All About the Baby (Melb Arts Fest 06 part 2)

I approached Italian director Romeo Castellucci's BR.#04 Brussels with a certain amount of excitement. I mean, I very much expected it to be a terribly overblown piece of onanistic self-indulgence, since there's plenty of that going around and getting big ups from the theatre crowd. But I secretly hoped that it would be something more, and it surely was. Some disagree, and think it was tripe; others have raved to me about it. I'm with the latter.

The show is just one part of a massive 11-play cycle (the Tragedia Endogonidia); each part was developed upon arrival in a city, and as a direct response to that city's history, culture, and so on. We got Brussels, and I read somewhere that Brussels was once the seat of legislative power in Europe or some guff like that, so themes of governance, institutionalised power and dominance run throughout this episode. But there's also a more generalised evocation of power and powerlessness centred on time, aging, duration, growth, decay, and hair loss.

The show is made up a number of sequences, wordless all, played out in a massive white-marbled cube suggesting a museum, palace, cell or church (among other things). The scenes are densely cryptic, travelling in directions often quite unexpected; sometimes they don't really travel at all. The first, for instance, sees a cleaning woman slowly moping the floor, boredly, maybe absent-mindedly. BORING. Or not. I found it hypnotic after a while, and began watching the way that the arc of her mop sweeping across the marble created a kind of mandala effect after a while: she wasn't randomly swishing the thing around at all. I didn't know what it meant, and I suspect it might have meant nothing, but it gestured at the possibility of meaning. Sums up the whole show, that.

Now, it's nothing new to lay out a stack of signifiers and refuse us the ability to construct any kind of sense from them. Normally I can't stand that kind of theatre, since it's so hard to do well. But I don't think that's the result here. Castellucci's created a tragedy without a chorus to explain the events we're seeing for us. We're not being told why these events are significant, or how we supposed to interpret them.

Since the Greeks, the chorus has been a hugely influential tool in theatremaking, and you could say that later modes saw the chorus internalised into the drama itself, so that the language and staging and so on maintained its function. A piece of theatre usually, in some way, says "this is this" and then "this is why it's here before you". Castellucci cuts that out, which is a very different thing from cutting out meaning or significance entirely. What we see on stage are very dramatic and gripping events, but there's no commentary of any kind which forces us to interpret them in any given way.

It wouldn't work if the scenes produced weren't so provocative, I suppose. And if you did't find them so, you'd probably be pretty switched off by the production. But for me, the image of a live human baby maybe six or eight months old sitting alone and unattended on a huge stage, gurgling away merrily, noticing a toy and picking it up curiously, slowly beginning to register some painful thought or feeling and transforming its face into a mask of rage or disappointment, then just dropping it all and thinking about something else: I was absolutely enthralled by what I will gladly call the Performance of the Year. And upstage, a naive cut-out face propped up on the floor began to open and close it's mouth and eyes, reciting numbers in a garbled voice. What was the connection? Was it the child being taught by rote? Was it technology as dumb infant? Was there comparison and contrast or connections to be made?

In a way the automaton reminded me of the play itself: it was a narration without a narrative, a plot with out a story (in the Russian Formalist sense), it was the hollow decoration that delights with its movement but contains no deeper soul inside. Because it was hollow, it had that levity I was thinking about yesterday: it wasn't 1984, screaming "this is important!" It was useless in the best way, in the Wildean sense ("all art is quite useless", says Oscar, and I wholeheartedly agree with that complex suggestion). It's the laughing seriousness advocated by Sartre, too, the work which approaches the truth by revealing the floating and ephemeral and plain silly nature of any kind of truth.

Man, it was a good show. Or not, maybe.

Levitas (Melb Arts Fest 06 part 1)

A friend of mine was recently telling me how, during a trip to Florence, he became transfixed at the window of a tiny shop selling (as he put it) "pope costumes". I asked if he'd bought one, since a number of circumstances in which papal threads would prove handy sprang immediately to mind (pulled over for cycling without a helmet; Jehovah's witnesses at the door; passed out in primary school sandpit). No, he explained, not costumes: this was where the bishops and prelates and I-don't-know-the-terms went to pick up this season's latest outfit ("What is this!? I told you I'm an autumn, infidel!"). I don't know to what extent mitre styles are dictated by Milan, but I imagine that like any item of clothing, wear and tear is inevitable, and a change of wardrobe is at some point necessary (is it blasphemy to suggest that addressing a crowd of a thousand faithful could perhaps up the perspiration rate and leave Il Papa a bit pongy?) And so, here in this tiny, dimly lit shop, little ninety year-old staffers shuffle about tending to the racks and the little ninety-year old men looking to buy something from them. I like that image. It has levity.

The concept of levity is, I think, very important.

When the pope drops by Casa di Firenze to refresh his walk-in-robes, what happens to the outfits he throws away? Does he donate them to the poor, the homeless? If I'm ever asked for spare change by someone got up like a cardinal, I'll swear eternal fealty to the church, believe me. If not, where do those robes go? To the Vatican staff, so that would-be assassins stealing into the Holy City are inundated with popes stirring broth and mopping marble and chatting up nuns before the tabernacle? Are they burned in a ceremony bordering on the profane? Or is there a secret that's been kept hidden for centuries, something to rival the Da Vinci Code in its combination of intrigue and inconsequence, a cover-up for what happens to the things that cover-up the high-ups?

Yesterday I got styled. Agreeing to a work assignment of a potentially ill-advised character (my boss today actually uttered the words "I don't think I should be encouraging this predilection") I agreed to hand my image and good sense over to a professional stylist, his assistant, a hair and makeup artist and a photographer with an unhealthily good sense of humour. What was I thinking? Would I be transformed into some bronzed He-Man deserving of a laurel crown?

Or would I, like Fabio, end up looking like a fallen idol bashed in the grill by an errant goose? Worst-like, would I be found gurgling in a haze of hairspray and 'product', halfway to comatosis, a gaggle of colleagues wiping the gunk from my pallid face as I uttered the immortal words of Ghostbusters' Venkman:

He styled me.

You'll have to wait and see.

Last Thursday I was due to attend the opening of the Melbourne International Arts Festival's 1984. Work commitments prevented me from making it, and to be honest, I was kind of ok with that. I'd read reviews that repeatedly mentioned the word "shouty"; if you want to turn me off a show, that's pretty much the first button you need to mash. I can appreciate a lot of theatrical modes. Gimme some Theatre of Cruelty, a side serving of Theatre of Catastrophe, with a dollop of Theatre of the Oppressed for good measure. The appetite's there. But Theatre of Shoutiness? I've had my fill, thanks (subtext: fill=university).

I won't review 1984, since I clearly ain't seen it. And it wouldn't be wrong to say that my reluctance to check it out is due to its reported didacticism, its literalism, the way it takes an obvious point (uhhhh...fascism is, like, totally sucky) and yells it at you for two hours. There's a lack of levity, it seems.

