variation and nuance. i slept in the upper part of matias’ house with an open window at either end (it rains so rarely there is no need for glass). the wind entered through one and left through the other. i placed my mattress underneath the eastern window where the wind came in. during the night the sheet beneath which i slept was constantly undulating and lifting as eddies of wind whirled around and tugged at it.
the main fauna on the island are hermit crabs, black lizards and mosquitoes. the former, locally called “ladrones”, are exceptional. they are everywhere. the sand is criss-crossed with their zig zag tracks. at any moment half a dozen of them are likely to be roving the house. they wear black and white snail shells, grow to the size of a fist, are scarlet in colour and have one immense purple pincer. when they are disturbed they fold themselves into their shell like a puzzle with the pincer flat over the entrance to the shell and the legs concertinad around it. they can reach almost any point on the exterior of the shell with their sharp-pointed legs as i discovered the first time i picked one up. only by placing a finger immediately above their head and a thumb at the very rear of the shell is it possible to pick one up without molestation. the older ones have extraordinarily powerful pincers, capable i suspect of crushing a child’s finger bone. esteban has already had a couple of run-ins with them.
the black lizards seem to be perpetually shedding their skin which gives them a faintly unhealthy appearance. every time i sat down to read they would creep up and nip my toes which became quite irritating. the mosquitoes meanwhile are monsters. next to those i encountered with kirmo in lapland they’re the most aggressive i’ve encountered anywhere in the world. at twilight a merciless assault commences which continues for several hours. they blithely penetrate cotton and linen. however their reactions seem oddly slow and it’s usually possible to squash them when they bite. but by then the damage is done and a thousand eggs have been fertilised.
finally four days ago i crossed with matias to gran roque and installed myself in a small house he rents here. the contrast was overwhelming. the population is not more than a couple of thousand but after the solitude of rasky it was like arriving in a great metropolis. on adrien’s yacht i met a lively italian girl called martina who is also staying here on gran roque. we got to know each other and in the evenings i’ve enjoyed dining with her and her friends, catered by a substantial roquita matron named philippa whom everyone calls “mamma”. a couple of days ago martina and i resolved to go diving. this was my second experience scuba diving, the first having been in the grenadine islands in 2007. i enjoyed it so much i ended up doing five dives and rather by accident gained my open water diver certification. i was taught by a brazilian speaking alternately italian and spanish then took the exam in english.
in a couple of hours i’ll meet matias at the quay and return once more to rasky. this will be my final night in the islands. tomorrow afternoon i fly back to caracas and the following day to oporto and london. i’ve been recording lots of film using the fish-eye lens mum and dad gave me for christmas and taking plenty of photographs. hopefully there will soon be some visual evidence to share as well as these words.
it’s been a blissful journey. my deepest thanks to matias and carolina for letting me share their life for a moment.
: c :
[ 17:49 thursday 31 december – bus from caracas to playa grande, venezuela ]
stuck in traffic at the edge of caracas airport with landing airliners passing low overhead. car horns and salsa music blare on every side, punctuated by the report of exploding fireworks as excitement builds towards new year. the sixteen seats of the bus are filled with people returning from a day in the city. around us the jungle-clad mountains are hung with sullen clouds as the tropical twilight quickens towards darkness.
i flew into caracas airport yesterday afternoon and immediately threw myself into a battle to find a seat on one of the two light aircraft crossing to the island of gran roque. my friend matias lives on a miniscule islet called rasqui, where there is no mains electricity or water, which is located in the same archipelago. there’s no way to contact him but he’s expecting me in the next few days. it proved impossible to get a seat for today but the application of a modest bribe secured me space on a flight leaving caracas at half past seven tomorrow morning. it will curtail my new year festivities but i find myself blithely unconcerned about that. from gran roque i’ll find someone with a boat willing to take me over to rasqui.
after a sublime ten-hour sleep (having had none on tuesday night) at a small hotel near the airport i spent today exploring caracas with a young french yachtsman called adrien whom i met at the airport. he got a seat on the same flight as me to join his friends and their yacht at gran roque. he’s an excellent fellow adventurer.
the first thing that struck me about caracas is that there are no tourists. during seven hours today we saw a total of three. this has the benefit that the usual poor-country ecosystem of aggressive touts and “guides” is also absent. it also means that we are wildly conspicuous. people stare at us everywhere we go. in general people are very kind and solicitous. every few minutes someone comes up and warns us that walking around in whatever area where we are is dangerous. the second thing that struck me is the ubiquity of enormous posters featuring the ever-grinning mr chavez accompanied by revolutionary slogans.
this evening adrien and i will follow our noses and seek some entertaining dive in which to celebrate. then it’ll be time to catch a few hours’ sleep and begin the next stage of the journey. this will probably be my final despatch until i return from the island.
in the meantime, feliz ano.
