Water water everywhere

 If you deny the existence of a form of magic which is generated when you put yourself in the way of life, with no effort or expectation, but just lolling your feet very casually in the river of human activity while you sit quietly on the bank watching the traffic of that river go by, then explain the following highly improbable encounter:

The crossing from Bari to Patras (or, with a little alpha-beta-ical flair, ᴨατραϛ) is eighteen hours, and my decision not to pay for a cabin resulted in me sleeping here, with surprisingly effective results, given the cold and my total lack of sleeping equipment other than my rain jacket to cover me.

Boarding a ship as a foot passenger is very odd. You just turn up at the edge of the land with your little pile of stuff and walk right aboard.

My cabin for the night. Actually it could have been far worse.

The following morning, as rain lashed the windows.

The journey from Patras to Athens is curiously ad-hoc given the fact that surely everyone must be going the same way. I was simply turfed out onto the street, blinking and stretching away the night's swelling, dreamlike crossing. I took a taxi to the bus station, went to a cafe to get my first spinach pie, where I befriended a man doing a Greek crossword by waving my crumpled Guardians at him and showing him the crossword I'd been doing. A bus took me to a train station and finally a train to Athens. On the train I got chatting to a pair of humanitarian workers who were working for the International Organisation for Migration, a UN body based in Corinth (I know: imagine working in Corinth! If I knew anything about Greek history I'd be amazed.) She was Greek and had lived in Strasbourg and he was Iranian and was doing interpreting work for the Pashtun speakers who had been doing the International Migrating.

We arrived at the central station and parted ways without swapping numbers and I walked my giant suitcase along the main road to the swanky downtown apartment I'd booked for my first night after the boat. The place was swish and I enjoyed some very mild strolling, ate Kurdish felafel with homemade bread, made before my eyes by a friendly Greek/Kurdish man, and generally began to form my impression that Athens is an unbelievably cool city where handsome people of all ages seem to be having a lovely time.

This morning it was time once again to move on, this time to the hostel that will be my home for the next two weeks while I start my Greek course and life starts once again to take some kind of shape. When I arrived at the Metro station, there was a hubbub as a small theatre troupe from Zakinthos were performing a traditional play in the street. I stood and watched in the sunshine (sunshine!) for a while then was about to call it a day when the acting was suddenly replaced by traditional hands-in-a-circle type dancing which was as easy for me to enjoy as the next person so I decided to stay and see it out. Some way through the performance I became aware of organised shouting behind me and turned around to see a protest passing, with flags and placards. It turned out to be a pro-Pahlavi Iranian protest demanding regime change in Iran and the restoration of the monarchy via the Shah's son. As I stood and watched the parade go by, reading signs and wondering at a population demanding a return to monarchy, someone from the procession grabbed my arm: the Iranian humanitarian man I'd met on the train! In a city of some large number of millions, I found myself right at the right place right at the right time! This time I wasn't going to miss out on a new friend so I walked alongside the protest just long enough to give him my number. We'll go for Persian food later in the week.

If you don't believe in magic that's ok for you, but I intend to keep dangling my feet in the river.

My first spinach pie

People of all ages having a lovely time

 

My newest friend

A few little impressions of my first day in Athens:

Overland to Greece: Bologna to Bari

My suitcase and guitar are in a left luggage office straight out of the 1970s at Bari port. I'm drinking coffee in a cafe at Bari airport having just dropped off the hire car that's ferried me around Apulia for the last five days. Thus officially ends a completely mad whirlwind of a time in Bari which defies summary and some of which is not for the family-friendly pages of this blog.

I arrived from Bologna and Florence, having decided that the weather was just too rainy and cold to stay in the North. Bologna is stunning, and I made good friends in the hostel I was in, and in Florence I visited D & T who I hadn't seen since London days and who made me an excellent welcome. But the kind of pacing the streets that freeform tourism requires is just that much harder when it's pouring with rain and 7 degrees. So I got on the earliest possible train South to Bari where my ferry was due to leave in just under a week.

I booked myself a room in a suspiciously cheap accommodation which turned out to be perfectly pleasant albeit in a ropey part of town, with young Russian influencer-types always occupying the bathroom. But I was sad to be in a room for one, rather than in a hostel. I thought what a mistake I'd made and set about glumly pacing the streets of Bari looking for someone to talk to. Bari was warm but also drizzly so unlimited strolling meant wet shoes.

