Category Archives: Wanderer

Cornwall, Wanderer

p o r t h e r a s

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[ 20:53 saturday 4 october – roskear road, camborne, cornwall ]

this morning i woke at quarter past six, took a train from london bridge to gatwick then flew to newquay where i was greeted by anna and adam. since the age of seven i’ve been making the journey up and down from cornwall by train or car. the sheer time this takes (london is six hours) gives it the character of an epic undertaking and accentuates the feeling that cornwall is somewhere separate and different. crossing the river tamar, fixed by athelstan in 936 as the boundary between england and cornwall, always provokes a gulp of emotion. in contrast making the journey by air is very strange. from london it barely takes barely an hour. there’s no symbolic moment when the frontier is crossed and no sense of a great journey. one departs, one arrives.

that said, it does open up the miraculous possibility of traveling down on a friday night or saturday morning, spending the weekend in cornwall then returning on monday morning in time for work. indeed the commencement of low cost scheduled services between newquay and london in the past decade has created a new class of weekly commuters with a consequent escalation in cornish house prices.

this afternoon we drove through the wind and rain to the village of morvah at the far north-western tip of cornwall. parking in a field we walked down the valley to portheras with its white sand beach and jagged granite cliffs. the atlantic rollers were combing in towards the beach with the wind pulling spray horizontally from their crests. i love being on the north coast beaches on days like this. everything is contrasts of grey and white, bleak and strong. for me this is one of the most characteristic moods of the cornish landscape. we had the beach to ourselves except for a hardy dog-walker.

from portheras we walked up the cliff and around to the lighthouse at pendeen watch. arriving at the cliff-head we were exposed for the first time to the full force of the south-westerly gale. it was so strong that it was impossible to open one’s eyes looking directly into it. from here we walked back inland through pendeen village and bowjewyan, cut across a field and managed to get ourselves somewhat lost. at this point my phone’s gps came into its own. i was able to pull up a satellite image pin-pointing our location and plot a route back to the car. along the way we found a sheltered hedge smothered with marvelous blackberries so we stopped and gorged ourselves. now we’re back home with the wood-burning stove blazing and our sodden clothes hung up to dry.

yesterday was london’s first truly cold day since april. when i got home after eddie prevost’s improvisation session i reluctantly got a heater out of storage and plugged it in.

: c :

In transit, USA, Wanderer

d u l l e s

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[ 17:46 thursday 11 september – washington dulles international airport, virginia ]

i’m sitting with a cup of tea at the end of concourse b, a vast white featureless corridor stretching as far as the eye can see. it’s actually been extended since i was last here and it now takes about twenty minutes to walk from one end to the other. i fear washington dc is a city i will never learn to love. it’s unrelentingly conservative, populated by blandly uniformed people and apparently lacks any iota of experimental culture. people hear wear clothes to go out in the evening that folks elsewhere would choose for the office. that can’t be good, can it?

monday afternoon’s presentation at the network roundtable went rather well. i was launching trampoline’s new technology for analysing and visualising social networks so it was a well-informed crowd. from time to time i sense a buzz in the room when i’m talking and this was such an occasion. the subsequent days were spent meeting various customers. this included my first visits to a couple of intelligence agencies. i was expecting terrifying security procedures but in fact it wasn’t much different from a typical international airport. the most bizarre experience was at the one and only agency that permitted me to bring in my laptop (though not connect it to the internet). here a man was specifically employed to stick a sort of rivet into my laptop’s microphone socket when i arrived and remove it again on my departure.

after an afternoon meeting at fort meade i made an impulse decision to drive out to the maryland coast rather than face the rush-hour traffic battling to get into washington. i picked a random point on my gps and half an hour found myself at the edge of a tranquil creek with neatly- tended lawns descending to the water and chesapeake bay beyond. i sat on the bank and watched the sun set over a power station then drove back into town.

yesterday evening i was walking down seventeenth street when a fellow in a kilt and flat cap strode past in the opposite direction and bid me good evening. i returned the greeting and we both continued on our way. but everything about this encounter was so wildly improbably that after a short while i stopped, stood pondering a moment then turned and ran back the way i’d come. he was walking at a good lick so it took me a few minutes to catch up. when i reached him i told him he was the first person to greet me on the street in the last three days in washington. we walked and talked together for the next thirty or forty minutes. he was kelly, born of irish parents who’d moved to nevada to run a petrol station. he’d come to washington a year earlier when he was kicked out of home.

chance encounters like this do more than anything else to remind me how wonderful the world is.

