Why am I doing this?

The new term is upon us – upon me, I suppose I mean – and I should be sitting here working on my schemes of work instead of which I'm doing this. It's just displacement activity because I lack the will to do what I have to do.

Anyway I want to get all self-referential for a minute and blog about blogs. We've been talking about them at wordcraft and one of my friends there has set up a blog just because we told her how easy it was. What though, she would like to know, is the actual point of doing so? Is it just therapy to put your thoughts down somewhere? Is it because, of all the millions of blogs out there, you are sure that people will somehow find and love yours? Is it to get something off your chest, she asks, or perhaps to get lots of comments or to connect to others?

I'm sure (I hope!) that she won't mind me saying that her new blog is on a subject that could probably be described as a minority interest. An extremely minority interest. It's about the word "epicaricacy" and while this may have generated tons of word craft discussion (such as here and here and here and at least a couple dozen other places) it's doubtful that many people would want to read a whole blog about it.

But the question of what blogs are for is interesting though it's really just the modern variation on the question that every writer in the history of literature has asked himself at some time or other: "Why do I do this?"

Take me. I write poetry, travel journals and occasional essays. Nowadays I get the odd poem stuck in obscure local writers' magazines; some of my journals made the local newspaper; I enter (but so far never win) story and poetry competitions and I perform poetry from time to time at City Voices, a monthly Wolverhampton storytellers' evening. So I have a small audience. For most of my writing life though my audience has been me. Even now probably ninety percent of everything I ever write is still never seen by anyone else. Would I like to be famous (preferably NOT posthumously)? Damn right, I would. Do I think there's much likelihood of it? Nope. Wouldn't bet my loose change on it. So why do I do it?

I have my own pet theories about why people write and they apply equally to blogs. I think it almost always starts out as a kind of therapy. People write to get something out of their system. This is why there is so much self-absorbed twaddle kicking around on the internet. If you write self-absorbed twaddle don't feel offended. I'm about to show you some of mine. People's first fumblings in writing are almost always "me obsessed" and about themselves and their inner turmoil. Let's throw in something of mine just to show you what I mean. I apologise in advance for how bad it is. I was either exactly fourteen or exactly fifteen when I wrote it.

31,536,000 Seconds

Don't wait for life because no one's coming
Don't dream too much when you're still running
Don't try too hard, don't try at all
No one will catch you when you fall.
Happy Birthday! Birthday dreams.
Happy Birthday! Birthday screams.
Happy Birthday! Birthday wishes.
Happy Birthday! Misery's kisses.
Try not to think, you'll hurt yourself.
It's easy to believe you're someone else
But the mirror still reflects your face
It's easier to just leave the race.
If you should hear the serpent's song
Though you know the tune don't sing along
The future good they said was coming
Was just the sound of dead men humming.
If you look up to the waning moon
And reflect on the fabric of the dreamer's loom
Try not to be bitter when you find out
That what you took for a victory was really a rout.
Dream alone to keep from the vision's harm.
Do not be fooled by the other dreamer's charm
Though you made it past another year.
There's a lot of future for you to fear.

Right . As you can see it's mostly gibberish but the tone is very clear. Teen angst. No friends. Unhappiness. Loneliness. It's rubbish from start to finish, of course, but that wasn't the point. Like all teenagers I did feel all those things and that poem and a thousand others like it (now mostly lost for ever, thank goodness) were therapy. Getting it out of my system. It could just as easily have been written ten minutes ago by some teenage kid (boy or girl) who dresses in black and spends a lot of time alone in the bedroom listening to doom-laden gothic metal. (And even at 51, I'm rather partial to that kind of stuff myself. May I recommend Within Temptation?)

That's how it starts and for many that's how it ends. Others though, like me, move on to the other stage – compulsion. As your writing gets better you start to write about other stuff and come to realise that with or without the personal angst the act of writing, of writing anything, is actually something you enjoy. By now it's too late to back out. You now write because you have to. The switch in your psyche has been flipped and it's locked on the new setting. You can no more not write than you can not breathe. That's how it is for me. I've been writing stuff for nearly forty years and there's no way I could possibly stop now. This new blog may well die a death as my other one did but it doesn't mean that I won't write. It means that I'll write something else, somewhere else.

