music

I missed the era of vinyl. Before I was really aware of music, the world had shrunk its music and moved it onto cassette tapes. I vaguely remember songs recorded from the radio, DJ announcements intruding on opening bars, mad dashes to the decks as realisation dawned that those opening bars were the ones you’d been after for weeks. I remember hand-scrawled notes on scraps of card shoved in plastic cases, birthday presents of entire albums across two sides of tape that passed through teeth, slowly getting mangled. In order to listen to music, you had to destroy music.

But these are snippets of memory. My real era was that of CDs. That of homemade mixtapes (the word outlasting the medium) with no indication of what was on them. When I find one today, and can find a player, it’s a pot luck dinner of nostalgia. I still remember the first album I bought, when I saved up pocket money and vouchers for weeks to buy Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. I still have it, and if I went through my collection, would probably find that particular CD inhabiting the box of a completely different album. I used to look forward to coming home and choosing a particular album to listen to from start to finish, the soundtrack to my evening of me-time, long before that word became a thing. An album was a vibe that you absorbed. A CD was a beautiful shiny relic, and I was drawn to them like a magpie. Disused copies became works of art. Two floor-to-ceiling cupboards in my childhood bedroom are still covered with them, shiny side out, a musical mirror fallen silent. Accuse me of rose-tinted glasses if you wish, but we listened to music differently back then. You were always aware of music, because it took a certain effort for it to be playing. Even when listening on headphones, a Discman was a physical presence in your lap. You felt it. You cradled it still to prevent it skipping. You learned albums inside out as you navigated them based purely on track numbers, or you left it to finish playing in its natural order. When an album came to an end, there was silence: silence like the closing credits of a film, or the blank pages in the back of a novel. Space for the listener to reflect on what they had heard, turn the emotions over, regain composure, float back into the real world. I miss those times. There was something of a ritual to music, an effort on the part of the listener that urged them to stay and listen to the whole piece as the artist had created it. 

But you can’t fight the times. I’m now a Spotify subscriber, an avid Soundcloud listener, a YouTube channel subscriber. Things just seem different now. There is no silence. One track by one artist fades into another by another, faceless algorithms pairing songs together based on the listening habits of millions. There’s no time for silence. Tinny earbuds spew the latest tracks into desensitised ears before becoming irrelevant again. There’s no time for time. Music is no longer owned, it’s leased from an overlord for the four minutes of its life, an overlord who can decide at the press of a button that the lease will no longer stretch to your geographic location. Music listening has changed: speed up, quality down. At least that’s how it feels. Yes, CDs got scratched, fitted maddeningly few songs, started to flake around the edges and drop bits of glitter all over your hands, but I look back on those times with pleasure. 

I realise this may well be my first foray into "it was all so much better in the past", and so despite all my grievances I know I'll always listen to music. How can I not, when the alternative is silence? After all, silence is only beautiful when it follows a beautiful album. 

thoughts on a journey

Around Lewknor, finally, the thick trees parted and the green opened up ahead of us. Cows grazed the rapeseed fields beside the road. 

Around Oxford, trees crowded the road again. A wild boar lay squashing the daisies. We pull off the A road and turn onto a cycle path. “Keep to the roads,” the sat nav reminds us. In the suburbs of Oxford I smell England again. 

Nowhere in Oxford has money. When we finally got change, none of the meters worked. I sat on a bench and sipped black coffee. 

Around Burford we saw what we’d come to see. Green stretching and punctuated by dots of villages. A single church stuck above the tree line. Entering the village we realised we were not alone. Cars stretched down the high street as flags fluttered from lamp posts.

Stow on the Wold. Passed through.

Approaching Chipping Campden I smell woodsmoke on pine breeze. The hills rolled up, broken by age-old dry walls. Sheep picked their way along grassy cliffs, their bleats echoing across the valley. Wool clung in smoky clumps to barbed wire. I watched Joost, tiny against the vast landscape. Chipping Campden was beige. The sandstone of Oxford had followed us here.

A dropped plate was the day’s biggest disturbance for a sleepy town. We stopped in a pub garden for lunch. I ate too much beef and too many potatoes. I washed it down with too much beer. Then I felt drowsy.

First drops of rain on the car.

Stroud is a forgotten suburb of inner London, sprawling grey and unlovely. We spend 10 minutes driving round, then looked for where to go next. Three inns were full. Each recommended two further fully booked.

