Portrait of England

When I was 4, my family drove to the south coast of England for a traditional British holiday. I buried my favourite Thomas The Tank Engine toy (Percy) on the beach at Weymouth, and the next year we went back to the same place. I tried to find Percy, thinking it’d have stayed where i’d buried it. I searched for hours. I completely ignored the World around me, as if it didn’t exist, in the hope that my concentration may lead me to find it. I never did find it. I do wonder where that toy is now. I wonder if it’s at the bottom of the sea somewhere? I miss Percy!

My portrait of England, is the great British seaside holiday experienced as a child……

A sign on the motorway for “The South“. A traffic jam on the M5 in the rain. A fleeting moment of frustration when the slow lane is moving faster than your lane. The moment of joy when you see the sea. Only to find out it’s a river. A stop off at a motorway service station without realising that everything you want to buy for the rest of the car journey is going to cost your parents more than the worth of their house. The moment you finally do really see the sea and you hear the seagulls. The drive up to the gates of the caravan park. The wait whilst your mum or dad collect the keys to the caravan from reception. The sound of kids playing in the pool. The moment you step through the caravan door with the awful furniture and the rock solid beds, but still you’re magnificently happy. The pointless act of looking through all the wooden cabinets in the caravan living room as if you expect something of supreme importance to be in there. There’s nothing in there. Actually, there’s one glass. There’s nothing else. Certainly not my Thomas The Tank Engine toy. The camp site entertainment team of 20-somethings who can sing and can dance but are held back by their over aged head-of-entertainment team leader who should have quit this game twenty five years ago but still insists on introducing (“Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only….“) himself. Production of Grease tonight. Entertainers from Birmingham and Stoke putting on 1950s style American accents. You don’t understand why that is. But don’t worry, twenty years later, you still don’t understand. Back to the caravan. Go to bed. Wake up the next morning to the sound of seagulls landing on the roof of your caravan. Or if you’re mischievous like I was….. throw bread onto the roof of your neighbours caravan and watch the entire population of England’s seagulls land thunderously onto their caravan. Laugh at their misfortune. Revel in your evil genius. Leave the caravan for a beach day. It’s not even hot. It’s cloudy. But you’re on holiday. Beach day it is. Take sun cream and sun block. Just in case. Coincidentally, find that sun cream fourteen years later in a draw back at home, unopened. Dad thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to leave the caravan wearing shorts, and white socks with sandals. Walk or drive down to the beach. Get out the car. Mum with a bag and an horrendously uncomfortable straw mat for sunbathing on. Walk on. See the sea. Stop suddenly. Excitement time. Mouth wide open…… you’ve heard the mellifluous sound of the amusement arcade. The grab-a-teddy machine that drops Zippy JUST before the hole, every time! Everyone else’s kid seems to have a Zippy. Why don’t you have a Zippy. Well perhaps when you’re 22, you’ll win a Zippy….