My first discovery was Alessandro, owner of a vinyl records bar just round the corner from my accommodation and certainly the coolest bar and the coolest guy in that grotty suburb. He'd lived in Leeds and we chatted and drank beers, and he rolled me a cigarette and even offered me something stronger.

But it was my second discovery that was to kick everything into outer space. On the first full day, I strolled so far out of town that I ended up at a suburban railway station on the outskirts of Bari. I decided to get a train to a seaside town nearby for a late lunch by the sea. I stood and waited on the platform for 20 minutes, only to realise as the train rolled in that I was on the wrong platform and only a dash across the tracks would allow me to catch the only train that hour. Defeated and deflated, I waited for the train in my direction back to Bari Centrale.

My head was full of thoughts about sliding doors moments and about how I'd missed my chance for something exciting to happen and instead was heading back to the town I'd already seen. It turns out I was right about that missed train being a sliding doors moment, but that missing it had actually put me on the right side of history. At Bari Centrale, the rain was now coming down quite hard and the afternoon was by now well advanced. A large group of people stood at the exit to the station looking at the rain and hoping it would slow. I joined them, and stood in a corner looking out at a rainy carpark.

"It's not dry where you're standing," someone said to me. I looked round and saw a smiling young woman. "I was just standing there and I got dripped on. You should move along a bit." I assumed she was crazy, but even a conversation with a crazy person is better than no conversation. "Looks alright to me," I said, "I'll take my chances." She said that it didn't look like it was going to stop any time soon, and I told her that that was OK with me because I had no plans. "I've also got no plans," she said. "I'm just waiting until evening so I can go to my accommodation." When I asked her if she wanted a beer, she said "always!" and the evening was afoot.

She gave me her umbrella to hold and went to get her rain coat from her luggage which was in storage at the station, then we set off into the gloom together under her umbrella. She turned out to be Bulgarian by birth, went to school in Germany, and had been living in the US for 11 years where she'd married and divorced two different Americans, and had just hitch-hiked from Sofia in Bulgaria to Bari where she'd spent the last two years caring for her dad who had had a long illness and recently died. She was working on a budget of very little money indeed and was trying to hitch hike to Tunisia where she had a work placement sanding boats.

We bought beers, bread and tomatoes from a supermarket and went and stood on a street corner to drink the beers and share the bread. We talked animatedly about our lives and she told me a series of astonishing adventures she'd been on, including living in her car after her first divorce, and leading white-water rafting groups in Greece after sleeping with a rafter she'd met in the beer queue at a festival. After a few beers she said that she needed to get some Wifi so she could text this guy she'd met on a couchsurfing website who had offered her to share his single bed for the night. She wasn't feeling that keen on the idea, so I felt it only gentlemanly to point out that I at least had a double bed we could share. The deal was sealed.

The next few days are too wild and various to go into in complete detail but, as a sketch, I'll say that we shared an electric scooter round town with her urging me to go faster, drove all over the region in my hire car, broke into a building being renovated and ended up hopping from rooftop to rooftop in an ancient stone city, befriended an old jewellery maker who lived in a cave, swam naked in the glittering and cold Adriatic, ran up a mountain side as the sun set and we realised we were in the wrong part of the valley, drank free Prosecco in an Italian restaurant where she'd charmed the owner, ate, drank, sang and danced and were generally incredibly merry and in love for four days. We exchanged music, talked about our lives and backgrounds and generally learned about one another in every possible way. We ate focaccia from an ancient bakery, the like of which I literally didn't know existed (nothing like the focaccia I've had in the UK) and saw ancient cities on hillsides that, old and jaded as I am, I couldn't take my eyes off. We stole kisses among the ruins at dusk. Her energy, thirst for fun and loving nature had a magic which transformed things. With her presence, she transformed my lonely room in a dodgy part of town into a little home which it was always a delight to come back to.

She left the night before last at five in the morning to get a bus to Rome where she would be getting a boat to Africa. As she left, she wrote my number on her arm and we agreed that one day we'd see each other again. I'm glad I missed that train, and instead got to spend a few days riding on this metaphorical one. A much more rewarding journey.

An old jewellery maker who lived in a cave

A very poor attempt to mirror some street art

Some entrancingly beautiful tourist opportunities, among whose winding ruins kisses were stolen

Overland to Greece: the cold and rainy first leg

 Only four days into my latest travels, and time is already doing that thing where it feels like a thousand years ago since I arrived at Victoria coach station in the freezing dark of a Monday morning, wrangling through the London Underground my giant wheelie suitcase and the too-tall-for-doorways guitar on my back.