But what's this levity deal all about?

Generally, I've always thought of myself as a big fan of levity's opposite, gravity. A production with weight, with an immanence that grounds it firmly in the earth, rather than presenting itself as something disposable, the flyaway hairs that resist the brush and you only hope won't be visible to outsiders; that's the thing.

But I don't know, really. Sure, last year's MIAF-sponsored presentation of Le Dernier Caravanserail was probably the most impactful show I've ever seen, and will ever see, and it was also a dramatisation of one of the most crucial crises to face the contemporary world (the situation of The Refugee).

And last Sunday's performance of Ros Warby's Monumental was an exercise in levity, despite the show's title. Warby is a dancer of immaculate precision, perhaps the most accomplished mover I've seen, every twitch and quiver a measured and immaculate thought embodied. The show plays with the classic, iconic balletic images of the Swan and the Soldier, but doesn't speak them, rather tickling our preconceptions to work against the grain. Warby knows her business, for sure; the show isn't an earnest plea for something-or-rather, but offers instead the kind of playful pointlessness only a master of the form can toy with. Ballet fans with intellect would find much to revel in here; I found it a skeletal dance, too light to gain a foothold anywhere I'm likely to be standing.

But isn't that the essence of levity? The opposite of gravity, the term signifies something impossible, the absence of weight, yet something equally sought (cos dammit, isn't zero-G the ultimate goal?!? No need to answer). Isn't the opposite of weight something purely theoretical? Can lightness achieve reality? Can levitas signify gravitas?

Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia finds the balance, in my opinion. I tend to agree with one judge, while finding myself at odds (critically speaking) with several others.

More to come.

One of them meme things

My earliest memory is… looking out the window of an commercial jumbo jet at the green fields dawdling by far below. My mother doesn't make sense of this memory; where did we fly when I was a baby? Don't know. If I dreamed it, that's ok, I guess, though it's crystalline in the memory banks. I really don't get it. Otherwise, it's the car accident in Booran Road, Ormond: I was mildly peeved that I only suffered a sore thumb, since that would hardly earn respect at school.

At high school I… could never have envisioned the high-powered, jetpack-enabled future of grotto-dwelling party-goers and marathon macrame sessions which awaited me. Funny, I still can envision it. But time, as the Stones said, is on my side (NB: assuming immortality).

My first relationship was… Better than I could have expected.

I wish I’d never worn… that patchwork shirt that made me a pariah in high school dancing classes.

My mother told me… that hair would eventually grow over the scar which runs across my crown from one ear to the other. It never did, which is why I wear my hair long, so as not to frighten small children.

I wish I had... three more wishes. And a robot valet.

My most humiliating moment was... just a precursor to the many minor humiliations to come. Read about 'em here.

At home I cook… for anyone who will eat, as often as I can. Cooking as therapy is vastly underrated (see also: gardening; knitting; emotional house-cleaning; the meticulous preparation of tea; cycling through a park on the first warm day of spring, a balmy breeze caressing your cheek and the sun glinting off the teeth of smiling strangers; and, of course, dancing.)

My last meal would be… prepared by me for people who'd enjoy it.

I’m very bad at… relationships.

When I was a child… I once had a sudden and unexpected understanding of the way the universe fits together which I still recall vividly.

The book that changed my life is… written by Thomas Pynchon.

It’s not fashionable, but I love… pitching peeled grapes towards the gaping maws of partially-clad supermodels during cocaine-fuelled Eyes Wide Shut-style scenarios in remote Tuscan grottos. No, wait, that's probably quite fashionable. Sudoku, then?

Friends say I am… different things, depending on who you ask. Anything from the crazy, kooky one to the calm and centred observer. It's the parallax view, I think. Don't get it.

The song I’d like played at my funeral is… Another One Bites the Dust, hummed beatifically by the congregation.

If only I could… make everything better, for everyone.

The last big belly laugh I had was… Little Superstar. I laugh hard only a few times a year, and that worries me. But when I do, I find it's mostly, and consistently, inspired by the sight of someone unselfconsciously dancing in a totally radical way. I don't know what that means.

What I don’t find amusing is… Most forms of humour based on us/them dynamics, which perhaps relates to a) why I really laugh so infrequently, b) my routine education in an arts-based course and c) why I'm pretty boring to be around at times.

I’m always being asked… How old are you really?

If I wasn’t me… I'd like to know who it was, and how to get those ugly stains out (vinegar, apparently).

At the moment I’m listening to… Diana Ross' Upside Down.

My favourite work of art is… by Franz Kline.

If I were a car I’d be… getting outta here.

I often wonder… if krumping is just a passing cultural fad.

I often wonder (2)... if I'll make it to the age of 70 or 80, when I'll be able to sit on a porch somewhere with all the friends I've managed to retain, lovers and nemeses, the garrulous and the begrudged, the ones who never got it, but accepted it anyway and found a connection with me in that, at least, if nothing else, or just ended up on that damn porch while I was there and somehow bridged the gap between banana lounges with a withered outstretched palm or gave me, a stranger, that knowing smirk that says "we got away with it!"



We didn't get it, but by god: we got away with it.

TAG: Our Man and (H)Ausculture.

Get Outta Denmark

It's a well-known fact (I think it's even in the Bible somewhere) that most of life's little "tight spots" take on an entirely different character when you reimagine them narrated by a crusty ol' Southern coot. I thinking of the whole Waylon Jennings thing from "The Dukes of Hazzard" and I'll be hornswaggled if Jennings ain't gotten me through more tough times 'n I can number. "Lookit thet, poor son's gotten one a them eviction notices!" or "Heh heh heh, seems like he's gone and got himself a bad case of lime disease!" or "Sometimes you can be cruisin' along, doing your own thing, 'taint bothering nobody. And then come the handcuffs. Life's funny like that, ain't it?"

So I've decided to hand the next leg of the trip over to Waylon, and busy myself with cookin' up some grits to keep him happy. Take it away, boss.

Well howdy there, glad you could join us. You might remember that we last left our wanderin' Jackdaw in the ol' Dalby Hotel, a fine mess of a place if ever I seen one - an' I seen my fair share (suffering a debilitating addiction to cocaine throughout the early 1980s). But this ain't about me.

So here's our hero, rustlin' up the fire to get his sorry ass outta bed and back on that there road. When he hit the hay last night, he was sure fixin' to leave that damn broke down horse of his out there in the carpark, and to leg it the rest of the way every which way he has to. But look at 'im now:

He's thinking "durn it, that tootin' nag got me this durn far, and I'll be durned if I'm a gonna give up on him when the going gets rough!" So even though it might be no use to nobody as a trusty steed, it's still got enough of the ol' pack horse in it to make it outta Denmark.

So he saddles up the thing, strapping his bags all over it till you can barely tell what's under all that junk. And it's back out on the open road, where he walks with his burro past the wide fields and thick forests lining the way. It rains the whole way, but he ain't fussin'. Takes about three-four hours afore he finds the next town, little place named Naestved, and soon he's a-buyin' a ticket to the coast, where a ferry will be takin' him on south over international waters.