: c :
[ 08:58 monday 28 september – bus from central palermo to punta raisi airport, sicilia ]
it’s touch and go whether i’ll make my flight back to london. i got to the station quarter of an hour early for my 8:09 train. after twenty minutes it struck me as odd that the station was swarming with people, predominantly school children, but i hadn’t seen a single train. this seemed ominous for peak time on a monday morning. arrivals were being announced and passengers advised to stand back from the edge of the platform but no trains were materialising.
i asked an old man on the platform who said “if the train doesn’t come, maybe the next one will” which was admirably philosophical but not exactly reassuring. 8:09 came and went. then the indicator board mysteriously went blank and details for the 8:39 appeared on the next platform. i searched out an official who apologised that there was a strike and all trains were cancelled.
once i would have felt irritated that no signs had been put out, no announcements made, to warn travelers of the situation. but my relationship with sicily has reached a point where i accept her foibles, perhaps even feel affection for them. so i simply rushed outside and got a seat in the half-hourly bus which runs from the station to the airport.
that was half an hour ago. this is the peak of the morning rush hour and we’re still battling through the palermo streets towards the autostrada. my chances of reaching the airport before check-in closes are evenly balanced.
i flew into trapani last saturday with sergio and spent several days there with his family. then on tuesday i journeyed to milazzo and took wednesday morning’s first hydrofoil to stromboli. the crew told me a scirocco was rising from the south-east and they were uncertain if they’d be able to dock. indeed there was a large sea running by the time we reached the island three hours later. but they managed to come alongside just long enough for me to leap off.
that was the last boat to dock until saturday. within an hour the waves were crashing down on the quay. there’s a special atmosphere on the island when it’s cut off like this. nobody arrives, nobody leaves. then after two days the wind and sea shifted ninety degrees and a maestrale came up from the north-east. now the waves pounded spiaggia lunga whilst scari and the quay fell into the lea of the island. stromboli was re-connected to the outside world.
yesterday afternoon as i was packing my bags the wind shifted back to the south-east and waves began to lick the sides of the quay again. one of the two companies running hydrofoils to stromboli cancelled their services. but my boat managed to come alongside. the hydrofoil was pitching and lurching alarmingly as we ran up the gangplank. it was the roughest i’ve seen anyone dock there.
the journey back to milazzo was quite an adventure. every few minutes the forward foils would catch a wave and the bow would slam down sending torrents of water over the cabin. i have the greatest admiration for the siremar crews. they continue to operate these machines masterfully under conditions in which most would stay in port. we reached milazzo right on time and i caught the last train to palermo.
it was eleven in the evening when i arrived in palermo. after my time on stromboli and with sergio in trapani i was expecting palermo to be the anti-climax of the trip. but sicily blessed me with one last surprise and i found myself in the chaos of a religious festival in the quarter where i was staying. a huge statue of the madonna was being carried through the streets by young men with priests and white-robed women carrying candles in front and two fifty-piece brass bands following behind. every twenty metres a handbell would ring, the statue would be set down and one of the bearers would shout invocations at the statue at the top of his voice to be affirmed by the rest of the bearers with an impassioned cry of “viva maria!”. all the while the bands kept playing, one alternating with the other to save the musicians from complete exhaustion. it was incredibly moving, there were moments when i had tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat.
dangling my camera, video camera and audio recorder from various limbs i threw myself into the thick of the procession. it took an hour passing down via roma before pausing and turning into piazza sant’anna. the piazza was blazing with ornate festal arches studded with coloured lights. as the procession entered a welter of fireworks commenced which rose to a deafening crescendo. fragments of burning carboard began to rain down and people started retreating nervously before a series of huge explosions marked its finale. the statue passed into the small plain church of maria of the mercede. there was an awkward moment when it came off the ramp to its resting place at the alter, triggering a thrill of terror that some harbinger of bad fortune was about to transpire, then a final heave restored her to her resting place and everyone relaxed.