Storm off in a huff. Notice the fish and chip stand. No longer in a huff. Want chips to take to the beach. Dad buys chips. But now you don’t want chips. You’ve seen ice cream. You want ice cream. With raspberry sauce. But you have chips now. Hmmm predicament. Luckily a seagull is on hand to make the decision for you. Lose your chips to the birds. Cry. Dad buys you an ice cream out of pity. Score! Down to the beach. More families claiming their spot on the beach, than there are grains of sand. Set up the wind screen. Dad tries to knock it into place with a rock. It doesn’t look very sturdy. One gust of wind. Wind screen falls down. Dad gets annoyed. Finally puts it up right. Bury Percy. TO THE SEA! It’s freezing. Seriously, why bother? You could literally freeze to death. Back at home, if your mum or dad asked you to stand or swim in water that appears to be colder than your freezer, you’d call childline and report abuse. Back to the beach. See the Punch of Judy tent. Judy says something. Punch slaps her. Kids laugh. Never has the glorification of domestic violence been such fun to watch. See men carrying surf boards. There’s more chance of a wave striking your bathroom sink than on a beach in Devon, what the hell do they think they’re going to be doing? See donkeys. Demand a ride on one of them. They look miserable. But fuck it, you have no concept of animal abuse yet, so go for it! Woman sunbathing topless over there. Ew. Boobs. Off the beach. Starting to get too cold. Mum grabs your feet in a towel to wipe off the water and sand. She doesn’t realise it hurts like hell to rub them dry of sand! Back in the car. Your shoes seem to be full of sand. Empty them at the back of dads car. He wont know. Back to the caravan. Eat at the club house. Watch the kids talent show. Thank the heavens you’re not competing. You have time now to take the piss out of the contestants. Girl tries to sing over the rainbow. Try to contain your laughter. She comes joint first with the only other contestant. You think it’s rigged. You’re only six years old and you’re convinced there’s a conspiracy. A contest without a winner? They planned this in advance. You just know it. The announcer is the Lee Harvey Oswald of South England. You eat your dinner. Go back to the caravan. Sleep time. Wake up, watch with excitement the weather forecast, say “it’s sunny back home”, dad goes to the caravan park mini-market to buy a paper. Finish breakfast. Time to do it all again. Zoo maybe? Water park? Saturday comes quickly. Time to drive home. Sleep in the car. Wake. See the miserable buildings of the smokey dilapidated city that you live in. See your house. Boo. School soon. Not for Percy. Lucky bastard.

The sound of my World

Have you ever sat on a lifeless beach at midnight watching the star light vibrate through the ripples of the waves? I rate my year as a bad one, if it doesn’t include doing just that at least once.

The most sensual and soothing sound in my World, is the sound of the sea. It has no design, no will, an aimless existence dancing wildly through time; it is simply chaotic and yet there appears a beautiful sense of order. From that order, comes the mellifluous sound that exists to relax me on such deep levels. It is the reason I sit alone on the rocks just before dawn, and get photos like this…

I suppose it isn’t just the sound, it’s the scene too. It’s essence is almost indescribable, because we all know what a coast scene looks like, but it looks so much more to me. The sparkle of the ocean, the effortless beauty, the freedom, the emptiness. The scene never changes, an eternal picture that exists exactly the same in my mind as it does in reality. I look out over nothing at all, but everything to me. The euphonious chaos and order of the sound of the coast, is matched only by the aesthetic quality of it’s indescribable essence.

As a kid, travelling down south in the back of my mum and dad’s car, i’d become addicted to trying to spot the sea. A kid from the chaotic city cannot help but be incensed with febrile curiosity the moment a glimour of water comes into view; regardless of the fact that for the entire five hour journey, i’d be pointing to the rivers and lakes of England in the vain hope that one of them might be the ocean.

The manic nature of the City, of Leicester, of London; the packing into tight spaces on the Tube, because no one can be arsed to walk half a mile down the road from Trafalgar to Westminster, or from Oxford Circus to Marble Arch and so our faces end up in the chests of other people tightly jammed into an airless carriage. The business men constantly sweating, on their mobile phones discussing the best way to maximise profits during this Global economic downturn, the stress of shop workers trying to cope with mountains of tourists who do not understand English, crying babies sat next to me on the tube or the train – and although I have no problem with any of that, it opens the gates of stress in my unusually calm mind. And so I lose myself in meditation; my mind is suddenly sitting back on those rocks with nobody around, with no sound except the harmony in the sound of the natural.

During the summer, i’m accustomed to sitting in my garden, and doing nothing in particular. It’s the sounds that intrigue me. The sound of distant cars, the sound of somebody somewhere mowing their lawn, the sound of the birds, the sound of a small aircraft maybe a glider low overhead in an otherwise featureless blue sky, the sound of running water in our cheap fountain at the bottom of our small garden. It makes me feel alive and during those moments, I do not have any worry. I’m least stressed when nature is somehow involved. Be it my cat, or the sound of someone mowing their lawn, it all exists to relax me, and it’s why I love life.

