TRAVEL DIARY: ADVENTURES OVERSEAS VOLUME 7

SPAIN, FRANCE, UK, IRELAND, GREECE, QATAR

PART 1 

 MONDAY 23 OCTOBER 2014: DAY 1 OF 24

We left the house at 11.30AM for our 4PM flight on Qatar Airlines. This time last year, we were stuck in a long queue where I chatted with a Norwegian from Oslo who was not into the Australian heat. He couldn’t wait to get back to the sub-zero winter in Norway. Today though, we went straight through check-in and customs. My rule is to never drink alcohol on long flights, since it’s hard enough getting over jet lag without the extra burden of drinking, which dehydrates you even more. Stick to water and juice. On our earlier trips on Air Brunei, we took to drinking tomato juice. We arrived in duty free, which is always so tempting due to cut-rate prices, especially during these days of the very high prices we are paying for everything. Alcohol in particular, due to constant government tax hikes on grog. That’s the only way you can raise revenue when, as a government, you have no clue how to generate income. That’s what happens when politicians spend their entire life working in government and have never worked in business or in a job in the real world where it is necessary to compete in order to be resourceful. So, when you enter duty free these days, your eyes almost pop out of your head. While buying a bottle of water, I was tempted by a half bottle of whiskey. It was too cute to resist. The girl at the counter checked my boarding pass and asked me if I was going to Doha and if I was staying there. I told her yes. She then asked me if I was going to drink this on the plane. I replied no. She looked at me curiously and I thought this strange. She said she would put it in a travel bag for me. Just as I was about to complete the purchase, my wifey rocked up. She asked me what I was doing. I told her I couldn’t resist. It’s so cheap. She told me no. I could not take that through Qatar. They would simply confiscate it. It was news to me. Both the wifey and the duty free girl explained that you cannot drink or have alcohol in Qatar. I bought my water and remembered that Qatar was indeed an alcohol no-go zone and that, as opposed to the UAE where we normally stayed overnight, Qatar was similar to Saudi Arabia and was very strict on Mohammed’s commandments. I had already made my first mistake.

I have learned over the years travelling that when you’re rollicking about on these overseas adventures, mistakes always happen. The bad vibe merchant always finds you at some stage. Sometimes, it’s early on in the trip. Sometimes, the dark side doesn’t raise its ugly head until the last minute, which happened a few years ago at Heathrow on the way home when they told us we were not allowed to enter Singapore for our planned stay there due to our not having six months left on our passports.

I considered that I had made an early travelling mistake and that hopefully that would by the last one I made.

Boarding takes an hour sitting on the plane. A real drag, man. Ho hum and a bottle of rum. This is when you need a bottle of rum, I thought. I proceeded to muck around with the flight entertainment thingy in front of me and ran through the movies, as is always my habit, and picked a couple of goodies. I was all set, yet again, with the help and blessings of God and my angelic helpers and protectors, who are my Guardian Angels. They assisted me more recently in relation to my back, which took nine months to fix in 2023. I am not speaking metaphorically. I met my Guardian Angels at a crucial time of severe suffering in my life. I pulled out my Bose headphones and was all set for the gruelling marathon that is a fifteen-hour flight.

 This time round I didn’t get nearly as much sleep as usual, or as much sleep as I needed. I was all fired up. So, it was a case of making the most out of the in-flight entertainment and my iPod. Yes, I still have an iPod Touch, albeit with a smashed screen. It’s more than handy when you want to listen to music without the drag of phone calls and texts interrupting your karma. You can indeed shut the world out completely with an iPod. That’s why Apple should keep on making them. And we need to spend way more time off our smart phones. As do our kids. My first film featured Morgan Freeman and the hugely talented Florence Pugh in 2023’s “A Good Person”. It turned out to be right up my alley, working in mental health and addiction. A magnificent story of hope and recovery by Allison, played by Florence, who goes on a journey of post car accident opioid addiction towards redemption and recovery. She is assisted with this enterprise by the marvellous Morgan Freeman, an ex-alcoholic, who knows the score. The film was not known to me and was a pleasant surprise. My movie watching on flights over the years has produced some very memorable moments. “Jersey Boys” stays in my memory. We were fed and watered and I still couldn’t sleep.

