XXIV - Rhythm and Blues
Working out your rhythm travelling – how often you move, how long you stay in one place, is pretty crucial. Otherwise you end up with rhythm and blues. For about a decade I led expeditions with teenagers across Europe. Young people are malleable, easily led and, by and large, quite high-energy. So you could plan a trip with a four hour drive in the morning, throw up tents, grab a sandwich and go white-water rafting in the afternoon. Adventures would last up to 3 or 4 weeks but we’d mostly stay in one place only 2 or 3 days, with an activity most days. I had this in mind when I planned our honeymoon, for which Rhiannon has never forgiven me. Driving from South-West France to West Germany (where we lived), stopping at Narbonne, Lake Como, then driving through Switzerland to Heidelberg, was not the beginning to our marriage she had in mind.
Middle-aged travellers and babies are even less resistant to short stays. I get grumpy travelling now, paranoid about missing trains, forgetting things, losing the children. Rhiannon is absurd in mornings generally, but following an arrival goes into a shutdown where she hisses through the door “I JUST NEED TO BE BY MYSELF.” Add to this that almost all travel including pretty much all long train journeys seem to happen through the night and you’ve got a problem. The children are out of sync – awake and asleep at the wrong time, and the constant checking – is this train on time? Where are we? Who is that sleeping beside me/underneath me? can be as upsetting as being forced to listen to free jazz. (Rhiannon tells an amusing story in her first year undergraduate at the Royal Welsh Academy of Music being lured to a free Jazz concert – after all, jazz is great and if it’s free it doesn’t matter that much anyway. Of course, if it turns out to be a free jazz concert that you have to pay for that’s a very different thing and disappointing on all counts. Nobody, apart from jazz musicians [Kyrie Eleison] likes free jazz.)
So we have made it across to East India (not the company), arriving this morning just before 8am in Puducherry (Pondicherry), having caught the train at 11:15pm, with a lovely send off from the Christian community we were staying with at RDM, Parakkanvilai. For the first time, we travelled in luxury 2nd Class, which actually was surprisingly fancy with 4 bed berths, sheets, blankets and a jobsworth ticket-guy who insisted on seeing ID for the children. Being fancy, it was, however, also much quieter, and I’ll say this for third-class that, because the air conditioning is so noisy, it cancels out the human element. Not so here. So I actually had the worst night’s sleep because everyone in India seems to snore and snoring creates an intense level of irrational anger in me that absolutely prevents sleep. I think it began with my middle brother, who I particularly remember on a caravan holiday as children was as loud as a horse and as irregular as the verb “to be”. In the army I used to always carry earplugs, as a lost opportunity for sleep when you’re knackered and have little time is devastating; and in the army, again, everybody snores. Here I put on the children’s headphones, which only served to make my head uncomfortable. It’s a peculiar effect of my irritation with snoring that I cannot help trying to hear the snorer, becoming obsessed with it, just as my phobia of spiders impels me to watch them even though they fill me with revulsion.
Anyway, we arrived but already at 8am the heat was awful, the humidity grotesque, everyone was irritable and of course we are way too early to check-in and hopelessly encumbered, like a great snail, trailing six bags and two foundlings. The taxi ride represented a particular low point as the guy overcharged us (again very cheap in UK terms but frustrating at being taken advantage of), and promised air-conditioning which turned out to be “wound-down windows” (which is closer to “sleeper class” or heaven-forbid “unreserved”* than 3rd.*) Apollo has now the most nicknames of anyone outside the mafia – He has always been Puck; here he’s often “Shah-shah” an adorable tiger cub; in Goa the staff nicknamed him Fanta (he was always asking and they were always giving); recently he has become “bag of snakes” due to his behaviour in cars, where he won’t sit still and climbs all over you regardless of the repressive nature of the heat. A sticky – or rather wet – taxi drive for an hour with 2 children climbing and sleeping on (desperately tired) my lap, having to play snakes and ladders on a phone to distract them while feeling car sick and heat sick, was grim.
But we made it. The villa we’re in is PERFECT. And I don’t say this lightly. I’m now sat on the roof terrace, which is cool with the East sea breeze coming across and a low straw roof trailing fans. The rooms have AC and we have Wi-fi, both of which have come to feel like basic human rights.