During the winter and early spring, my bedroom window stays open. I rather unsuccessfully wrap myself up to stay warm at night, whilst leaning out of my bedroom window listening to the sounds of nothing. The stars are feint dots on a black canvas, that you have to narrow your eyes to see clearly because the illumination of the street by electric light washes the beauty of the night sky away like an evil man made etch-a-sketch. So if you haven’t sat on a lifeless beach at midnight watching the star light vibrate through the ripples of the waves; you do not know peace.

The weakness in me

As masculinity goes, i’m no Charles Bronson. I don’t like violence; I’m a pacifist; I like imaginative language such as that of Jack Kerouac and John Keats; I read a lot; I don’t particular like any Sport (even though I used to adore football and boxing); i’m horribly clean; any talk of animal cruelty annoys the life out of me, angers me, frustrates me more than most; my World philosophy is based on love; i’m overly protective of people I think seem naive or easily manipulated; and i’m constantly in search of that hidden entity that brings me such deep inner peace; which at the moment exists for me, only in the indefinably mellifluous sound of the ocean waves at dawn, in the small town of Dawlish Warren, South Devon.

Despite this apparent mutated masculinity, I do have certain traits that one could refer to as “manly!”…. The Sopranos is my favourite TV show; I wont back off from a debate even if i’m being threatened; and my one monumental, incessant weakness is my inability to resist the charms of attractive and intelligent women. By those standards, i’m slightly more masculine than previously suggested.

However, that slight glimour of masculinity; that light of manliness in a forest free from it, was soon reduced to darkness again when Stacy (my girlfriend) and I went to the cinema this weekend, to see the film “Marley and Me”. We’d originally planned to go for a meal, and then to a bar, in celebration of our three years of being together. A meal and the bar had to do; I peaked in the arena of amazing boyfriends when I took her to Rome for our first year anniversary. So anything after that, was going to be difficult to top. I failed at topping it this year, but was a lovely evening nonetheless.

We finished the meal – which by the way was lovely – at the new Chinese Buffet Restaurant in Leicester’s High Cross Shopping Mall (new, in that it’s a bit bigger…. it still has the same crap shops you find in every other city in the Western World… other than Camden), and decided to go to the brand new Cinema. We chose Marley and Me because neither of us knew too much about what it actually was about.

The film is based around a family and their dog. It’s that simple. But within two hours of knowing this dog – Marley – you cannot help but fall in love with it. And suddenly, you’re almost a part of this fictitious family, watching it grow from the side lines. By the end of the film, most of the audience was in tears. I myself never cry at films, and I had to really concentrate on those damn deceivingly lugubrious eyes of mine, to make sure that although I thought I was in control of them, they wouldn’t just explode in a fountain of Jamie tears at any given second. Luckily I managed to keep them dry, but that was purely down to being able to think about something else, rather than the incredibly emotional scene being shown on the big screen. I fought those tear ducts, they wanted to burst open, but I was having none of it! The film finished just in time, because another five minutes, and i’d have been an emotional wreck on the floor of the cinema.

If you’re male, and you’re goal in life is to be seen to be masculine and strong; an Adonis of the human race; Zeus of post-modernity…… it’s probably best that you don’t go to see Marley and Me.

The unplanned life

Summer 2009, i’d planned to go back down to the south coast of England for a week. Holidaying abroad bores me unless it’s a beautiful city like Rome. I always chose the South of England as a destination for spending a week during the summer.

I wake up one morning every time I go, at around 5am, and walk down to the coast, sit on the rocks, when life is at it’s most peaceful, and be the first person that day to see the Sun paint the sky red. At around 6am, I notice the people out walking their dogs across the golden sand through the red light of day. They seem magically happy. They wear smiles that never fade. They’re different. The World is different at that time. The World that i’m able to see at 6am sitting on the dusty rocks, eyes closed, feeling the breeze that forces you to love life, watching the sea build up and crash down, is my paradise.

I’ve changed my plan this year.

I want to use the £400 i’ve so far managed to save for a week during the summer for a different kind of holiday. I now plan to drive across the South coast of England. Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset. A new place every day for one or two weeks. Pay £25-£30 a time for a cheap hotel room. Spend the beautiful English summer morning, sitting on different rocks, desirous of the start of day from a different place each time. Very little money to spend on anything that I do not need. No planning involved. All spontaneous and exciting. Drink the evenings away at different bars, meeting different people. Drive to a cliff’s edge, and lay on the bonnet, and witness the tranquillity of a sparkling sea on the horizon joining with the silent stars.