i ate a carton of panelli on the street, drank a few glasses of rum at the tiny bar “monkey” on the piazza where i met some friendly musicians, then it was time for me to retire and get a few hours’ sleep.
thus sicily continually tests me and shows me her different faces. it is a place, a people, where i find a vividness and intensity of life that raises me above myself.
we are on the autostrada now. i think i will reach the airport in time.
: c :
[ 23:33 wednesday 19 august – haggerston road, london ]
when trampoline raised three million pounds in 2007 the business plan anticipated raising further investment at the start of 2009. i duly started speaking to venture capital firms this spring. trampoline is widely respected and the field of social analytics is gaining attention. but the financial crisis has led firms to cut back on investing, allocate more money to their existing portfolios and focus new investment on ventures that are either tiny or close to profitability. businesses like trampoline which have completed product development but are just starting commercialisation are finding it impossible to raise finance from conventional sources. one fund after another turned us away.
the realisation that we weren’t going to be able to raise more capital was terrifying. i’m responsible for a dozen people’s livelihoods and the trust that my friends placed in me when they invested at the beginning. it was particularly galling to think that six years’s effort would be thrown away just as we were on the cusp of seeing the payoff. the orthodox choices in this situation would be to sack most of the workforce or try to sell the business for anything we could get. i felt trapped at the centre of a dimishing set of choices.
then one evening, after dinner with my friend eric, i had a wild idea. i’d heard of a technique called “crowdfunding” where the internet is used to raise small sums (generally below a hundred thousand pounds) from thousands of people. it’s been used in the film and music industry, but never to finance a technology business. why shouldn’t trampoline be the first to do it?
the next morning i scribbled down a one-page outline describing my idea and sent it round the management team. i half expected people to tell me i was insane. but they didn’t. several days later, after thinking through the details, we assembled the whole company and told them we were setting out to raise one million pounds from up to a hundred investors with a minimum stake of ten thousand pounds.
i spent most of july with lawyers working out how to could operate the crowdfunding process within the regulations policed by britain’s financial services authority. a breach could result in criminal charges being brought against me and craig as directors so there was a strong incentive to get it right.
finally on the twenty-ninth of july we unveiled the scheme to the world and it immediately started attracting attention. the financial times wrote a feature when we made the announcement and quoted me in another article a few days later. the sunday telegraph published a feature examining the implications of what we were doing. last week the venture capital and start-up blog techcrunch posted a story about us which brought several thousand people to our website. most importantly we started to be contacted by people wanting to find out more about the company with a view to investing.
like any innovation it’s impossible to predict how the process will unfold. but we already have commitments for a third of the sum we’re seeking to raise. i’m hopeful we will be successful.
all the details of trampoline’s crowdfunding initiative are on the web at http://crowdfunding.trampolinesystems.com.
: c :
[ 18:56 sunday 2 august – river stort, roydon, essex ]
sitting in the saloon of volker’s barge as the evening sun filters through the trees and sparkles on the river outside. it’s an old dutch barge to which a superstructure was added in the seventies. there’s lots of light and space. most of the time volker lives on a mooring at springfield marina on the river lea at clapton in east london. when he gets sick of london he just unties and takes the boat somewhere else for a week or two. in the nineteenth century railways were often built close to the routes of canals constucted in the eighteenth century. as a result it’s generally possible for volker to moor close to a station and commute back to london for his work lecturing at university college london. it’s an excellent way to accommodate elements of nomadism within the vicissitudes of urban life.
yesterday afternoon i took a train through the grimy north london suburbs and out to cheshunt in hertfordshire. from there a short bike ride brought me to the river and volker’s boat. we chugged upriver for the next few hours. the leaden sky became progressively heavier and heavier as we went. finally they opened and unleashed a downpour. volker sprang out on the foredeck and scrubbed it down in the rain, getting soaked in the process. i always loved to be by water in the rain.