The coach from London to Paris is a very odd mix of people. It's wildly cheap and takes a very long time indeed, which clearly attracts a certain section of the market, that section seemingly being Latin Americans, immigrant families with lots of luggage and the occasional London teenager keen to get started ASAP with the TikTok and tunes out of their phones' speakers.

The coach was so cheap that I bought the seat next to mine too (something they actively offer you at less than double the price of one seat) so it was actually a very tranquil and meditative 11 hours of London traffic, white cliffs of Dover and, eventually, long after the sun had set on Monday evening, the chaos of the Paris périphérique.

As has been the theme of these travels so far, it was pouring with rain and extremely cold in Paris that evening, but I managed to stroll around a bit, have a beer while staring into space and pretending not to be listening to the French conversations all around me, then found myself at a punk rock gig in a little sticky-floored venue just off the Bastille. There's something dream-like about these solo wanderings where, as a man, your existence goes completely unacknowledged and you can float on the edge of various societies in an almost documentary film kind of way. The soaking wet shoes and socks on my return to the hotel were all too tangible though.

It's much quicker to get from Victoria coach station to a grotty Paris music venue in photo-montage form than to do it in real life

Absurdly early the following morning I got the train to Milan, which covered the boring sections of central France in the hours of darkness and had arrived in more scenic climes by the time the sun rose. It's Very Fast Indeed from Paris to somewhere South of Lyon, then the same train becomes a kind of winding alpine cattle-herd of a thing, with stops every twenty minutes at which no one gets on or off, and the snow on the platform is increasingly menacing-looking. Eventually we crossed into Italy and the Alps quickly eased off, replaced by rain.

The sound made by a wheelie suitcase coming upon sharp rocks hidden beneath the snow

One more slog up and down Metro stairs with my giant suitcase and, before you know it, you're breezing along a canal in the Milanese rain looking for a place to have a beer and some free Italian crunchy snacks. The rain was unrelenting and the cold somehow more intense than Paris, but the strolling was second-to-none. I chatted to some American Winter Olympics people on a tram (not team members sadly, but marketing and events drones but, being Americans, were still fun to chat to) then wandered around an art gallery called Pinacoteca di Brera which left you in no doubt as to what they thought Jesus and Mary looked like in 16th Century Europe. You could probably get a BTEC in crucifixion if you were really concentrating.

My Milan hostel was of the co-working-space, everyone's doing something important-looking variety. This included the reception staff and the bar staff and the people in my dorm who were all very concentratedly scrolling Instagram, so no fun was had. I left early the following morning to get the train to Bologna.

Joy and merriment of the good old-fashioned variety

"No I'm not in London, Droitwich. DROITWICH!"

The one thing I've always liked about hippie philosophising is the idea that "The Universe Provides" in response to a request or a need. It's a kind of Karmic mumbo-jumbo version of "fortune favours the brave" which seems to be the uniting force behind much of the antics in this blog/life.

And sometimes to fully realise the truth of this mantra, you've got to pay £500 for a week of Buddhist retreat in the beautiful Devon countryside, eat nourishing home-cooked and -foraged vegan food, sit for long periods of meditation, spend hours in sombre, sober silence, get bored, glum and claustrophobic and leave in a mad hurry after less than two days.

Yes, it's true. The promised new birth of an enlightened new Rob has ended in ignominious running away, dodging the morning's silent porridge breakfast, staircase hoovering, sharing circle and generally mindful drudgery. I just couldn't face it. It wasn't the Qi Gong in the drizzle, or the tears in the sharing circle about lives gone awry in as many ways as there were "retreatants". It wasn't even the narrow bedsprung single mattress, the pins and needles of the penis during a 40-minute meditation on a cushion (this is real and not at all as fun as it sounds), the bowing, the hands-to-heart-centre or the constant ringing of bells, gongs and singing bowls that seem to be the requisite accompaniments to a simple philosophy of impermanence, being in the now and breathing nicely.

No, it was just the po-faced mock-solemnity of the whole thing, and the complete absence of a twinkle in the eye of anyone, facilitators or retreatants, during the long periods of silence which were scheduled only to get worse during the week. I could have done it, I really could. I kind of like the idea of communal, silent task-doing. But it's got to feel light, fizzy and full of merriment and gratitude, otherwise it just reminds me too much of the glum, eyes-down church-of-england style processions I had to participant in as a member of "serious" chamber choirs my whole life.