We fell on our feet and found the Egypt Mill. It had roaring fires and lakes, good beer and hot food. So I sit, beer in hand, fire on my back, listening to the birds. We drank ale as ducks swam nonchalantly in the rain. The Cotswolds could be a different world. The rain that was forecast was droplets and had minimal effect on our plans.

I dreamed that night of an underground city, a blaze of life in disused sewers. I lay underneath the world and looked up at it through those little squares of glass in the pavements. A film played on a projector. I met Keith Richards and a face-shifting man. 

A single bird on a telegraph wire waits for a message in nameless countryside. The distance is thick with drizzle. Fields extend to hills over the horizon. 

The serenity of green squares. Along a damp path by the church. Clouds hang like sheep’s wool in the valley.

Road trip dip. 

swim by streetlight

When it rains, puddles form on the road outside my window. Some people love rain for the sound it makes. I love it for the windows it creates into a world far beneath. I love the sight of tiny droplets, seen only upon impact, as if the sky is trying to become one with the earth. In another world, they are fish, nibbling the surface of a gigantic underground lake, only revealed through the rain. 

I shut my front door behind me as I go out onto the street. Droplets flow towards the underground lake past my ears, looking to return from whence they came. It’s been raining all afternoon, and now the lamplight of the street is shone back at me in a golden path. If I sit and watch myself in the pools, and look really close, I can see myself reflected back in the eyes of my reflection. Through my own eyes I watch myself sit motionless, a tiny mirrored me under streetlight.

When I decide the time is right, I sit on the edge of the puddle, my legs trailing in the water as one would in a pool. It feels cool, and the ripples my entrance caused send tiny wrinkles of light dancing across my legs. The impact marks of the pitter-patter rain cease to be falling drops and become instead tiny fish, gasping at the surface of the puddle. 

I hold my breath, and as I break the surface, a world of light floods my senses, a world of azure and sunshine a million miles from the grey city I’ve left behind. I find myself swimming, quite naturally, eyes open and seeing all that swims with me. Below me, I know from previous dives, lies a giant outcrop of coral, in which I know my soul resides. Swimming down, sans snorkel, I see it surrounded by clownfish and parrotfish and many others whose names I’ve never looked up. The only sound is the crackle of the sea floor. I leave the reef of my consciousness behind, and swim, outwards, to where I know cliffs block my path, dotted with caves. In two of these lurk my eyes, in two more my nostrils. My mouth is a great outcrop, still now but for the rise and fall of breathing. I take in every inch, edging along the lines that I know must form my chin and back up, swimming in the maze that is my ear. Then I swim back to the enormous blaze of colour at the centre. I spend a fair bit of time here, watching the coral and the fish around it, swimming, darting from crevice to crevice, carrying messages and thoughts around my personality. It’s rare that I get to observe my own thoughts as though a third person. The city above requires so much of my attention that these dives are few and far between.

But I like them. It’s peaceful down here. I feel safe swimming these waters. That promotion, those groceries, that festival you’re planning; it’s all meaningless here, lost in the face of eternal beauty and stillness. Time is immaterial and I can’t say how long I’m here, but eventually I feel a tug and must return to the surface. The outside world may require my attention. So I swim to the surface as slowly as I can, to linger ever so slightly longer in this paradise, then break the surface once more and am back on the street.

It’s still dark. The lamplight still shines. I have no idea how long I’ve been gone. It doesn’t matter. I emerge and climb from the puddle, dripping like I’ve just been born. If it’s still raining, I can’t tell. On hands and knees, I survey the world: the pavements, the parked cars, the sad dripping trees. Paradise it isn’t, but some days are pretty good. I stand to go inside, then turn to take a final look round at the puddle, by now still. Still waters run deep, I say to myself. I’ll be back, I know. But now it’s time to return to reality. After all, there’s a festival to be planned. Who's headlining that one again? Was it Radiohead? 

the next station is: Bank

By Chancery Lane, the crowds have dispersed, spilling station by station into the rat-race of Central London. As the doors slide shut at St. Paul’s, there are even some seats available. The train wheezes and coughs along the underbelly of the city, masking the deathly silence inside the carriage. Headphones in and heads very firmly down, Londoners shut out the reality of overheating and overcrowding to dream the commute away one stop at a time. As the doors roll open and heels meet the greying platform, a chaotic clicking drumbeat cascades along the tunnel. When it reaches the escalators, it falls still again and the warm whirr of machinery takes over, audible above the complete silence of three hundred people. They feed into the ticket hall, the barriers beeping greedily, crashing open and shut like rows of unbrushed teeth. Up the stairs, the world explodes into life once again as buses roar by. The day has begun.

obsolete

It started when the Underground staff lost their jobs, replaced overnight with indefatigable 24-hour machines churning out tickets. But they couldn't tell you how to get home at 4am on a Friday night when you're in such a state you can hardly tap in. 

