lone figure on a beach, just before Christmas

you stoop, 
feeling the cold in your knees.
you are old.
you may not have many winters left.
you are examining something,
something far older than you are.

you peer at it
turning it over
in your hand
in your mind
still for a minute
unmoved by the wind.

your gaze shifts
you’re not looking at it anymore
you’re looking through it,
through all the stones on this beach,
through the centre of the Earth
and out the other side into nothing
clawing back memories breeding memories
as if by picking up one stone
you’ve revealed another
then another
a whole beach of associations
stretching back to the beginning of time.

you face the sea, 
and now throw
as far as it will go.

you’ve turned away
before it lands
with a tiny crown of salt-water.

Aldeburgh Lookout - Poem II

the sea is the same
and yet
never the same
for to give it just one name
puts to shame
its depth of being
and insults our seeing
and does no honour to the being of sea.

today it champs at the bit
white horses straining at reins
rushing up the beach
seeking shingle.
townsfolk keep their young indoors,
shops shut up early.

now daylight fails
until the only band of light
between the black of beach
and unlit night
is the row upon row of mashing teeth
and the spit of the sleepless waves. 

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.

woodsmoke

it could’ve been any other seat
in any other carriage
on any other line
but I didn’t know that when I sat down.

through underground grime
and blackened newspapers
came quickfire mental pictures
of the ends of long summer days
on the wasteland behind the old garage
of old Mr Smith, a silhouette shepherd
a father, at least to the fire
to which we floated like moths.

as the book in my lap lay open
so too lay the box of memories, strewn,
turning words into smoke and carrying them
up, into my nose as I breathed deep my childhood.

now, you’d say smoke is smoke
but smoke is never just smoke
smoke is wood or weed
or snuffed candles
or anything else gone out
or burned up
none of it without fire
and none of that without a spark
and who then lit the stars?
and which idiot sent them spinning off into space like that
for humans to wander under and wonder over
and shoot up their own little surrogate stars
off crackling autumn branches
and dry-wood pallets
and anything else going out
or burning up
like I guess, we all will
and one day there was no fire
to dance around and
Mr Smith didn’t come out to light the stars
and they built flats on the wasteland
and the next station is Archway
and I’m getting off like I’m waking up
from a dream I’m not ready to leave
but I guess what’s gone is gone
and the train is gone
and the smell is gone
and Mr Smith is gone 

and I’m...well, I’m still here.

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."