Now, listen up, y'all.

You might think from this image of the wayward stranger trudging into town through the driving rain, leading his hobbled horse by the nose and not sayin' a whole darn lot, well, you might think he was some kind of troubled drifter out on a mission of revenge, or runnin' from a dark past he refuses to name. You might be prospecting some leathery gunslinger whose hidin' a fistful of pain behind his no-nonsense, stoic demeanour, spoilin' for a Danmark death-run that'll help him forget, or die tryin!

Well, that's where you'd be wrong, mister. See, turns out all that riding left him happier 'n he'd been in years, and you know what: he's still got that to this day. Whenever times are gettin' him down, he just remembers making his way through that strange countryside, so licked he could barely see the road ahead of him. And hell if that ain't some kinda good feeling.

I guess it comes down to the little pow-wow he has with the nice lady at the train station in Naestved. Come down from Copenhagen, he says, on this here little fella, so I'll be needin' a ticket for him too. "Rode from Copenhagen?" she asks.

Sure as the nose on his face.

"Why?"

He thinks about that. And if he's going to be honest with himself, it's the first time he really did think about it. People had been askin' him in other ways for a time now, but he'd never really had an answer. And now it's almost over, he still don't.

"I don't know. Just felt like it, I guess."

As he's about to board the train, the conductor comes running over. "You ain't takin' that on this here train," he says. But I bought a ticket! "Not on my train". So what, I just leave it here on the platform? "That, or you stay with it."

So there you go, partner. If you're ever in Naestved, keep an eye out for a lonesome looking bike on platform 2. Give it a good home, or fix it up so it's back on the road. I like to think some kid found it, some poor Danish country kid with no money for a ride of his own, but who knows. Last we saw of it was out the window of the train as it pulled out of the station, and soon it was gone.

When the train pulled in Rodby, he saw the ferry squatting there like some kinda bull toad. And he scanned the horizon to see that, yessiree, Rodby was just like every other town he'd been through: nothing there. And there ain't no way he was spending another night in another no-good wasteland of a town, so he determined to get on that boat, whatever it dang well took. When's the boat leave? he asked the woman selling tickets. "Two minutes." You take cards? "Not in two minutes." But I'm outta cash!

And then, when he least expected it, this kindly old woman he'd never met and never would again, bit her lip for a moment then stuffed the eighty dollar ticket into his hand. "Go!" she yelled. "Run! RUN!"

And run he did, dagnabbit! You shoulda seen that critter fly! Scootin' up stairs, hot-footin' it round blind bends and heck, his feet mighta hardly even touched the gangplank! That little act o' kindness was the last thing Denmark gave him, and boy was he grateful. And then he was gone.

Well, that's about it for me, and that's about it from him, too. We'll be shuttin' up the travel shop for a whiles now, seein' as how there's some big festival in town that's a-gonna be takin' up all his time. He'll probably get back to the usual point of this here place, which is writin' up all them shows he sees. But maybe one day he'll be back with tales of illegal Russian bars and riding through mountains and the place where the word for "yes" is "no". Till then, I'd like you all to join in me and my little pal here for a duet:

Maybe tomorrow, I'll want settle down,
Until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on!

So if you want to join me for a while
Just grab your hat, come travel light - that's hobo style.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll find what I call home,
Until tomorrow, you know I'm free to roam!
Everybody now-

No Sleep till Dalby (pt 7)

My wardrobe’s lycra-quotient is zero. I’ve never scoured the classifieds for a position labelled "freak willing to cycle the length of Denmark pursued by inner demons." Did it, but. If you’re not the sort predisposed to find value in cycling tour diaries, perhaps the presence of ass-paddlings and/or tight jeans will change that. Perhaps not.

Did I really feel it appropriate to cycle the length of a country in rolled-up stovepipes, $2 sunglasses that folded up to pocket size and a tee screaming "Who loves Burritos!"? I’ll never tell.


If I ever run into God in a pet store or Ticketmaster7 outlet or motocross rally or wherever, I think the first thing I’d say is "Hey! You probably hear this all the time, but I’m a real fan of your early work."
But I’m pretty sure in God’s workshop there’s a corkboard with a note on it saying something like "DON’T FORGET – FINISH DENMARK (it looks rubbish!)" And over the millennia, the memo has been covered with all sorts of other post-its and party invites ("ladies, please bring a plateaux!") and God never did get around to touching up Denmark. A few structural refinements would have been nice.

Like mountains. Mountains are smooth (if obvious) manoeuvres. They’re like God’s jazz-hands. Cheap and gimmicky, the ole razzle-dazzle, but hey: mountains, man.

There are no mountains in Denmark, not a one. I saw a few hills with delusions of grandeur, but they’re dreaming. The highest point is 173m above sea level. The annual death toll for persons falling off cliffs is only 0.2, compared to the whopping 18 Australians who die every year from the mountainous fatalities which I just made up. Needless to say, riding a bike across Denmark isn’t like climbing Everest.
But rural Denmark wasted no time at all in letting me know that it was a boring place. I guess I have to respect that, since it didn’t offer the pretence of something interesting around the next corner. No, it took about 20 minutes to realise that it wasn’t getting better. Don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply in love with Denmark and want to live in your wonderfully friendly country for many decades. But do some terraforming, please. I totally know a canyon going for a sweet deal. That said, if empty wheat fields are your ‘thing’, you’ll probably get your dollar’s worth from a trip like this. I guess I saw a few trees too.


After enjoying the pleasures of a day riding across Denmark I feel qualified, nay compelled, to state that said day would have been infinitely improved if it hadn’t required a bicycle to be involved in any important aspect of the trip. The journey from Copenhagen to Dalby was like an eight hour behind-paddling from an over-enthusiastic prefect at an English boarding school in the 1930s. I think I violated a number of United Nations treaties on myself during the trip. That wasn’t the worst part of the ride, but it was the part that would probably most easily bring that bitter-beer wince to your face, so I thought I’d start with that.
I begin the ride aiming for Koge, a little seaside town around 20kms out of Copenhagen. It looks doable, and I decide to try and make it by nightfall. I make it by 2pm, which sort of throws my plans out. What now? Might just keep on riding. See how far I do get by nightfall.

And so I do. Just keep on riding. Occasional stops for a cigarette, or to pop into a petrol station for something to eat. It’s worth noting that petrol stations in Denmark don’t have anything for a vegetarian to eat, not even a plastic salad sandwich. I don’t eat for the entire ride (I down a lot of unpronounceable fizzy drinks, though).
This lack of food, combined with endless hours of pushing on down deserted country highways, past quaint farmhouses and lowing cows, up rickety hills and down ancient, winding lanes, knocked my brain about a bit. An hour after Koge, I was deep in the country. The ‘towns’ I passed through consisted of a petrol station and maybe four-five houses. That was usually it. There’d be a car every ten or twenty minutes, but I otherwise rarely saw a human being. I just kept on, burning up in the hazy sun, drenched in perspiration and aching all over.