Next, cars became self-driving, stocks self-managing, TVs self-watching (for who else would watch the drivel being produced by self-producing TV stations?) books self-writing, magazines self-reading, music self-composing, alcohol self-intoxicating, doors self-opening, beds self-sleeping. 

Everything that mankind used to defined themselves by was now done for us. The human race had out-invented itself. We were obsolete. We'd built a world so autonomous that we didn't even need to be there for it to run. In fact, it was better for our models if we kept our misbehaving beaks out of it. BP still drilled for oil, by now at maximum efficiency, feeding petrol pumps and refineries without any interference from human hand. Their shares rose and fell on consumer behaviour that wasn't there, on systems and algorithms so advanced that no one could tell them apart from real humans, so no one did. And when no one did, no one cared. Self-running charities continued to pump money into a self-running model of Africa, self-fighting civil wars still tore self-governing country-systems apart. The whole simulation was spot on. We were no longer needed. 

So what did humans do? What kept us busy while the world we used to run now ran itself? We turned to farming, to hunting, to families and friends. We busied themselves with basket-weaving and rearing sheep. We surfed, we dug holes in the sand, we cooked fish, caught with a line, over roaring fires. 

We did the things we'd always been meaning to do. We painted cave-paintings, we sang songs. We danced and were merry. And while we did all this, somewhere else in the world, Barclays was buying a controlling stake in RBS. While Rio Tinto was buying up minerals in Nigeria. While Real Madrid won the Champions League and millions of TVs tuned themselves in to watch. And we never once cared.

Writing a winter sunset

15:20
backlit wisps and railroad tracks in the sky. flashes of starlings’ wingtips. I look at the river too long, and now see it every time I blink.

15:24
the twittering of daybreak returns in earnest. the birds make sunday’s last stand.

15:30
a flock of black stars before the sun, they settle on the ghosts of trees.

15:32
visibly darker by the second. chattering birds swoop to aerial perches. I spot the crescent moon.

15:33
the horizon goes a dirty orange, over my head remains purest blue.

15:35
the sun loses intensity. I can now look at it through the branches, trees stark against golden glow.

15:37
lone starlings. the sun is but a glow. paintbrush clouds, the colour of day-old snow.

15:40
river reverting to sludge green. the sun is but a memory uplighting lazy long-drawn-out clouds. the day’s first wood fire on the breeze.

15:42
the last dog walkers on the dike. orange and blue and yellow. sadness creeps into my heart.

15:46
the birds are relentless, but tiring. the last light is scattered on the river, weak now, blown on the breeze.

15:49
as one, the birds fall silent. I can hear every ripple on the river. backlit clouds give rise to ufo myths.

15:52
first hints of purple. horizon could be on fire.

15:56
clouds now thick black smoke. horizon might actually be on fire.

15:59
darkened clouds swirl like enormous slow-motion tornado. can’t feel my toes.

16:01
moon now dominant celestial body. first lights on the cathedral go on. two silhouettes paddle upstream towards me.

16:04
rooftops outlined in pink. shepherd’s delight. soft greys, baby blues. melancholy.

16:08
third hundred-strong flock of dots in as many minutes. sky above me maintains purity, darkens somewhat.

16:10
sky smudged. lights go on in cottages. only a thin band of red remains. trees the colour of tar.

16:11
toes aching. sunday’s last rays, black clouds tinged with pink, smoke tinged with beauty.

16:13
first star. smell of dinner. want to leave, but pink grows in intensity, almost orange in places.

16:19
pink fading to yellow. grey creeping back in. sky loses intensity. hunger sets in.

16:20
it’s been an hour. single bird perched on telegraph wire against dying pink. wisps of cloud haven’t moved in half an hour. beautiful pink reverts to grey. bare trees. time to go in.

