It must sound like I do hardly any work at all, but — outside the hammock — I’ve been rather busy. Secret signups for Thighs of Steel are going really well. The list is now over two-thirds full so if you’re umming and ahhing, don’t wait too long!
Beth and I have also been working on a new project about vans. We spent yesterday evening at a meeting for van dwellers in Stokes Croft, partially for research, partially because I’m genuinely interested in buying a van in which to dwell.
It turns out that van dwellers are a community under attack.
This ‘consultation’ is driven, once more, by a government eager to stamp out alternative — both desperate and creative — solutions to a housing crisis of their own making, and instead to protect the property investments of their friends.
It’s also worth saying that most Travellers — over 95 percent according to some estimates — live on land they either own or have rights to, like my friend who lives in a yard under the wonderfully named ‘Showman’s License’.
This ugly witch hunt reminds me of the 2011 Conservative anti-squatting ‘consultation’, which received little support from the general public and vehement opposition from those who would have to enforce the unfair, punitive laws: both lawyers and, again, the police.
Despite this, the harshest imaginable anti-squatting laws were passed.
When peoples’ only choice is criminalised, the legality of the law itself is discredited.
There is something ineffably childish about a hammock. It shouldn’t be allowed: to spend half an hour gently rocking between the boughs of a tree. Certainly not on a Monday lunchtime.
But that is exactly what I did, once I’d figured out — and learnt to trust — the soft shackle fixings of my new sling.
It weighs scarcely more than a third of a kilo and can hold two of me (although that’s against the rules laid out in the instruction booklet, and not only because cloning humans is ethically dubious).
Tucked up in the canvas, I feel swaddled. Staring up into the fractal treeline, there is nothing to do here except relax. So I let myself gently down into the golden apricity.
Watching the birds fly overhead, the squirrels skipping from branch to branch and the pigeons wooing from the upper boughs.
I’d love to hear from you if you’re joining me on my attempt to spend thirty minutes in nature every day for thirty days. Give us a shout and let me know. We can swap notes. There’s only one rule: don’t miss twice.
This morning I spent 60 seconds staring up into a tree.
On a circuit of the local park, I broke off my run to stand and stare at bark branches twigs sky.
I felt looks from dog walkers.
The first time I attempted this task, I checked my watch at barely 40 seconds.
40 seconds.
My untrained unfocussed attention span is two thirds of a minute. I can hardly blame that entirely on shiny screens, but the interior life dictated by the screen is suspect number one.
And it doesn’t feel great to be holding my breath.
I stared up for another 20 seconds, laughed at the lichen and continued my run with a light heart and a smile.
The Nature Fix
Why might staring up into a tree for a minute have made me feel lighter? One answer might be in the fractal patterns of the bark branches twigs sky, especially noticeable in winter.
What is a fractal? Essentially, a fractal is an image that exhibits similar, repeating patterns, whether you’re observing from far away or super close up.
It’s like how branches branch off into smaller branches and smaller branches branch off into twigs and twigs into leaves and leaves into leaflets and leaflets into veins and the whole set is mirrored underground in the roots.
Anyway. It turns out that a specific range of fractals are good for us.
In one of a series of remarkable studies, physicist Richard Taylor and psychologist Caroline Hägerhäll found that viewing images with a fractal dimension of between 1.3 and 1.5 easily led people into the alpha brain state (‘wakefully relaxed’) associated with increased creativity and reduced depression.
Nature adores these low- to mid-range fractal dimensions and they are found everywhere, from the patterns we see in snowflakes, coastlines and clouds to the structure of our lungs and neurons and even the movement of our eye’s retina.
This is an important discovery: our eyes work over an image in the same fractal patterns of which natural landscapes are composed. In nature, then, our visual cortex feels most at home: confident, comfortable and, assuming no tigers are detected, wakefully relaxed.
Such ‘visual fluency’ is stress-reducing in the same way that ‘French fluency’ is stress-reducing when you step off the ferry in Calais.
This is not, when you think about it, a surprise. Our eyes evolved to seek food and spot danger in natural landscapes, after all.
What’s mind-blowing is that scientists have studied and uncovered this and can point to our city streets and say things like: ‘The fractal dimensions are totally wrong here. You’re going to feel stressed’, or: ‘Looking up at those trees gives your visual cortex a fractal dimension of 1.37. You’ll feel wakefully relaxed.’
And doesn’t this computer-generated fractal pattern look like the outline of a winter’s tree against the sky, or a lichen’s tattoo on bark?
When I got in from my tree staring, I went online and bought a hammock as a promise to my future self to spend more time among the branches. I know that I want to spend more time outside, but I struggle to make it happen.
I’m not alone in this.
Humans are terrible at forecasting how great we’ll feel if we only get outside.
People may avoid nearby nature because a chronic disconnection from nature causes them to underestimate its hedonic benefits.
It’s hard to prioritise the great outdoors when we persistently fail to draw a line of connection between going outside and feeling good. Would you keep going back to a doctor who you thought was a quack?
Somehow, we need to force ourselves outdoors and trust that nature will do its work whether we credit it or not. It’s not easy, in fact you might call it a challenge…
The 30×30 Nature Challenge
The David Suzuki Foundation run an annual challenge in which participants try to spend 30 minutes in nature every day for 30 days. That might not sound like much, but I for one don’t hit those kind of numbers, especially not in winter.
Since 2013, the Foundation have added science to their 30×30 nature challenge and have tested what happens to our wellbeing when we make a regular commitment to more outdoors.
The first thing to note is that, even before the challenge, the 1,896 participants were already getting their 30 minutes a day on average. But that wasn’t not the point. The point was to make a commitment to getting outside every day for 30 minutes – not just on average.
That commitment saw total time spent in nature double over the course of the challenge – an extra 8 hours per week.
Of course, those 8 hours have to come from somewhere and, on average, participants in the study spent 52 minutes less per week on their phones and a ridiculous 3 hours 57 minutes less time on the Internet.
None of the other measured categories of time use – shopping, at the gym, in vehicle, and sleeping – saw statistically significant increases or decreases.
Except one: visiting friends.
The challenge participants spent, on average, an extra 92 minutes with friends every week. That’s a huge increase. Apparently, humans love to share nature.
We haven’t even got to the proper results yet, but you can see where this is going, can’t you? Surely any activity that means less screen time and more friend time is going to be good for our sense of wellbeing, isn’t it?
Yes.
Positive affect (being content, enthusiastic, relaxed, joyous) went up over the course of the study. Negative affect (being anxious, sad, irritated, hostile) went down. Fascination (awe, fascination, curiosity) went up. Vitality (feeling alive and vital, having energy and spirit) went up. All results passed the test for significance (p<0.001, stats fans).
Topper: the more participants increased their time in nature, the stronger were the positive effects on their wellbeing. Good news for those of us who struggle to get outside: we’ll feel the most benefit.
Awe is an experience that reminds us of our puny position in the universe. Awe subsumes us into the whole and can help us forget our struggles, strife and stress for a moment. It’s mindfulness, only much more fun.
Paul Piff, psychologist at the University of California, has also found that nature is really good at delivering awe and that humans can convert awe into prosocial behaviour.
Staring up at those eucalyptus trees made the study participants more helpful to a clumsy experiment stooge who dropped all his pens than did participants who stared up at a building. They also reported feeling more ethical and less entitled. Rather than focussing on themselves, the tree-starers opened up and orientated more towards others.
Now, my stubby Bristolian park is no grove of mighty eucalyptus, but as I finished my run, I decided to try my tree-gazing minute again.
This time I didn’t check my watch until more than 90 seconds had passed.
Stand at the foot of a tree and stare upwards for a minute.
Get fractal and gaze into a fire (or a Jackson Pollock painting).
Do a sit spot in nature. Go to a favourite place and, um, sit there. Go back tomorrow. Nature Mentor has a great introduction to sit spotting, but it’s really no more complicated than sitting and spotting.
Climb a tree and find a comfy branch.
Watch the ripples of rainfall onto a river, lake, canal or – in extremis – a puddle. Alternatively, follow the traces of droplets down your window pane.
Hypnotise yourself with waves wherever you find them.
Look up at the cloudscape.
On a sunny day, watch the shifting shadows cast on the ground by the wind and the trees.
Watch a lightning storm.
Inspect the weeds between cracks in the pavement or the lichen on a wall.
If you really want to get sciency, commit to being out in nature for 30 minutes a day, every day, for 30 days. I’m on Day 1!
~
99 percent of the research for this post came from the excellent book The Nature Fix by Florence Williams.
When invited to volunteer doing DIY for a paramilitary youth organisation last week, I politely declined.
‘Paramilitary youth organisation’ is a deliberately precise way of describing the Sea Cadets, but I’ve had enough of euphemisms in the service of killing people.
A paramilitary is a semi-militarised force whose organisational structure, tactics, training, subculture, and (often) function are similar to those of a professional military, but is not formally part of a country’s armed forces.
Okay, so the Sea Cadets might not be issued arms, but they do train young people in target shooting and ‘follow a similar ethos, training plan, and ranks, to the Royal Navy, and are recognised by the UK Ministry of Defence’.
There’s another euphemism: ‘defence’.
The United Kingdom has an incredibly violent history and it’s almost impossible to justify any of our killing sprees with the word ‘defence’.
The biggest threat to UK citizens since the end of the Second World War has come from terrorist activities on British soil: the IRA in the 1970-1990s and the so-called Islamists since the British-American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003.
One important thing to note is that, although this terrorist activity on British soil has represented a real threat to our lives and livelihood, the defence of our citizens was largely performed by the police and other emergency services, not the military.
Terrorist activity is not a justification for the military. In fact, as I have rather clumsily intimated, I would argue that it was the activity of the British military that fomented these terrorist attacks, both from the IRA and so-called Islamists.
~
What most annoys me is that so many of my fellow citizens believe that a belligerent military is necessary for a flourishing society.
In 1947, Japan voluntarily surrendered its right of belligerency in Article 9 of their constitution.
ARTICLE 9
(1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
(2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
The Japanese don’t seem to have suffered for the decision. From the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan grew to become the second biggest economy in the world (now third, blown away like the rest of the world by the rise of China), and one of its most technologically advanced, leaving the UK in its dust.
Please can we all give up on the idea that belligerence is somehow necessary for our flourishing as a society?
* Important Note: Since the first Gulf War in Iraq, and despite ridiculous levels of development between 1947 and 1989, successive Japanese governments have extended the scope of its now euphemistically titled Self Defence Forces. The nationalist government of Shinzo Abe are currently doing their damnedest to revise Article 9 as well. These militarising decisions seem to be based more on gaining ‘international respect’ and getting a seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council than on supporting the health and flourishing of their citizens.
~
Notice that I’m talking about belligerence, not violence in all forms. I’m not a Buddhist and nor am I a pacifist. In fact, I’m not much of any kind of an -ist.
Categorical decision-making can tie you up in knots and I’d rather judge situations on their merits.
I concede that, perhaps, when human beings have really fucked things up good and proper, it’s just conceivable that violence is our only recourse for genuine defence.
But this is not the same ‘last resort’ rhetoric that is wheeled out with such alacrity by our politicians at the first whiff of oil. Human beings have to make decades of poor decisions before violence might become a necessity.
Whenever I argue against the existence of (for example) paramilitary youth organisations, people often bring up the Second World War. Wouldn’t I support – even participate in – military action to stop Hitler?
Not only is this incredibly disrespectful to the people who fought and died in such misery, but it also ignores the history that led to the awful violence.
The Second World War didn’t come out of nowhere; it resulted from decades of horrific mismanagement of international affairs.
Diplomats failed, economists failed, politicians failed. In the decades leading up to the start of the Second World War, including the First World War and its aftermath, human beings failed, time and time again, to cooperate harmoniously.
Then the worst thing that could possibly happen, happened.
Defenders of ‘defence’ seem to forget that war is the worst thing that can possibly happen to anyone. They seem to see ‘defence’ as something that happens a long way away, to other people. And, growing up as we have in a time of domestic peace, they’d be absolutely correct.
British ‘defence’ drops bombs and wrecks homes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Serbia. Each bomb is a testament to decades of shocking failure. But there is no doubt in my mind, having met quite a number of refugees from our conflicts, that war is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a human being.
Isolated and insulated, our military takes action too quickly, as if to justify their existence. So much can happen before violence breaks out: we should remember that side of history, not the reckless moment we start firing rockets.
~
But they do good things!
Humanitarian missions, disaster relief, ‘peacekeeping’ (another euphemism) – our soldiers do good work!
I wouldn’t even bother trying to argue over the value of our military’s humanitarian work. Only to say that there are, obviously, other ways of providing this relief through organisations that don’t rest on a fundamentally violent basis.
I believe that the fate of humanity is best served by cooperation between equals and that everyone is responsible for ensuring knowledge and power is shared equally.
This philosophical and ethical position is the diametric opposite of military organisation, where power is concentrated in the higher levels of the hierarchy, orders cascade down from above, and intelligence is shared on a ‘need to know’ basis.
If there is a kicker to this polemic, it’s this: in 2017, Panorama revealed that the Ministry of Defence had paid out more than £2 million to former Sea Cadets who were sexually abused.
As one of the victims said:
You are trained to follow orders and you are trained to respect the officers and do as they tell you. That includes having to lie on the floor on a dirty blanket and just lie there and… take it like a man.
According to the BBC, the Marine Society and Sea Cadets apologised unreservedly and promised that it wouldn’t happen again. Because that’s how power works, right?
I’ll leave the final word to a man who knew about military power and the paramount importance of both the unquestionable hierarchy and silencing those who strive for non-military solutions:
Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? …
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. …
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
‘Have you got decent bins?’ I’m asked by a man wearing a cagoule.
Well, isn’t that an intrusive question! And I’m about to muster indignant excuses for forgetting to take the recycling out when the man waggles a pair of binoculars and adds: ‘They really help you get up close.’
I’m on a boat in the middle of Poole Harbour, in the squalling rain and the huffing wind of a gale blowing in. The boat has a full cargo of people in cagoules with decent bins, here for an RSPB bird tour of Brownsea Island.
I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a birder. And yet here I am – and next week I’ll be cycling around the RSPB nature reserve at Rainham Marshes. Maybe you don’t choose birding; maybe birding chooses you.
‘Great Northern Diver at eleven o’clock – no he’s dived. Shag at one o’clock. Spoonbill on the beach. Merganser pair just taking off – three o’clock.’
A running commentary sends us birders lurching from one side of the wind-lashed deck to the other, hunting through our misty bins for flecks of white on the storm-grey sea.
For the hobbying birder, this trip is all about spotting new species. When the commentator announces a Slovenian Grebe at four o’clock, there is quite the commotion, let me tell you.
I stare blindly over the hunched shoulders of twitching bin-bearers. I’m as astonished as anyone: Slovenia is all but land-locked – I wouldn’t have thought it’d be known for its sea birds.
Slavonian Grebe. Slavonian. They can swallow fish whole and eat their own feathers. And they’re so rare that they’re on something ominously called the Red List.
Despite frantic Wikipedia research and my rapid identification of a Swan at eleven o’clock, I think it’s fair to say that I’m still not a birder.
My favourites are the bobbers: those birds who bob on the tide, waiting patiently until I catch them in the rings of my borrowed bins before beating their wings against the spray or pulling a dive into the choppy waves.
Other than that, I still rank my birds by the romanticism of their names. Avocet. Little Stint. Black-tailed Godwit.
And, of course, the Wigeon. ‘Isn’t that just a wet pigeon?’ I ask a friend, also not a birder. ‘I thought Wigeon was a Pokémon character,’ she says.
After two hours of chasing feathers, we dock at the John Lewis castle and make our way onto the island.
Brownsea Island has been a National Trust nature reserve since the sixties, after the people of Poole somehow raised £100,000 to save their island from Billy Butlin, he of holiday camp notoriety.
But the only reason there was ever any question of Brownsea becoming a nature reserve was thanks to the whim of a monied misanthropist.
Mary Bonham-Christie bought the island in 1927 and immediately ordered the mass eviction of the 200 people who lived there, then banned the Boy Scouts from their historic campsite and finally hired goons to eject any meddling intruders.
By the time she shuffled off this mortal coil (the ultimate act of any self-respecting misanthrope), only she and her boatman lived on the island. It’s fair to say that Bonham-Christie was not a people person.
But her loathing for the human race did open up a hitherto overcrowded corner of the ecosystem for other wildlife. Red squirrels most famously, but also other cute animals including voles and sika deer (the pretty ones with spots).
This imposed haven from humanity made the island an appealing acquisition for the National Trust who completed the purchase in 1962 with help from the Dorset Wildlife Trust, the Scout and Guide Movements and John Lewis (whose staff holiday in the castle). Now goon-free, Brownsea Island has been open to the public for nearly sixty years.
Birders in particular are drawn to Brownsea thanks to the work of another, shall we say ‘energetic’, aristocrat, Colonel William Petrie Waugh.
When he bought the island in 1852, Waugh saw an opportunity in the shallow water to expand his territory. With a bulk order of over a million bricks, he and his lackeys built a wall in the middle of the sea, enclosing a vast paddling pool from which wind-powered pumps extracted the water. Hey presto – pasture for grazing cattle.
But you can’t keep the sea out forever, not without constant investment (see also: the Netherlands), and gradually the sea wall started leaking. As the salt water joined forces with freshwater leaking from inland, an enormous lagoon was created.
Cue cheers of delight from a multitude of invertebrates – and the sea birds who prey on them: the Shoveler and Teal and Turnstone and Dunlin that us birders had all come to inspect through our rain-splattered bins.