What, then, is the answer to the original question? What is the point of blogs. There are two answers depending on how long you've been doing it. They are either there to ease your own troubled mind or there because if you didn't write that, you'd write something else.

And it doesn't matter if no one comments on it. It doesn't matter if no one likes it. It doesn't even matter if no one reads it. What matters is that you wrote it.

And now, because I can't just let that crappy poem stand as the only one in this blog. Here's another one, more recent, less narcissistic and, in my view, considerably better.

It has absolutely no connection with what is written above. It was written after a visit to the cemeteries and museum at Gallipoli.

In Gallipoli Museum

I saw two letters, under glass
In a room of weapons
Uniforms and photographs
And more.
I saw the fragments of the shells,
Mounted, captioned
Memorabilia of hell
And war.
The letters drew me to the day
- The calm between the storms -
When two men had tried to say,
"Goodbye!"
With words that might console
If grimmer tidings came
And their name was on the roll
Of those to die.
Transcribed afresh and copied clean
Where faded ink on yellow page
Might be no more than simply seen,
And yet not read.
Each wrote of optimistic times,
Comforted his family far away
Tonight on opposing battle lines,
Tomorrow dead.

Next time: more selections from Samuel Johnson.

Northern Lights

By coincidence, a few hours after I posted my last entry about birthdays (specifically mine), I ran across my diaries for a trip I made a couple of years ago to Iceland. I'd completely forgotten that I was there for my birthday. That may be because that year my birthday fell on the Easter weekend itself and in Reykjavik all the bars were closed. Fortunately the days leading up to my birthday were so great that I thought I'd share a pared down version of those diaries with you. And a couple of the poems I wrote while I was there too.

The approach to Keflavik airport must be one of the bleakest in the world. As the plane banks a view of a green-grey ocean flecked with the thin white lines of the breakers is replaced by a barren and empty land with patches of snow. In its turn this is replaced by the mountain range that is the landward continuation of the North Atlantic Ridge. Here and there, there are villages - fishing communities - spread out collections of low buildings as flat as the landscape they occupy but with brightly coloured roofs that make them seem rather festive.

We swept down into Keflavik airport, which is large, modern and remarkably quiet, and when we had disembarked we loaded our bags into two massive four-wheel-drive vehicles and climbed in for the drive to Hella. It was a flat landscape of sombre greens and browns in weather that seemed forever to be on the verge of turning really nasty but never actually progressed beyond distinctly unpleasant. We detoured briefly for a stroll on the beach where a freezing wind tore across the black sands and whipped the waves up into frothy peaks that looked horribly cold and uninviting.

Hella was an odd town, small and flat and spaced out but eerily absent of people or indeed any signs that people had ever been there at all. There were buildings and some of them had the lights on and the curtains open but no-one moved inside. The streets were wide and clean and completely empty of any kind of traffic. We were, as far as I could tell, the only guests at the hotel which was a comfortable and pleasant place. Dinner was at a local restaurant which was, apart from our group and two waitresses also empty.

Next morning we set off on our first proper day of the trip. The landscape was still, to begin with, predominantly flat with occasional red-roofed farms being the only structures to break the monotony of it. At this time of year the grass had a yellowish hue and was thin enough that the black volcanic soil showed through. Wherever there was surface water it was frozen and as we drove on, climbing steadily in our approach to the highlands, an increasing percentage of the landscape was covered with snow. Inhospitable as it looked this was farming country. The farms are usually quite large and keep mainly sheep and cows but the animals we saw most were small Icelandic horses which were once working animals but now, having been replaced by tractors are kept more or less solely for riding. They were all short and fat - not one of them came even as high as my shoulder - with shaggy unkempt winter coats.

As we drove on it was into a landscape that was increasingly obscured by the snow. We paused for a photo stop at a waterfall at Trollkomhuhlaup where, so the story goes, a female troll spied a male troll on the opposite bank of the river and threw in all the boulders she could find to make stepping stones so that he could get across to her. Now I realised just how poor visibility had become for whereas I had assumed that the horizon was as flat as out immediate surroundings, a brief breeze parted the mist and revealed that there was in fact a previously unnoticed mountain there. Even then it was visible only as a slightly varying shade of grey in the grey mist and the grey sky.