: c :

USA, Wanderer

b l u e r i d g e m o u n t a i n s

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[ 11:29 sunday 7 september – skyland lodge, blue ridge mountains, virginia ]

yesterday afternoon i flew into washington in the remnants of tropical storm hannah. the last half hour of the flight was excitingly bumpy and when we landed at dulles rain and wind were lashing the tarmac. i rented a car right away and drove west into the blue ridge mountains, which kaz had recommended as an escape from washington. as i rose higher wraiths of clouds were forming and swirling mysteriously around trees in the strong wind. several times i stopped to watch and take photographs.

there are two lodges in the hundred-mile stretch of mountains where tourists can stay. after looking on the internet last night i booked a room here at skyland lodge. the building was constructed in the early twentieth century from stone and wood on a plateau a thousand metres up in the mountains beside stony man hill, the second highest peak in the range. when i arrived everything was bathed in cloud. i checked in then straight away hiked up to the peak of stony man hill. the view from there was magical, with an apocalyptic black mass of storm clouds overheads, glimpses of the shenandoah valley spreading out in the twighlight to the west and twists of cloud swirling over me.

overnight the storm played itself out and i woke this morning to clear blue sky, birdsong and the sun filtering through the trees outside my room. now i’m driving to the northern end of the chain for a six mile hike. time permitting i’ll do another hike after lunch. i’m hoping to see deer, bears and turkey vultures amongst other beasts. the whole range is covered by the shenandoah national park so the habitat is relatively pristine. this evening i’ll drive back to dulles and check into the hyatt ready for my presentation at the network roundtable tomorrow afternoon.

: c :

Stromboli, Wanderer

g i n o s t r a

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[ 22:13 friday 29 august – ginostra, isola di stromboli ]

it’s eight years since i last spent a night here in the tiny village of ginostra, huddled the opposite side of the island from stromboli’s principal settlement. back then there was no electricity and no quay big enough to accommodate the ferries and hydrofoils which ply the rest of the archipelago. having a shower meant pumping a lever for five minutes to fill a header tank. houses were lit in the evening by paraffin lamps and candles. mobile phones were turned on for just a few minutes a day and could be taken to gian luca for recharging via his solar panel for a modest fee. ginostra has historically attracted a particular class of tourist, predominantly wealthy intellectuals from milan, florence and bologna. they came to live in ginostra for a month or two each year during july and august, a self-conscious retreat from the hubbub of the modern world. they would dress in simple clothes, eat simple food and positively relish the non- electrified inconvenience of the place.

this is what i found when i came eight years ago. the peculiar intensity of the location and the bizarre community there gathered represented a fascinating blend of real and artificial to me. only thirty people lived there all through the year, too few to be a viable community in its own right. they were more like stage-hands, keeping the wings swept tidy and sustaining the illusion of a real village for the gratification of the ethereal summer residents. more than anything it brought to mind marie-antoinette with her shepherdess fantasies at versailles.

that was in the august of two thousand during my very first visit to stromboli. now, eight years later, many things have changed in ginostra. during a fateful san remo festival, broadcast live to the italian nation, a plea went out that the people of ginostra should be provided with electricity that they might share in the delights of the festival. the machinery of the italian state duly creaked into action and a huge solar generation facility was installed. as a result the houses now have electric lighting, hot and cold running water and televisions. mobile phones remain turned on throughout the day. at the same time a huge cement quay was being constructed, dwarfing the old harbour (the “pertusa”) which is suspected to be the tiniest in the world. five hydrofoil services a day now dock at ginostra during the summer months, with ferries arriving three times a week.