One morning wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a glimpse, a respite in a day battered by storms. We can, if we allow ourselves, be bewitched by nature. I returned to the fraying town doused and refreshed, content.
If you don’t know how the world’s longest (and bestest) charity relay bike ride works, then here’s a quick and dirty guide on How to Play Thighs of Steel:
1. Don’t worry – you’re not cycling the whole thing, this is a relay. Pick one week that fills you with butterflies of excitement rather than dread. There’s something on this route for cyclists of all abilities and we are totally non-competitive.
Historically, more than half of our cyclists have been women – I only mention that because cycle touring has a shit reputation of being lonely, miserable and macho. It’ll be challenging, but you’ll never be alone and, with smiles, songs and snacks, everyone helps everyone through. Most people only do one week of the relay – some crazies do two.
2. Do logistics. Book your time off work and your transport to and from the start and finish cities.
3. Train like heck. We have training rides every month in London and there are now over 200 current and former Thighs cyclists you can meet up with for beers and bikes. (In reality, you’ll probably only train a bit and then panic unduly. It’ll be fine. We all do this.)
4. Fundraise like heck. All the money goes to grassroots refugee organisations and we suggest you aim for a minimum of £500. We’re always on hand for fundraising advice. Putting on a party or a dinner is always a winner, but don’t forget the simple stuff like charity pots in your local cafes and pubs. Over the past four years, Thighs cyclists have raised over £320,000 for projects that are making a real difference to the lives of refugees in the UK and Greece.
5. Cycle a really long way. Wahay! Adventure and the unknown is our standard operating procedure as we wild ride, wild camp and wild swim our way across the continent.
People focus on the cycling, but what makes Thighs special is the people. Nothing bonds a campful of strangers like climbing a mountain in 40 degree heat, or getting sprayed down by a farmer with a power hose, or handing out a pannier full of figs picked straight from the tree, or mending a puncture in a thunderstorm, or just sitting by a lake at the end of a long day and watching the sun set in silence.
6. Come home with a suntan, steely thighs and stuffed full of stories to share. It won’t be the end unless you want it to be. Repeat with friends in 2021?
Signups open for real on Sunday 1 March, but you can get early bird access on Monday 24 February by joining a special mailing list. This is good because places go fast and no one wants to miss out!
A dear friend of mine is currently reading Factfulness, an optimistic book about facts written by development darling Hans Rosling and his able collaborators.
The book opens with an absolute minefield of a multiple choice general knowledge quiz, which you can take here.
I’ll wait.
As you may have noticed, the quiz is intended to blow your mind with how much better life in our global village is today than most people (including experts) believe.
Less people live in extreme poverty than we think, more young women have access to education than we think, and global life expectancy is higher than we think.
In 2017, Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation asked nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries to answer these questions. They scored on average just two correct answers out of the first 12. No one got full marks, and just one person (in Sweden) got 11 out of 12. Fifteen percent scored zero.
In fact, chimpanzees would have outscored the 80 percent of humans who did worse than random chance when they took the quiz.
There are two reasons I like this book, despite not having read it:
The disparity between how well humans did – 2 out of 12 correct answers – and how well we should do if we simply picked one answer at random from the three given – 4 out of 12 correct answers – shows that our sources of information (AKA the news media) is systematically biased against reality and in favour of negativity. Newsless since 2017, I have long beenan advocate of the No News is Good News information diet. Now I have some evidence that I might also be better informed.
Although the general drift of the book is that things are, in general, getting better, the authors don’t argue that this is a result of anything other than decades of extremely hard work. Nor do they make the argument that everything is rosy in our planetary garden. As Rosling mega-fan Bill Gates puts it: ‘the world can be both bad and better’.
But one thing that immediately struck me as I was discussing the quiz with my dear friend was the absence of any questions about displaced persons.
And, as the 2019 Aegean Boat Report reminded me earlier this week, the world can also be both bad and worse.
At the end of 2018 – the latest year for which UNHCR have data – there were 74.79 million ‘persons of concern’ across the world, including refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons and stateless persons.
Ten years earlier there were ‘only’ 34.46 million such persons of concern. The number of human beings suffering has more than doubled.
Bad and worse.
UNHCR only have solid data going back to 1951, but, for reference, Wikipedia states that World War II created 11 million displaced people.
The last big surge in refugee numbers was after the break up of the Soviet Union. In 1992, there were 17.83 million refugees according to UNHCR figures.
At the end of 2018 there were 20.36 million – and this excludes the 5.5 million registered Palestinian refugees cared for under the auspices of a different UN agency.
Bad and worse.
Raw refugee numbers have doubled in the last decade, but the biggest single reason for the twenty-first century surge in UN persons of concern is down to a huge increase in the number of those displaced within the state they used to call their own.
In 2012 there were 17.67 million internally displaced persons in the world. At the end of 2018, there were 41.43 million.
This figure includes those driven from their homes in Syria, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine and Colombia. They don’t meet the technical definition of ‘refugee’, but when you’re fleeing for your life it doesn’t much matter where you draw the border lines.
I’m a huge fan of Hans Rosling’s factfulness because it reminds us where we should be putting our efforts. The problem of displaced people – whether we call them refugees or not – is bad and getting worse. It deserves our attention.
If the mixing of peoples was the order of empires and the ‘unmixing of peoples’ the order of nation-states, what’s on the horizon?
Kapka Kassabova, Border (2017)
There isn’t an awful lot of serendipity built into my writing process, but occasionally I accidentally dig up something worthwhile that I’d completely forgotten about.
As I’ve mentioned before, I use the last few days of the year to peer back at the past and to throw forward to the next. While hacking through the state of my existence, I decided to search my writing archive for the word ‘life’ – and was surprised to rediscover the following unpublished poem from 2015:
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
Dinner should be littered with corks and candles
Life is a matter of taking your chances
Making the most of your circumstances
Taking up hands at dinner-dances
Falling in love with the merest of glances
Life should be lived as much in the sea
Entwined in a hammock, or under a tree
Vows should be made down on one knee
In the dark, in a church, in Tennessee
Write your own doggerel verses
Sprinkle your talk with Shakespearean curses
Pocket your change and don’t pinch purses
Petition the government to hire more nurses
Don’t be afraid to spend time alone
Enter outdoors and exit your phone
Listen closely, you can still hear the silence
Traffic and television are an odd sort of violence
The sky is a constantly changing companion
Instead of a down, it’s an up sort of canyon
Every breath is there for exploring
Forget all I’m saying and take up drawing!
But pepper your life with shocks and scandals
Life should be lived wearing shorts and sandals
We are thrilled to announce that together this year Thighs of Steel have raised a staggering £87,184.40 for grassroots refugee organisations.
A big thank you to everyone who donated – it means a lot!
Guided by expert advice from Help Refugees, that money has been granted to five organisations we believe will do justice to your hard earned cash.
Picking projects to fund is a tough job, and of course we wish we could support every project with everything they need, but we’ve tried to cover a wide range of refugee needs, including emergency aid, legal assistance, social integration and human dignity.
Here is a pretty pie chart showing where the money’s gone:
A monologue, delivered by a young woman to her friends (and, incidentally, the rest of the carriage) on a GWR train from Cholsey to Paddington.
I got Netflix last night. It represents a real turning point in my life – basically an admission that I’ll be lonely the rest of my days.
I’ve always borrowed Netflix off my girlfriend or the person I was seeing so not getting Netflix forced me to continue the pursuit of love. Now I’ve got my own Netflix I don’t need to go out anymore. I’ve given up.
On the plus side, though, getting Netflix means I don’t have to stay too long in toxic relationships – that’s worth £10 a month!
Actually it was £6 because I got the individual account. They boosted me to premium for the first 30 days – I only wanted it for Christmas.
So I spent all last night watching Don’t F*** With Cats. Everyone’s talking about it – where have you been, under a rock or something?
I don’t know anything about animal cruelty, so I thought it’d just be that woman who put the cat in the bin, but it wasn’t.
Some parts of the Internet don’t seem to age. My website is not one of them. This was DavidCharles.info in June 2010 (courtesy of the Wayback Machine):
There’s something unmistakeably 2010 about this image. It’s hosted on Blogspot, for one. ‘Follow me on Facebook’ and ‘My Flickr PhotoStream’ – I haven’t used these services for six years or more.
I have no idea what ‘The Knowledge’ was. Presumably not a record of my attempt to learn all 25,000 streets within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. And the less said about this ‘powerful tool’, the better.
On the other hand, there are some corners of the Internet that don’t date. This ridiculous Gnarls Barkley cover was recorded by Don Ross in 2010 and still sounds as fresh as ever.
This man is 10 years older now and, until a couple of days ago, I’d never heard of him. The Internet, sometimes, is cool. The work we do, sometimes, is timeless.
~
At the start of the last decade, I made the decision to apply for an internship at Amnesty International, and to apply for a place at a housing cooperative in London. I was accepted for both and set off on a course that directed my daily life for most of the next six years, and that still tides the general wash of my existence today, ten years later.
Amnesty didn’t really work out. I get strangely paranoid in large office environments and end up feeling stifled and powerless – even when the work is meaningful.
The International Secretariat remains the last open-plan, filing cabinet-filled, water cooler and canteen office I have worked in.
But Amnesty showed me what I did want work to look like: creativity and the outdoors. In 2010, I wrote my first books, including a tale about hitch-hiking to Scotland, The Soles of My Shoes, which is still on sale.
The 2010s was, for me, a decade of exploration. Sanford housing cooperative gave me that formative freedom to write books, start a theatre company, study English teaching, volunteer with refugees in Calais, and cycle around the country.
It wasn’t always healthy living situation, but a housing cooperative is run for the benefit of its members, not for the profit of its landlord. Everyone had a secure tenancy and a vote on how the cooperative was run, including rent-setting.
At the time, it was one of the few places in London where you could actually cover rent with a part-time job or with housing benefit. The rest of the week, then, was ours – to study, volunteer, travel, or create. It sounds like dream fairyland, but it could be the way we organise all our housing in this country.
Could be.
~
I’m glad I left Sanford, though. What my soul needs at the end of 2019 is not the same as it craved when the decade began.
In a 2015 paper published in Psychological Science, researchers found evidence for the instinctual notion that ‘temporal landmarks’ that signal new beginnings – such as the turning of a year – strengthen our motivation to achieve our goals.
Hence New Year’s Resolutions.
But the researchers also found that the bigger the sense of a fresh start, the bigger the motivation. A fresh start puts distance between our present and our past, imperfect, selves. The fresher the start, the greater the psychological distance, and the greater optimism we feel that we can finally overwhelm our ambition.
In a couple of days, we all have the opportunity to ‘spur goal initiation’ on a scale not seen the noughties clicked over into the teens. This gives a surprising weight to these few days that can otherwise slip between the cracks in the festivities of Christmas and New Year.
Turn-of-the-decade decisions echo long in the body, mind and spirit. Those two decisions that I took in early 2010 – Amnesty and Sanford – put me on a path that I was still exploring six years later and which have given me the life I lead today.
A great wave of momentum is coming, bringing with it the freshest of fresh starts – not merely of a new year, but of a whole new decade.
So, in among the minced pies and the turkey soup leftovers, I’m going to clear some time to make a couple of decisions that will set a new course and help me ride that wave long into the twenties.
What life choices will I look back on in 2029? What can I do today to increase the probability that someone, somewhere will find my work in 2029, surprised that it’s ten years old already?
What fresh start will you make in the twenties?
Above: The earliest photo of me taken this decade that I can unearth.
My first Crisis shift is on Monday. I usually do two shifts at the end of the holiday, when everyone is clean and refreshed – but apprehensive about leaving the warmth of the converted school for the freezing loneliness of the streets. This year, I’m looking forward to greeting the guests as they come in from the cold on day one.
I know I’ve written about Crisis umpteen times on this newsletter, but last Saturday evening I sung my heart out at the Crisis carol service at Southwark Cathedral. Between the carols and tidings of goodwill, we heard three heart-rending stories from Crisis members, before Jon Sparkes, the charity’s chief executive, took to the pulpit.
He did a very diplomatic job of welcoming the new Conservative government.
‘Homelessness is a policy choice,’ Jon said, before outlining the plans to end homelessness that the Scottish government already has in place, and that the Welsh government are currently piecing together, in close consultation with Crisis.
The government of England has no such plan, nor any plans for such a plan.
Responding to the Conservative manifesto before the election, Jon said: ‘It’s deeply disappointing to see the Conservative manifesto fall short of the mark when it comes to ending homelessness, in all its forms, once and for all.’
Crisis is instead working with local authorities to implement their own plans, helping them take control where national leadership is lacking. Newcastle, for example, has pledged to end homelessness within the next ten years.
This Christmas, about 4,500 homeless guests – or ‘fellow citizens’ as Jon called them – will join 12,000 volunteers at the ten Crisis centres around London.
12,000 volunteers! This is an incredible show of support for our marginalised fellow citizens, whose population has grown so vertiginously over the past ten years.
But what’s even more incredible is that we are all still living in a society beholden to the pernicious Vagrancy Act of 1824 that makes rough sleeping a criminal offence.
Crisis are currently running a campaign to scrap the act, but isn’t it incredible that they should have to campaign at all?
Yet here we are. In England, at least, we fall further and further every year from our goal of ending homelessness, in all its forms, once and for all. The United Kingdom is the sixth biggest economy on the planet. Shame.
Rather than leave you on such a downer, I want to say again that we are each of us tiny slivers of society. Yes, life would be so much easier if we had the backing of the government and that enormous economy, but we can each participate, with our time, money, anger, or simply with a kind word on the street.
The Thighs of Steel Core Team arrive in Athens after 9 weeks and over 6,000km of cycling. This photo sums up the best of what I learned in 2019.
Your gut behaves like a second brain of over 100 million nerve cells called the enteric nervous system, which can communicate with your head-brain through the vagus nerve, and also by releasing bacterial metabolites into the bloodstream. We are what we eat, in other words. Read a digest of the science on my blog.
Fingerspitzengefühl is a splendid German word, literally meaning ‘finger tip feeling’ and best translated as ‘intuitive flair’ or ‘instinct’. I have no memory of where I picked this up.
This year, The Guardian updated its style guide to recommend journalists use terms that more accurately reflect the science of climate change – sorry – climate breakdown. Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner says: ‘The phrase “climate change”, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.’ Words are important. Read about other word choices in The Guardian.
Fires in equatorial Asia contribute 8 percent of global carbon emissions and 23 percent of methane emissions despite only accounting for 0.6 percent of the world’s burned area. That’s down to the burning of carbon-rich peatlands in countries like Indonesia. I learned a lot more while writing this article for Forests News.
Rejection is joyous. Read more on my blog – or watch this TEDx talk by Jia Jiang.
‘Activity gives you more energy, not less’, one of five key ideas from the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. Read the other four on my (new) blog.
Millennials are the burnout generation. There is so much in this article, but here’s one idea that struck home: ‘[Burnout] takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed.’Read the full article on Buzzfeed.
In Utah there’s a 6,000 tonne quaking aspen that is between 80,000 and 1,000,000 years old. I’ve learned how to age trees (without chopping the in half) twice this year and forgotten both times. Every species grows at a slightly different rate, and at different rates at different ages and in different environments, but a half decent rule of thumb is that the girth of the tree will increase by about an inch every year. I found this PDF from Wokingham District Veteran Tree Association useful.
A psychedelic experience has the potential to be a Black Swan event for the individual. Read through this thought on my blog. Better yet, read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind and/or watch this video of him in conversation with Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London:
As well as the amelioration of symptoms of depression, specific anxiety (not generalised) and PMS, psychedelic microdosing has been linked with physical enhancements in strength, stamina and flexibility. The talk I gave at Love Trails Festival showed me that runners are really interested in the practical application of vanishingly small amounts of psychedelic substances. Read more in Advances in Psychedelic Medicine (Google Books).
Injuring your hamstring can take months and months to recover from. Bloody annoying when fifty percent of your stress-reduction strategy involves running.
There are five major varieties of bullshit jobs: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers and taskmasters. The antidote to bullshit jobs and the bullshitisation of our lives is to care. We won’t be rewarded financially, but we will be rewarded in other ways, including with the intrinsic reward of being able to sleep at night. Read Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber at your local library or online for free at The Anarchist Library.
People on a meat-heavy diet could shrink their food-related footprint by at least 33% by becoming vegetarian. Eat less beef, lamb and cheese. Substitute with pork, chicken, eggs and molluscs. Replace with beans, pulses, grains and soy. Read my digest of a New York Times deep dive on the subject.
Reading a book is ‘forced meditation’. Please, please watch Bookstores, a documentary paeon to reading. It includes a wonderful interview with ‘total baller’ Dr Ruth J Simmons at ~29:30: ‘If you enforce reading, you are likely to enforce time for reflection because it’s hard to read without reflecting … Busyness does not make our lives meaningful; it is the interior life that makes the greatest difference to us in the end.’
The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That sounds like a lot, but most of the water we ‘drink’ is embedded in the food we eat: producing 1 kilo of beef for example consumes 15,000 litres of water while 1 kilo of wheat ‘drinks up’ 1,500 litres. Read my investigation into the environment demerits of showering on my blog.
On 29 July, volunteers in Ethiopia planted 350 million trees across 1,000 designated sites in 12 hours. Read more on Atlas Obscura.