Nuwara Eliya - Sri Lanka

“This is the worst time to drive!” Sali, our driver, says. Generally a jovial fellow, he’s been trying to escape the winding chaos of Kandy for half an hour now and it’s playing on his nerves. He’s right though – it’s 13:30 and schools have just been dismissed. There’s a blizzard of activity on the street as children in neat white uniforms make their way home or wait outside to be picked up. The colonial buildings that line the road are in disrepair, blackened, with tiles slipping from the roofs as if melting in the heat. Local shops have taken hold inside – some crammed with phones, calculators and headphones, others floor-to-ceiling displays of flip flops and leather shoes. 
Eventually we break from the traffic and the city makes way for ramshackle roadside shacks, coarse brick shopfronts and washing drying on countryside lines. 

We’re eight days into a three week tour of Sri Lanka. After a healthy dose of Buddhist temples and ancient capitals in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa, it’s time to see some European heritage. We’re heading south to Nuwara Eliya, a hill-station ringed by tea plantations. “It’s so British, you’ll instantly feel at home,” Sali promises.

As the road begins to rise, the weather closes in, and pretty soon, we’re driving in the clouds. The trees around us stand as limp tropical silhouettes in the mist. Sali steers the van nimbly along steep double-back roads, pointing out a waterfall engulfing the pockmarked cliff which seems to start straight from the clouds. On the other side of the road it’s a sheer drop into milky nothingness. Occasionally, boys wrapped in woolly hats and makeshift waterproofs appear on hairpin bends, optimistically waving bunches of flowers – fireworks of colour in a world otherwise entirely green and white. Elsewhere, rickety shacks cling to the side of the road, overflowing with fresh carrots, cabbages and avocados. We pass abandoned houses, their walls never finished, left to the mist and stray dogs.

We rise above the clouds as the climb continues and a sea of tea plantations emerges, stretching round the hills in neat waves. At Mackwoods Tea Estate, colourful pickers punctuate the landscape, bags strapped to the back of their heads to carry the leaves they’ve picked, backs bent double under their loads.

We reach 1893m, the highest point of the road, and start to drop again. Soon we’re in the town, with brightly coloured advertising, traffic and chaos. Mansions like Lochside and Spencer House stand regally on manicured lawns, their green-tiled roofs matching their balconies and balustrades as if lifted straight from a fairytale. The golf course stretches into the distance, the clubhouse fresh white against the lush fairways. A row of horses stand tied up outside the racecourse. Even the British rain had followed us here. As I climb out of the van and pull my coat closer around me, I start to wonder where Sri Lanka has gone.

the Writer

That night, he sat by his open window and shook a match from the packet with a satisfying crack. It sparked briefly on the sandpaper, then burst into flame, shooting fireflies into the gloom. The candle sputtered at first, then drew light and began its solitary dance. The shadows cast shot high up the walls.

It was the twenty-ninth of September, he wrote, then paused. He put the pen down. The street was quiet – a passing street rather than a stopping street. A lame fox limped down the pavement, a straggly bone in its mouth. A motorbike roared a few streets off. Unremarkable, he thought, then pondered the paradox of his having remarked upon it. He picked up the half-burnt match and relit it on the candle. Reaching up to the shelf, he took another and held the lit match to the wick. There, he now had two candles. As the match burned, he came to an idea and reached for another. Lighting it, he eyed another on the shelf, but the match pricked at his fingers, so he dropped it into the third candle where it caught and burned bright.

Now, it may be a trick of the light, but it looks like a glint comes into our protagonist’s eye. He lays his hand, palm down, on a blank sheet of paper and unsheathes his pen. Now reader, if I tell you what happened next, you’ll scarcely believe me. Said writer raised the pen up to eye level and aimed it at his hand, still stationary upon the sheet. In a flourish, he brought the pen down, forcefully, piercing the skin of his hand and driving through onto the paper. As I watched, streams of characters began to flow forth. Unstoppably and building in force with every heartbeat, words and then whole sentences flowed from this gaping wound. Out poured sin, and beauty, out came art.

For two whole hours he sat there, transfixed by his own absurdity, while the candles coughed and shimmered in their glass cages. Reading over his shoulder I saw scenes of unspeakable beauty, of soaring eagles of stories, of mighty peaks of emotion. Reader, by now you’ll believe I never wanted this to end. But eventually the wound started to close around the intrusion, and the stream of words slowed to a trickle, less coherent now, less thick on the page, until it had become nothing more than a few letters clinging to the pen. It remained stuck in his hand, which he raised to shut the window.