There are several, separate funny stories to tell about the other participants but I'll leave those for in-person, but picture the scene Tuesday morning as I hid in my room, packing up my stuff while my course-pals ate a silent breakfast and presumably wondered where I was and why the stairs hadn't been vacuumed. I called H, the face of sanity among any level of new-age hogwash, and within an hour and a half I was safely in a cafe in Taunton, a convenient halfway point between the two of us.

We decided to make a holiday of this unexpected time together and went to a gorgeous swimming lake near her, whereupon I discovered than in my hurried departure I had not only had time for the bread to leaven, but I'd also left my swimming trunks and all my pants and socks in the bedside table back in the world of the deeply and spiritually relaxed. So I had to swim in my underwear, which was fine until we got out and had to go to a nearby Tesco where H bought me some new underwear while I sat in the car in only my towel. I was struck by the speed at which the sublime can become the ridiculous as I ate my Gregg's and pondered the comings and goings of the supermarket car park.

I spent the night at H's and decided to do a tour of The West, seeing all the people I know who live in the delightful and utterly inaccessible places around these parts. I'm now sitting on a train at Shrewsbury station on a train to Machynlleth in mid-Wales, having broken up the journey with a night outside Worcester in a small country hotel straight out of a bleak 1970s sitcom.

The Pear Tree Inn, not even "in" Droitwich

Worcester to Shrewsbury. Who knew where any of these places even are?

The Ale Hub Droitwich (see pin at bottom right). One of two places in this story which isn't even"in" Droitwich.

The choice of Worcester as an overnight stop started with a search for "open mic nights near Birmingham". I had my guitar with me so I thought I turn up somewhere and sing a few songs an make a few friends. It turns out that the last Wednesday of the month you're spoiled for choice round here and I had to decide between a full-band karaoke at a rock venue in Worcester, or an open mic in a tiny place called "The Ale Hub" surrounded by miles of new-build estate in the nearby non-place of Droitwich Spa. When I asked the guy in the pizza parlour in Worcester what he thought of Droitwich, he was most un-encouraging about the prospects for night life. But I made the call that even though the Worcester option would be livelier, I was far more likely to get chatting to people in an out-of-the-way open mic night than in an actual rock venue.

It so it proved to be. The venue was tiny, with about ten tables, many of which were filled with old dudes and their guitar cases. But the atmosphere was good and the standard not too bad. I immediately got chatting to some friendly Brummies next to me and later ended up sitting with a man and his daughter who'd come in from Worcester for an evening out. It transpired that he'd done some performing in the past, but was resistant to my suggestion that he try something with me accompanying him on the guitar. But later on his daughter came over saying that she wanted to take me up on the offer, and did I know Elastic Heart by Sia. I didn't but a quick listen off my phone in the car park and I found out it only had four chords, so we had a little practice then did it live, with me on the guitar and trying to put in some harmonies where I could remember the melody line.

I announced that "Rob" was now "Rob and Nicole", did my little set (Pray by Take That, Nothing Compares 2 U) then Nicole joined me and we busked our way through the Sia belter. It all went very well, and the 20 people in the room were all very impressed, with the dad beaming with pride right at the front.

This cemented us as firm friends and after the show was over, we decided to go together back to Worcester to see if the rock karaoke was still going on. The dad had had a serious car accident 9 months ago and was on crutches but was getting free taxi rides as part of the legal settlement, so I got a free ride with them into town. The rock venue was pretty busy and very much in full swing when we arrived, and long story short I ended up closing the show (purely by coincidence of how late we arrived and signed up) with a version of Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel which I'd been belting out in the car for the last month or so, so knew well enough to really do with some energy. The band were extremely nice about it (straight after the last chord, the keyboard player shouted "where the fuck did YOU come from?" and they all wanted to know if I lived in Worcester and would I be coming again.

We ended the night saying goodbye to our new best friends in the band, and going to a kebab shop with my father and daughter pals being sweet with one another, and generally excellent company. Numbers were exchanged and there were repeated cries of "If you're ever in Worcester again..." etc. etc. It was the universe answering my call for spontaneous joy and merriment of the good old-fashioned beer, music and friendship fuelled variety, with not a singing bowl or a lowered gaze in sight.

 

Back for good

 So that's that then. I'm back in the land of the ice and snow, and swimming in the sea and empty Shabbat streets are already turning into memory.