This year, I learned how to play The Trellis by Nick Mulvey (who, incidentally, went to the same university as me – I remember watching his old band Portico Quartet in the student union). Get the TAB from Bantham Legend and play along with this video:
From a standing start, fully dressed at my desk, the minimum viable swim (out to beyond my depth, plus three head dunking dives and back) takes exactly 13 minutes. Read why you should always take the swim on my blog.
Climbing trees is good for you in ways that you can’t quite remember until you’re up there, looking down. ‘Trees deliver us from the banal, and reaching the top of one is like coming up for air and breaking the bubble of our timetabled lives.’ Read The Tree Climber’s Guide by Jack Cooke.
On flat ground, I take 64 paces to walk 100 metres. A useful thing to know if you’re trying to navigate in low visibility (or trying to find an obscure map feature as part of your Lowland Leader Award assessment). Learn more about pacing from Mountain Safety.
Fractal environments, such as those we experience in abundance when in the countryside or beside the sea, help regulate emotions and reduce stress in a similar way to music. Read The Nature Fix by Florence Williams for a full exploration on the myriad ways nature does us good – or read this Atlantic article on Why Fractals Are So Soothing.
I really like Emmental. Also: always travel with a pat of butter. Tortilla chips slathered with butter makes for a surprisingly good cycling snack. Ignore the doubters.
Neapolitan street food is dangerous. Frittatine di pasta is a depth charge of carbohydrates, macaroni, béchamel and pork weighted with enough oil to power a medium-sized caravan. Digestible only when halved, quartered, and shared to soak up limoncello. Eat more on my blog.
Refugees and asylum seekers dress well and wear cologne because it helps them integrate into society. ‘For me, to look good and to be clean could help me in front of society. People might accept me.’ Read Mahmud’s story on my blog.
The Croatian Adriatic coast is beautiful, but the Adriatic coast road will be too full of touring motorists in mid-summer for you to fully relax and enjoy the ride. As you can’t see in the photo below.
Cycling around Ikaría, a Greek island home to Europe’s highest concentration of centenarians, is really fucking hard. Read the story on my blog.
Diving into the sea head first can really mess you up. From a height of ten metres, you break the surface at 36.6mph and that exerts crazy force on your body as the water slows you by more than 50 percent in a fraction of a second. I guess that’s why diving is an Olympic sport. I got a dislocated shoulder, but maybe I was lucky not to get concussed. Read more about the risks of diving on SportsRec.com. Next time, I’ll be following this sage advice from Tourism On The Edge.
Greek can be disturbingly similar to Spanish in the most unhelpful ways. For example: aquí in Spanish means here; εκεί in Greek means there.
17,205 people were granted asylum in the UK in 2018. Over the same period, Germany granted asylum to 139,555 people. In Turkey, there are in excess of 3,600,000 Syrian refugees, living with the limited legal rights granted under ‘temporary protection’, in the shadow of a war zone. Read my full report from İzmir on my blog.
You can know a culture through its language. While in the Netherlands I learned two Dutch word-philosophies: gezellig and niksen. Gezellig is an earthier version of the Danish hygge, while niksen is doing-nothingness. Both vital. You can take two minutes of niksen using this timer – it took me two attempts to complete because I am, at heart, a millennial.
TOTALLY UNRELATED TO THE RESULTS OF THE GENERAL ELECTION: it is theoretically possible to acquire French citizenship (and regain an EU passport) in only two years if you study for a masters in the country and have no ‘assimilation defects’. Read this petite histoire on Pret A Voyager before embarking, however.
Divock Origi.
I have already spent more time with friends and family in 2019 than I did last year. Yep: I keep a spreadsheet. I’ve spoken at least twice with a total of 47 people this year, 14 of whom I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to at least 20 times.
According to my rough estimates, I have visited 59,323 web pages so far this year – that’s over 1,100 unique pages every week and a 14 percent increase on 2018. Can I think of more than a dozen web pages that have made a positive difference to my life in 2019? No, I can’t. 8 percent of unique page views were on the BBC Sport website, for example. I frequently fantasise about a life without the Internet. But then I wouldn’t be able to write you these love letters, would I?
By and large, I stuck to my No News Is Good News reading habit. I accessed almost double the number of BBC News stories as I did in 2017 – but nearly half of them were actually sports stories like ‘Enes Kanter: Turkey seeks arrest of New York Knicks star’. WTF. I have no interest in baseball (is that even baseball?) If you exclude sports stories, then I only accessed 56 ‘news’ stories in 2019. Of those, my primary interests were Brexit, the General Election and the environment.
I enjoy ice skating exactly as much I suspected. I’ll try not to leave it another thirty years before my next outing. (Artwork below by my niece, aged 5.)
After keeping a nightly journal of ‘5 Great Things’ since 5 February, I have learned that the greatest things in my life are quite often miniscule, and almost always related to other people. The strongest element of keeping such a journal is reflecting on past entries so here’s an incredibly mundane sample of three, picked from random days in the two notebooks I’ve filled this year: ‘Loads of walking >18km’
‘Being woken up by Django licking my face’
‘Sauna’
I should say that Django is a dog. I was inspired to start the journal by this article on For The Interested.
Leather trousers are surprisingly comfortable.
That’s it!
Well done for getting this far. If you’ve enjoyed reading, then I’d be thrilled if you share the link with your friends or on your social media. Thank you!
This will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
Bear with me on this one.
For me, like many, this election was the first where I was an active participant beyond casting my vote. I wish I could find numbers to support this comment, but all I have is anecdote.
On Monday night I went to canvass in the Kensington constituency, but went home without knocking once – there were more than 200 volunteers and only so many doors.
But my canvassing in Bournemouth West and Reading West meant that for the first time in my life I was purposefully engaging complete strangers in conversation about everything we humans hold most dear: our health, wealth, families and futures.
How could such meaningful conversations fail to bring us closer together?
Perhaps half of the people I spoke to weren’t remotely interested in holding an unsolicited conversation on their doorsteps. They’d convey this in a manner either polite or abrupt – I hold short of saying ‘rude’ because who knows from what I interrupted them?
But half of my answered knocks ended up with a profitable conversation of some sort. Of course, some of those conversations were with people intending to vote for the Conservative Party. Of course, we started from opposite poles of opinion. But did those conversations drive us apart? No.
The original sense of the word ‘conversation’ is to ‘live with’, rather than to ‘talk with’. For these brief moments, facing each other across a threshold, we tried to find ways of living together, squaring the sympathetic human before us with the antipathetic opinions they espoused.
It wasn’t always easy, but I always walked away feeling like I understood a little better and had lived a little fuller.
From brief glimpses, I guessed that the lives I interrupted were trimmed from the same cloth as the one I returned to after the door closed softly: a mother and son watching the football on TV, a woman washing the dishes before going out, one man drinking a beer after work, another taking the dog out for a walk.
So, for me at least, this will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
What do we do now?
Today, though, everyone is asking, ‘What do we do now?’
I’ve done the research. France sounds good – citizenship in two years if I enrol on a masters degree and don’t develop any ‘assimilation defects’.
Italy is a viable option too, assuming I can find someone – anyone – willing to marry a jobbing writer in his late thirties.
Quitting the country aside, what do we do now?
Last night’s election results have made me think more carefully about what I’m already doing, and to measure that against the yardstick of my ideal future society.
It’s not a complicated calibration – am I pushing in the right direction? – and I think this election gives us all a moment’s grace to tap the barometer and take a reading of our purpose.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday is helping to create our own vision of society, then we should double down and use the vacant impotence of the general election results to motivate ourselves to work harder and faster toward our goals.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday doesn’t align with our vision, then we must change. We must do whatever we can to change whatever we can in our lives today so that we are always working towards a more promising community.
Life is too short to stay indoors, praying for rain.
~
So I spent the morning working on Thighs of Steel, a project that creates the kinds of communities that I want to participate in.
This year, for example, the 90 cyclists raised over £87,000 for grassroots refugee organisations that I know have a uplifting influence on the lives of the dispossessed in our society.
So what can I do? I can use the energy of this election to work even harder on next year’s ride to make sure that it’s as successful as it possibly can be. That’s what I can do.
In just over a week, I will be volunteering with Crisis at Christmas. This year I’m doing three shifts instead of my usual two. It’s not a huge amount of work, but it’s the kind of response that I can make to the crisis of five more years of Conservative government.
We know that homelessness will increase again during this parliament.
I cast my vote for a party that promised to end rough sleeping within five years. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a priority for most of my fellow voters.
So what can I do? I can, in some small way, stand in solidarity with rough sleepers and homeless people by volunteering my time over Christmas. That’s what I can do.
~
Reading that back, it sounds like I’m virtue signalling, wanging my holier-than-thou altruistic tittery around like a politician before his scandal hits the newsstands. Sorry – that’s not what I meant.
I’m trying to say that everything we do is political because everything we do contributes to the future society that we’re building together.
So how does that society feel to you? And how can we use the energy and momentum of this election – however you voted – to deepen the ways we live with each other?
The Punkt MP02 will liberate you from your smartphone. It’s not a smartphone-killer, but it will free you from the burden of the dreaded online default mode.
Most of us are stuck in online default mode. We need a phone for communication in the modern age and smartphones are the most flexible solution for those moments when we absolutely must get online while out and about.
I get it.
But those moments of the essential online are fewer than we think. And what we are left with is the online default mode, in which we carry around the internet in our pocket, with instant access at any time.
The Punkt MP02 relieves you of this default and replaces it with an offline default mode. The online world is still accessible, through 4G tethering to a second device – computer, tablet or smartphone – but it is never only a swipe away.
Reaching into my pocket, I’m separated from a swift fiddle with Whatsapp by a dozen key presses and a twenty second wait. This is just enough to stop me from using my smartphone when I don’t need it – but still convenient enough that going online when I need to is not a hassle.
With the Punkt MP02, I am liberated to use my technology as I need it. A good example is that I often leave the house with either one or the other, but rarely with both phones.
If I want to contact others, I can take only the Punkt and stay offline. If I want to take photographs, then I can take only my smartphone camera without being tempted to go online.
Best of all are the times when I leave both in their drawer at home!
New Model Update: Better or Worse?
This is the second MP02 that I have tested. The first model I reviewed back in April and you can read my thoughts here. Ultimately, this model was unusable long term, mainly because of the short battery life (scarcely a day) and the frequent dropped calls.
So is this new model any better? The short answer is yes, but there are still snags.
Limited battery life
Since the first edition of the MP02, the battery life has improved – but it’s still not sensational compared to other feature phones like the Nokia 3310.
I would say that my Punkt phone use is no more than moderate and I need to charge the device every 36 hours or so. Not terrible, as it was before, but not world-beating either.
As you would expect, the biggest drain on the Punkt battery is tethering. I use this feature a fair amount because I travel often and sometimes need to connect my laptop to the internet.
As a guide, 45 minutes of tethering used 10% of the battery; 70 minutes drained 19%. Sometimes I plug the Punkt in to charge and tether for longer periods, but the phone does get warm and I doubt this is particularly good for the battery life.
Unfortunately, Punkt have withdrawn the ability to tether over USB and Bluetooth connections, both of which use less power than a wifi connection. I hope these features will return in future updates, but customer support didn’t give me any cause for optimism when I mentioned it.
Dropped calls
After a month of use, I haven’t had any dropped calls. Fingers crossed that’s a vast improvement.
Home screen snags
There are still a number of glitches in the software – particularly in the way the home screen behaves – and that’s not cool in a phone that costs £295.
The main glitches are when waking up from standby. The worst of these is that the home screen frequently freezes, leaving me staring at an unresponsive phone until it recovers.
The clock also takes a couple of seconds to update – slightly annoying when you’re quickly checking to see whether you’re about to miss a train.
There are a few features that I’d expect to see that are missing, especially with contact management. The address book works in mysterious ways and there is no easy way to delete duplicate contacts, for example.
It would be wonderful if I could manage my Punkt contacts using my computer and a USB connection. Consider that a feature request!
On the plus side, it was easy to transfer contacts from my smartphone to the Punkt using Bluetooth. Full marks there.
I can’t have an audible ring tone without also turning on all the other annoying system noises
No improvement on the old model – actually worse because my phone refuses to vibrate, despite having that option turned on. I would ordinarily rely on the vibrate to get around the obnoxious system noises that come whenever the ringtone is set up.
I’ve asked customer support about this and they appeared baffled by the desire for an audible ringtone without audible key tone presses.
In conclusion, this new model MP02 is a significant improvement on the previous edition. I can see myself using this model for the foreseeable future, but I sincerely hope that further improvements to the software are in the pipeline.
Note: Punkt sent me this new model MP02 gratis. Thank you!
There’s nothing like a public sauna for meeting people you wouldn’t otherwise meet. The health benefits are well documented, but the real value of a sauna is in the friendships you make, however brief.
Saunas are too small for private conversations. None of us can help eavesdropping and I’ve not met anyone yet who minded.
~
Jack caught my attention with the conversation he was having with his pal. They sat down heavily on the wooden slats of the sauna in my local leisure centre.
Jack’s friend put his feet up and asked: ‘What’s your business name gonna be?’
Great, I think, I love hearing about people’s mad business plans.
‘What do you mean?’ Jack replied.
‘I thought you were going to pretend you had a business,’ his mate says. ‘But you said you needed to make up a name.’
Pretend? Make up?
‘Nah,’ Jack says. ‘I’m gonna tell her it was my grandad’s business.’
‘Oh, and you inherited?’
‘Yeah. So if she asks any difficult questions, it doesn’t matter when I don’t know the details.’
Her? She? Inherited? Difficult questions?
‘Like, if she asks what kind of car I drive,’ Jack continues, ‘I’ll just say an Audi S4 and tell her my grandad’s the one who was into cars.’
That seals it: these guys are clearly planning some kind of fraud or, at the very least, catfishing on Tinder.
I interrupt: ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
Jack looks up from the floor, a bit sheepish. ‘It’s a new E4 dating show.’
‘What, really? I thought you were catfishing!’
Jack laughs. ‘Nah. This girl has to choose between four millionaires – except one of the millionaires isn’t a millionaire.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘How could you tell?’ Jack and his mate laugh. ‘I haven’t got a clue what millionaires do. I’m more of a Lidl kinda guy.’
The woman sweating beside me joins in: ‘Oh, I love reality shows!’ she says. ‘How did you get it?’
‘They just messaged me on Insta,’ Jack says.
‘Is there a prize?’
Jack scratches his head. ‘I guess the prize is her,’ he says. ‘The producers can’t tell me much, but they say she’s a ten.’
I’m not sure I like the general drift of this show. ‘What’s her prize, then?’
‘What do you mean!’ Jack says indignantly, before laughing at himself. ‘Her prize is all the swanky dates us four take her on, I suppose.’
‘You’re not paying, though, are you?’
‘No – that’d give the game away straight up. Cheeky Nandos, love?’
The woman on my left laughs with unpolished delight. ‘Or maybe it’s like Love Island and she gets a cash prize as well.’
‘I applied to Love Island this year, actually,’ Jack says. ‘Got down to the final round.’
‘Amazing!’ the woman says. ‘Are you gonna apply again?’
‘Definitely. Next year I’ll have this E4 show on my CV and I’ll be able to say I conned a girl into thinking I was a millionaire – hopefully.’
(This story was, of course, first written up as part of my daily diary.)
Last Sunday I finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. With its tawdry promise of ‘a revolutionary system to get 1 per cent better every day’, I resisted reading this book for more than a year.
I wish I hadn’t.
It’s an excellent summary of the current research on habit-building and habit-breaking.
One of the deceptively simple insights that has stayed with me is that every action you take is a vote for your future.
If you write one newsletter, then that’s one vote for becoming a newsletter-writer. If you only ever write one newsletter, you’re not going to accumulate more than one vote and you’re unlikely to become a newsletter-writer. That single vote will be swamped by all the other votes you’re constantly casting for other future selves, whether that’s ‘master carpenter’ or (in my case) ‘internet browser’.
If you keep publishing newsletters every week, then you’re regularly casting votes for ‘newsletter-writer’ – and, more than 150 Fridays later, here we all are.
~
What’s made this newsletter-writing habit stick for the past three years? I think there are, appropriately enough, three major reasons.
Firstly, and most importantly, I’m accountable to my readers. I have made a promise to write something interesting for you to read every Friday and I want to make damned sure I deliver. So thank you for sticking with me. You are my habit!
Secondly, I have a set time every week that I publish: Friday. If I miss a Friday, like I did last week, then I publish as soon as I can. Missing one Friday deadline isn’t a disaster and skipping a whole week is hardly likely to cause much of a cataclysm either, but habits like this are all too easy to let slide.
As James Clear says: don’t miss twice. I’ve now got this motto written down in the notebook where I record my work progress.
Thirdly, I enjoy writing. Writing is creative, obviously, but it’s also critical. Writing is a way of being in the world. Putting words down on paper forces me to think a lot more about what I do – and pushes me to do a lot more than I think.
Writing the scripts for Foiled is a slightly different experience. Rather than delivering content directly to an audience every Friday, the accountability for a radio series like Foiled lies in making my co-writer laugh and in regular deadlines throughout the three-month writing process: pitching story ideas, drafting story beats, writing the first and second drafts, and incorporating writers room punch-ups.
What makes a writing habit hard is when there is no one reading.
~
Since 2014 I have written a regular diary and I’ve been aiming for at least 1,000 words per day since 2015. I have more or less managed to stick to this habit, as this count shows:
2014: 314,084 words across 353 entries
2015: 392,241 ” ” 354 “
2016: 327,837 ” ” 320 “
2017: 248,865 ” ” 254 “
2018: 292,593 ” ” 313 “
But in 2019 I’ve only written 159,220 words in my diary – less than half you’d expect by the beginning of December.