other things remain unchanged. there are no roads, no motor vehicles and no street lights. everything arriving at the new quay is still carried up the steep cliffside on the back of a mule. after midnight the village is immersed in an intoxicating silence, even in august. but the advent of electricity and easy transport have upset the previous delicate equilibrium in which tourism was poised. life in ginostra no longer demands such an exacting or spartan sensibility. different people are coming, seeking different pleasures. being here the last few days it has sometimes felt as if an unusually chic suburb of milan had been transplanted to this remote outpost, preserving its complex web of parties, social obligations and status distinctions intact. this is no less surreal than the marie-antoinette fantasy i found before but i cannot help but reflect that its aesthetic qualities are somewhat diminished.

personally my preference has been to seek a certain pensive solitude. right now i sit writing by candlelight on the terrace of the house where i’ve been staying the last few days. ripe bunches of musty purple grapes hang from the vines entwining the roof. the sea stretches dark before me with the lights of the other six islands in the archipelago glimmering on the horizon. a million stars blaze above me with an occasional flash of silent lightning to my left. the air is hot and humid, sweet with the perfume of fallen prickly pears fermenting on the path in front of the house.

for me this is not an idle vacation. there are many choices to make about the next chapter in trampoline’s development. i have come here to unclutter my mind and see things with a clearer perspective. during that first stay in ginostra eight years ago i wrote the specifications for the simple prototype system which was destined to be the seed that later sprouted into trampoline and has consumed these last years. It is fitting that this should be the place to which i return now to consider where the path leads next.

it’s not all been work, though. on wednesday evening i gave a little performance of bach’s goldberg variations for the crowd at stromboli’s bookshop and on the street outside, for which i was accompanied by several cockerels gathered in the neighbouring garden. also gusti has brought a clutch of fire jugglers and artists to the island who are giving a series of performances. and these last days in ginostra i’ve spent many hours sitting on rocks, swimming in the azure water and reading. last night at half past midnight i decided to go to punta u corvu and watch the volcano erupt. i’d never been there before and ginostra is a maze of paths and alleyways but after a variety of wrong turnings my instinct led me where i wanted to go. i sat there an hour or so watching the lava arcing gracefully into the air and everything fell into place around me.

: c :

London, Wanderer

e s c a p e

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[ 04:27 saturday 23 august – haggerston road ]

i’ve spent the last two hours working out how i can get to stromboli by sunday evening and booking tickets accordingly. finally it’s done. the trenitalia website (italian state train operator) nearly drove me bonkers with its byzantine booking system. i have a stack of reservation details sitting on my printer as follows:

– train ticket from london kings cross to sheffield
– air ticket from east midlands airport to rome
– train ticket from rome to naples
– hydrofoil from naples to stromboli
– hydrofoil from stromboli to naples
– air ticket from naples to london gatwick

right now a week on stromboli is a welcome prospect. i might even sneak round to tiny ginostra on the other side of the island for the second half of the week. my friend matteo is renting a house there and invited me to come and stay.

: c :

In transit, USA, Wanderer

m i a m i

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[ 18:55 saturday 19 july – miami international airport, florida ]

i’m in my seat on the flight for london, taking advantage of a pre take-off delay to tap out a few words on my trusty laptop. following foo camp i took a couple of days’ holiday to stop off here in miami and visit shemoel at his family home. the main objective was for us to work out a modus operandi for producing songs together with me in london and him in san francisco.

this is the first time we’ve tried composing together instead of improvising. neither of us knew how it would work out but things fell into place smoothly. after two days our first song is already coming together. shemoel put down an idea which sparked me to add something, which in turn prompted him to change another section and so on. i recorded bass clarinet, vocals and a few electronic bits. shemoel recorded drums and the bulk of the electronics. we listen to a lot of similar electronic artists but we have very different musical personalities. i’m constantly delighted by shemoel’s perspective and how he responds musically in a completely different way to me. the process we followed over the last couple of days seems like it will lend itself well to long-distance collaboration. it will take more will power to keep it going but hopefully we can muster that.

we took breaks from the music to go swimming on the beach, hang out in sweat records (the epicentre of miami’s small experimental music scene) and join the full moon drum circle on the beach until the police broke it up. i managed to record half an hour of this on my new digital audio recorder.

it looks like the flight’s cleared for take-off so i need to shut my laptop. there are big tropical storms all the way up the florida coast. it should be an exciting ride.