Up above the cloud line the snowy boundary of the road disappeared into a shifting void a few yards to either side of us and the pools of water became frozen mirrors with even the streams where the water should have been flowing caught in a pattern of ice waves.

The road conditions became markedly worse as craters and pits appeared in its surface and occasional chasms and gaps that our drivers navigated around with the ease of the long practised. Many times we crossed frozen rivers - sometimes directly, sometimes – thanks to the GPS – by following the bank until we found ice thick enough to drive on and then returning to the road along the opposite bank. Now and again in spite of all the caution the wheels broke through the layer of ice and into the water.

It was late afternoon by the time we arrived at our overnight stop - a mountain hut a very long way from anywhere. It was basic but clean. There was a toilet - of the long drop variety - but it was several hundred yards away and reached by ploughing through knee deep snow. While the cabin heated up from the gas heater and stove we went off in various directions for a walk. It was still overcast but there was no snow or rain and in our winter gear we were warm enough. There was a splendid isolation about it all as we trudged around the area being careful to note our way back to the hut for dinner.

Overnight the skies cleared. There were upsides and downsides to this. The upside was that the morning was bright and the sunlight on the snow scene spectacular. Behind the mountain that we had seen last night another was revealed, a giant shadow silhouette against the pale sky. The downside of course was that the clear night had brought a plunge in temperature and the biting wind tore savagely through our clothes as soon as we stepped out of the shelter of the hut. We ate breakfast and piled into the vans for today’s drive.

It was an interesting journey. The road was the roughest of tracks marked by poles which were often swallowed whole by the snow. Frequently there were areas where either the snow had drifted onto the road too thick to traverse or the road itself had collapsed into pits too unsafe. Our actual route was a kind of harmonic variation on the nominal direction of the road. rather as a jazz riff will weave around a tune, sliding on either side of it, never far enough away to be unrecognisable but never quite hitting the actual notes, so we weaved near – but rarely on – the road. I watched the black triangle on the GPS as it slid first to one side of the line that marked the official route and then to the other.

How, I wondered, had anyone ever managed this before the advent of such technology. I asked the driver. He shrugged and said,
“Slowly.”
As we drove it started to snow, at first lightly but soon hard enough that the tracks from the other van were filled in before we reached them although less than a hundred feet separated us. The snow came and went in random storms, Obscuring our view completely for a few minutes and opening up an horizon to horizon vista for the next few.

In one of these latter periods with the sun shining and a truly spectacular view we paused for lunch on a bleak rock strewn plain. The wind howled across it raising whirling dervish flurries of loose snow

We continued on our way until we came at last to Aldeyjarfoss. “Foss” is Icelandic for “waterfall” and this was our second. There would be more. Later, for example, we stopped at Godafoss, a smaller but, in the dying rays of the setting sun, much prettier waterfall. We walked along the rim a dozen feet above the water and met up with our vans the short ride to Myvatn which is a small scattered town in an area that is very geothermally active. This activity means that there is a plentiful supply of natural hot water to heat all the buildings so that our hotel was gorgeously warm inside. If anything it was rather too warm. The shower too was lovely and hot with the slight inconvenience of leaving the showerer smelling faintly but indelibly of sulphur.

We had a full day planned for 6th April. It started with a drive around the geothermal area. It was a crisp cold morning so that the steam from the geysers was sharp and clear against the background. So is the steam from the power plant which generates enormous amounts of electricity from this underground resource. This is another area where Bauxite is smelted into aluminium and also where diatomite - a mineral used in filters, insulators and the like - is recovered from deposits in the lakes and refined for export. The power plants that provide the electricity for this vent great clouds of steam into the air and the wind drifts it into plumes that are kilometres long making a ghostly and alien spectacle against the sky. Even those power plants, grey seem to be of a piece with the landscape, as if they belong there -grey gloomy and squat but somehow of a piece with their surroundings. The pipes that snake out from them carrying the hot water also look at home.

At a barren and remote spot we stopped and got out for a couple of hours hiking. The snow on the ground was fresh and about knee deep which made the hiking beautiful but fairly taxing. Wrapped up in my new parka jacket I was warm, rather too warm in fact so that whenever we paused to regroup I had to push down the hood and loosen the fastenings to cool off a little.