About six hours in, I wasn’t thinking much. I had the funny idea that if I maintained the rate I was going at, I would probably hit the south coast of Zealand by about 10 or 11pm. In fact, I’d complete my entire ride by lunch the next day, rather than the three or four days I’d given myself.
A little after this, I was passing a cobbled side road and noticed a figure not far down it. It was bent double, as if tying its shoes. From the waist down, entirely white. Waist up, entirely black, including its head, and kind of fuzzy-looking. I stared, and couldn’t make out how it could be human, though it had a human-kind of shape. But it looked more like some kind of Danish rural creature from a fairy tale, some mythical thing that you’d never see when you were in a normal state of mind.

And I thought: Oh boy! I’ve just lost my mind.

I should have seen that one signposted by the looks every petrol station attendant gave me when they saw me pull up on my squeaky velocipede. They gave me the glazed stare I’d expect if I’d been wearing a tee-shirt with "I’m biking my way through personal crises!" iron-printed across the front. In short, they were short.
I knew during this period that the real reward I was gaining was the pleasant memories I’d be fondly recollecting for about eight minutes after the trip was over, and this was enough to keep me soldiering on, though I was more like the soldier who runs crying and blabbering incoherently through the undergrowth in any direction but the one the colonel has ordered. I’ll admit it: I was a pitiful skid-mark on the toilet bowl of humanity, a dangling booger bringing an embarrassed rictus to the face of every Danish commuter zooming past towards the north. I’m amazed some Dogme-appreciating father of four didn’t ‘accidentally’ hiccup and cause his 7-seater to swerve across a few lanes to put his fender through my grill ("A hit, a palpable hit!" cries a child! "A mercy killing" he tells his traumatised daughters, "the thing was already halfway to Copenheaven, really.")

Such terrible thoughts. To be or not to be.



For years I’ve had the whole Haunted Man shtick going on, thinking I’d earned a Nam-style thousand-yard stare caused by the recollections of the things I’ve seen ("We were just babies, dammit, and they sent us into a warzone!") But really, I was just a dumb schlubb (or is it schmuck?) who thought that people gave a crap what crappin’ crap makes up your crappin’ history, when people usually have their own crap to deal with. That was the real lesson Denmark taught me, when Haunted Man had his ass kicked by Broken Man. Had his ass kicked so bad I’m surprised I didn’t have to sleep standing up.

Getting Broken can be the best thing you ever do, if you’re a self-pitying fool like me. Reduced to nothing, just a husk running on autopilot, almost at the animal stage, so tired that actual thought is barely even possible, well, it can open up new perspectives, put things in order. It’s not that you make better sense of things; the opposite, really. You stop trying to make sense of anything, and just accept all the stuff you’ve got no control over. It’s the same sort of state people aim for with extreme sports, or getting completely wasted, or marathon meditation sessions, or starving themselves. You empty out the human and hand the reins over to the reptilian part of your brain leftover from the old days. You wouldn’t really want to stay like this forever, but the occasional visit can be an eye-opener.

I was so Broken that all I could do, eventually, was ride. So Broken that after an hour of wondering about that funny bump the back wheel of my bike was giving me, I finally summoned the mental energy to turn around and have a look. I’d been riding on a completely flat tyre for an hour. It was time to stop. The next town was about five kilometres away, so I coasted down hills and walked the bike up them until I got there. The town, as usual, was just a petrol station. The attendant politely informed me that yes, there was somewhere to stay nearby, about five kilometres back the way I’d come. So I walked the hour back along the route I’d just taken, and as darkness fell found myself at the Dalby Hotel.



Thinking back, I wonder if the Dalby Hotel even existed. Perhaps I just slept in a field and imagined the place. Certainly, it was the weirdest place I’ve ever been. It was as if Stanley Kubrick had designed it for The Shining 2: Death Comes to Denmark. Long, empty corridors, wood panelling everywhere, a low and omnipresent hum, and not a soul to be found. If a wall of blood suddenly erupted from behind one of the closed doors, I wouldn’t have blinked.


I wandered for a long time before I found the concierge, who stared at me blankly as I asked if there was a room available. He spun the check-in register around and I filled out my details. I’m so happy I found this place, I tell him. I’ve just ridden a bike from Copenhagen. His face is still devoid of all expression. Seconds pass.

"That’s a long way," he says.

Yes, yes it is. Good night Dalby.

Just Copen (pt 6)

Seeing as how the travel posts have been unfurling unstoppably like a roll of toilet paper across the bathroom floor, I may as well give in and try to unravel them all as quickly as I can. I should say, however, that I didn't get many charming shots of Copenhagen since I had nowhere to recharge my cameras batteries (campsite: remember?) and since a lot of European cities look quite similar in photos, I'll save the architecture for later. Today, alongside the text, I'll post some lovely images of people pretending to be Scandinavian instead. I can do that because I consider myself a pretend Scandinavian, too. I am the Scandy Man, and the Scandy Man can, as the song goes.

Our old friend Saint Augustine tells me that “Life is a book; not to travel is to read only one page.” Augie’s modern day equivalent, Oprah, gives us contrary advice: “Wherever you go, there you are.” I don’t know who is right, and today I was wondering which side I’m on. Does travel change us, expand us, make us more? Or do we carry our bags at all times, every new destination only reflecting where we’ve come from?

Talking to Darko last night, I learnt that he’s studying psychoanalysis, which was interesting as I’d never met someone who was accredited in that field and also because the guy next to us had a drink gaffer-taped to his hand and a chair taped to his leg, which begged interpretation from some kind of professional or at least exuberant Montenegro guy who was on his way there. I asked Darko the obvious question, given the company he kept and the past he’d had (not much fun, to put it blunt-wise): you’re doing it to understand yourself, right? He laughed (which, typically, made the table shake, plaster fall from the ceiling and old people in nearby apartments cross themselves and whisper prayers to the Lord) and nodded, going further to argue that every conversation with another person is just a chat with ourselves.

But if that’s the case, I’m back to the same old question: why am I here? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not asking this in the manner of some old guy who spends as much time as he can sitting in his ’83 120Y listening to Yes and wondering how he went from a go-getter who possessed what is known as “potential” to a mortgage-saddled burnout trying to raise a blended family while doing his best to avoid them. I mean, sure, I’m an embarrassing husk of what I might have once been. But I’m still doing ok. The reason I was thinking along these lines today was simple. In hungover agony, I started pondering the routines I fall into, the rituals that tell me who I am. No, I’m not going to detail any here since that’s none of your business, but I suppose putting yourself in a strange environment throws those patterns into relief, makes you wonder why you react to something in a certain way and not another.