This year so far, I’ve skipped 141 days. On 42 percent of days, I haven’t written anything at all in my 2019 diary. Can this still be called a habit?
In comparison, during my most ‘successful’ diary year of 2015 I missed only 11 diary days, just 3 percent.
Browsing the data, it’s obvious that James Clear’s rule holds fast: don’t miss twice. It’s astonishing how quickly a habit as strong as my five-year daily diary can break down after I skip just one day.
When nothing bad seems to happen after I skip a second day, my habit easily unravels and I go one or two weeks with hardly an entry.
So don’t miss twice.
~
I say that nothing bad seems to happen, but my daily diary is where I work out all the kinks in my life, personally and professionally.
My 2015 diary was enough of a success for me to start putting together a collection of highlights.
Looking back over words that I wrote nearly five years ago, the value of this daily habit comes clear. I can watch as moments of realisation surface, like in this entry from 5 January 2015:
There is no such thing as a great writer or a great anyone. We are all partners. My story is your story. My story is only a story if you’re invested in it; the language of finance is not misplaced. You invest in my story; you become a partner – an equal partner, no less. My story cannot get off the ground if it doesn’t have outside investment. I need that, we need that, the story needs that.
Diary writing is one of the most important habits in my life. I can scarcely pinpoint what the diary does for me, but I know that I am better off when I am writing regularly for nobody but myself.
Postscript: There’s something similar going on with running. At first glance, the benefit of a running habit is that you get outdoors and stay relatively fit. But running is so much more than that. On my lunchtime run today, for example, I came up with six good ideas that I can immediately implement to save money, improve my fitness and get better at business. Not bad for twenty minutes’ work.
UPDATE 6 January 2021: In 2020, I’m pleased to report that my diary-writing habit bounced back, despite, well, everything. I wrote a total of 319,893 words over 335 days, missing only 8.5 percent of that momentous 366-day leap year.
The big news from my keyboard is that Foiled has been recommissioned for a record-breaking fourth series on BBC Radio Wales.
When we put down our deposit on a flat in Edinburgh during the 2016 Fringe Festival, who’d have thought that, four years later, we’d still be writing about a little hair salon in the Welsh valleys?
(Certainly not the Arts Council, who turned us down for funding. Ahem.)
It’s almost as hard to believe that – barring any Shining style breakdowns – we’ll be back here in six months with another four complete scripts, ready to record. So send your plot ideas to the usual address. (Not a joke.)
A huge thanks is due to every one of you for listening over the years. And, if you’ve somehow missed Foiled despite my constant carping, then I can only repeatedly apologise on behalf of the monopolies commission for the absurd fact that it’s only ever online for 30 days. The rules might be changing this year. Might.
Greetings from Amsterdam. I write this as the weekend is drawing its last deep breath, as I watch the sun diving into the IJ and stock up on black bread for an eleven hour coach back to London Victoria.
Aside from the windmills, the dijks, the pannenkoeken and the oil rigs, the main event of the weekend was, of course, Youtube sensation The Tim Traveller’s mass ascent of the highest natural point in the lowest province of the Netherlands.
It’s about an hour’s drive to Urk from Amsterdam and we had no idea how many people to expect at Tim’s first Youtube meetup. The sun was shining, though, so we thought maybe ten or twenty.
Arriving on Urk (‘on’ not ‘in’ – Urkers are proud of their former status as an island) an hour early, we had a cup of tea in a smokey sports bar before walking down to the rendezvous.
About a hundred Internet people were gathered at the foot of the lighthouse, most of them filming ‘the most exciting event to ever happen on Urk’ on their smartphones. Two drones buzzed overhead, flying out of the sun like a scene from Apocalypse Now.
Tim, it’s fair to say slightly overwhelmed, was soon swamped in a cloud of Internet people eager to meet the hero of the hour. Dozens had travelled for hours across the country to meet Tim. One guy had flown from Edinburgh.
After half an hour of hand-shaking and selfies, Tim addressed his public, announced the commencement of the climb, and we set off, a protest march without cause.
The walk from the lighthouse to the church took about five minutes. Visibility was good and there were no accidents, besides the outrageous accident that a silly travel video had brought a hundred strangers together for a very silly afternoon.
At the summit, we were met by a man dressed in traditional costume, who formally greeted the crowds before melting away into the churchyard.
Then we found a pub where, thanks to the extremely high average geek quotient in attendance, we proceeded to learn an awful lot about polders – an understandable point of pride for the Dutch, given that about half the land in the Netherlands is reclaimed from the sea.
‘God created the world, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.’
Other things I learned:
The Netherlands has a border with France. Can you point to it on a map?
In a politically correct move that divides the country, Zwarte Piet, Santa Claus’ black-face assistant, has become ‘Soot’ Piet.
People born on the Caribbean island of Curaçao are Dutch citizens, with Dutch passports, but they are not members of the European Union.
Every twenty-five years, the academy convenes to decide how the Dutch will spell words that might have shifted in pronunciation. In 1996, to the delight of menu printers nationwide, the word for ‘pancake’, ‘pannekoeke’ changed to ‘pannenkoeke’.
Talking of which, the day finished with a stop at a Hansel and Gretel themed pancake house, where animatronic statues of sinterklaas flapped their arms around and every fifteen minutes the tables started tilting up and down for the entertainment of the (mostly under eleven years old) guests. Very gezelligheid.
What was the point of all this? The Tim Traveller gave us strangers – united by nothing more than an interest in the world – an excuse to go out and do something, even if that something was as pointless as climbing the highest natural point in the lowest region of the Netherlands.
An afternoon outdoors, connecting with people you would never otherwise meet, in a place you would never otherwise go. Isn’t that the most beautiful expression of what it means to be human? I think so.
A hundred Internet people gather to climb the highest natural point on (not in) Urk. Photo: The Tim Traveller
On Wednesday afternoon, I canvassed the streets of Westbourne on behalf of the Labour Party.
People jump to conclusions when you wander around wearing a very large, bright red rosette on your jacket – I would too if someone knocked on my door saying, ‘Hello, I’m canvassing for the Labour Party.’
I watched a film last week. I don’t watch many – perhaps two or three in a busy year – so the ones that I do see tend to linger in the memory, especially when they are as personal as this one.
Official Secrets is based on the true story of GCHQ translator Katharine Gun, who in 2003 was sent an NSA memo that requested GCHQ’s help in spying on members of the UN Security Council to find leverage so that Britain and the US could get the votes needed for a second UN resolution to approve the invasion of Iraq. Pretty corrupt.
Gun leaked the document to the Observer newspaper, caused an international incident, confessed her crime and was charged with a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
When her lawyer decided to use Gun’s time in court to put the legality of Tony Blair’s Iraq war on trial, the government withdrew the prosecution.
On Monday, I was stomping through the Millennium Wood in Cholsey when I spotted that it was the nineteenth birthday of this pretty little clutch of hazel, birch and ash.
Growing up as I did in Cholsey, I remember the close-cropped grass that used to occupy this land; banishings for cigarettes and fights on the outskirts of the football fields.
I remember the planting of the wood and thinking how my successors at the primary school dug into the earth on that cold November day while I worked a temp job and saved for university.
It warms the cockles to remember that hundreds – thousands – of communities across the UK chose to celebrate the turn of the millennium, not only by setting fireworks off in the sky, but also by planting trees down in the earth.
Once you start noticing the humble stone plaques that commemorate the hopes of those millennial tree-planters, you start seeing them everywhere. Two weeks ago, when staying at Castle Cottage in Wales, we tramped every morning up to a hilltop formerly known as ‘the lonely tree’, now a maturing copse also entering its twentieth year.
Today, we are in the midst of another mass planting that will dwarf the millennium celebrations.
Thankfully, we are not our political parties and politics also happens on scales small enough that we can all contribute.
National Tree Week begins tomorrow. The Woodland Trust is running events across the country. Planting trees is the most obvious way we can show that we care for generations beyond our own, and about time spans that transcend the human.
In this entertainingly comprehensive examination of why books still exist, Craig quotes Philip Roth, speaking in 2009:
To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really.
As someone currently pootling through Jane Eyre, this struck a chord with me. Two weeks? I’m currently on Week 5 and I still have fifty pages to go.
I do see what he means, though. The faster you read a book, the more ‘into it’ you become, and the more, perhaps, you get out of it. Certainly, a little more speed might make it easier for me to recall beside which hearth poor Jane is once again warming her ice-crusted fingers…
Reading 20-30 pages a day would be enough to get through most books in a fortnight. That seems doable – surely I could find 25 to 35 minutes for reading in a day?
In 2019 so far, I have finished eight novels at an average reading speed of 18 days per book. Six of them I finished inside Roth’s two week deadline, but three (if we also include Miss Eyre) took me more than five weeks each.
Dear reader, you are my witness to a solemn vow: I shall add to my evening bedtime reading a morning session. What better way to start the day than with ten pages of invigorating fiction?
The Pick of My Summer/Autumn Reading
A Passage to India (1924, fiction) by EM Forster. A splendid novel that dances wittily around the social politics of British rule in India, before exploding in your face. A Passage to India frequently makes ‘all-time best novel’ lists and I can make no accusation of false advertising.
Bitter Lemons (1957, non-fiction) by Lawrence Durrell. An autobiographical account of the three years (1953-1956) Durrell spent on Cyprus, as British rule disintegrated. A wise companion for any journey east; alternatively, ideal for those seeking literary sunshine during our dull northern winter.
My Current Autumn/Winter Reading…
Jane Eyre (1847, fiction) by Charlotte Brontë.
Underlands (2019, non-fiction) by Robert MacFarlane – a gift, thanks T.
Neurotransmissions: Essays on Psychedelics from Breaking Convention (2015, non-fiction) – also a gift, thanks B.
What have you been reading – anything good? Share with us!
For the past two years, I’ve supported The Next Challenge Grant, a wonderfully simple idea to crowdsource donations from people like me so that impecunious adventure-newbies can take on the kind of challenges that I’ve been so lucky to enjoy over the years.
My £200 donation – enough to fund one adventurous grantee – is dedicated to my nan. This is the dedication I wrote on the grant’s donor page:
My first big adventure, cycling 4,000 miles around the coast of Great Britain, was only possible thanks to support from my nan. She’d absolutely love The Next Challenge Expedition Grant so now it’s my turn to help you find your own awesome adventure. As nan used to say: Do it while you can!
This rest of this post was written by Tim Moss, the founder of the grant. Read on for the incredible stories of some astonishingly imaginative adventures made possible thanks to donations from the general public, people like you and me.
5 years, 60 adventures funded
Here’s a look back over five years of the Next Challenge Grant and the 60 adventurers that have won it…
Mike Creighton is running between all of the UK’s national parks as I write, while Ruth Thomas is preparing to run the Thames Path and Valerie Rachel is preparing to run the Trans-Labrador Highway.
Karl Booth pedalled 2,500 miles to the top of Europe, off-road and then declined to accept any money from the grant. He said that he got so much sponsorship after telling people he’d won a Next Challenge Grant that he didn’t need the cash and I should give it to someone else. Legend.
There are also plans to cycle the Netherlands in search of new food technologies, explore the worst-selling Ordnance Survey map, trek around Scotland with a pony and complete swimming escapes from the UK’s three prison islands.
The stories from these adventures would be enough on their own but the fact that they come from “normal people” who have been part-funded by “normal people” somehow makes them feel even better.
2020 grant applications now open
Applications for the 2020 Next Challenge Grant are now open. The deadline is Sunday 5th January. Read more and apply here.
It is open to people all over the world, of any age, nationality or background. Expedition experience is not necessary and, in fact, the grant is aimed squarely at those who are new to the adventure world and “don’t normally do this sort of thing”.
So if you’ve had a look at trips above and thought “I’m not the kind of person that does stuff like that”, then you need to apply.
The application only takes five minutes and – because Tim only has a small readership and typically makes 10 or more awards – the odds of success are high.
What are you waiting for? What is the worst that could happen?
But let’s have a little perspective, shall we? In Turkey, there are over 3,600,000 Syrian refugees, living with the limited legal rights granted under ‘temporary protection’, in the shadow of a war zone.
So, while on Samos, I had to take a couple of days out to visit İzmir, one of the most important transit cities for refugees crossing from Turkey to Greece.
İzmir is positioned with easy access to the strip of coastline that faces Lesvos, Chios and Samos, three of the Greek island ‘hotspots’ where refugees can register for asylum in Europe.
Syrians have been coming to İzmir for decades: easily evidenced by the dozens of established cafes and restaurants doing quick business around Basmane railway station in the city centre.
After a hearty lunch of fuul and khubz in a canteen overflowing with Syrians – young and old, male and female, refugee and resident – I asked around for someone who spoke English and was directed to a young guy we’ll call Ahmed.
Ahmed told me that he’d only been in Turkey for 20 days – and had spent 15 of those in prison. He’d already tried to cross to Samos twice and both times he’d been picked up by the Turkish coastguard after helicopters spotted his boat.
According to Aegean Boat Report, the Turkish coastguard have stopped 2,699 boats like Ahmed’s from crossing to Europe this year. Only about a third of the refugees who leave Turkey on boats arrive in Greece.
~
Ahmed tells me that he’s got a brother in Athens who crossed the Aegean to Greece before the 2016 EU-Turkey refugee agreement that has made the coastguard so vigilant.
In the 2016 deal, the EU promised Turkey €6 billion in financial aid as well as visa-free travel through Europe for Turkish citizens. In return, Turkey would better patrol the European border and re-admit refugees who reached Greece illegally.
In reality, the Greek leftist Syriza government, in power until this summer, proved reluctant to send refugees back to conditions where their human rights would not be respected.
The new Greek conservative government has promised to make far greater use of the returns agreement, but it is yet to be seen whether such a course of action is feasible, let alone defensible.
~
After being picked up by the coastguard, Ahmed and the others in his boat were taken to a detention centre. He told me that he was beaten up by the police and that the detainees shared living quarters the size of a basketball court with as many as 1,500 others.
Ahmed spent five days in detention before being deported back to the border with Syria. But he – and all the friends he made in the detention centre – came straight back to İzmir to try to cross again. ‘Here is no work; there is war,’ he says. ‘What can we do?’
~
Ahmed isn’t even supposed to be in İzmir: he doesn’t have the right papers. He’s supposed to stay in the province bordering Syria where he first arrived in Turkey.
Throughout our conversation, Ahmed’s eyes were darting around, looking over my shoulder for the police who often sweep through Basmane checking people’s papers.
Earlier that day, I’d spoken to Onur, the head of an official refugee support NGO in the city. Over a glass of tea in his office, Onur politely apologised. He was sorry, but he couldn’t tell me much about the situation for refugees in Turkey without getting the approval of the Directorate General of Migration Management.
But Onur was able to tell me that there were around 180,000 Syrians in İzmir – significantly more than the official figure because of irregular migration between provinces by refugees like Ahmed.
Onur told me that refugees can change their papers when they move to a different province, but Ahmed explains that this is not the case for İzmir, Istanbul, Ankara or any of the other few places where you might be able to live – or escape to Greece.
~
Here in İzmir, Ahmed shares a room in a hotel with his new friends. Despite splitting the single room between five people, one of their jobs today is to find somewhere cheaper.
The whole area around Basmane is a maze of cheap hotels, fast food joints, shoe sellers and cigarette pushers. The hotels are mostly full of Africans, who stay for one or two nights and then move on. Syrian refugees tend to stay in run-down houses, scarcely fit for human habitation, infested with mice and cockroaches – but at least they’re cheap.
Life here is hard. Ahmed has only one friend who can speak Turkish and he has to do all the translating for the group. Ahmed speaks great English, but that’s not much use here. He studied English in school for eight years, but since then he’s lived through seven years of war.
‘I’m 25,’ he tells me. ‘If I don’t go to Europe, I have no future anywhere.’
~
Samos Update: There are now 400 more refugees on Samos than there were when I arrived – up to 6,492 according to Aegean Boat Report. That’s despite the transfer of more than 700 people to the mainland a couple of weeks ago.
Two weeks is a long time on such a fevered island as Samos. The sights, sounds and stories could each fill a book, I’m sure, but I’ll have to content myself with reporting these snippets that I don’t have time to do justice to.
~
After I left Samos, a friend sent me a short text message concerning the distribution of open cards that saw 700 people transferred to the mainland. ‘Did you know that during the big transfer they actually broke up families?’ she asked me, rhetorically. ‘Half the family would be on the list and have five minutes to pack. If the dad was on the list and he wasn’t there, they just left him.’
~
I met a young man – let’s call him Aarash – a 17 year-old from Afghanistan who grew up in Iran. He came to Samos alone and was excited to show me the ‘house’ that he had just finished building with the help of resourceful friends made at the camp. It was a wood-frame shelter stapled with tarpaulins.
Minors aren’t given any money to survive, so rely on kindness and solidarity. He was given a sleeping bag by an NGO and a mattress by the camp. Older refugees who’d taken care of him used some of their money to buy tarpaulins and wood.
Four people will sleep on that mattress, but it’s a significant upgrade from the flimsy tent they had been living in for the past few weeks.
Aarash goes to an NGO-run school in the town and learns English, Greek and German. They feed him breakfast and lunch, so he doesn’t need to rely too much on the revolting food handed out at the end of a long queue by the camp authorities.
~
There is one doctor for 6000 refugees on Samos – medical, not psychological. Not everyone has flesh wounds; most of the scarring is on the inside.