We had a second shorter hike in the afternoon, along a twisting circular route that confounded my sense of direction totally so that I was astonished when after about an hour we rounded a corner to find ourselves back at our starting point. The snow was virgin and white and the rocks stark and black so that the hike took on a startlingly monochrome nature with only the washed out and faded greens and browns of trees and earth forming a very slight contrast.

Sadly all the plodding through snow had flared up my old knee problems once more so that I didn’t feel up to any further activities for the day so while others chose between sno-mobiling or more hiking I just sat and read and wrote a little and drank a couple of bottles of ludicrously expensive beer.

The next day there was a lot of driving on the schedule. We set of at the quite civilised time of nine O’clock and reached the northern capital of Akureyn shortly before lunch. We stopped to have a look around the town. It’s quite moderately sized and has a lot of interesting buildings but I was more interested to find that it has a good book shop with books in English and German as well as Icelandic. I can read both English and German but have no knowledge at all of Icelandic. Naturally I was looking for an Icelandic book. It took some time and the aid of two of the shop assistants but I left the shop clutching an Icelandic copy of Lisu I Undrilandi - Alice In Wonderland - to add to my collection. I was slightly disappointed that it was the Anthony Brown illustrations rather than Tove Janssen which would I felt have been more appropriate but nevertheless I had one. I added a couple of CDs of Icelandic rock music and three bottles of beer to my purchases, and went back to the van.

Then it was on to our overnight stop - another mountain hut. Unlike the first one this one was heated and had lighting. The geothermal power provided the hot water for washing and heating and a diesel generator at the weather station about a mile away ran a cable to provide the electricity.

We ate a splendid barbecue dinner, went for a magnificent walk in the bleak but beautiful surroundings, drank our lunch time purchases and waited for the Northern Lights. Last night in town we had seen faint traces of green in the sky and assumed that we could expect no more tonight. We were wrong. When they appeared they were something far more strange and wonderful. A great green, shimmering arc split the sky from horizon to horizon. To either side of it there were lesser patterns of shifting hazy light. Fringes of luminescence rippled across the sky and died even as others appeared elsewhere.

Here, with no disturbing background light and the clearest of clear nights, the show was breathtaking. We all stood around watching them until, forty-five minutes later, that faded. Twenty minutes later the second performance started. This time they formed a series of hazy veils like silk curtains around the edge of the world shimmering as if moved by some unseen hand. It was everything we had hoped for and more. The whole sky was ablaze with them and no-one, however cold hearted or cynical could fail to be impressed by the spectacle. We retired to bed a very happy bunch indeed.

The first poem here is about the town that is described at the start of the piece above.

In Hella

The houses are neatly laid out in rows
and the windows are lit but none of them shows
any signs of life.
The roads are wide but have no cars
and the tables stand empty in all the bars
through day and night.
The banks and shops seem silent and closed
and on the pavements skeletal trees have been posed
but no birds sing.
There are distant throbbings that might be planes
flying away from some distant airport but could again
be some other thing.
The hotel where tonight we have to stay
has no other guests at all to get in our way -
it’s an empty place,
like the town that surrounds, the buildings and all
the streets and the street lamps that can’t quite recall
the human race.

This second poem was written the morning after we saw the Northern Lights when I was first to waken and sat in the early morning silence just watching steam drifting across the landscape.

Northern Lights

There are no lights in the sky now
save for the bullying sun
threatening the faintest of faint clouds
that cling to the horizon
unwilling to let go
fearing oblivion.
Ghosts of steam escape the underworld
to haunt the rocks and hollows
to drift across the empty land
lost, lonely, spectral things,
pale dancers pirouetting
in the daylight.
Since last night the world has changed
for then there were flames and fire
ghosts above us rather than around
angels in a hollow sky
reaching into our hearts
from eternity.
Silk circles wrapped around the world
rippled and shifted and shook
and shrank to faint lace traces
that glowed more brightly as they died
leaving the sky a deep
and empty black.

This last, long, poem was written on the afternoon when I sat around doing nothing. I was in the hotel bar where, on a shelf above the optics, was a very threadbare stuffed arctic fox. It set me thinking and as I sat there I started this poem. It was several months later that I finished it.