Let’s take another philosophical position: to be is to do. We don’t arrive at our selves fully formed, but continually produce who we are by the way we act, and the way we react. Of course, you can argue that we don’t have that much choice – how we act is often conditioned by other factors. But once you realise a constant to your personality, once you’re aware of it, you suddenly do have that choice, since to continue to act that way is no longer something unconscious. Maybe that’s what travelling can offer: the chance to change. Maybe not.
Switching gears, or perhaps just coasting for a while: If we are what we do, I understand why I like Copenhagen so much. It’s the bikes. It’s most definitely the bikes. Words can’t really do justice to their ubiquity. I cannot recall, in all my time here, a moment when a cyclist wasn’t in view. Moreover, from anywhere I’ve been there has always been at least a dozen parked bikes visible. Everyone rides, everywhere, and it’s probably why everyone seems so damned fit. They’re not the cycle freaks of most countries, pedalling determinedly in lycra and fierce scowl; businessmen, pensioners, supermodels and ferals all rub elbows in the bike lanes that border every roadway.
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give any traveller, anywhere (except, perhaps, London, where traffic is lethal) it’s to buy a bike. It’s not just the fact that an entire city becomes convenient, any destination just a few pedals away. It’s the unique mode of perception made available. You get to see vastly more of your environment, without removing yourself from it. You’re still in the streets that you ride, but can skip the boring bits. In a car or bus or train, the panorama unfolds like a TV screen. Riding around a strange city is less like TV, and more like being really cool in a cool place with people who think you’re cool. Not exactly, but it feels like it (cool). Riding a bike is fleshy, corporeal. And when it comes to Copenhagen, it’s terribly cute.

In Malmö, another bike city, I saw an older woman telling off a young cyclist in corporate attire for talking on her mobile while riding. In Copenhagen, riding while talking is very common, and unremarked upon. I don’t know what the distinction means, but it feels like something.
Both cities have one thing in common, though: European wasps hovering over every bin. I guess it’s Europe, after all.

My last night in this city I’ve grown to love ends on a strange note. When I return to the campsite at around 11pm, I notice a row of candles leading up the hill to the site restaurant (yes, they have a restaurant. While I’m drowning in a sodden tent, the camper van crowd is living it up on Tuborg and saganaki). I realise that I haven’t seen the campsite at night, so this might be a regular thing, but I wander up the steps anyway. I pass the restaurant and head for the beach, avoiding the couples dotting the shore. They’re murmuring quietly on benches, and I can’t help but think how camping is connected to whispers, furtive sounds slipping out from canvas and zippers to only hint at what’s going on inside. Camping is stealth, cunning and disgraceful.

I wander down to the two piers which jut out fifty metres or so onto the water. The first had a white-clad garble of figures vaguely discernible at its end, a romance-ridden couple, probably, so I keep on till the second quay and tread the creaking boards. Near its terminus, I sit down and look out at the lights of the city in the distance, and the foggy grey of the horizon. A smudge of light, only visible at the peripheries of vision, might be Malmö. Boats are sprinkled along the horizon, betrayed by tiny safety torches.
Then I hear him. It’s not a couple on the other pier, but a man on his own. He is visible as a vague silhouette, kneeling. He is singing.
It’s a devotional song in Arabic, a Muslim prayer directed out across the ocean. His chorus is the birdlife quacking and squealing at irregular intervals and the steady lapping of waves against pylons.
His song is the most beautiful thing I’ve heard on this trip, and I feel like I’m his sole audience member. The passion with which he sings is audible in the occasional cracks in his voice, not flaws but fault-lines suggesting a tectonic, heaving faith. There’s a gradual rise in volume, until he almost seems to be crying his song. After 20 minutes he hobbles to his feet and staggers off. A drunken prayer, perhaps. Still a beautiful thing.

Time to leg it from this joint. This morning was an exercise in disaster, to overstate the case (as is my wont). I hadn’t banked on summer nights in Denmark hitting freezing point, and so I spent the night in my tent shivering, sleepless, wearing every item of clothing I’d brought for the trip and serenaded by the chatter of my own teeth. When I got up at sunrise (not woke up, since I hadn’t gotten a wink, but literally just stood up to see if sunlight meant warmth, and to separate night from day) my troubles, well, continued. I bought a bottle of orange juice from a supermarket and took a big swig. Thus discovering that I’d bought a bottle of orange cordial. I dropped my iPod in a puddle. I decided to ride the 40kms to Koge on a rusty bike with one brake, a backside and spine nearing breaking point, a pocketful of krone and a heartful of optimism. Care to join me?

Conditioned (pt 5)

Copenhagen. I will learn to love this kind-hearted and cheeky colossus. I’ve only been here 30 minutes and I feel at home. It’s not the prettiest city, sure, but it’s got moxie. I’m sitting in a café surrounded by unassumingly cool kids with laptops and lattes browsing the creased old novels set in bookshelves below the bar (pulp romance, detective or sci-fi, mostly). They (the patrons, not the books) spill onto the street where bicycles whirr by incessantly. A sultry Danish folk singer croons from the stereo. And it looks like the sun is about to come out.

The best part of the Laundromat Café (probably a novel name in Danish) is what gives it its title: the tiny red-walled room at the back which houses a row of modern washing machines and a couple of gleaming steel dryers. Coming from Malmö, I’m in heaven.
Malmö has no laundromats, no public washing facilities, and no substitutes in the hostels, ya see. In an unrelated coincidence, I arrived in town with no clean clothes. Every residence in Malmö, I’m told, has its own machines in the basement, so there’s simply no call for a Laundromat. I can go to a dry cleaners, the hostel owner hopefully suggests. Yeah. I’ll be getting my underwear chemically cleaned and steam-pressed, because my name is Jean Claude Van Damme and my unmentionables are worth more than pressed gold and I’m incognito for a film here in Sweden based on the true story of an expensive underwear-wearing cyclist who battled his demons while doing the splits on a cheap rented bike. That’s why I’m here at your hostel. I hear it has splits-friendly facilities. Oh, and a pool table.
The Malmö clothes-cleaning crisis was a blow, and last night I was out wearing a crumpled, unironed shirt which I found near the bottom of my bag, and a pair of jeans and a jacket which I literally doused in aftershave before daring to brave the streets. Maybe this contributed to my minor malaise; dirty, running on an average of 3 hours sleep since arriving in Europe, and feeling like a bedraggled stranger in a strange land. Now I’m rested, washed and cheerful. God bless Copenhagen. God bless the Laundromat Café.

Well, you’re back. Now, where did I leave you? Ah yes, Copenhagen. The city has only gotten better. While my time in Malmö was defined by solitude, the opposite has been the case in Copenhagen. In my first 24 hours, I met dozens of people – people who’d approached me, stopped me, dragged me onto a dancefloor or into a bar. Nice change, this.