~
One founder of an NGO on Samos told me that, while grassroots organisations like his ‘want to go out of business’, the big, transnational NGOs are already planning their budget for 2021 – ‘they need to stay in business’, he says with disgust.
~
I met a 27 year-old man whose ‘Greek age’ is 17. It’s a calculated gamble on his part: if at his interview they accept that he is indeed only 17, then he is will be classified as an unaccompanied minor and put on the priority list for transfer to Athens.
Without giving away too many details, this man’s home country is in Africa; he stands little chance of getting refugee status if the authorities discover his real age.
In the meantime, however, as a 17 year-old, this man does not get the financial support that older asylum-seekers receive; he lives by volunteering for the Samos NGOs and gets food in return. He has chosen short-term penury in the hope of longer-term advantage.
He looks 27.
~
‘Here is nothing special’ – the words of an Ethiopian woman, looking around at the disgusting camp and reflecting on why she bothered coming to Europe.
The two most shocking stories I heard while travelling came as a pair, one from each side of the Aegean border.
The first I heard from a Turkish volunteer in Izmir. This was her friend’s story and she prefaced the whole by saying that she was only repeating the otherwise unbelievable – and barbaric – tale because she trusts her friend absolutely.
The two friends volunteer for a small organisation in Izmir that tries to help refugees integrate into Turkish society. It started as a place where refugees and locals could come together to cook and eat a meal. Now they also distribute warm clothes during winter and help refugees navigate Turkish bureaucracy. Just last week, for example, the volunteers helped a Syrian boy enrol in a local schools, something that his parents couldn’t have done alone.
Recently, the friend accompanied a pregnant Syrian woman when she went to hospital to give birth. The birth was a success, but afterwards she was presented with a piece of paper to sign. The new mother couldn’t read the paper written in Turkish, of course, but she was pressured to sign anyway.
It was a medical consent form for the surgeons to strip her ovaries and render her infertile.
After repeating this story, and repeating her incredulity that it could possibly be true, my Turkish friend averred that the hospital’s reported behaviour was totally unethical. But she also said that it was understandable, from both a financial and moral stand point.
Turkey isn’t a rich country and childbirth costs a lot of money that the government cannot recoup from penniless refugees. But my friend also told me that many refugees in Izmir live on the streets, or in hotels and apartments that are barely inhabitable. There is little enough money to feed themselves, let alone extra mouths. It’s irresponsible to have kids in this situation, my friend cried. It is not right.
It was my time to repeat a story I’d heard a few days before in Samos. There might be other reasons that a refugee needs pregnancy and childbirth.
Two months pregnant and travelling alone, a Syrian woman arrived on Samos and was taken to the hospital for a check up. At the hospital, it was discovered that this woman had been raped during her journey to Europe. The doctor told her that, because of the rape, she was entitled to have an abortion.
The woman refused. Thanks to her pregnancy, she explained, she would be placed on the ‘vulnerable persons’ list and given priority for transfer away from Samos to the mainland. No one wants to stay for long in the filth of Samos. Pregnancy is the closest a human being here can get to a free ticket out of the camp.
These rules are made with the noblest of intentions, I’m sure, but their side effects are barbaric.
As a topper to this story, I was told a third by an Ethiopian woman in the Samos camp. She had a friend who had been transferred to Athens because she was pregnant. Tragically, after she arrived in Athens, she had a miscarriage. With no baby, the authorities tried to transfer her back to Samos.
I should say that these stories are uncorroborated, but they raised little more than an eyebrow when retold to local volunteers who have heard too many, too similar.
Women’s bodies are history’s oldest warzone: a millennia-old war fought between state and self over who has the right to new life – in all senses.
As some of you will recall, back in August (not July as in the audio) I left a love letter, hidden in the crack in a wall in Paris, for someone I’d barely met.
Who would spend 86 hours and about £300 travelling from Athens to the UK when a four hour flight costs a third of the price?
The answer is, of course, me – but I was rebuking myself with this question yesterday afternoon when I found out that my ferry crossing from Cherbourg to Poole had been summarily cancelled because of what can only be described as British weather.
As I scrabbled to find an alternative route that wasn’t disgustingly expensive (Eurostar topped £200, the train from Dover was nearly £90), unhappily time-tabled, or, indeed, already fully booked, I was annoyed at myself for choosing the slow road home, horrified at the mounting expense of two extra train fares, and disgraced by the choices we’ve made as a species that put such a high premium on terrestrial transport.
Then I remembered the people I left behind in Izmir, Samos and Athens: the Afghan students I’d taught the days of the week, the Syrian, Yemeni and Iraqi chefs who’d cooked for me, the friends of many nations with whom I’d hiked to the beach – the thousands of people who would give anything (their life savings, their youth, their life) for the chance to travel across the continent so charmlessly.
At the port, as police swept the underside of lorries for desperate stowaways, all I had to do was dangle my passport and cycle aboard. For me, there’s only the merest whiff of a border, and a delay of an hour or two is no delay at all.
~
As it happens, I feel very lucky to be on board – and not only because I’m winning the passport lottery.
Yesterday, after frantic re-routing analysis, I finally settled on the Caen to Portsmouth ferry as the least painful option. I booked the same, swiftly followed (naturally enough, I thought) by the booking of a train from Paris to Caen.
I agonised over the timings: should I book the languorous early train which would leave me a yawning two and a half hours of footling around in Caen, or should I book the dynamic later train, with time for a leisurely lunch in Paris and a snappy arrival 45 minutes before departure?
Eventually, my cautious nature won out and I booked the early train.
Good thing too – because the Caen and ‘Caen’ of my tickets are two completely different places. In fact, one of them isn’t called ‘Caen’ at all.
Caen, the actual Caen where my train arrived, is a landlocked town some 16 kilometres from the English Channel.
The spurious ‘Caen’ of my ferry booking is actually a place called Ouistrehem, which might look less catchy on the brochure, but has the singular advantage of being geographically accurate.
Good thing I had that spare hour for a rapid bike ride through the misting Calvados rain.
UPDATE: I have just done the accounts on all my travels this summer.
I was particularly shocked by how expensive all the overland travel was – especially after my ferry on Friday was cancelled and I had to rebook a couple of trains as well.
So I looked up the cost of my 5 trips this summer if I’d used air travel.
(Drum roll…)
Total plane cost
5 days, includes airport transfers and bike carriage £992.00
£198.40 per trip
Total cost of travelling overland
11 nights, includes hostels (and ferry and train cancellation costs)
£1,214.87
£242.97 per trip
It still feels a bit wrong that flying through the air is cheaper than taking a train or bus, but it’s nowhere near as cheap as I’d thought it’d be.
Remember, too, that included in my £44/trip overland travel premium were three beautiful evenings in Paris, two with friends in Milan and a whole day to explore Brindisi.
My route from Athens to the UK was scheduled to take ~82 hours, but that includes about 9 bonus hours in Brindisi and 16 bonus hours in Paris. And does mean that I arrive in Portsmouth, which might not be everyone’s idea of the UK.
Leg 1: Coach Athens-Patra (€20.70)
They’ll take bikes underneath. I had to take off my front wheel, but otherwise left the bike intact.
Takes about 3 hours. Has wifi. More or less airconditioned.
Another option is to cycle along the Gulf of Corinth, which I have done before, in the opposite direction. 3 hours versus 3 days.
Leg 2: Ferry Patra-Brindisi (overnight)
It’s a 3-4km ride from the coach station to the ferry port. Ignore the one way signs and take the first ‘exit’ into the port, saving yourself a huge loop. There’s a handy AB supermarket just before you turn into the port.
Do you really need to arrive at least 2 hours before departure for check-in? Probably not. Did I? Yes. Passport control doesn’t open until 60 minutes before departure.
Don’t worry about boarding: the bike just rolls on and gets tied up. Easy.
I got the overnight ferry so that I could make full use of the cabin. Some people will think this is a waste of money when you could just sleep on deck. I think it’s worth every penny. I slept like a log from about 10pm until about 7am.
Plus it’s nice to have somewhere to dump all your crap while you romp about the ship. And I met a lovely chap called John from Poland.
The ferry arrives a short 3km ride from Brindisi town.
Leg 3: Train Brindisi-Milan (overnight)
Again, I booked an overnight train to avoid spending money on a hostel in Milan. That meant two things:
A full day in Brindisi to eat focaccia.
Only 90 minutes to get between station in Milan for my connection to Paris.
There was no problem getting the bike onto the train, but Brindisi train station doesn’t have a lift between platforms so be prepared to lug.
Try to book a lower bunk so that you feel less like a prick when you take up the entire floor space with your bike. You can’t squeeze the bike underneath the bed, so it has to fit into the space between the ladder and the window.
Woe betide you if there are two bikes.
Try to book a cabin near to the train door so you don’t have to carry your stuff so far. Alternatively, I simply moved my stuff up the carriage into an empty cabin about half an hour before Milan. This is only really important if you have a tight change, which I did.
I got a three bunk cabin, by the way. You will not be able to do anything in a triple cabin. The beds are comfortable, but there isn’t much head room. There are stools to perch on in the gangway, but you’ll frequently have to stand up to allow passage.
In spite of there being shampoo in your deluxe complimentary pack, I couldn’t find the shower. There is a sink in your cabin, but you won’t be able to get to it because your bike will be in the way. There are adequate sinks in the toilet.
Leg 4: Train Milan-Paris
I only had 90 minutes to get off the train, put my bike together, cycle to Garibaldi and pack up the bike again. Luckily, it only took me 45 minutes.
The Milan-Paris train left from platform 11 – useful to know, but only if it always does.
I got a hostel and stayed overnight in Paris, where I wandered around and ate crêpes.
Leg 5: Train Paris-Caen
Easy: just wheel the bike onto the train.
Leg 5.5: Cycle to port which is actually 16km away
Ooh – unexpected! Thank god I allowed plenty of panic time.
Leg 6: Ferry Caen to Portsmouth
Easy. The bike wheels on and, some hours later, wheels off.
So that’s it: Athens to the UK in four travelling days. It is possible to do the journey faster, but I was quite pleased with my free time in Brindisi and Paris.
But that’s all part of the adventure and I’d much rather have these disruptions than the misery and suspicion of airport security and customs. Overlanding wins!
It’s said that the Greek islands are where time stands still. The waves and the shore, the sun in the sky, old men in the plateía, the stars. Well, time certainly doesn’t stand still on Samos any longer.
Over the past two weeks, refugees, activists, volunteers and townsfolk alike have been rocked by a series of convulsions that have created what one long-term volunteer described to me as, “the toughest conditions I’ve ever seen on Samos”.
Samos is one of five designated refugee ‘hotspots’ across the East Aegean, the liquid border between Turkey and the European Union. These hotspots, which also include the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Kos and Leros, were created in 2016 as holding pens for people wishing to claim asylum in Europe.
The hotspot system means that refugees arriving on Samos are stuck here until their claims have been assessed — a process that often takes a couple of years. But, with more people arriving on the island than leaving, the system is heading inexorably for failure.
The official 2011 census put the population of Samos Town at 6,251. The most recent figures from Aegean Boat Report for the town’s refugee population is 6,458 — with 599 arriving in the last week alone. Meanwhile, the official capacity for the refugee camp is just 648 (yes, that’s not a typo — six hundred and forty-eight).
With a camp almost ten times overcapacity and a refugee population to match the town itself, life in Samos is tense. Everyone is fed up.
The Camp
The official refugee camp and the informal ‘jungle’ shelters that surround it are pitched precariously on the steep slopes above the town. Conditions are predictably awful; a pattern for refugee accommodation repeated so often across Europe that it’s at risk of sounding ‘normal’.
There aren’t enough tents to go around, there aren’t sufficient toilets, showers and sanitation, there isn’t electricity or lighting, there are no kitchens or cooking facilities, and nowhere near enough drinking water taps. Normal.
Over winter, Samos gets more than twice the rainfall that London does. The downpour turns the hillside camp into a mudslide. Worse. Outside of the official camp, there are few (if any) toilets: 6,000 people with little choice but to shit and piss wherever they can. Every winter, the refugees’ cheap tents are washed away on a tide of mud and piss and shit.
The recently elected mayor of Eastern Samos, Giorgos Stantzos well knows these problems. But the people I spoke to in the town were far from certain that their leader was helping to solve them. In fact, some thought he was creating conditions that would lead to catastrophe.
The Attack on NGOs
On Samos, there are a dozen or so refugee support organisations who do almost all the work necessary to give refugees some hope of a future on planet earth, let alone in Europe.
There are organisations that offer legal advice, others that hold language classes in Greek, English, German, French, Farsi and Arabic; some that cook and serve food (the less said about the food provided by the camp the better), others that put on fitness classes for kids and adults.
These solo volunteers, grassroots organisations and larger NGOs exist only so long as the local Greek authorities, led by Mayor Stantzos, turn a blind eye.
At 9.30am on Friday 11 October, representatives of every branch of local government — the mayor’s office, the police, the health service, the fire department, building regulators and the tax office — marched en masse into the offices, kitchens, warehouses and schoolrooms of the various refugee support organisations on the island.
Do you have this certificate? Do you have that invoice? Where are this man’s papers?
These organisations, funded by hundreds of small-time donors like you and me, face the threat of gargantuan fines upwards of €10,000 for the slightest infraction — a missing invoice for tomatoes or a building certificate they didn’t realise was (or has mysteriously become) necessary.
Needless to say, the cost of such fines would be unbearable. Then who will teach Greek, English or German? Who will show a path through the asylum labyrinth? Who will feed the hungry?
It was an overwhelming display of power. Not, you’d have thought, the actions of an administration that wants the best possible care for the refugees in their fiefdom.
That night, Afghan and Arab refugees started throwing improvised ‘gas bombs’ at each other. The fire department were called, but, according to eyewitnesses, stood idly by as the fire ripped through the camp, turning tents and shelters into ash and making hundreds homeless — even more homeless, if it is possible, than they were before.
The police told refugees to abandon the camp and go down into the town, where they were looked after by — who else? — the NGOs who’d been the subject of such official hostility only days before.
And the Mayor? His response was to close the schools in the town. One Samos resident I spoke to was furious at his actions: ‘What message does that send to people? “Be scared!”’
The Mayor is very careful to point the finger of blame for the disaster at the Greek government and the European Union. But by shutting down the schools and launching a bureaucratic assault on grassroots refugee support NGOs, he is at least contributing to an atmosphere of catastrophe.
And perhaps, when neither Athens nor Brussels will listen to anything but the most lurid headlines, a catastrophe was exactly what the island needed.
Everyone saw how last month’s deadly fire on Lesvos resulted in quick transfers to the mainland. Is it any surprise that some might see chaos as their only chance for peace?
The Hunger Strike — and Open Cards
In the days after the fire, refugees from Africa started blockading the food distribution in the camp in protest at — well, in protest at just about everything.
On Saturday, the blockade was broken when the camp authorities started handing out the precious ‘open cards’ that would allow some refugees — mainly single women and families — to leave Samos and travel to Athens and the mainland.
This is what passes for good news on Samos. The reality is that even the transfer of as many as 1,000 people only rolls conditions back to how they were in March, beyond the point when aid groups were already warning of a “humanitarian disaster”.
The reality is that life on the mainland is rarely much of an improvement for most.
Every time I visit the margins of the union we’ve created, my opinion becomes ever more certain: there can be no resolution to this crisis until Europe implements a sensible policy of open borders and freedom for all to work.
It used to be said that the Greek islands were a place where time stands still.
The waves and the shore, the sun in the sky, old men in the plateía, the stars.
Well, time certainly doesn’t stand still on Samos any more. It’s only 24 hours since my last audio from the island, and already I have news.
After a food blockade that lasted since the fire on Monday night, this afternoon the authorities started handing out the precious ‘open cards’ that would allow some refugees – mainly single women and families, mainly African by all accounts – to leave Samos and travel to Athens and the mainland.
Meanwhile, at the seafront, a group of Arabs are now protesting: where are their ‘open cards’?
An hour ago, I went down to have a look. A thin line of police stood in front of a banner the Arabs had unfurled.
We demand the European Union and the United Nations save our children.
The sun sank into the sea. I took some photos and started to record audio.
Then I was pulled away by police. They asked for my passport and told me to delete the photos, not only from the photo gallery, but also from the ‘recycle bin’.
(Luckily, my phone is old and slow so I was able to restore them minutes later.)
The distribution of ‘open cards’ – they’re actually just stamps on refugee documents – is a step forward. The news is going around that by next week 2,000 people will have been transferred off the island.
A week is a long time in politics, especially when that politics is throwing gas bombs at your tent in a refugee camp.
On Monday morning, I wrote an email to The Guardian.
I thought they might be interested in the news that I shared with you last Friday: that the mayor of Samos seemed to be engineering the conditions for a catastrophe by putting unbearable pressure on the international organisations who are supporting refugees with food, shelter, clothes, education, entertainment and legal advice.
The final line of my email to the International Desk was:
While refugees on Lesvos have at least the sympathy and support of the island, on Samos the mayor is bent on pushing the situation to catastrophe: a riot, a fire – anything to make Athens and the EU take notice and do something.
That night, after an earlier dispute in the long queue for food, Afghan and Arab refugees started chucking gas bombs at each other. A huge fire ripped through the camp, turning tents and shelters into ash and making hundreds homeless – even more homeless, if it is possible, than they were before.
I couldn’t help but send what was admittedly a pretty snarky follow-up email to the heretofore silent International Desk:
Huge fire in Samos refugee ‘jungle’ tonight, hundreds evacuated and homeless. Maybe someone will take notice now!