near hoddesdon we turned onto the river stort which quickly became narrower and wilder. many of britain’s rivers were canalised in the late eighteenth century. in some cases the natural character of the river survives more or less intact. in others the imposition of man was more intense and the river feels like an artificial creation. we went a little way then moored under some trees. then we walked a little way to a secluded lake where we stripped and swam. it was bliss.
this morning we continued up to roydon in essex until a modern railway bridge thwarted us. the coach-house roof was just a couple of centimetres too high to pass beneath. we considered inviting some plump fellows from a pub to clamber aboard or opening the cocks and letting water into the bilge to lower the boat so we could pass beneath. but finally we admitted defeat, moored by the railway station and continued our exploration by bike. by this time the sky had cleared and the sun was shining so it was a pleasure to unhitch our bikes from the taffrail and set off across the fields.
we just returned to the boat and opened a couple of peronis. later this evening i’ll get the train back to london.
this trip marks my first outing with a new solid state video camera i had shipped from tokyo. it’s been interesting to use it in parallel with my stills camera. it will take a while for me to develop habits and style with it but already i find myself starting to parse subjects for still or moving capture. it will be interesting to see the results back in london.
: c :
[ 20:30 monday 8 june – liberdastrasse, berlin, germany ]
the front room of timur’s house is a cross between a bicycle repair workshop and a bohemian salon. on one side of the room there’s a big shop window onto the street, currently displaying a selection of linus’ mumpelmonster booklets, badges and political pamphlets. behind this five bicycles stand in various states of undress, two upright, two upside down, one on its side. the other half of the room is occupied by two desks, a sofa (my bed), book shelves and assorted computer and audio machines.
my previous visits to berlin have been in the midwinter fastness. now the snow and heavy skies are replaced with vibrant foliage and street culture. the transformation is marvelous. yesterday i went cycling with timur, weaving around the backstreets from kreuzberg up to mitte and into the north of the city; lapping up his observations and commentary as we went; darting off occasionally to explore an alleyway or buildings that caught my eye. we stopped to visit the courtyard of humboldt university where timur is (supposedly) studying. there we were surprised to find ourselves confronted by a dozen tv cameras and journalists huddled with a solitary figure dressed in a monk’s cowl with a placard on which was written “europa: der kontinent der melancholie”. nothing was really happening. it looked like everybody was waiting for something. the scene was somewhat difficult to understand.
then in a moment of inspiration timur proclaimed “maybe angela merkel is coming here to cast her vote in the european elections!”. scarcely were the words out of his mouth then the lady herself ambled in, flanked by a couple of bored-looking security guards. i grabbed my camera and started snapping. merkel passed the protesting monk and through a door. timur and i were right behind her. a porter muttered at us in german but didn’t seem particularly bothered when we pushed past. so we watched as she collected her ballot paper, went to a booth, cast her vote and reemerged. then she walked past, just a foot away from me, gave a brief statement to the journalists outside in the courtyard, and was gone. i’ve never had any strong feelings about mrs merkel but i found her overwhelming sense of ordinariness rather charming. there was also something friendly about the lack of heavy security or protocol. i couldn’t help but reflect how different it would have been in london.
by some fortunate synchronicity mako and vajra were both visiting berlin (from massachusetts and california respectively). i met mako in an anarchist bar at two in the morning, talked intensely about the struggle between scientific method and intuition, then went off to dance with jan, claire, timur and adeline in a pink-fur-lined gay club in kreuzberg until dawn. vajra i found at a cafe in the north of the city and we cycled out together to the eye-popping soviet war memorial in treptower park.
each time i come to berlin i’m struck by the sheer civilisedness of the place. this afternoon timur, linus and i biked out to go swimming at badeschiff, an open air swimming pool stuck out in the middle of the river spree. what a magical idea. after a chilly swim we reclined on deck chairs, observed warily by a heron and some ducks, and absorbed the comings and goings of the city around us.