Meet The Bike. It might not look like much, and that’s because it isn’t much. In fact, since it was the Cheapest Bike in Copenhagen, I don’t think I’m out of line in dubbing it the Worst Bike in Copenhagen. Still, I’m sure we’ll have lots of odd-couple adventures, knocking over apple carts and being chased by fist-waving cheese vendors.

In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I bought the bike so I could ride down the length of Denmark to the Southern coast, where I’ll jump on a ferry to Germany. Why not, I say. And to add to this completely frivolous decision to camp out in a one-man tent while here, and I just know what you’re thinking: Oh Boy! He’s going insane again.
But that was later. Dalby. We'll get there.

Shortly after I’d done my laundry I saddled up the bike and headed for the camping ground. At this point, the heavens opened up and I stayed drenched for the next six or seven hours. Pitching a tent in driving rain is nasty business, especially if you’re trying to shield two bags from the elements. It’s even worse if you have no idea how to construct the thing.
Luckily, as I stood huddled in a tiny alcove (a remnant of the 1880s fort the site is built upon) and pondered my problem, a Danish man walking past offered to keep my bags in his large tent while I set up. I took up the offer and he introduced himself as Stig, while his ‘travelling companion’, a firm-looking youger guy from Poland, served up steaming coffee from a thermos. When the rain let up a little, we turned to the task of tent-up-putting, though the other guys were as baffled as I was when came to the assembly process. An hour or so later, it was mostly up. A bit saggy, and filled with water, but workable.

I badly needed warmth, civilisation and a drink after the horror, so I thanked my new friends and headed back into town.
It wasn’t long before I met Darko. I was sitting alone at a bar when he approached me and told me he was happy for me to join him and his friends. I’d noticed them on the way in; a noisy, motley lot, mostly young and attractive and energetic. I should have guessed that they were a hospitality crowd; the staff of the bar itself, in fact, sending off one of their own in a typically rowdy fashion. Ethan was an Australian and after eight months here was off to Melbourne again. The others were mostly Danish, with exceptions.
Exceptions like Darko. At 38, he was older, and hailed from Montenegro. He was unnervingly vivacious, with a booming voice and animated features. He’d clap a bear-like hand on your shoulder to emphasise a point, then bounce back in his seat laughing wildly. He didn’t work at the bar, but I could tell he made friends wherever he went. I guessed I was one now, too.
When the bar closed, we were shuttled around the corner, a solid mass guided by unknown forces. We found ourselves in Rust, where Darko managed to fast-talk us past the long and unmoving queue. Inside, the crowd was big and beautiful. Copenhagen knows how to party. But if the daytime Danish are friendly, it’s amplified after a few drinks. More than once I’d feel a tug on my sleeve or a call from a nearby booth as a local struck up a conversation with me. Confronted with a reel of Danish, I’d have to respond with an I-don’t-speak-Danish apology. And just off the boat (or train) my first reply was an I-don’t-speak-Swedish, which was fine since the woman I was talking to didn’t either. But it’s unsettling to feel welcome when you’re travelling blind. Enjoyably so.
It’s probably not right to characterise the city as an especially open and friendly one. The people don’t seem that different to those I encountered in Malmö. There are just as many curt workers, and couples in cafes who’ll politely answer questions but won’t welcome you into their homes. I don’t think Copenhagen is necessarily the most amicable place around, but it sets up the conditions for friendliness. People don’t drive as much; they glide around on bicycles, which are a far more sociable form of transport. Diners and streetside café tables line the roads and laneways. There are spaces to encounter someone everywhere you turn (I’m talking about the areas just outside of the city centre, at least – the centre seems colder). In Copenhagen, it’s just possible that you can go out for a quiet drink on your first night in town, and go stumbling back to your bed as the dawn begins to sweep across the sky.
Though in my case, that bed was a tent still filled with water. Not the best end to a night, but an end, nonetheless.

The Odd Stranger (pt 4)

Did you ever have that thing at school where you accidentally called the teacher "mum"? All the other kids laugh and it's embarrassing. It's way worse when you call someone else "mum" though. Like that police officer. Or the magistrate. Or your cellmate, Frankie. I usually find the best way out of these is the tragic route: pause, and follow up with "I never knew my real mother". Don't say that to your real mother, though.



I don’t think I ever knew the real Malmö, Frankie. Malmö isn’t a city that rewards the lonely. Some places do. Paris is the city of lurve, but the flipside of this is that being lonely becomes an integral aspect of any visit to the place. We can never measure up to the romance of Paris, and the city is wonderfully, gorgeously deliberate about this disappointment. Berlin subsumes loneliness, making us aware of the smallness of our suffering and the inconsequential nature of a brief moment without friends or loved ones, before cheering us up with all the other things invented to stave off despair.
Malmö does none of these. If anything, it reminds me of London on a miniscule scale. It offers polite indifference to my miserable solitude. It recognises me with a clenched-teeth smile. I don’t think I should have come here alone. Sure, it’s a pretty city, and its inhabitants are obscenely beautiful in a way that I, as an Australian, can’t begin to comprehend. And its name obviously throws a bone to all those hardcore umlaut fans. I’ve often thought Melbourne’s loss of “most liveable city” status was largely due to its lack of umlaut action. But all of Malmö’s loveliness only makes things worse.

I did have my photo taken for a Swedish magazine. Being forced to recite the labels of the clothes I was wearing was a humbling experience, mainly because I had to check each label as we went along. The journos were lovely kids, though.

The most meaningful human contact I have here is with an old man at a table outside a nondescript pub. I’ve hit a minor crisis point, having covered much of the city on foot and not finding a toehold anywhere. I’ve exhausted my mental resources trying to find a way into the city, and been saddened to discover that all said mental resources could come up with is the purchase of this miserable dessert pizza slathered in cream and Spanish onion. The look on the face of this woman says it all.

Good times, good times. So I just stop, and sit down at an outside table. The old man at the next one along says something to me in a good-natured way and I gesture to him my lack of Swedish (I can’t describe this gesture, but it’s kind of like the “no speaka English” shrug which was rightfully banished from the Australian comic repertoire around 1991). He idles over and asks where I’m from. He knows Australia; this I gather from his battered English. His friend’s brother’s girlfriend lives there. In a big city, like Stockholm.
He’s a nice guy, in a sodden, standoffish way. Even the drunks here, it seems, are defined by a politely distant formality. It’s not the distance I saw in others who stopped to chat with the guy – they offered the tight-lipped curt blokeiness I recognise from home, the carefully macho pose outlined with quick nods and regular silences which reminds the listener that the conversation isn’t too close, and can be terminated at any time. Old drunks are often granted familiarity, comrade-status, but are rarely allowed to think they’re anyone’s friend. I guess I shouldn’t characterise him as an old drunk. I have no idea of his age.
When I begin to inquire about this man’s story, he tells me that his father’s brother is the richest man in the world, and that I must have heard of him. I nod, though the name he gives me is nothing like Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei or whoever’s pouting from the cover of Forbes these days. I ask if my new drinking partner is from Malmö and he shakes his head before informing me that his mother’s mother is Astrid Lindgren. This is a name that I do know, and will get to know better in the next half hour. He tells me a lot about Astrid. How her novels such as Pippi Longstocking (or Pippi Långstrump, as she’s known here) were the greatest fantasies the world has ever known; of her time as a teacher in the DDR; of the award she received in those years in Moscow; how she was never a socialist and how no one knew her age when she died in 2002 (if she really died, he cryptically adds). This is interesting, but every time I try to steer the conversation back to his own life, I’m met with a blank stare, even a jolt. Each time, he bounces back with more details of Astrid’s life, non sequiturs all.