Silence at the International Desk. Well, I guess no one died and something kind of similar happened a few weeks ago on Lesvos, so…
On Monday a fire broke out at an overcrowded camp above Vathy, the port town of Samos, after inter-ethnic clashes.
‘Inter-ethnic clashes’. Really?
Factually not inaccurate, but this throw-away line does no justice to the events of the past two weeks.
Worse, this kind of journalism perpetuates the narrative that political decisions – international, national, local – have no effect on how human beings like you and I behave.
This ‘no effect’ narrative is easy. It’s easy to simply put the fire down to ‘inter-ethnic clashes’. Far too easy. Lazy you could almost say.
~
In October 1963, Bob Dylan wrote a song about a boxer who died as a result of injuries sustained during a bout earlier that year.
‘Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what’s the reason for?’ Dylan asks, as the referee, the angry crowd, his manager and the gambling man shrug their shoulders and pass the blame.
The last to pass the blame is ‘the boxing writer’, who points the finger squarely at Davey Moore’s opponent.
An easy narrative. It’s easy to simply pin the blame on a foreign boxer who ‘came here from Cuba’s door’. Far too easy. Lazy you could almost say.
~
What is my narrative, then?
Who can blame refugees for fighting over food when the food always runs out before the whole of the two-hour queue has been served?
Who can even blame the mayor for cooking up the conditions for catastrophe, when nothing else has convinced the EU to put an end to this barbarism?
There is only one practical solution to this crisis: open the borders and let these people work.
In 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel saw that this was the only practical solution. She was not supported by the rest of the EU, and now has been compelled to fall in line with our other so-called ‘leaders’ and join them in refusing these people justice.
Which is all a bit of a shame because a recent report found that the million or so refugees who came to Germany in 2015 have been ‘integrating’ into society faster than expected: around 400,000 are already employed. This is better than past migrations, such as after the Balkan conflict in the early 90s, and particularly impressive given how difficult it is for Arabic speakers to learn German, let alone start a new life in the country.
But the ‘open borders’ narrative is not so easy. It makes it hard to answer the question I’m often asked: ‘What can we do?’
In short: we can give our time and/or money, either directly to the grassroots refugee organisations who are supporting people on the ground, like those here in Samos; or we can use our elevated European status to advocate for the only just political solution: open borders.
ABOUT SAMOS: Samos is an island ruled by legend and beauty.Everything around the virgin landscape is made of colour and light. Each step one takes is a revelation. [Visit Greece]
ALSO: Samos is one of five designated refugee ‘hotspots’ across the East Aegean, the liquid border between the Middle East and the European Union.
These ‘hotspots’, which also include the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Kos and Leros, were created in 2016 as holding pens for people wishing to claim asylum in Europe. This means that refugees arriving in Samos are stuck here until their claims have been assessed – a process that often takes a couple of years.
RESIDENT POPULATION OF SAMOS TOWN: 6,251 (2011 Census)
REFUGEE POPULATION OF SAMOS: 6,085 (Aegean Boat Report, 11 October 2019)
Refugee population numbers are always difficult to get right: the Aegean Boat Report figures are slightly higher than the official UNHCR count. Local NGOs estimate the figure to be even higher, with perhaps as many as 7,000 refugees on the island.
The difficulty comes because, when refugees receive a second refusal to their asylum application, they dare not renew their protection documents in case they are picked up by the police, and so they are missed in official counts.
But they are still here. And still they arrive.
Last month alone, 2,124 more people arrived on Samos from Turkey. The numbers of new arrivals have more than doubled compared to September last year. [UNHCR]
MAXIMUM CAPACITY OF SAMOS REFUGEE CAMP: 648 (six hundred and forty-eight, IOM)
~
The refugees on Samos predominantly live in and around the refugee camp, on the hillside that overlooks the island’s main town. A few are able to rent accommodation in the town, but most live in shelters and tents pitched on the steep slopes.
The steep slopes.
As I write this email to you, the sun is shining on another bright October day. Like me, you probably have a strong image in your mind of the Greek islands in summer: vast blue skies and a sun that bakes. In summer.
The Samian winter – which runs from the end of October until mid-April – is perhaps mild by British standards (although British standards do tend to assume a house and central heating).
But the rain.
We had the first sighting last Friday. A storm broke while I was leaving Ikaría. The wind blew, the rain gushed, local Greeks ran for cover, children screamed, and the power cut out for several hours.
Over winter, Samos gets more than twice the rainfall that London does. The downpour turns the panoramic refugee camp into a mudslide. Worse. Outside of the official camp (population 700), there are few (if any) toilets: 6,000 people with little choice but to shit and piss wherever they can.
Their cheap tents are washed away every winter on a tidal wave of mud and piss and shit.
~
On Samos, there are a dozen or so refugee support organisations who do almost all the work necessary to give these people some hope of a future on planet earth, let alone in Europe.
There are organisations that offer legal advice; others that hold language classes in Greek, English, German, French, Farsi and Arabic; some that cook and serve food (the less said about the food provided by the camp the better); others that put on fitness classes for kids and adults.
These solo volunteers, grassroots organisations and larger NGOs exist only so long as the Greek authorities, including the camp administration, shrug their shoulders or turn a blind eye.
I won’t repeat what has been said to me, but I haven’t yet heard a single good word said about the leader of the camp administration. It is fair to say that none of the grassroots organisations have any kind of a relationship with the people that run the camp.
When I arrived last week, all the volunteers I spoke to told me that the local authorities were trying to shut down all the refugee support NGOs, harassing them with spot-checks from the mayor’s office, the police, the health service, the fire department, the building regulators and the tax office.
Today it happened.
Starting at 9.30am this morning, representatives of every branch of local government marched en masse into the offices, kitchens, warehouses and schoolrooms of all the refugee support organisations on the island. It was an overwhelming display of power.
Do you have this certificate? Do you have that invoice? Where are this man’s papers?
~
I will have to leave you on a cliff-hanger, I’m afraid. As I write, an emergency meeting of NGO coordinators is taking place. Right now, people who are only trying their best to help are licking their wounds and comparing the size of their fines.
These tiny organisations, funded by dozens – hundreds – of small-time donors like you and me, are under threat of gargantuan fines up to €10,000 for the slightest infraction – a missing invoice for tomatoes or a building certificate they didn’t realise was (or has mysteriously become) necessary.
Needless to say, the cost of such fines would be unbearable. Then who will teach Greek, English or German? Who will show a path through the asylum labyrinth? Who will feed the hungry?
For the past two months, volunteers at one community restaurant have fed around 550 refugees every day, serving a free lunch to the camp’s most vulnerable residents, including the elderly, disabled, and pregnant and breast-feeding women.
But with the authorities seemingly determined to shut these NGOs down, how long can this restaurant survive? The restaurant founders spent four months getting all the right certificates and licenses to run a kitchen above board. But if the shut-down is not successful today, then what about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s tomorrow?
Then everyone will have to go back to standing in line from two in the morning to get a breakfast of one plastic-coated croissant and a carton of juice.
After today’s assault, perhaps some of the NGOs here on Samos will have to end their operations. Perhaps the crack-down was also intimidation, a message to the EU from a Greek government that has had enough. Perhaps, to some extent, life will go on as before.
I have circumnavigated both Britain and Tunisia on my bicycle (he has a name, Martin). Now I can add the mythological island of Ikaría to that illustrious list.
There are many myths attached to Ikaría, starting with the island’s very name – does it derive from an ancient word for ‘fish’, or was it here that the ill-starred Icarus crashed to earth?
There is the myth of the ‘long-lived’ population (a myth that goes back at least as far as 1677). It might be the calorie-restricted diet, it might be hard-working lives and no retirement, it might be close family, or the radioactive hot springs.
There is the myth of ‘Red Rock’, the island where 13,000 communists were exiled – quite possibly all of them ribetiko players (in spite of the disapproval of the Communist Party).
There is the myth of the Free State of Ikaría, with its own government, armed forces, stamps and, most importantly, flag. The state lasted 5 months in 1912; you can still see the flag flying.
Then there is the myth that Ikaría can make for a relaxing cycle tour, even in the dying embers of summer.
Ikaría doesn’t give up its myths easily.
~
The first warning landed on my deaf ears even before I’d booked my ferry ticket: ‘It is very hilly,’ my friend told me, ‘and the road isn’t too good in places.’
The second warning came moments after disembarking, met in a port-side cafe by an Ikarían friend of my friend. ‘It is very hilly,’ he said. ‘Mountains. And there is no road in some places.’
The third warning arrived at the end of an afternoon that had fair zipped along, fuelled by Popis’s aubergine in red wine, on rollercoaster contours where descents powered the climbs. ‘The road goes straight up from here,’ the painter under the tree said. ‘And, from Karkinagri, the road is impassable. You might be able to get through, but you’ll have to carry your bike.’
The fourth warning was a map. If it’s possible to have deaf eyes, then I had them. A circumnavigation of the whole island was less than 140km – a day’s work on Thighs of Steel – how hard could Ikaría be?
Turns out: really fucking hard.
There were plenty of moments, perched high up on a wheel-spinning gravel track, bike in hand, where I fancied an Icarus-like plunge into the sea rather than take another heave on the pedals.
It’s amazing how fast your body forgets the sweat-earned hills when you’re racing to sea-level at 50kph. Every day is showtime here: the sun playing in the waves, the clouds decorating the Amazonian canopy, the Ikarían rock, polished or volcanic, changing colour from bleach to blush to black.
Yesterday I took rest in the far east of the island. I walked over the headland to a cove where stone held the sea close, and the sand paddled underfoot. I dived from a boulder and let the current drift me out to the sunset.
I hiked up to the Cave of Dionysus, startling two bull-like goats into the thickets of gorse. The maw of the cave hung open, the walls melting with the crushed skulls and bones of thousands of years. A bottomless fear stalked me.
I climbed up along a trail marked with scarlet splashes of paint, chasing the falling light, cresting the hilltop as the sun bent itself into the western mountains I’d climbed two days before. The stars flicked on.
There is an organisation here in Athens called Kids Klub who – among other things – help construct playgrounds in the squats that house refugees.
SIDE BAR: Why are refugees still living in squats? Indeed – why are they still living on the streets? That’s a question you’d have to ask the Athenian municipality.
Constructing playgrounds for refugee children seems like a marvellous idea, and when I found out about the project I was delighted. But not everyone – not even everyone who supports a state-free world and No Borders – sees it quite that way.
The disagreement orbits the essential question faced at some point or another by everyone who comes here wanting to support refugees:
Should we try to satisfy the immediate material needs of people in a shitty situation; or should we instead focus on the massive, long-term, systemic political or bureaucratic action that might just lift people out of their shitty situation, permanently?
~
Over the past few weeks, at least five squats in the Exarchia area of Athens have been evicted, the playgrounds torn up, destroyed.
Understandably, the volunteers who’d helped build the playgrounds were utterly distraught at seeing their work undone and hundreds of their friends rounded up, loaded onto buses and driven to a detention centre in Corinth that doesn’t even have beds, let alone toilets.
But this wanton act of violence – when viewed from the other side of Alice’s looking glass – was entirely predictable.
~
I had a conversation with a friend grown tired of the whole unhappy cycle of emergency aid and eviction. Their fatigued conclusion was that perhaps the last few years of volunteer efforts (including their own) have been misplaced and that the current complaints about the government and police action are more self-righteous than justified.
Clearly the police response was (and continues to be) barbaric – no one on earth deserves to have all their worldly possessions thrown into a rubbish truck and driven out of the city to be incinerated – but it was not unforeseeable. As a permanent living situation, the squats were completely unsustainable: a humanitarian, but illegal response to an emergency without end.
It is an unfortunate circumstance that we live in a world where one can’t simply appropriate an empty building to house destitute people. This is bullshit, of course, but it’s the bullshit in which we haplessly wallow. The squats were always going to be evicted, if not yesterday, then today.
My friend, a staunch supporter of refugee freedom who lives as they preach, couldn’t help but wonder whether the majority of the last four years of tireless volunteer action, spent on slightly improving the day-to-day lives of refugees in unsustainable accommodation, had in fact been squandered.
The squats have now been evicted and what do the refugees have to show for all their work? Almost nothing.
Yet what might have been possible if all those volunteers had thrown themselves with equal vigour into political advocacy?
Perhaps the painful sacrifice of day-to-day humanitarian support (and playgrounds) would have been offset by a significant concession from the government to make refugees’ lives in Greece more sustainable in the long term (or at least got them out of the country).
Perhaps more work on refugee integration might have reduced rather than exacerbated the local Greek resentment that has proven fertile ground for the new right-wing government.
These remarks are enough to earn you plenty of cold shoulders, by the way. They represent a voice not often heard among the volunteers of Athens.
~
Chatting to another friend on one of the regular protest marches through the city, I heard the other, blunter, side of the argument.
‘It’s all very well saying that political action should take precedence over humanitarian action, but a lot of the people in the squats are friends or relatives of people outside.
‘What would you do if a friend of yours couldn’t afford food and has a crying baby? Tell them that first we need to talk politics? No. You say, okay let’s get you some food, and then we’ll talk politics after your baby has stopped crying.’
The problem is that, in Greece, the baby has never stopped crying. You may not be hearing so much in the news, but last week around 1,600 refugees arrived on the Greek island of Lesvos alone.
There will be no resolution to the problem posed in this article. Sorry. There is, of course, urgent need for both emergency humanitarian support and long-term political change.
One organisation that at least tries to balance the two is Khora – one of the projects funded by Thighs of Steel. They run both a Free Shop that provides refugees’ immediate needs and an asylum support team that aims to lift refugees out of their shitty situation for good.
I have spent today interviewing the unheard voices of long term Khora volunteers. It’s been a fascinating day and I hope to share some of those conversations with you next week.
In the meantime, if you want to do something today to remind a refugee that they are not alone in this nasty world, then you could do a lot worse than to record a charity record with some really famous people, film a video of you and your buddies wandering around some desolate sand dunes, pump loads of money into promo, get it to Christmas number one, hit Top of the Pops, give a speech at the BAFTAS in which you cry (mainly because you accidentally poked yourself in the eye with the wrong end of a cocktail umbrella), before FINALLY transferring the proceeds (after agent fees) to a massive international charity who promptly misappropriate the funds on schmoozing pop stars for next year’s charity record…
After more than 6,000km and 90,000m of climbing, Thighs of Steel is done and dusted for another year.
Over the past 9 weeks, more than 90 cyclists have covered every single inch of asphalt between here and London. As part of the core team for 4 weeks this year, I have cycled 1,670 of those kilometres (8.9 laps of the M25) and climbed 18,600m (2.1 ascents of Everest).
I also shared 7 van days, supporting the incredible sweat-work of the fundraising cyclists, finding wild camp spots, fixing broken bikes, cooking hearty dinners and generally trying to make everything run as smoothly as a transcontinental bike ride can be.
Two bikes arrived destroyed by airlines. On day one, another bike fell apart on the road. On day three, a fourth bike succumbed.
On the first night, the police broke up our beachside camp with hard stares and unveiled threats.
The starter motor on Calypso (the van) broke, leaving the van team stranded on a beach with hungry, tired cyclists rushing ahead expecting food and shelter.
At the tunnel under the Ambracian Gulf, the whole team were told that the shuttle service for cyclists had been terminated, they couldn’t cross, and should instead make a 100km detour.
We had our first serious accident: a gravel slip on a fast descent that left a bruising dent in an elbow.
After fixing precisely zero punctures in the past 3 weeks, this week I personally replaced three exploded inner tubes – other teams copped yet more.
On the final morning of the ride, a thunderstorm broke. Sheet lightning, thunder claps and hard rain laying waste to the camp we’d pitched among the stones of an ancient archaeological site.
But of all the weeks I have taken part in, this was the one I enjoyed the most.
Albania was the country I most loved cycling through, but this week gave me the sense – nay, the strong belief that no challenge was insurmountable for this motley collection of strangers that had come together to ride and raise money for refugees.
This disaster-filled ride most encapsulated the Thighs of Steel ethos: whatever troubles we face, we face together and we solve together.
It is testament to the resilience and generosity of the human spirit that, when we come together in common cause, anything is possible. I feel like the past few weeks, in the company of so many committed people, have filled me up with good faith in our shared humanity.
On Thighs of Steel we usually ride in two or three groups so that we’re staggered across the roads. It’s easier to manage smaller teams and groups of four or five dodge much of the ire of other road users.
But it was fitting that, after weathering the morning’s tempestuous thunderstorm, Thighs of Steel 2019 ended with the 16 cyclists gathering in a restaurant just outside Athens and riding into the city to meet the van team at the summit of Lycabettus, so that we could celebrate our ride all together.
£10,000 of your generous donations will help fund Pedal Power, a cycle training programme for female refugees in Birmingham. I’ve written a bit about Pedal Power and Thighs of Steel on The Bike Project blog if you’d like to read more.
There is a word in Greek, xenia, which translates (badly) as ‘guest friendship’. It manifests as generous hospitality to strangers and travellers and is a common theme in Ancient Greek mythology.
I remember studying xenia as a central theme of The Odyssey. As Odysseus is battered and blown from port to port across the Mediterranean Sea, his return to Ithaka is made possible thanks only to extravagant displays of xenia by the people upon whose shores he washes up. (With the exception of witches who turn his crew into pigs and the like.)
One of those to help him (after a seven year delay…) with wine, bread and a raft was a nymph who gave her name to the the Thighs of Steel support van – Calypso.
Thighs of Steel, like the famous Odyssey, is a journey entirely dependent on the extraordinary xenia of those we meet, those who fill our water bottles, find us camping spots, give directions and food and welcoming smiles.