Dead Things

Look at me, I used to be an Arctic Fox
With long white fur and bushy tail
My domain was a landscape of ice and rocks
Where I knew each hillside trail
Against this snowy background it was really tough
To spot me as I went about my way
But, so it transpired, not nearly tough enough
Or else I might be living there today
But no...
Now look at me a shadow of my former self
With yellow fur and a tail worn thin
I stand here in the bar room on the knickknack shelf
That overlooks the whisky, rum and gin
I’ve lost count of the years since that bullet through my brain
And makeover at the taxidermists hand
I was never that religious but when I think of it again
It’s not the kind of afterlife I’d planned

Look at me I used to be a crocodile
Admittedly not someone nice to meet
But I couldn’t help my nature and at least I had a smile
Whenever I met someone good to eat
I would lie there in the shallows patiently all day
But move like lightning should the need arise
I thought I was invincible and so I have to say
That my sudden death came as some surprise
So now...
Look at me I have to bear this heavy load
I’m really not the animal I was
I’ve become a creature of no permanent abode
For example my head’s mounted in the lodge
While the greater part of what was once my sleek anatomy
They’ve found a dozen different ways to use
And with great imagination have converted much of me
Into handbags and accessories and shoes

Look at me I used to be an elephant
A hulking great monster of a beast
But I was quite gentle and wouldn’t step upon an ant
Branches leaves and twigs made up my feast
But it seems that I was valued for more than just my size
Or my temperament, however sweet
It’s really rather flattering to be worthy in men’s eyes
But on the whole I’d do without the treat.
Because...
Now I somehow feel that my life has gone to bits
For my body parts have gone their separate ways
My feet it seems were ideal for umbrellas, canes and sticks
Though that’s gone out of fashion nowadays
My tusks when carved in shapes by nature unintended
Made ornaments for all the finest homes
As for the rest of me when my life had ended
That was left as rotting flesh and bones.

Look at me I used to be a human being
Master of the world in my own eyes
But that’s because I had my own peculiar way of seeing
And mixing up reality and lies
I strode across the continents and conquered seven seas
Created and destroyed in equal measure
And demonstrated a facility that came with perfect ease
Of muddling the trash in with the treasure
Well...
Now I’m nothing more than a shadow on the wall
An outline silhouette of dust and ash
And all because I didn’t know the rule that binds us all
Everything in life at last must pass
And the world on which I lived is just a cinder in the sky
A mausoleum, tomb and monument
To my great capacity to demolish and destroy
With or without a ruinous intent.

Alice in Wonderland and Samuel Johnson

It will soon be my birthday. Birthdays, in general, get less and less fun as you get older. Mine stopped being much fun a very long time ago – around the time that people stopped buying me presents I wanted and started buying me presents I needed – most often shirts. Normally I can at least have the day off work. I'm a teacher and most years my birthday sits comfortably in the middle of the Easter break. This year, because Easter is so early (or put more simply), I'll be back at work by the time the day rolls round. I don't suppose it will make very much difference – apart from the obligatory purchase of cakes for the staff room.

Last year, though, was different. It was in some ways like being a kid again. I wasn't in England, I was in America for the second annual wordcraft convention in Chicago – an event far less grandiose and far more companionable than the title might suggest. I spent the evening in a bar drinking the various ales produced by the Goose Island brewery and unwrapping the best array of birthday presents I'd had in years.

Now if I list them I'm going to sound as if I should be locked up. After all I have already indicated that I am not in the first flush of youth – to be precise I was fifty last year. A fifty year old man shouldn't really be talking about how much he enjoyed receiving, for example, an Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up book, should he? On the other hand I do have a rather large collection of Alice in Wonderland books that I have been building for many years now and the Pop-Up book in question was the one by Jotto Seibold which not only has complex and well engineered pop-up illustrations but also has a unique modernist take on its humour.

That was actually the second present that I unwrapped – the first being a set of fluffy white bunny rabbit ears. When you've had a few drinks you don't mind being photographed wearing such an item. There exists a set of photographs of all those present – me included – wearing them. I hope they are locked away in a secret vault somewhere.