Something smells fishy here, and I ain’t talking about Astrid’s recipe for Gravlax Surprise (note: gravlax is literally translated as “entombed salmon.” For what it’s worth). I have no idea if he was really related to her or if he just knew a lot about her. What did hit me, though, and leave me with a terrible ache, was the way he seemed to be filling some void with these stories, unwilling to talk of his own life, only throwing random facts of another person’s history forward at whomever would listen. And the pain came not from pity, but recognition, since this is a lot of what I do for a living. I don’t know anything about the guy, really, but I imagine him staving off a monstrous loneliness in Malmö by trying to create some kind of narrative which will give him a place within it. And all he is met with by all is indifference.

Hey Frankie, did you ever watch Battle of the Planets when you was a kid? Now that was a good show. Every time that came on I’d go abso-freakin’-apeshit (on the inside). But what really got me, years later, is finding out the truth about the cartoon. It turns out that it was an American edit of a Japanese show called Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman. Not just an edit, really: the US version took the footage and remixed it to create an entirely different story, more suitable for Western audiences. The whole “planets” deal, for starters. The original didn’t feature any space travel, for instance, which is why BotP featured excursions to strange remote worlds which looked suspiciously like Earth. More bizarrely, the character of Keyop, known for his creepy Tourettes-style verbal tics and nonsensical vocal eruptions, was completely different to the original, in which he made total (if sometimes profane) sense. And of course there’s arch-nemesis Zoltar: in Gatchaman the villain was a hermaphrodite, but in the US the character became two completely different villains, so as not to confuse the poor kiddies or their bible-belted parents.

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. It’s just that sometimes I think that writing about yourself is like watching an episode of this show. The amount of editing that goes on, and the fact that you’re second-guessing your audience, well, you’ve walked a mile in your own shoes and there’s no way you want to foist those stinky old goobers onto someone else. So you pretty it up, make with the funny and possibly add interstellar travel as a major structural component, even if it doesn’t quite add up. You might be depressed in Malmö, but nobody wants to hear about that, so you splice some Astrid Lindgren into your footage and try to cover up the seams.

Dang, he’s gone off to sleep right when I was gettin’ to the good bit. That ain’t like Frankie.

So, obviously, it’s really me I’m writing about here. And of course, it probably helps when Lindgren Jr. does find the odd stranger willing to listen to his story for a little while, so thank you too, reader.
Hey, did I mention how ridiculously good-looking everyone is here?

Giraffes, maybe (pt 3)

Ask me why I’m here. Go on, I dares ya. Not why I’m here on earth (I explained that in the last post, but short answer: co-inkydink). Not why I’m typing this up (short answer: none of my friends want ta hear about my holiday). And not why I’m overseas to begin with; Macaw and Starling’s wedding was two days ago, though, and now I’m dry-retching my way through the world’s worst coffee on a 6.50am flight to Sweden. So why am I here, and not back in London with the rest of my friends?

The wedding went off without a hitch, apart from the obvious one. Dove and I met up with Mockingbird in London, grabbed Dove’s old housemate Kite (now a UK res) and drove across England in a rental car, pausing to navigate the dangerously non-linear geography of Bristol to pick up a travel-hardened Drake before heading into the rolling hills and dales and glens and fens and heaths and copses and other topological forms which make Somerset so beautiful. Which it truly is, as was apparent from the first moments spent speeding through the countryside.

The winding roads are charmingly narrow, almost always bordered on both sides by ancient stone walls, thick hedgerows or abrupt drops. There are no pavements and indeed no hard shoulders along most of the roads, some houses even opening front doors directly onto the tiny two-lane highways. The extremely snug fit of all this means that a fractional misjudgement would mean a certain crash, and with Mockingbird at the wheel maniacally careening across the English landscape, this was a distinct possibility. Guy knows what he’s doing, though.

The night of our arrival was pretty quiet. We arrived at the church for a wedding rehearsal and walked all over Clevedon looking for a late dinner. We saw how grand and proud much of the town is, immense historic houses arcing up gorgeous sloping streets, most looking like converted churches. We saw how different our lodgings were. Warren’s Village is not, suffice to say, in Clevedon’s most sought-after district.

The day of the wedding itself kicked off with Dove being attacked by a cow. He’d risen early and wandered off down the meandering lane to get some supplies for breakfast. On the way back, he was ambling contentedly along a country lane, bordered on either sides by the ubiquitous hedgerows, and looking closely for hedgepigs (the quest for hedgepigs was one of the constants in our voyage). Suddenly he heard what I can only describe as a bone-chilling moo, and I’m pleased to think that you’ll never read that phrase again in your long-legged life. The cow-roar was accompanied by the sound of clattering hooves. Soon enough, around a bend in the road came a wildly cantering cow, and by his account, a cow with its hoof hard on the gas pedal is a deeply disturbing sight. It charged towards him, and a combination of shock, fear, and comic disbelief rooted him to the spot. Also, there were eggs in the shopping bags which might have been broken had he tried to jump a hedge. Just before it reached him, the cow veered to one side and he found himself alone again, with only the sound of a rapidly disappearing mad cow and a sense of unreality to accompany him. All in all, a nice way to start the day.

This comedy of errors continued when I noticed that Mockingbird had worn my contact lenses instead of his own. This wasn’t a problem for me, but since he was off somewhere driving around those narrow and perilous roads, I began to worry. Mine are about three or four times as strong as his. When he’d left to help set up the wedding, he’d commented on how filmy and blurred his vision seemed. To my shame, I’d told him (a new contacts wearer) that this wasn’t strange in the morning, when the eyes can take a while to adjust. These thoughts might have been ringing in his head as he barrelled through a crumbling wall on top of a picturesque bluff.

But that didn’t happen.

The wedding, of course, of course. Macaw and Starling were (and are) a gorgeous couple, as everyone remarked.

The ceremony was well attended, and the reception was unforgettable. Set in a green country estate replete with cows and goats, I danced with old people and children. This is always one of the joys of special occasions, though you’d never want to dance with old people or children at most other points in your life. There were speeches which managed not to be embarrassing or ill-judged, but instead came across as tender and aww-worthy (Mockingbird's best man speech wasn't as violent as the prep suggested):

There were slightly drunken relatives whom I’d never met but who nonetheless welcomed me as a fellow countryman, and applauded the fact that the strange young Australians were the first on the dancefloor, and the last to leave - although really, we weren't the first, since the bride and groom cut some rug to warm things up, in accordance with tradition:

There was a Scot who kept his iPod in his sporrin.