Xenia may be a Greek concept, but there must surely be a similar word in Albanian. Everywhere we went this week we have been almost assaulted with outrageous generosity.
Three cafe owners refused to let us pay for our coffees or cold drinks, and one gave us chocolate bars when we asked if we could use his toilet.
A car wash owner (Albania is full of lavazh car washes) broke off his siesta and fixed my bike while his black-clad mother brought out a watermelon and ice water for the rest of the group.
It seemed that whenever we went to pay, we were met with a touch of the heart and a smile. Such was the hospitality that it became almost an embarrassment.
One afternoon, as the sun crushed us like bugs into the asphalt, we spotted what we thought was a bar where we might be able to buy drinks and eat our leftover lunches from last night’s dinner.
But when we rolled up to the establishment, the bar turned out to be a restaurant. Quite a fine restaurant, with white cloths on busy tables that were piled up with plates of salad and grilled fish.
‘Maybe they’ll let us eat our lunch here anyway?’
At this suggestion, two thoughts surfaced:
This is Albania: of course the proprietor will let us eat our pots of chilli and bread rolls at his restaurant, use his toilet, fill up our water bottles and cool off in the shade of his veranda. He would touch his heart and smile.
If this Albanian man showed up at any restaurant in the UK and asked to eat his packed lunch, use the toilet and fill his water bottles under the shade of the veranda, there is no way in hell he’d be given anything other than an angry clip round the ear.
I felt ashamed and walked off down the road, looking for any corner of unbleached stone where we could sit and picnic. By the time I came back, the rest of the group was pulling out our food as the restaurant owner welcomed them with a fresh table cloth. A neighbouring table of soldiers clinked beer bottles and translated.
As it happened, we ended up buying quite a lot of extra food, so I think it worked out pretty well for the kind restauranteur, but that’s not the point. I have never known such unrelenting generous hospitality from an entire citizenry on my travels before.
The incidental benefits of cycle touring are well known: fitness, tan-lines, an insatiable appetite. But I think I can say without fear of contradiction that cycle touring isn’t particularly famous for its promotion of good personal hygiene.
This year, I am proud to be a part of the Thighs of Steel core team for the glory run to Athens. During those last three weeks of riding, I’ll probably have only 8 showers and wash my clothes twice. Most days, I’ll wake up in the sweat I accumulated the day before, and step into the clothes still encrusted with grime from yesterday’s riding.
Most days, our only chance to scrub will be in rivers, lakes and perhaps under a bucket. Shampoo, perfume and pomade are, for most of us, redundant.
But not for all of us.
~
Mahmoud couldn’t actually cycle, but joined the van team for two weeks from Paris to the Pyrenees. He couldn’t ride because of a long-term knee injury sustained during the Syrian war. He now lives in Germany.
One thing you should know about Mahmoud is that he is very particular about his personal hygiene. Every morning, he combs wax through his styled hair. He applies perfume to neck and wrists, and coats himself in a layer of antiperspirant.
Where most of us have perhaps one change, Mahmoud seems to have a bottomless wardrobe of crisp, clean clothes. He refuses to swim in our wonderfully wild rivers and lakes because the water is dirty. It’s a fair point, and one that he emphasises with good old soap and tap water.
He does everything he can to hold back the inevitable tides of sweat and grime that two weeks’ camping set down. His careful preening is a good-humoured joke. Good-humoured because he wears his fashion lightly; a joke because, standing next to us cyclists, he looks superb.
~
‘I had days where I slept with the blood of other people on my body,’ Mahmoud says. ‘Because you sleep when you are tired, you don’t care about yourself. You can’t imagine the dirt – sometimes I slept in some shit.’
We’re sitting on an artful block of concrete on the banks of the Garonne in Bordeaux and Mahmoud is explaining why he is such a stickler for cleanliness.
‘Because of this trauma – why do I have to be dirty? Why do I have to smell?’ His voice rises in incredulity that anyone would choose dirt.
‘Everything is in my hands now. I don’t want to go back to those days. I have a developed nose and any smell could bring me flashback – I don’t want any flashback.’
~
‘I feel like cleanliness makes me trust myself more,’ Mahmoud explains. ‘If somebody smells in front of me, I take a step back.’
As a refugee, Mahmoud feels like ‘the whole society has taken a step back from me already.’ He doesn’t need to add bad hygiene to the repulsion.
Mahmoud met Harri and Annie, two of the brains behind Thighs of Steel, at a grassroots community centre in Athens. ‘At Khora, everyone was lovely,’ Mahmoud says. ‘Fucking amazing lovely people. But Khora was a small world, really.’
The small world of fucking amazing lovely people doesn’t care whether you’re a refugee, whether you’re dirty or smell bad, or are dressed in cheap clothes. But the big world does.
~
‘The big world really doesn’t like you, really doesn’t want you, and doesn’t accept you,’ Mahmoud says. ‘So I have to do what other Syrians do. They spend money to wear Adidas, to wear Gucci – why? To fit into the society, so people know they have money, so people stop judging them. You cannot afford Gucci if you are not working.’
‘I could lie to myself and say everyone is nice – no. People smile in front of your face, but they don’t like you. They smile in front of your face for the society. Do you think that everyone talks to me nicely?’
‘For me, to look good and to be clean could help me in front of society. People might accept me.’
~
Thighs of Steel is Europe’s biggest charity relay bike ride, taking 9 weeks to cover the 6,000km from London to Athens, with a frankly silly detour via the Pyrenees to make it more than 90,000m climbing over three of the continent’s toughest mountain ranges.
Over the past four years, Thighs of Steel supporters have raised more than a quarter of a million pounds for grassroots refugee organisations like Khora. Already this year we’ve raised more than £50,000.
What, if anything, makes you fall in love with a person?
I reckon we can climb that fence. Yes!
Here, try this. She hands me a forkful of mozzarella.
At 2 a.m. we are still sitting out on the rocks overlooking the Bay of Naples.
Kindness where kindness is unexpected. What’s mine is yours. Sharing private moments together, even in public. Saying yes. Eye contact, smiles, easy laughter, a light touch. Conversation that burrows deep. Lingering.
There is magic in play and even more in secrets.
My companion on last week’s Neapolitan food tour was a woman from Texas. For the sake of this email, let’s call her Sylia because, quite frankly, that’s her name and it becomes impossible to conceal later on in the story…
I only knew Sylia for the 64 hours it took us to eat our way around Napoli. After our final espresso breakfast, I was travelling back to England via Milan and Paris, and she was flying to Dubrovnik before flipping over the pond back to California.
She told me that she had a layover in Paris too. In fact, less than a week separated my overnight sojourn in the City of Light and hers. We parted.
~
I walked down to the Seine to watch the sunset. I’ve been here before. Crowds milled around Notre Dame, taking selfies in the golden hour.
Below the busy streets, nowhere-steps led down to the river’s edge where a few of us enjoyed a private showing of the day’s final rites.
I sat on a polished stone wall and let the sun soothe my travel-tired face.
Then I had a thought.
Sylia felt like more than a fleeting acquaintance. For 64 hours, we behaved as if destiny played our hand and, as ever when destiny gets involved, much had gone unsaid.
For 64 hours, we had sailed that soft shoreline between the moment now and the future then, saying nothing that might come too close to broaching our pleasure.
But now I wanted to feel my feet on solid ground; and I wanted her to see me standing there too.
So what if I wrote a letter and left it for her, here, in Paris?
~
I had a notebook in my bag, but no pen. I heard an Australian voice a couple of steps down: a middle-aged woman and her Belgian lover sharing a dusky pique-nique of ham and torn bread.
‘Excuse me, do you have a pen I could borrow?
I sit back down and tear a single sheet from my notebook. I promise myself no more than one side of A5. That is surely enough for me to say what I need to say. I’m not a schoolboy any longer.
So I begin, sure that I will find the right words as a rhythm starts to flow.
Sylia – Did you know that your name means ‘If there is…’ in French? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I met you…
I fill one side of A5, but it’s half baked, scatter-brained. I promise myself the second side and turn over.
There are so many things I haven’t said here – and the ones I have, so poorly expressed…
It doesn’t quite happen on this side either. I say some things, I fill the space, but it’s not right. Oh well. My promised time is up.
I origami myself an envelope, write her name on the outside, and fold the whole into a dart of paper. Then I feel the stone walls for a crack that might hide my letter until she arrives.
I look around. Everyone is either on their phone or with their back to me. I slip the letter into the wall and smile.
I return the pen and share a few words of thanks before sitting back down on my wall.
Fuck.
It’s not right. A writer and I never found the words.
‘Sorry, I don’t suppose I could borrow your pen again, could I?’ Mild surprise, mid-mouthful. ‘I’m writing to a friend, and you know when you realise that you haven’t said a word of what you meant to…?’
I unfold the origami envelope. The inside of the envelope is blank: enough room for a dozen lines, no more. The mind is focussed and I write.
p.s…
~
I fold the envelope back over the letter and squeeze it back into the letter box, certain now that someone has seen me and is only waiting for me to leave before tearing open the letter for a laugh. I hope they return it instead of chucking the feeble paper into the softly infinite river.
But I have said almost exactly what I wanted to say to Sylia and the rest is now in the hands of fate.
I brush my hand over the wall where the secret is hidden, casting a spell. We can turn the city into a place of magic so easily. A place of games and play, of secrets and love, that stretch across time and space.
I walk back up the steps and into the gloaming night. The streets are still busy, but now everyone’s clutching at home.
As I walked, Sylia, the person at the heart of the story, became almost irrelevant. I sent her a few photos that I hoped might lead her to the location. Notre Dame in the background. A distinctive piece of graffiti. The crack in the wall. Enough that, if she wanted to find the letter, she could.
I returned to London, and then Wales for a week of writing with friends.
In among the laughter, the work and the dog walks, of course, I didn’t entirely forget about the letter, or the woman; but as time passed, the immediate sensation that we were close enough to touch faded.
I sent her a message on Saturday: Are you in Paris?
Some people might like to go for a drink or something afterwards. Who knows.
Those were the last words I wrote in my diary before heading out for an evening food tour in Napoli.
64 hours later, my Neapolitan food tour finally ended in an orgy of pastries and coffee – my companion and I fervently insisting with each successive bite that we were quite replete and couldn’t possibly finish it all.
Reader: we finished it all. Not just that morning, but the whole long weekend. All of it. There was not a corner of Napoli that went unsampled by our insatiable taste buds.
The official tour started from the shadow of Dante’s statue and led us around the street food of Napoli.
Buffala mozzerella fresh that morning – quite unlike the mozzerella palmed off on us in Great Britain. Served with carralo biscuits made with almonds dry as dustpaper, best suited to mopping up the olive oil dripping from your antipasti.
Limoncello, of course, made with lemons from Sorrento and alcohol from Dante’s Inferno. Aperol spritz in cheap plastic cups, served from windows open straight onto the street.
Two species of pizza, from Sorbillo’s – the finest pizzeria in Napoli and thus the world. First pizza a portafoglio – a simple wallet pizza that’s eaten folded and on the run, then pizza fritta – a deep fried specimen that wouldn’t be out of place on a night out in Glasgow.
Frittatine di pasta is a depth charge of carbohydrates, macaroni, bechamel and pork weighted with enough oil to power a medium-sized caravan. One to be halved, quartered, and shared to soak up the limoncello.
Sfogliatelle, rhum babá and gelato to finish. Or so I thought.
‘You guys wanna come for a drink?’ asked a voice I would come to know well from the late night, early morning menu inspections that would plaster our weekend.
She’d come for the coastline, Capri and Amalfi. But the storm we watched roll in one night – sea spray dousing our wine – put paid to that. So we sacrificed ourselves instead to tracking down the city’s gourmet offerings of seafood and pasta.
I don’t have the heart to ruin your Friday lunch (nor mine) with any more distant dishes. Suffice to say that, were I still wandering the alleyways of Napoli, I suspect I would already have Type 2 diabetes and a drinking problem.
Smooth stone slabs and close houses make for a furnace. Narrow alleys burst open onto ornate cathedrals. Religious niches behind glass. A white dog with a pink tongue. Songbirds. The street spills into houses, households tumble onto the street. Families in states of undress around a floral tablecloth, bunk beds in the corner. Impromptu greengrocers and fruit-sellers. Washing lines decorate the walls. Courtyards hidden behind doorways and pillars. Cigarette vending machines. And, above all, mopeds.
The other day, I did something described as ‘so silly’.
I was passing through Paris, arriving in the afternoon, and leaving the next morning on an early Eurostar.
The train was due to leave Paris around about the time boulangeries open, and get into London around the time people have breakfast at their office desk.
So I messaged a friend I knew would be working in central London: ‘Fancy croissants for breakfast tomorrow?’
~
‘You’re so silly for doing this.’
~
The world can be a very prosaic place. It is full of offices and commutes and the tiresome effort of staying alive: breathing, eating, sleeping.
There is very little magic, it seems, in day-to-day life. We don’t expect it, so it never comes.
What do I mean by ‘magic’? I mean those moments when the world seems bigger and more connected than it ordinarily does.
Magic imbues the world with meaning where before there was none. And who doesn’t want to live in a world suffused with magic and meaning?
When you notice the size of the moon, when you write someone a letter, when you hand-deliver croissants from Paris.
This is magic.
It’s different for everyone, but you know magic when you feel it. There are other words we could use: ‘romantic’ is another good one, but that gets confused in our heads with sexual objectives.
Young children rarely see much that is unmagical, but for us adults, the world is often stripped bare like the lighting in our most ghastly supermarkets.
The world has been unmagicked. And by whom? All by ourselves.
~
It’s a shame because magic costs so little. As any child will tell you, the only obstacle to magic and the only limitation on your spell-casting is in the vigour of your imagination.
We get out of the habit of casting spells, so our imagination dullens, and we miss the opportunities for magic that are all around us.
What did it cost me to cast the spell of croissants for breakfast? Almost nothing; only the exercise of a little imagination.
The boulangerie was on my way to the train station. I was second in line after it opened. Not knowing how many people my friend worked with, I bought five croissants and paid an extra ten centimes for a sturdier paper bag to protect them on the journey.
Then I caught the Eurostar and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later in London. I picked up my bags and took the Underground two stops.
As I walked the eight minutes to my friend’s office, the rain fell in a drizzle. It was refreshing after a month of continental baking. I arrived at 8.50, ten minutes before my friend was due. I read the last pages of my book.
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
She arrived. I handed over the croissants. She smiled. I walked to catch another train, to catch another few hours’ sleep.
The world desperately needs remagicking, but we forget that we are the magi.
~
Ingredients for spell-casting:
It takes practice and a little imagination to spot opportunities for magic, but they are all around, all the time.
We need audacity and courage to step outside of the limitations of self-imposed adulthood.
Magic is founded on delighted surprise and the joyful unexpected. Or silliness.
You’ll need empathy and thoughtfulness so your spell makes the kind of magical connection you want.
It seems hard to believe it today, as I dry myself off in the sun after a swim in the Bay of Naples, but in 2011 I managed to cycle around the whole coast of Britain without once going for a swim in the sea, or in any of the dozens of rivers, lakes and streams that I passed.*
It was this realisation that led me to the maxim that I carry around the world’s waters with me: Always take the swim.
Myriad are the times that I have really hated the idea of jumping into a river or lake, but zero are the number of times that I’ve regretted doing so.
When faced with a wild swimming opportunity, my brain does something silly and the combined efforts of willpower and desire are not enough to get me into the water.
I need automatic thinking – and I’ve come across enough other people in the same metaphorical boat to believe that many could benefit from this humble maxim.
Always take the swim.
Whenever there is an opportunity to swim, you should take that opportunity. And you’d be amazed how many opportunities there are in your day-to-day life.
Seas, oceans, rivers, streams, burns, fountains, lakes, ponds. The water is waiting.
Don’t let excuses get in the way. Your brain, for some reptilian reason, will furnish you with dozens of excuses ripe to fit any occasion. You must ignore them and instead trust and follow the maxim.
Always take the swim.
Not having your bathers is no excuse. I have taken swims naked and in my boxer shorts when nakedness is scorned.
Not having a towel is no excuse. On days like today, I dry in the sun, on less clement days I have dried myself with a t-shirt – or simply shaken myself down and put on my clothes still wet. It’s never that long before I have the chance to find a towel or a change of clothes. And I have still never regretted taking a swim.
Cold water is no excuse – although it is a very good reason to be cautious. Cold water makes for the most invigorating swims. Cold water should make your maxim yet more urgent.
But beware: enter the water slowly, and make sure you are confident about warming up again afterwards. It doesn’t take much (and you still don’t need a towel) – just run up and down on the shore until you’re warm again. Then put your layers back on.
Poor weather is no excuse. This overlaps with cold water, but I would hasten to add that there is no more joyful swim than that taken in pouring rain. How perverse, how apt!
Even better: high winds equal high surf and vastly more pleasurable sea swimming. Although, please be careful and watch out for rip tides.
Not having time is no excuse. Whoever said a swim has to take a long time? There aren’t many places in the world that are a long way from a water course – almost by definition. Humans need water, so settlements rise up along their route.
When I am in Bournemouth, blessed with a 10km shoreline, I calculate that the minimum viable swim (out to beyond my depth, plus three head dunking dives) takes exactly 13 minutes, from fully dressed at my desk, into the sea, and back. I defy anyone unable to find 13 minutes in their day for a swim.
Not being near the sea is no excuse. For some reason, rivers and streams are usually excluded from most people’s acceptable notions of outdoor swimming. This is madness for I find that they are the most rewarding.