Another Alice item was a cup and saucer which was unusual in not being a Disney item but rather being from Cardew Design NA Inc.

Not all my presents were Wonderland related though. One of the parcels turned out to contain a book of selections from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary. Given that we were ostensibly there at a convention celebrating the English Language this was rather apt.

As the preface to the book explains Johnson's Dictionary wasn't the first, wasn't the most up-to-date or the most comprehensive and wasn't the most accurate dictionary. And of course no one would sit and read a dictionary for fun, would they? That would be absurd. Absurd indeed, nonetheless it is a great book to dip into and pull out random gems. Here is half an alphabet of words that have taken my fancy. Some of them, such as abbey-lubber, just seem to be splendidly useless, others seem to be so useful that I may start reintroducing them in my own conversation. Some I just like for no particular reason.

abbey-lubber: A slothful loiterer in a religious house, under pretence of retirement and austerity.
(can there be many words that would be more useless in the modern world?)

botryoid: having the shape of a bunch of grapes
(I can think of piles of circumstances where that might be useful.)

cackerel: a fish, said to make those who eat it laxative
(I just love that definition, it seems so apt.)

discalceation: the act of pulling off the shoes
(never heard that before but I think I'll start using it.)

eame: Uncle: a word still used in the wilder parts of Staffordshire
(I live in Wolverhampton. I just love that "wilder parts of Staffordshire" comment.)

fescue: a small wire by which those who teach to read point out the letters
(I have no idea what this is but as an English teacher I want one..)

grammaticaster:a mean verbal pedant, a low grammarian
(Plenty of these around on the internet.)

humicubation: the act of lying on the ground
(Seen frequently outside pubs at closing time.)

ignivomous: vomiting fire
(Interesting mainly because a few pages earlier we also have flammivomous meaning "vomiting out flame". Just how many words for this concept did they need?)

jegget: a kind of sausage
(A definite touch of the Baldricks to that one!)

to kemb [now written perhaps less properly, to comb] to separate or disentangle by a denticulated instrument.
(Don't you love that definition?)

liplabour: action of the lips without concurrence of the mind
(Ah, the customary mode of speech of a politician then.)

to moble: to dress grossly or inelegantly
(I must try this one out "Why are you mobling tonight?")

The dictionary includes examples and etymologies (some of which are quite ludicrously wrong, good for a laugh though.) I'd recommend it is a thumping good read for linguaphiles. Sometime soon I'll pick a few favourites out from N-Z.

Anyway, as I said, my birthday has now rolled round again and this time being both back home in England and working I expect that I'll get a card from my Dad and maybe one from my brother. As for presents, well I think I'll have to buy those for myself. I may be sure of getting something I want but it isn't half as much fun as getting presents from other people. Perhaps I should considering retiring to a monastery and becoming an abbey-lubber. (I knew I could work it in, if I tried!)

How I like to travel

Robert Browning wrote a rather famous poem called "Home Thoughts From Abroad". Everybody knows it, or more precisely everybody knows the opening bit of it – "Oh to be in England/Now that April's there". It's poem filled with longing and wistfulness, the daydream of a homesick traveller. I stood in a classroom last week invigilating an exam and occasionally gazing out of the classroom window at the giant silver space-doughnut that is the new Birmingham Bull Ring and wondered idly if anyone had ever written the inverse poem – the daydream of an erstwhile traveller now stuck at home.

I suppose I'm being a little unfair. I love my job and my life is pretty good but I do miss the travelling. I miss the knowledge that tomorrow I will be seeing things I have never seen before. I miss the sensation of waking up in a different place each day, preferably somewhere that I arrived after dark so that I can view everything with new eyes. I miss the motion.

Another poem that I wrote for the Wolverhampton City Arts Festival (one that didn't even make runner up status) was called "The Road That Runs Through".

Under my skin the itching is growing

I've spent too long here, it's time to be going.

I have to be moving, and I really don't care

Where the road leads or how I'll get there.

It isn't important, my next port of call.

The motion's the thing, the journey is all.

Though the mountains and deserts are wondrous to see

It's the road that runs through them that's important to me.