There were sunflowers:

And there were lots of people from Somerset. I’d never met someone from Somerset. They’re a breed apart.

A day or two later, back to London, where Mockingbird left for Italy and Croatia and the rest of us stayed another night. I went to the zoo with Drake and Meadowlark (staying in London for a while). There were giraffes.

And the next morning I woke an hour and 40 minutes after my alarm went off and dashed madly across London to make it to my flight to Sweden.
Which doesn’t answer your question, does it? What am I doing here?

Sunflower (pt 2)

There’s a sunflower garden at Singapore airport. It’s worth a visit. Sunflowers don’t get enough play these days. They did on this trip. I saw a lot.

Coincidences have been on my mind lately. You let one in, the others follow. They pile up, crowding in at the door like noisy friends-of-friends at a party. Of course, they’re a fun bunch who know good dance moves so you don’t call the cops. But you do wonder – who are these crazy mixed-up kids?
The long leg of the Singapore to London flight takes around 13 hours, making it a tough one. Some people complain. Me, I can’t wait to relive those memories a dozen times per week for the coming fortnight at least. Reminiscing about long and uneventful periods of my life helps me avoid the difficult bits. That’s how into long flights I am.
By the time Dove and I made it to happenin’ Heathrow (the most Carnaby Street of airports (except not)), we’d been awake for about 40 hours each, unable to get more than a handful of hours of fitful rest on the plane. We met up with Kite, kind enough to take into her London home the slimy husks we’d become, looking as familiar with hygiene as the Mother Country is with dental plans, good coffee and respect for former convict-stock. Ah London, how I have missed your sun-dappled boulevards and grinning, fruit-proffering denizens!

As an-ex Melbourne housemate of Dove’s, Kite was very charitable in taking us in. I'd like to say that our appearance was "practiced disarray" but it was closer to "escaped mental patient". Nonetheless, we found a warm welcome up four flights of stairs (four flights from the smokers' courtyard, I should add).

We also found fellow Melbourne travellers Meadowlark and Mockingbird. (By now you might be wondering about the whole bird-theme with everyone’s names. Obviously, I’d prefer it if I was meeting a bunch of avian companions and acting like they was human, taking hilarious (if delusional) jaunts across the English countryside with my fine feathered friends until some quaintly-accented rural gent accidentally takes me down with his twelve-gauge and stands over me in head-shaking pity/scorn uttering words such as “twas ne’er meant fer man te cavort wi’ t’ birds so, aye” and my family to gather round my coffin clutching a feather in each hand. ‘Twas not to be, ladies an’ gents. The bird-words are merely to conceal identities, and also to produce a general bird-theme to this blog (note to self: keep thematics sublimated. Make the reader work).

London: We all went out for dinner and drinks at a few pubs near Kite’s. It was probably close to 48 hours we went without sleep, Dove and I. Waking up at 6.30am this morning on the cosy loungeroom floor, well, it felt like coincidence and randomness were far away. In the warm, still, nearly soundless hush of the old inner-London terrace, I ambled around making myself coffee, looking at pigeons and flat grey skies, feeling safe in an orderly and unsurprising universe.

Of course, coincidences aren’t always alien to such environments, and are often less than dramatic. Some examples: on the Singapore to London flight, I’m watching Tom Cruise grimace his way through Mission Impossible III. I’m not surprised that Tom’s on-board in this way. You don’t get more captive than this. I’ve joined that all-important demographic of “people who oughta know better, but don’t,” and Tom’s accountants are establishing their kids’ college trust funds on that fact. It’s the perfect flick for a half-attentive plane trip, and I’m able to dip in and out of alertness as I’m served food, check the time till arrival, and so on.
At one point my gaze drifts to the screen of the passenger to my left, and I find my neighbour is watching Cruise in The Firm. To my right, my other neighbour is watching Cruise in Days of Thunder. Flicking through the inflight magazine, I see we have 80 films to choose from, plus dozens of tv shows and documentaries. Still, for some reason we’ve managed to accidentally inaugurate the first ever Tom Cruise Midflight Film Festival, without any conferring on the matter. Which I find funny.
Stranger, though, is the moment when Tom kisses his wife in MI3 and spins her around in a lovely cinematic classic shot. At precisely this moment, I catch Tom pulling the same move in Days of Thunder, the camera twirling around Tom and Nic exactly the same way. It’s uncanny, double vision, and I’m startled by the apparent coincidence, since I'm not nearly drunk enough to make sense of it. After all, it’s not that an on-screen kiss is that rare, or even that the shot mightn’t be one that Tom loves to demand in a film. But the chances that both myself and a neighbour would start our films at the correct moment to synchronise the two kisses would seem pretty slim.

But that’s the way coincidences work, right? The chances of that occurrence taking place are a million to one at best, but the chance of something equally unlikely happening, anything at all, is almost 100%. The number of strange, nearly inexplicable things that could potentially occur in our lives is limitless, so we’re not that often shocked when they do. It’s kind of what I enjoy most about travelling like this – I have no idea what possibilities might befall me, scary or hilarious or enlightening or wearing an outrageous hat, but I can be reasonably sure that unforeseen and highly unlikely events of some sort will be likely and foreseeable. Is it coincidence that will lead me here?

A final example on this kind-of boring point. My aforementioned flight neighbours and I were sitting in business class. Anyone who knows me would know that I could not afford and would not shell out for anything more than a crappy economy class seat surrounded by smelly whiny-voiced strangers who are all elbows. By a bizarre coincidence, though, I received that legendary thing spoken of only in reverential whispers, the first thing people dream of when they plan to take a flight: a pair of complimentary plane socks. I also got an upgrade. I’d like to offer a recipe for upgradification, but my good fortune came down to this: somewhere in business class was another passenger with my name, middle initial and all. When the airline was allocating seats, it couldn’t tell which one of us had paid for business, so we were both given the sweet seats up front. I wasn’t complaining (and I know what you're asking - were my first words "stop your fussin' and get a-bussin'!" I'll never tell, but yes, there were! (Or weren't)). And of the 20 or so other passengers seated in my section, I never did work out who my namesake was. The chances of our sharing a flight and name are, surely, astronomically remote, but like I’ve been trying to say (lord, are you even listening to me? Jeez.) most things that happen do so against astronomically remote odds. What are the chances that a bunch of molecules will make their way across the universe over millions of years and get together to have a big multi-decade long knees-up named you? What are the chances that we’ll be born, grow up, develop faces, not be murdered by circus folk, fall in love or out of a car, understand the faintest thing we hear and be as children amazed by the complexity of everything that happens?

All I say is: thank you John M. Bailey, business class traveller. I’m pleased to wear your shoes for a day. You’re not touching my complimentary plane socks, but.