The sea is relentless and – dare I say – a little dull sometimes. The river is never short of interest, from the sludgy coolness of the mud shore, to the abundant wildlife that coos and chuckles from the treeline. Plus there is the eternal pleasure of striking out upstream until exhaustion, before drifting back to base on the current.
I have swum now in rivers all over Europe and never once contracted ringworm.
I dread to think how many swims I missed out on during my round Britain cycle, but I am glad in a way that it has brought me to my fool-proof maxim. I cannot turn back the clock, but I can try to convince you to always take the swim.
May the tides be with you!
* Full disclosure: I washed myself once at a friend’s local watering hole in a river near Bath, and I also got my feet wet in the North Sea at John O’Groats. Up to my ankles. Doesn’t count.
Being part of the core team for Thighs of Steel this year is a very different experience to riding the full week as a fundraiser. Mainly because I spent two of the six days driving Calypso, the team’s support van.
That’s not to say that van days are easy. There’s an intimidating list of jobs that need to be done:
Pack up the campsite
Plan a meal and buy food for dinner
Drive ~120km (on the wrong side of the road)
Find the perfect wild camping spot for ~15 cyclists, not too far from the pre-planned route, but quiet, secluded, flat enough for tent-pitching, and ideally close to a river or lake for swimming
Cook the perfect camp dinner
A dozen hot and hungry cyclists depend on the van team getting this right. Oh – and you have to do all of this while feeling like absolute crap.
It is an unfortunate side effect of long distance cycling that your body mistakenly believes that van days are rest days. The body shuts down, the mind follows suit.
I felt like an extremely hot zombie. This was not great news, especially as I was driving and my French was in high demand to help secure us a wild camp site.
But on Thighs of Steel miracles happen. Indeed, the ride depends on miracles, almost every single day.
I’d been warned that finding wild camping for a dozen cyclists and a humungous van is the hardest part of the job. The plan is completely reliant on some kindly farmer, landowner or mayor taking pity on our ridiculous endeavour and letting us camp on their land.
After all, what would you do if you saw a circle of chairs, filled by dirty-faced foreigners, set up in your orchard?
But, in more than 20 weeks of touring, only once have Thighs of Steel been asked to move on. It is a daily miracle. Thank you, kind-hearted people of Europe.
With the help of my co-driver, I rang the doorbell of a likely-looking landowner, not far off route. We’d spotted a campervan parked in a closely-mown field behind his house.
With the help of his excitable dog, the owner was roused. He opened the door, and the dog bolted for freedom.
The man apologised, but couldn’t help: the owner of the field was in Belgium. He suggested that we ask the mayor, gave us directions to the town hall, and started calling for his lost dog.
We drove Calypso up to the quaint village Mairie. It felt like we were parking our tank on their lawn.
I began in faltering French: ‘We are 12 cyclists looking for wild camping…’ And, hallelujah, it was as if he’d been expecting us. ‘I have the perfect place,’ he smiled.
What followed felt like the oral part of my GCSE French exam: ‘At the crossroads go straight on and follow the road for 3km. You’ll see a low, white wall, with a gap in the middle. Go down this track, over a disused railway line through a wood, and then over a small bridge into a field.’
I follow the directions with apprehensive nodding. The mayor finishes by kisses his fingers: ‘And the river is perfect for bathing!’
We took his address to send a thank you card from Athens, and then drive out – slightly nervous – to our campsite.
To my astonishment, I’d understood his flawless directions and we found the field atop a tiny island, split by lazy turns of the river. Fishermen dabbled in the shallows and a paddleboard drifted past.
It was perfect (especially when the insects clear off).
We set up chairs in a circle, looking out at the sun dunking itself into the stream away to the west. We set the pot boiling with a vegetable curry.
Half an hour later, the cyclists arrive, stinking of joy, bells a-ringing. It’s only then that we notice the chairs are arranged in a perfect ring around a single, plump dog turd.
Thighs of Steel is Europe’s biggest charity relay bike ride, taking 9 weeks to cover the 6,000km from London to Athens, with a frankly silly detour via the Pyrenees to make it more than 90,000m climbing over three of the continent’s toughest mountain ranges.
So far, the cyclists and supporters of Thighs of Steel 2019 have raised over £38,000 £50,000 for Help Refugees.
It’s odd because, of course, Foiled has yet to begin for most of you. The broadcast dates are lined up in August, but all our work is done and we’re already looking ahead to what’s next.
Tom and Dave have finished editing episode one and say that it sounds like the best thing they’ve ever produced. Certainly from the writing side, I feel like – somehow – Beth and I have delivered on our grandiose ambition of writing our own (more modest) version of Radiohead’s OK Computer.
Which brings us to the cheerful faces of those sprightly actors in the photo above. Our guests for this last episode were Sir Derek Jacobi – so good they knighted him twice – and his partner Richard Clifford.
Sitting in the rehearsal room with these two grandees of British stage and screen was a pinch-yourself moment. All the actors were stealing glances at Sir Derek as if they couldn’t believe what was happening – but also to learn from a master of their craft.
Every single one of Derek’s choices was spot on. He took the lines and lifted them beyond wherever they deserved to be.
In all the knight-of-the-realm kerfuffle, Richard Clifford could be overlooked. But that would be a serious mistake. An equally fine actor, although undecorated, Richard brought relish and gravitas to his role as Professor of Celtic Studies from the University of Monmouth.
And, so I’m told, the actors we know and love from Foileds past, raised their game to match theirs. I can’t wait to hear the finished audio.
This episode was written inside three weeks – only 30 hours of scriptwriting compared to the 50 or so for the other three episodes.
With no writers rooms, we had only ourselves and a little assistance from producer Tom Price on story, and from comedian Ed Easton for a few lovely gags here and there.
Everyone has said maybe we should write all our episodes with a three week deadline. Maybe they’d be right, but that method leaves no leeway for mistakes.
In three weeks, we could afford course correction, but no full rewrites. If we’d fucked up too badly, then who knows what would’ve happened. Maybe it would’ve ben fine; maybe Sir Derek might have politely declined. Who knows?
People like Sir Derek get fifty offers a day. He has no need for a job on Radio Wales. No need whatsoever. This is a man who has played Hamlet at Elsinor Castle.
Derek and Richard only do passion plays now and it’s down to my wonderful writing partner that they felt this project was worth their time and creativity.
As they rushed off home to get back to their dog, Derek chortled: ‘Let’s get this on TV, shall we?’
What a day.
L-R: David Charles, Beth Granville, Richard Clifford, Derek Jacobi, Tom Price, David Oakes, Garnon Davies, Dave Cribb, Stephanie Siadatan
On Monday, I was given this ridiculously good-looking book as a birthday present. On Tuesday, I spotted a line of limes politely shielding All Saints graveyard from the impertinence of neighbours.
And so I began to turn the pages…
The book is a twenty-first century update of John Evelyn’s Sylva, a comprehensive ledger of Britain’s trees published in 1664.
Evelyn had this to say about the lime tree:
the carvers in wood use it … for the trophies, festoons, fruitages, encarpia, and other sculptures in the frontoons, friezes, capitals, pedestals, and other ornaments and decorations, of admirable invention and performance, to be seen about the choir of St Paul’s
Four words that I don’t understand, and one not even known by the Oxford English Dictionary.
The New Sylva adds the following:
Limes are among the few insect-pollinated trees in Britain and do not flower until June or July. … Planting of small-leaved lime is greatly encouraged by those seeking to increase biodiversity in woodlands. Lime seeds have no invertebrate predators, and the ripe fruits are eaten by birds, mice and voles.
Those of you who follow my thoughts to a frankly intrusive degree, will know of my fondness for Albert Camus.
Not only was he a goalkeeper of some repute (see Monty Python), but as a philosopher he had the flair of a novelist. Or as a novelist he had the flair of a philosopher. I’m not sure which. I’ve asked Jeeves and he doesn’t know either.
In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Camus lays out the logic of his practical philosophy. The argument (as pertains this newsletter) goes as follows:
There is no god.
So there is no ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad.
Therefore the old philosophers’ hunt for ‘the good life’ has been a wild goose chase. It’s impossible to live a good life because there is no good if there is no bad.
So are there no suggestions a jobbing philosopher can offer on how to live? Yes, there are – Camus proposes. To live not better, but more.
By aiming to get the most out of life we are not dependent on outcomes of subjective good and bad. Camus offers up three avenues for most living.
The actor gets the most out of life by playing hundreds of different roles, sometimes covering the entire span of a life from birth to death in a single day – twice if there’s a matinee. This is the archetype of freedom.
The conqueror – whom Camus imagines a kind of soldier – lives constantly in the shadow of death. When you deal in death, life tastes moreish. This the archetype of revolt.
The Don Juan uses romance as the road to most living. Rarely do humans feel more alive than when indulging the fiery emotions of love. This is the archetype of passion.
These are the three archetypes that Camus sketches for us, but it’s easy to imagine myriad sub-types – the paramedic and the mountaineer are sub-types of the conqueror, for example.
The Actor
My primary interest here, of course, is the actor. In fact, most of us are actors already – but perhaps we’re not getting the most out of the masks we wear. Perhaps we try our hardest to apply the same make-up and costume every day.
There are good reasons why we might want to do that. But if there is no good… What harm can come of trying another role today? It’s not forever – the actor melts into another role as easily as night follows day.
So what harm can come of trying another role for ten minutes, in the time it takes you to ride the train two stops?
Expression and Suppression
We seem to have two modes of living (here I deviate from Camus): expression and suppression. I am either expressing something or I am suppressing something.
There are good reasons, again, why I might want to suppress some impulse. And, besides, we can’t express everything all at once: that way mania lies. But the basic distinction is there: either I express or I suppress.
But if there is no good or bad, and our only philosophical position is most living, then there is nothing to be lost from expression.
So why then do we suppress? Personally, it comes down to a fear of rejection by other people. Even when there is no one in earshot, I can feel a weighty oppression from social norms.
Rejection challenges are a great way to turn such obstacles into opportunity. An obstacle isn’t a roadblock if it’s a game.
Games are areas of life around which we draw a boundary of rules. Inside, we play; outside we work. But those boundaries are arbitrary.
There is no reason why – again, given that there is no objective good or bad – that we can’t as individuals draw our boundaries in a wide compass around all of life, and play as the actor plays.
Permissive Characters
Can I give you an example?
In Foiled, Sabrina is a god-awful hairdresser with a penchant for chucking customers out of her salon. One of her favourite lines is ‘No, absolutely no way, come you – out!’ I think Camus would have approved: she says exactly what she wants to say.
It’s a role, of course. But it’s an extraordinary useful role for us in day-to-day life. Sabrina speaks the unspeakable. And she speaks in such heightened language that, with a smile, she helps us say things we could never say.
We put the words into her mouth that we dream of saying to others. And little by little we build our courage until one day some outrage is visited upon me, like I’m served a dodgy cup of tea, and I say those words: ‘No, absolutely no way…’
Sometimes we need permission to express ourselves and, in a world with no good or bad, fictional characters give us that permission. Roles like Sabrina are stepping stones that pick a path through our comfort zone.
We can try a new character on for size, change the cut of our clothes, use new language and tone of voice, take on different mannerisms. Take a peek over the other side of the wall. Try out the priest or the predator.
We have a choice. Expression or suppression, action or inaction, attraction or rejection, stasis or growth, sensitive or resistant, yang or yin.
Empathy
Acting begins with empathy. On stage, you know very quickly whether an actor is engaged empathically with the character and with you, the audience.
If all the world’s a stage, then we players must find the empathy in our roles and with each other. For empathy is the conduit that connects us and allows the plurality of experience that Camus prescribes.
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.
In our third year of Foiled, I feel like I can say something about the rhythms of writing a radio sitcom. Settle in, this is a long read.
Writing a sitcom episode is like building a house (kinda)
In reality, Beth and I usually start laying bricks before we’ve got any blueprints. If you hired us as builders, you’d probably want your money back.
Whether any of those early bricks make it into the final building is a matter of luck. The risk is that we’ll fall in love with some clever brickwork, which makes it all the harder to tear the folly down later.
But it feels good to write ourselves into the series, reacquaint ourselves with the world and the characters. Unlike in construction, in writing nothing is ever really wasted.
Typing through a script, once the plans are finally in place, is pretty easy now we’re in our third year – a matter of placing one brick alongside another and remembering cement. By this point, we know the returning characters back-to-front; and the hardest part is always putting together the episode’s new characters.
Once a story is written out from start to finish, it’s clear where the problems are. We can start the heavy manual labour of ripping walls down, moving the bathroom into the kitchen, and adding a loft conversion. This part of the process feels very physical – huge swathes of script cut and, sometimes, pasted.
As the story sorts itself out, we move onto the fine work of painting and decorating, sanding and polishing. At this point, we can stand back and admire our handiwork, or – as so often happens – realise that the whole edifice is about to collapse and we need to buttress our walls or tear them out.
The timeline of construction
Foiled was re-commissioned at the end of 2018. The first mention in my diary of any writing comes in mid-February. We were slow to get started, basking in the glory of a commission, putting off the actual labour.
By this point we’d already got the broad ideas for stories: something about a work exchange, something about hedgehogs, and something about a cash and carry. It’s not a lot to go on.
We really started working on the scripts from the beginning of March, with ten days together in London. By the end of this spell, we’d pulled together the ‘beats’ of each of the episodes, and run them past the producer with mixed results.
The ten weeks through the rest of March, April and May were mostly spent working separately, with increasing dedication.
By the end of April, we’d sent the producer first drafts of two of the episodes. The third episode follows in early May. The producer sends us notes. We tear our hair out in gratitude.
The week before the writers rooms, we send the producer what we think will be approximate working drafts. We’re wrong, for two of the episodes at least. Frantic re-writes ensue.
The two days of writers rooms at the end of May give a burst of energy to all three scripts. Which is handy because we only have 9 days before the recording.
Luckily, by this point I’m in London and Beth and I can work together more closely, in the high-rise, riverside solitude of my friend’s flat in Woolwich (thanks Tim!).
A hangover the day after the final writers room doesn’t help, but long days mean that by Monday lunchtime we can send the producer what we think are two finished, record-worthy scripts – Episodes 1 and 4.
Again, we’re wrong about one of them – something we realised only yesterday.
In the meantime, we go over the final script – Episode 2 – with a fine tooth-comb, tightening the nuts and bolts of the story and turning place-markers into zingers. We send it off on Wednesday morning in a blaze of emotion.
Why are we doing this, again?
That night, I re-read Episode 4. After two days’ creative distance, and having raised the bar with our work on Episode 2, we decide that the mid-section is completely wrong. One of the characters is just floating along and a pair of titanium toaster tongs appear at the episode climax for no discernible reason.
It’s not just the amount of work needed that’s a concern. The scripts have already been sent to the actors and the sound engineers have already done the work needed to make sure all the SFX are in place. A new script for Episode 4 is completely out of the question.
So yesterday morning, I start working on the re-working, and Beth starts working on the producer. She jokes that she’ll pull out of the project if he doesn’t accept the new script. At 2pm, with the ‘new’ script almost finished, I go for a swim in the Thames to await his answer.
None of us do this for the money. I don’t think the producers have made more than a few pennies from Foiled. Beth and I get paid, of course, but it’s not much more than minimum wage.
The only real reason for writing and recording Foiled is for the sake of the work itself. This is our creative reputation. Tomorrow’s recording will almost certainly outlive all of us. The oldest recording in the BBC archives is dated to 1890. The scripts that go into St David’s Hall tomorrow will be humbly printed on eternity.
So it’s fair to say that my leisurely swim yesterday was quite stressful. Could I even bear to sit in the room as the old script was being recorded?
The good news is that our producer gave the new script the green light. And we worked into the summer dusk sanding and polishing Episode 4. It’s now a piece of writing that I’m proud of and I reckon it might make you laugh.
So the writing is done. All that remains, for me at least, is to send one of the actor’s a recording of my sister’s partner speaking Danish, and to get myself to Cardiff tomorrow.
Oh – and then start work on Episode 3, which we’ll record in a studio in London at some point over the next month. The cycle continues!
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For those of you interested in a more detailed breakdown, the first two weeks of March involved about 8 hours per week of script-writing. We stepped up script-writing to about 11 hours a week for the seven weeks from the beginning of April up until the week before the writers rooms at the end of May. For the last three weeks I have done almost nothing other than work on Foiled: more than 20 hours a week on script-writing alone.
I write this not to show off, but to show you honestly the work it takes to write three episodes of a radio sitcom: about 150 hours of pure script-writing, plus plenty of other work behind the scenes on story-writing and talking things over with Beth and the producers.
By complete coincidence, I got an email this morning from a man who saw Foiled at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016.
We met you in George Square gardens in 2016 when you talked us into coming to see Foiled that afternoon. Brilliant!! We’ve raved about it ever since and watched its success since then.
It blows my mind to think that there are people out there who, years later, are still thinking about the work that we’ve done. This is what I mean when I say that we don’t do this for the money.
Series 3 of Foiled – indeed all of Foiled since 2013 – has been a wonderful experience; thank you for your support and I really hope you enjoy listening as much as I’ve enjoyed writing.
UPDATE: After writing this, a fellow writer of radio sitcoms got in touch to share his data. In terms of hours, I was reassured how similar they were: he takes 55-65 hours per episode.
Where we differ is on how spread out those hours are. Beth and I spent about 74 days working on Foiled since the beginning of March; my correspondent and his writing partner cover similar ground in only 40-50 working days.
But they do have 30 years’ writing experience on us!