That is my plan this year.
Want to come along?

The peaceful life

Devon, on the South Coast of England, has a deep, profound affect on me. It is etched into my mind, that the only place I get a mindful sense of true serenity, able to block out any negative aspect of my life that may be strangling my existance, is south Devon. It’s a World away from everything. There is no fear. There is no worry. There is no conflict. It sits upon a higher plateau of existance and thought in my ever growing constantly perplexed mind.

I’m becoming deeply disatisfied with life, and I cannot figure out what I dislike, or how to change it. I’m not scrupulously unhappy, or crying out for any kind of help, but there constantly feels like there’s a void. Something that I cannot seem to understand. There’s a dire conflict between my need for absolute serenity, and the feeling that if I don’t speed through life like every businessman on the planet, i’m ultimately going to fail. I cannot harmonise the two.

South Devon, be it Dawlish or Starcross, has the most calming affect on me. More so than being around family, or friends. Even the country road leading to the coast, a mile or so away, amplifying the distinct sound of the seagull that when translated into English, will always be “Welcome to your peace” in my mind. The thought alone, is so profoundly melodious that it has the ability to turn me from a stressed wreck on the verge of tears unable to cope with my own seemingly horrible lack of motivation and my incessent need to question everything around me, to a peaceful, spiritual being, clear of all thoughts other than the melliflous sound of the ocean crashing gently into the rocks on which I sit tentatively, every time I, in essence, meditate.

I think the entire deep-rooted peaceful feeling that I get, rellies on the fact that I know that life is difficult, and it’s fast, and it’s an endless chase for fortune, that it’s stressful and often lugubriously inadequate, and so it’s comforting to know that a place of such magnificent solitude is always there, waiting for me. My entire life has been city based. Fast, worries, money problems, family arguments, heart beat racing when things seem to be going wrong, scared to leave the house at night because of the inner city mindless street gangs, police cars racing past every other minute, cars in traffic at 8am beeping mindlessly into the conflicting calm morning air, the local news demanding my attention for nothing but violence and intolerance. And then suddenly, I discover a place, 300 miles away, with such serene coastline, and a such a lack of fear of crime, in that the most criminal thing i’d seen in Leicester, is a man being kicked in the face by a gang of six men, who I then read in the news the next day, had, after i’d left, pulled out a knife and stabbed the victim, almost killing him. Contrast the violence of that situation, with the most criminal activity i’ve ever came across in south devon, being this oddly humorous criminal offence……

And you start to get the feeling that one of my main worries, is my own safety and shelter from harm. Contrast is a big part of my life. The contrast between my views on sex, and those who believe sex to be reserved for those in love. The contrast between my liberal tolerant views, and those of the Daily Mail reading audience filled with hate and rage. The contrast between my understanding that the Open Market Capitalism can be so beneficial, and yet my feeling that the concept is so deeply flawed when it still allows people to be dying of poverty everyday. The contrast between my entire life spent in the City, the rush and the fetish for success and money, and yet my seemingly dire need for absolute peace and serenity, away from any materialistic thought, so much so that when i’m that stressed, I close my eyes, and picture myself sat on the rocks of the beach in Dawlish, early morning sunrise, with no one else around, just me and the ocean, and there is nothing that can make me happier or more relaxed than that image, like a poster there to remind me everytime I start to panic. If I somehow lost that tranquil, untroubled, at peace with myself feeling, unable to find it again, or if it’s power over me suddenly disintegrated, ripped apart by pressure and panic, unable to balance the anguish of a fast, largely fatuous money-chasing life, with the tranquility and serenity I so beautifully rely on, i’d be lost.

This picture will obviously mean nothing to the small variety of individuals who happen to read my blog, but to me, it’s the very pinnacle of what it means to be at peace with myself. The emptiness, the calming light, the incredibly soft nature of the incoming waves. It all plays it’s part.