Lying in bed a few minutes later, he chanced upon a patch on the sheet, when he realised his wound was still oozing. It would dry by the morning, he thought, as he reached to turn off the light. By the light of the candles still guarding his evening’s work, I could see, every now and then, another word slip out onto the pillow, lost to the night. Within minutes though, this came out as random single letters instead. His breathing, previously heavy, settled into a soothing rhythm. He rested, a happy writer.

Radiohead in Lisbon

The moon smiled and was gone, hidden behind the main stage, where some huge unknown warm-up act – who we tolerated purely for what was to come – winked at the girls. Condensation ran down my fingers as I clutched the beer that would see me through this long wait where time trickled like sand – but what was three hours when you’d waited three years?

As this minor band left, the pack flowed forward, squeezing into every nook the leavers made like cement into a mould. By the time it set, we were not thirty metres from the stage. Thirst drew my mouth into a desert and turned my rationing of beer – beer that was by now very warm and very flat – into an art form. We had Russia in front, Canada beside: a motley army of worshippers to greet the greats, the goods, the everlastings, the been-away-but-come-back-agains.

The sky darkened into dusk, then the stage lights followed. A blue glow cast across the podium, then four gladiators entered, the crowd baying at their arrival. From that moment on, I watched Thom like a hawk, his spindly hands playing keys, his whine punctuating the summer.

At times, it was as if the crowd assumed an instrument of their own, as tens of thousands of voices combined to form one to chant “Fade out...again,” back at the Gods on stage. An entire crowd, it turns out, sounds all lengths of the spectrum and all visible colours in the night.

They left the stage, then returned – the been-away-but-come-back-agains embodied – to play five more. Beside us, the Canadian was in tears. I watched them hammer drums into the air on “There There”, then they were gone again. This in itself would have been a worthy end, but back again they came. Only with Creep. Only with their biggest song ever, the cry for disaffected youth, “I wish I was special, but I’m a creep,” and we felt his pain, so vivid was the melody, so vibrant his sorrow.

Then the piano started. The song that brought Radiohead into my life in the first place. “This is what you get, when you mess with us” – well, so far Thom, messing with Radiohead has brought me nothing but joy and grief and self-discovery. It’s been a soundtrack for growing up, a driving force in my maturity, so I think I’ll be messing with you for the foreseeable future if you don't mind. Thom rises to seal the night. “For a minute there, I lost myself.” Yes, and so did we. So thank you.

As we sat on the bench afterward, too stunned to move, too broken to speak, too mind-blown to think, a cry from the next table echoed into the night. “Fade out...again,” and with an instinct I can only compare to breathing, I found myself singing along, and as ten voices became a hundred, I felt the process of time tearing in two and the world had very seriously changed. The time that was to come would bear no resemblance to what had gone before.

That chant will now forever be the sound of time itself splitting in two.

running late

It's three minutes until the wedding, and I'm in Seoul traffic, sweating. The grey of the high rise is indistinguishable from the sky. My fate lies, as it has so often so far in this city, in the hands of someone who speaks not a word of English. Though he'd nodded perfunctorily enough at my mention of Apgujeong station, it would be a minor miracle if I made it there on time. Being late in your own city has something inherently uncomfortable about it. Being late for the whole purpose of your trip to a foreign country is another matter altogether. 

The traffic sat. Those on foot overtook those in cars. Horns buzzed in the suffocating air. I try to piece up the tiny scrap of map I have for the venue with the screen of my driver's satnav.

I take a leap of faith, grappling to win back a little bit of control over the situation.
"Drop me here," I say, my hands gesturing at the nearest kerb. He asks me a question in Korean. I point back at the kerb.

On the streets I start running the two blocks to the where I think the venue is. With a lurch, I realise that if I've misjudged the map, there's no way I'll make the wedding. Nothing like a bit of all or nothing. The roads seem to expand in the heat, stretching away from me, mocking me. The lights at the crossing are in on this twisted joke too, taking an age to turn to green. Day two in the city and I'm already jaywalking. My feet drum a rhythm into my head of the groom's words last night: "Don't be late eh, gents?"

Reaching the turning I think I need, I cut left and jog along the road which slopes up a hill. Not this one. Too early. Car showroom. Japanese restaurant. Shit. Turn corner, scan buildings. Still nothing. Check phone. 11:59. Try one further. Arts Center. Hoards of suits. Buzz of voices. Is this it?