But what has become apparent is that we’re now in THE LAST DAYS. This is not the actual final days of a trip where you’re riding high on the adrenaline, the requirements of immediate change, the physically necessary acts of leaving, when everything has dropped away except the effort of getting home. THE LAST DAYS is the interminable difficult period where you’re not on your actual lasts – last meal, last hotel, last sleep – it’s actually exactly like any other stop on your trip where you should be excited to arrange trips, to do activities, to keep the children’s diary going and everything you have been managing more-or-less throughout the rest of the journey. The problem is your motivation is gone – you know you have to prepare for the readjustment and so your stupid brain has already started and that’s already taken away 15% of your attention. Your energy is low and you’re thinking those anxious thoughts – have I made the most of this? Was it worth it? Have I changed at all? Will it all be dreadful when I return? Is the vicarage still standing, the dog alive? Has the curate run off with fabric fund (we don’t have a fabric fund)?
Judgement is the theme of THE LAST DAYS, like the book of Revelation where the world is swept away in thirds and forces of good evil and evil take turns to rush to the fore. Homesickness strikes members of the group, but equally I know that with the sunshine, the beach, the affordability, the adventure, why would I possibly want to go home? This period, which is itself the length of what would normally be a good holiday, is tragically tinged with a sense of loss – with the sense of an ending, with the anticipation of completion that dare not yet get excited, like a marathon runner on the twenty-second mile, who has fallen out of the steady state that made the last ten miles pass with pleasure. In THE LAST DAYS relationships fall apart. The ambivalence that has settled in our minds and disrupted our sense of ease and purpose leaves us tired, and with tiredness impatient. The dis-ease has passed to the children who now refuse to soldier and the effort to leave the house to do something that feels like making memories of a lifetime becomes colossal. Everyone wants to watch television. It’s as if paradise is just too bright, too perfect, too much for the wearied states of our souls; the curse of the creative or activist who lacks the completer/finisher’s dogged boring delight in just bloody getting it done.
So morale is shaky. The mind is just not logical. People are nonsensical. We are unable to take things as they come. Unable to live in the moment. Unable to appreciate the beauty of presence even when the Kingdom of God has come. Instead, our minds work like maniacs to list the things we are missing, the anxieties of what is to come; even if it is worse, disaster even, we wish it to be now, so impatient are we for the future. It is a curse, like the figure who has been given by the gods the knowledge of their own death. Our hearts are restless – anything that lacks the permanence of eternity is saturated with the sadness of anticipated loss, the future’s grief, or the imagined benefits of a kingdom that is still to come. In my mind, I long for the enjoyment of this present moment now in my future. To look out at the sea 50m away in a warm sea breeze, with the recent memory of the sea refreshingly washing over my ankles – on a cold, damp London school run with a to do list and a discussion of safeguarding over zoom. I cannot keep it, nor can I quite enjoy it as I would like. The peace which passes understanding is not slowing the inexorable passage of time that need not dictate my movements, my preparations, but surely does, with the perverse satisfaction of having done what needs doing, of scratching out the calendar days, of drawing all things to a close.
So we are frustrated and fighting and regretting our words and failing to understand, or to find forgiveness so easy, or fun so simple. Mosquitoes sense our weakness and steal our blood earlier each evening on the tingling dryness of sunburn. This is the moment where a mistake might happen – an accident, a lost passport – in this tired, confused state of mind, the vigilance of our long sojourn feels less secure at this moment than ever. But this too will pass. After three months of being constantly together, of sharing beds and showers and the daily struggle and wonder of shared adventure, we will somehow survive THE LAST DAYS. And then it is a whole new adventure to succeed to what comes next.
*the run-down of train classes goes something like 1st AC, 2nd AC (“Executive class fits somewhere between these but only operates on non-sleeper trains), 3rd AC, Chair Class (which again is fine as long as you’re not overnight), Sleeper Class (no blankets and howling gales through the carriage as we found out to our discomfort in Rajasthan), then “Unreserved” or “Second Seating”, which we’ve not yet tried (along with first-class).
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