I have so psychologically prepared myself for the despair that was sure to accompany my return home that I think I've overshot, and I'm actually feeling pleasantly happy to be here. I've had that magical thing you get when you talk to a stranger in English for the first time and it's as easy as pie to understand and be understood. The weather is also playing its part in easing me back in: it's been relentlessly sunny, still and the kind of wild cold that's impossible to ignore, and which makes you feel like an explorer every time you leave the house. I'm writing this from a pub in North East London where I'm eating Monster Munch and drinking proper tea with milk and all suddenly feels familiar and sort of wonderful.

So this is the last blog entry until the next one. Thanks for reading along with me and my latest mid-life crisis. The picking up of the pieces can now begin in earnest. I've got choices to make, a new job to start, choirs to either join or create and a good Jewish woman to find and marry. I'd better get on with it.

Tea and Monster Munch prompt deep musings and sensations of belonging. As per usual...

A life sentence in Tiberias bears fruit

It can now be announced officially as a finding of science: love really is all around.

My decision to stay at the world's oddest hostel in the world's oddest town seemed scientifically designed to test the theory that something worthwhile can come from anything, if you just make yourself available. Surely here, in this barren and often rainy dead end town, with it's poorly-lit hostel populated with religious nutcases and non-denominational plain old nutcases, the conditions were perfect for a pure science experiment of the hypothesis the good things came to those who hung around long enough.

And I really did think I'd found the counterexample, that all the fun had already been squeezed out of my roommates Vlad and Nikolai by experiences in the Russian and Belorussian armed forces. But after 10 days of low-octane routine, breakfast at 7.30am, painting rooms with Israeli radio blasting, coffee and snickers at 11am, sporadically trying and failing to persuade the beautiful receptionist to go for a drink with me, and going to bed with my Steinbeck at 8pm, a certain peace settled over me which was either acceptance in the prison-for-life sense, or acceptance in the fat merry Buddha sense, I couldn't tell which.

And then suddenly everything changed in two subsequent arrivals. A couple arrived from Haifa, he British of the Oxford PPE then Sandhurst variety, and she Aussie of the "I haven't really got much time for ya bullshit t'be honest mate" variety, and they were very much looking for many beers on the rooftop which is exactly what transpired. We were joined by a totally insane Israeli, who'd just come from 8 months living on the beach, and who's liberally shared joints were of psychosis-inducing strength, and we had an evening of energetic talk and total hilarity which kind of broke the ice of the entire hostel in a way that seems pretty hard for me now to quantify, justify or explain.

But suffice it to say that when that evening a new volunteer suddenly arrived as if from nowhere, a young American man with a mandolin and a sharp dry sense of humour, it no longer seemed like such an impossible place to find such a person.

When the couple was leaving, after a further night of rooftop beers, guitar renditions from the new American, and laughing about the previous night's nonsense, the British trainee-officer asked me if I'd leave with him to have a final night of debauchery in Tel Aviv at the dubiously named "Roger's House," and the Aussie insisted I give her my Instagram because I was "a very special person," which left me wondering how she'd be telling this same anecdote to her friends.

I ruminated on the offer of a final night out in Tel Aviv and eventually told Fleur, the Dutch 20 year-old volunteer, that I'd decided that it would only be laziness if I decided not to go, and that that was no reason for making a decision and that I would therefore be leaving that afternoon. She seemed genuinely devastated at this news and said such nice things about how they'd all miss me and how much fun we'd had that I changed my mind again and decided to stay for another night, and cook a farewell dinner for all the volunteers who now suddenly seemed transformed from fellow inmates, into my crew from whom I was about to take a sad departure.

So I bought food, cake and Challah and we had a Shabbat dinner. Fleur miraculously found candles from nowhere and made cookies and I did the blessings on the candles, bread and wine. Sean, the new American, played songs on the guitar after dinner which we all sang along with. We then retired to the pool table for more beers and music and good fellow-feeling, to such an extent that Vlad surprised us all by saying, as it was finally time for bed, that it had been an "unexpected and unforgettable evening".

With these words ringing in my ears, today was finally time to leave Tiberias for real and I went up to the roof where Sean and Fleur were smoking cigarettes in the rain. I asked for my guitar back and Sean said "before you go, let me just play you something I've been working on" and proceeded to play a fully formed and wonderfully fond song he'd written about me, called "The biggest fool in Gallilee."

As I sit here on the bus, speeding away from the purgatorial ending to my time in Israel and towards an unknown future back in frozen England, I still can't quite believe it happened. Love really is all around.

My life in Tiberias perfectly summarised in a single bedside table

Suddenly a crew

Shabbat dinner

Late night at the pool table

I am unexpectedly serenaded as I leave