I'm still scanning faces when a familiar voice, almost 9,000km from where I last heard it, takes a pin to my bubble of panic.

"You made it! We've got you a seat upstairs. Here's a glass of white."

Korea's DMZ

"Skip it," Min had said in the hostel. Spend your money on beers instead."
I ignored him. When else would I get the chance to see over the border of the world's most secluded country?

*****

It's a forty minute drive to the border, past mile upon mile of barbed wire and sentry posts. Every hill in the distance became a guessing game: "Is that North Korea? It sure looks pretty bleak there." It wasn't.

There were at least ten other buses on the lot as we pulled up at Freedom Bridge. A neatly-designed visitor centre sold smoothies and postcards. The seats of a Ferris wheel hung unmoving in the drizzle. Loud voices of all languages clashed in the air. Our guide spoke a language that at times resembled English. In dramatic terms, she told us a pocket version of the Korean War, the creation of the DMZ and intense security of the compound. At least I think she did.

A soldier boarded the bus at the checkpoint and walked down the aisle of the bus, casting an eye over everyone's passports. I could have showed him last night's dinner receipt for the attention he paid it. From this moment forward we were in the DMZ. Every hill became “North Korea” again. At the first stop, our fellow travellers streamed off the bus and flocked around three enormous letters, spelling out the area's acronym. Selfie sticks were extended, poses perfected, filters chosen.

Across the lot was a museum of sorts, marking the North's numerous attempts at breaching the zone. Shepherded into a cinema, we were shown a rollercoaster of scenes narrated by an enthusiastic American. Footage of the war and maimed bodies was interspersed with calming shots of the many types of wildlife now living in the DMZ. "Visit the DMZee today," it said, "where animals great and small live in perfect harmony. The DMZee is nature's haven forever."

As the film ended we donned hard hats and ventured down into one of the tunnels, the third of four discovered since the DMZ's creation. It’s unknown how many others may exist. Painted black inside by the diggers who then claimed it was a coal mine, the tunnel sits over 70m beneath the surface. A single-file procession ran in each direction, in and out of the tunnel. Most of the ceiling was propped up by metal scaffolding, and the dripping walls and shouts of tourists were punctuated by the frequent sounds of hard helmet hitting the metal. The barbed wire at the end of the tunnel was decorated with fairy lights. Boarding the bus later, I saw the row in front had bought "authentic DMZ barbed wire". Someone's mother-in-law was in for a real treat at Christmas.

Our guide was by now so incomprehensible that she could go entire streams of thought without me picking up a single word. Next, apparently, we were visiting the sober tree. It was only when we pulled up at the hill that the 'sober tree' in fact became the 'observatory'. It was also here that the tour came to resemble a trip to the zoo. Cue more loud voices, more elbows, more selfies. A row of binoculars stood at the edge of the viewing platform as we looked down into the lion enclosure. No cameras are allowed at the edge, as we wouldn't want the North Koreans seeing the latest Samsung model.

Forgive me if I'm trivialising here, but after a day of the war-zone being trivialised by the never-ending marketing surrounding it, it comes frighteningly naturally.

We moved away and found a pagoda in a haven of quiet with a view over the border. It was here the enormity of the situation really struck. We're actually looking into a country at war with our hosts, just 40 minutes from Seoul. I said a silent thanks for the freedom we take so much for granted.

We carried on to Dorasan Station, the South's final stop on the line towards North Korea, built at a time when reunification looked more likely. It had never seen a train go north. Tourists posed under signs reading "Trains to Pyongyang" and the departures board was now being used to encourage visitors to check-in on Facebook.

A booth in the corner of the station offered us the chance to get a Dorasan stamp. A sign hung above it: "Do not use in passport or on bank notes." The American beside me grinned like an imp and stamped it down opposite his Korean entry visa. I wished him a pleasant trip through Customs.

Because a bus trip is never complete without being forced through an "authentic local handicrafts" factory against your wishes, we were dropped at a two-storey ginseng showroom. Time for a tactical tap-out.

"Sorry, we're running short on time. Thanks for the tour! Gamsa hamnida!" We damn near ran out that door.

*****

Min was in the hostel living room when I got back. He looked up as I took my shoes off at the door.

"And?"
"You were right." I said. "Let's grab a beer."