: c :
[ 22:37 sunday 3 may – asinara, sardegna, italy ]
seated on a rock in the mirror-flat sea several feet from the shore. i leapt here from the white sand beach of cala sabina, ghostly pale under the half moon. the limbs of the bay stretch in from either side, silhouetted against the star-spattered sky. the nearest artificial lights twinkle on the coast of sardegna twenty-five miles away. i can make out the town of porto torres by the concentration. the only sound is the gentle shush and heave of the water moving against the rock and sand.
this island of asinara is one of the most strange and beautiful places i’ve been. it’s ten miles long and five miles wide with a human population of no more than forty. in 1885 the freshly-minted italian government designated it as a high security prison and relocated its community of five hundred shepherds and farmers across the water to sardegna’s nurra peninsular. shortly afterwards a quarantine station was opened for mariners with contagious diseases.
during the great war austro-hungarian prisoners of war were interned on asinara. five thousand of them died here. the ethiopean imperial family was incarcerated on the island during the italian occupation of their country from 1936 to 1942. during the 1970s the facility was used to intern high-level mafia criminals. with poetic irony certain of the judges leading the prosecutions against these same figures also took up residence on asinara for their own safety. in 1991 the island was designated a national park. in 1997, after one hundred and twelve years, the penitentiary facilities were closed down and people started being permitted to visit under strict controls.
what remains is an environment of astonishingly pure nature punctuated by grim abandoned penal structures. the combination is jarring, emotionally confusing.
just two days ago, sitting in the trampery, i decided to escape from london for the weekend and impulsively acquired a return flight to alghero in north-west sardegna. i made no plans for what i’d do once i arrived. claudia kindly sent me a message with a few suggestions. as soon as i arrived i became curious about asinara. in alghera i asked people if there was somewhere i could stay on the island. a lady in the council office said she thought visitors could stay in the old barracks.
so i rented a car and drove fifty miles to the tip of the nurra peninsular where i stood looking across to asinara. there was no sign of a quay or ferry so i drove back south to the nearest town, stintino, and picked my way down to the compact harbour. i learned that there was one boat each morning crossing to the southern tip of asinara. someone also had a mobile phone number for one of the people working at the barracks on asinara. it took several attempts to get through but when i did i was told i could stay.
not wishing to spend the night in stintino (which felt one-dimensionally touristic) i continued south and arbitrarily took a side road to a tiny hamlet with the fabulous name of noddigheddu. this consisted of seven single-storey stone houses arranged around a green. one of the houses was abandoned and the roof had caved in. an elderly lady called giovanna had two rooms where people could stay. i dropped my bags and continued down the dirt track to the coast. just before sunset i was walking on the long deserted beach when thirteen flamingos appeared magically and noiselessly in the azure sky above me, wheeled slowly around where i stood watching, then returned the way they’d come.
this morning giovanna plied me with sardo biscuits and told me some of her family history. her great-grandfather had been a farmer on asinara, part of the community forcibly depopulated by the state in the 1880s. after breakfast i drove back up to stintino and down the track to the quay. the boat was waiting for me. i leapt aboard and we were away across the sparkling water. arriving at fornelli i hitched a lift up to cala d’oliva at the north of the island and dropped my rucksack at the barracks. then i set out on foot and spent the rest of the day walking. except for the three staff at the barracks i haven’t seen another soul.
this is a tough landscape of granite outcrops and hardy low shrubs populated by wild donkeys, goats and birds. about five miles north from the barracks i crested a hill to find a jaw-droppingly beautiful view spread in front of me. a shallow white-sand beach with turquoise sea breaking against it, low woodland behind the beach, a headland extending to the east surmounted by a crumbling genoese watch tower. this was cala d’arena. i picked my way down through the scrub and reached the beach. there was no sign anyone had been there in weeks. the only footprints were from birds and donkeys. the detritus washed up over the winter remained undisturbed.
my excitement at the opportunity to explore and photograph was in conflict with my reluctance to disturb the pristine environment. i trod lightly and sparingly with my heart in my throat. i remembered the excitement in kirmo’s eyes when we walked through ancient untouched forest in lapland. after exploring the beach and the lagoon behind it i picked my way along the rocks to the watch tower then came back over the scrubby headland to the beach. i discarded my clothes and swam in the chill clear water. my first swim of the year. the current was quite fast at the edge of the beach so i did not go out far.
later on, back at barracks, i was served dinner alone in the mess. nobody else is staying. then i walked out to the rock where i sit and write now. tomorrow i want to hitch a lift down to cala reale to explore the cluster of old prison buildings there.
: c :
// charles armstrong // 