I still get Christmas cards from people I met when I was out and about in the world and I may be projecting my own feelings but I sometimes seem to detect in them a similar regret that they too are now settled in their various locations. I've written a lot about my travels elsewhere and there are a lot of travel tales from my friend Manu* (who I spent six months with in the Americas) on his web site. Unlike mine, his includes a counter of how long he has been at home with his family. I'm sure that that's pride in his home-life, but if I were to include one it would definitely be nostalgia for the old days.

My students are mainly refugees and asylum seekers and I talk to them a lot about the world, the places we have been, the things we have seen. They inevitably ask me which was my favourite country and I usually answer that it was China. I have been there twice – the second time spending a couple of months crossing from Pakistan to Hong Kong. There was so much about it that I loved (though obviously not the Government – a sentiment shared by most of the people I met) that I could write a thousand pages about it and probably shall on another day, but if truth be told it's a convenient fiction. I don't have a favourite place. I've loved (almost) everywhere I've ever been but mostly I've loved travelling between places.

Most of my travel, airline trips to get to the start points and from the end points notwithstanding, most of my travel has been resolutely low budget. When I spent six months travelling from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego it was all by road. I travelled with a couple of overlanding companies for most of it. Now if you haven't travelled much you may not have encountered overlanding but basically someone else provides the route and the vehicle and you do everything else. You travel as a group and take it in turns to cook, wash up and so on. You sleep in tents or out under the stars or, if in a city, in a cheap hotel (often that you need to find for yourself). The trucks vary depending on which company you are using. They usually vary from basic to extremely basic. It's all great fun.

At other times I've travelled on local trains (derailed four times in one day in Peru), local busses, ferries (both seaworthy and otherwise) with a cabin, ferries without a cabin, tractor (it's a long story, I'll tell it another time), taxis driven by clinically insane drivers, tuk-tuks, jeepneys and in the back of cattle trucks. This kind of description horrifies some of my friends who feel that travel should involved luxury air-conditioned coaches, spacious and elegant en-suite bedrooms and plenty of fluffy towels. It's what I like though.

There is nothing that makes you feel more like a real traveller – an explorer even – than spending an hour or two digging your truck out of a mud hole or watching helplessly as the train crew try to use leaves and branches to get the wheels back on the tracks.

This idea that there are "travellers" and "tourists" is quite prevalent among a certain section of the public. There is a fashion to be sneering and supercilious about ‘tourists’ who are not proper travellers. Overlanders, travelling together on an organised trip, are considered to be scarcely better. After all it isn’t proper travel unless you’re doing it on your own, making the arrangements yourself, dealing with the authorities yourself and finding a doctor yourself when that nasty bowel problem is still persisting after two weeks of regular emergency dashes. It’s at places like Riobamba Station that you realise how little difference there actually is between the ‘wouldn’t catch me on a package tour’ brigade and the rest of us who actually form the majority these days. Riding on the roof of the train from Riobamba to Alausi and then down to Devil’s Nose sounds like something terribly adventurous and I suppose if your annual holiday is a week in a caravan in Rhyll it probably is but when you realise that the train has several very long carriages and the people on the roof are shoulder to shoulder all the way along - all of them tourists ( the locals have the sense to travel inside) you start to suspect that adventure it might be, uncommon it’s not. Practically everyone who goes to Riobamba makes this train journey whether they arrived hitchhiking, by local bus or on an overland truck. It may have been the province of ‘real travellers’ in the days before such mass travel became almost commonplace but nowadays it is definitely a tourist experience. No-one rides this train because they want to get to Alausi, they are riding it so that they can say that they did. Kids with trays full of sweets and chocolate, or paper cones full of sweetened nuts walk along the rows of the captive audience. Railway employees sell hats and T-shirts. At the stations women climb up with their hot empanadas and their roast bananas and men with buckets of ice follow them selling bottles of beer. If this isn’t tourism then, forgive me, I don’t know what is.