: c :

USA, Wanderer

f o o

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[ 19:25 sunday 13 july – bodega head, california ]

here i am, a couple of hours north from san francisco, looking out to sea as the evening sun casts a golden glow over the jagged rocks. from where i stand a narrow ridge leads across to a guano-covered islet thick with nesting seabirds. below me is a little cove with a coarse sand beach an a kind of seaweed i’ve never seen before; thick elastic sheets dappled in cream and forest green. i nibbled at some but it was tough and rather flavourless. on my way here i stopped at a beach the other side of botega bay and took a swim in the icy-cold pacific.

for the past two days i’ve been embroiled in an event called foo camp just east of here in sebastopol. each year tim o’reilly, the technology publisher and impresario, invites three hundred technologists, scientists, artists and thinkers to spend a weekend camped out in the orchard behind his company’s offices. this year i was lucky enough to be included.

the event was structured very loosely. after supper on friday evening a couple of big boards were propped up against the wall with a grid comprising a dozen or so spaces along the top (ranging from meeting rooms to marquees) and time slots down the left hand side. anyone could take a giant sticky note, write down a topic for a session they wanted to lead and put it in a square on the grid. as soon as the boards went up there was a stampede of people eager to claim prime slots. this was followed by a gradual jostle of revisions through saturday and sunday.

some of the interesting sessions i attended included neuro-mechanics and techniques for disrupting how your brain functions, the emergence of data visualisation as a mainstream interface discipline and modifying the knowledge-worker lifestyle to be better matched to the ways of living for which we evolved. on saturday evening i led a session on the relationship between technological innovation and the emergence of new organisational structures. a lot of ad hoc conversations happened outside the sessions and there were all kinds of projects and activities going on at the fringes.

on saturday night the campus turned into a kind of esoteric kindergarten with clusters of people in every corner making puzzles, fabricating circuit-boards and playing games. i had a whale of a time playing gypsy jazz with my bass clarinet in a group consisting of two guitars, a ukelele and a baby accordion. this is the first time i’ve done anything other than experimental improvisation with the clarinet so having to play in key and in time was quite a challenge. the session ended with me singing a somewhat unorthodox of weill’s “mack the knife”.

the most striking aspect of the weekend was its fluidity and openness. things just happened. i was expecting it to be uncomfortably cliquey but in fact it was easy to walk up to anyone, however well known, and talk to them about anything you felt like. my thinking was challenged on several fronts, i made a bunch of new friends and i came away fired up to do great things.

: c :

Japan, Wanderer

l a k e s h i k o t s u

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i noticed that my last couple of despatches haven’t made it through the system so i’ll try sending them again.

[ 20:36 sunday 8 june – itou onsen, lake shikotsu, hokkaido, japan ]

last week i was in sapporo, the largest city in japan’s northernmost island hokkaido, to give a presentation at a technology conference. next week i have to be in boston for another one. it’s been a stressful week so on friday evening i decided to try and escape into the wilderness for the weekend. i spent half an hour on the web looking for interesting places. initially i was tempted by some lakes in the far east of the island but it turned out it would take nine hours to get there. hokkaido is enormous. after a bit more searching lake shikotsu caught my eye, with its mysterious forests and mountains. i found a small slightly run-down looking onsen (a hotel beside a hot spring) in an isolated location at the lake’s edge. i phoned. one of the staff spoke some english. a room was available. i made a reservation for two nights and made my way down by bus yesterday afternoon.

i’m sitting now in an old-fashioned tatami-floored room with a thin futon where i’ll soon sleep. the sliding window is fully open. through it i look out across the huge still surface of the lake, ringed by three volcanoes each rising more than a thousand metres. everything is covered with dense deciduous forest. a small cluster of lights in the distance marks a cluster of restaurants and shops the other side of the lake, otherwise the horizon is dark in every direction. i hear the slap and gurgle of the small waves against the shore and the occasional cry of a heron. if i leave my room, go down the stairs, left out of the door onto the lakeside and down some steps i reach a pool made from rocks at the edge of the lake, with a fence dividing men’s and women’s sides. this is where the hot spring emerges, accompanied by a faint whiff of sulphur.