All of which is not to deny the excitement of the journey, or the unpredictable nature of travel. We were less than half an hour out of Riobamba, heading through some lovely scenery that seemed even better from this unusual viewpoint, when we had our first derailment. The train had slowed down which, given that it hadn’t been travelling very quickly to begin with, had brought us to little more than a quick walking pace. Suddenly there was a lurch, not a very big one, and as momentum carried the train forward it was obvious that our wheels were no longer on the tracks. Everyone instantly climbed down from the roof for photographs - more proof that inside every ‘real traveller’ a tourist is waiting to get out. The train driver and the guards crawled underneath and assessed the situation and then set about getting it back on the tracks. Their tools for this consisted of leaves, twigs, lumps of trackside stone and a curved piece of iron that was clearly purpose built for the job. They seemed very practised and skilled at it and although the whole process of edging forwards and backwards repeatedly, took over an hour, I couldn’t help wondering how often they had had to do this. Finally, it was done. The main difficulty had been that as each section of train went over the faulty piece of track it derailed in turn and had to be sorted out. Still eventually we were on our way. The second derailment came about an hour later.

By the time we reached Alausi the train had been off the tracks for about as long as it had been on them with four derailments in total - the last coming when in a fit of ‘oh no not again’ pique the driver had taken a fast run at a bad section and succeeded in simultaneously derailing the engine and every one of the coaches. I passed the time waiting for it to be put right in conversation with ten year old Sixto Ivan, one of the many children hawking sweets and cigarettes on the train roof. He was, he told me the fifth of a family of seven brothers and sisters and wants, when he leaves school, to be a mechanic. When I asked him why he wasn’t at school he told me indignantly that he goes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. He had spent the journey running along the roof selling his goods and asking people if they would give him their cushions at the end of the journey. He wasn’t alone in this, every one of the children - and there were quite a few - was doing the same thing, getting the promise of as many cushions as possible. I asked Sixto why and he told me that at Alausi they would be able to get money for them by selling them back to the cushion salesmen to be used again.

It wasn’t a very long journey but it had been made longer by all the problems so that when we reached Alausi it was already quite late and there was still the ride down to and back from Devil’s Nose before we rejoined the truck. I was apprehensive, having done this section of the ride a few weeks ago I knew how steep it was and with the four derailments still nagging at me I hoped it wouldn’t fall off the track again. If it did the consequences could be disastrous. I didn’t think there was any chance of it going fast enough to cause any injury but I did think that if it happened on this section it was going to be a whole lot harder to put right than at any time so far.

We pulled out of Alausi and started down and it became obvious that we were going to see very little through the low lying cloud that filled the valley. I was glad I’d been here before, I could imagine the glorious views of ever receding ranges of mountains and the dramatic drops down to the valley floor but the reality was a series of tantalising glimpses through the occasionally shifting cloud. On the return journey the rain, which had been stopping and starting all day finally decided to start properly and the kids, Sixto included, all snuggled down in among the adults trying to shelter from it’s sting. Nevertheless ten minutes out of Alausi, with the rain still falling sharply, all of them started to run about the roof gathering their treasure trove of cushions. There were dozens of disputes as two or more insisted that the same person had promised their cushion to each of them. There were scuffles and scrambles but in the end everyone was satisfied that they had got something for their trouble and we all climbed down from the train. The kids forgot us as soon as we were on the ground, ignoring us totally as they ran off to find someone to buy their booty before the train went back to Riobamba, taking them with it.

I'll stop quoting from my diaries now and finish off with another poem – actually not an especially good one. I came across it among my piles of papers about a week ago. I have been going through trying to sort everything out and this was a poem that I think I wrote – or at least started to write – at a writers' group that I was a member of. It describes a particular truck journey in Greece.

There's more pot-hole than road
And the truck smells of goats,
But at least it's a road –
And it's straight.
Then THUMP and then BOUNCE
And then OUCH and then CRUNCH
As we turn off the road through a gate;
And onto a track.
Slide right, then slide left –
The wheels find no grip on the mud
We fall on each other.
The air's filled with fright
As each lurch jars our spines with a thud.
The driver shouts wildly
With evident glee
And points out the shrines where the accidents were.
He lets go of the wheel
It's spinning quite free
As he fingers the rosary he has hanging there.
He revs up the engine.
We slide down the banks.
Some of us whimper, some of us squawk.
Then he slams on the brakes
And we all give our thanks.
That for the next week we are going to walk.

(* Coincidentally, after I started writing this, the post arrived and brought with it a postcard from Manu who is currently holidaying on one of the Thai Islands.)