today i climbed mount eniwa, the largest of the three volcanos, which rises directly behind the onsen. it’s a steep climb and reaching the summit at one thousand four hundred metres was hard work. several sections even required ropes. the path mainly follows a sharp ridge that arrives at the summit from the east. a succession of fumeroles belches out sulphurous gases which mingle with the clouds eddying and swirling round the peak of the mountain. people said it would take four hours to get up but i did it in less than two hours. i passed half a dozen people on the way, each with the customary bell tinkling on their backpacks. at the summit i met a couple of friendly chaps from a town near sapporo so we made the descent together and taught each other a few words. i was exhausted when i reached the onsen. stripping and lowering myself into the pool was blissful. i stayed in there a couple of hours, watching fisherman come and go in their little boats.

granny’s funeral was held on friday the twenty-third of may in shrewsbury. in the middle of the service i played the second movement of bach’s italian concerto on the organ. i never had a chance to play this for her but i think she’d have liked it a lot. i was nervous that i might break down in tears halfway through playing it, which happened when i was practicing it the day before. but i avoided this and actually i think it was the best performance of the piece i’ve given. i found the christian elements of the service quite distasteful. the priest’s contributions all seemed to be impersonal and grim. shockingly he even got granny’s name wrong at the committal. a couple of my favourite photos of granny are here with me now, propped on chests at the side of the room. it’s hard to believe i won’t be taking any more.

immediately after granny’s funeral i escaped to stromboli for a few days. alitalia overbooked the flight so i ended up in a milan hotel for the night then on the six o’clock plane to palermo the next morning. the only way i could reach the last hydrofoil of the day to stromboli was to get a taxi all the way from palermo to milazzo, about two hundred and fifty kilometres. my visit coincided with an intense scirocco and temperatures in the mid thirties. i spent much of the time on the beach and in the sea. despite the brevity of the visit i saw a lot of my friends. i also saw antonio’s almost-completed portrait of neptune for the first time, a remarkable piece of work. on the monday night i walked up to punta u bronzu with giuliano. we watched the volcano erupting and the moon rise as the hot wind blew over us.

a taxi will be here at five in the morning to take me to the airport so i ought to pack my bags and get a few hours’ sleep. tomorrow i fly to tokyo, then new york.

: c :

London, Wanderer

e n d e d

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[ 01:34 wednesday 14 may – haggerston road, london ]

at one minute after nine o’clock mum phoned to say she’d watched granny die a couple of minutes earlier. i was still in the office, glad to have sergio there to comfort me.

now i’m at home, a candle burning in the centre of the table, my photographs of granny placed around the room.

there are so many memories to cherish i scarcely know where to begin.

: c :

London, Wanderer

g o o d b y e g r a n n y

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[ 23:58 monday 12 may – haggerston road, london ]

i spent the weekend with granny. on saturday she alternated between three states. the first appeared to reflect agitation: scrunched up brow, lifted left knee, dabbing at her mouth and nose with her right hand. the second state looked like surprise or wonderment: lying still, raising her forehead and eyebrows. the third state was tranquil: either asleep or perfectly calm. her eyes were closed all the time. she didn’t speak but occasionally made noises in her throat. she was definitely aware of what was going on around her. a couple of times when she was agitated i spoke reassuringly at her side and she relaxed. when mum and i lifted her up, held a glass of water to her lips and urged her to drink some she did. when i held her hand she responded by squeezing it.

on sunday she’d passed a step further and ceased responding to anything. i sat with her for three hours and it was the most difficult time i’ve spent with her. holding her hand without feeling her fingers tighten around mine was particularly tough. her hands were so warm, the life was so conspicuous in her, but she was completely inert. writing about it now is making me cry again. for some of the time i dozed with my forehead against hers on the pillow, which brought to mind all the mornings as a child when i’d woken up early and crept into bed with her. i talked to her, thanking her for believing in me and loving me. i wished her strength for the voyage she was undertaking and told her i was there at her side every step. i sang some folk songs i thought she’d like, though my voice faltered.

eventually the time came for me to leave. it felt like the last moment i’d ever be with her. walking away was unbearably difficult. i kept turning back to kiss her and say goodbye yet time. finally i walked backwards through the door, watching her sleeping form until the very last second. with tears pouring down my face i continued to repeat “goodbye granny” as i walked out of the hospital and as i cycled through the streets of ludlow. today, whenever she comes to mind i repeat it again.

goodbye granny.

: c :