Next on the menu was “The Theory of Everything”. The story of Stephen Hawking. The best thing about this film was the beautiful Felicity Jones. Another alluring and charismatic Englishwoman. We had watched this film quite a few years ago, and despite the dreadful diagnosis delivered to Hawking and his incredibly brave fight against his illness, which is a remarkable and inspiring story in itself, the science to us is just a great big yawn. Possibly a great remedy for inducing sleep on a long plane flight, which it ultimately was. After a sleep, and more drinks and toileting and stretching and other stuff, we finished the film thinking how stupid and banal scientists are compared to those in the field of the humanities. There appears to be absolutely no common sense when it comes to science. Since all you get is a prescribed diet of “what can we prove?” It’s all meaningless gobshite. This film proves that physics of the highest order is a complete waste of time to humanity since it is all consuming rubbish that is based on only the physical world. So what if Hawking was able to prove that time had a beginning. We all know that time had a beginning since, in rational terms and with the help of non-scientific reason, the fact that the universe had a beginning means that time also had a beginning. So what? The only question that matters to real thinkers is: what precedes time? Naturally, it is that which has been placed in the rubbish bin by scientists and education. It’s called the infinite. The eternal. That which is non-corporeal in nature but is all around an in everything. That which is everything but which is also nothing. It’s the higher power. And, as such, unbeknown to the narrow-minded intolerance of science, that which precedes the creation of the physical universe is neither time nor space based. That which precedes the physical universe does not exist in time or in space. However, it is eternal, it is indestructible. And, in the end, as all the major religions of the world attest to and know, it is the Love and the Light.

We left the braindead moron Stephen Hawking and all the other myopic scientific morons behind. It was now most definitely time for a big evacuation in the plane toilet after trawling our way through being blinded by science. If only we had that half bottle of duty free whiskey, we thought.  Three to four hours of mostly hallucinatory weirdness, that light form of dreamy, half sleep, ensued.

We ate breakfast at a time that was more likely a late dinner time by now. So began the jet lag inducing, brain-fag time warp. We arrived in Doha and were subject to a very long queue of hundreds of people at midnight where, to my great annoyance, we were fingerprinted and treated like the usual kind of Western second-class citizens by some very serious and extremely dour policemen at customs, who obviously hated our guts. This infringement of our human rights was alleviated by the warm air outside and the excitement of our taxi ride through the blue lit streets down amazingly wide freeways adorned on either side by majestic middle eastern structures. You become aware straight away that you have been transported through time and space into another culture entirely. To that extent, we could have been on Mars. All of a sudden, with the complete change of environment to the senses, combined with your brain being treated, once again, thank God, to things you have never seen before in your life so far, you have embarked on an adrenaline fuelled adventure that is incomparable. We arrived at the Ibis Adagio Hotel at 1AM local time, met by a whole array of friendly and magnificent looking Nigerians and Kenyans outside the hotel as they collected our baggage, and then smiling at us warmly at reception.

The first leg of the tour de France was complete.  

TUESDAY 24 OCTOBER: DAY 2

It’s very basic accommodation but cheap. All we needed at this juncture was somewhere to lay our weary heads down, wash, and eat. Due to the time difference head wash, having slipped in to a coma the night before, we awoke much earlier than expected and headed downstairs at 7AM where we demolished a huge breakfast of western chicken sausage (no pork), scrambled eggs, hash browns and grilled tomato, toast, coffee, and juice. All the favourites. One of the things I love to do is to sample all the different flavours of the world. Those things that the taste buds have never before experienced over decades of consumption. I tried a small cup of Arabic coffee, the first one since Dubai several years ago, quickly deciding that it wasn’t for me, and fuelled up instead on Americano filter coffee and a few flat whites from the machine. I had now embarked on the process of my body and brain slowly grinding its way into an entirely new body clock, transforming itself from the usual late-night owl into the get up early adrenaline fuelled pump that I needed to be.

 After breakfast, as is the norm, we hit the pool. There was no view out over the sparse desert sands and huge buildings as there had been in Dubai and Abi Dhabi but it was exceptionally clean, as is the middle-eastern way, like Japan. They take great pride in their environment and their history. After a long flight, there is nothing better than frolicking around in the water for half an hour clearing the head and the soul while clearing the body of all that recycled jet air. We had decided that if you have the time, it’s a much better way to go than flying straight through. As you get older, it’s important to keep in mind that you can no longer go out to pubs and nightclubs till dawn, followed by playing a game of footy the next morning. Nor is it advisable to fly for twenty-four hours when youse don’t need to. The fresh, clear water was a balm and, before I could say jihad, the temperature had reached thirty-seven degrees. The wifey departed due to the heat. I lay in the warm air for half an hour reading my book and took another couple of swims until my body clock hit a snag. Up in our room, the afternoon was spent performing a much-needed job removing old pics from my iCloud, which was now full, in order to make room for what was to come. I went through the long process of removing all my photos from the past year and transferring them to USB stick. It’s something I like to do each year for two reasons. There is no way I am paying Apple for 50GB of iCloud storage space. Also, I tend to view my photographic masterpieces more regularly by plugging the USB stick into the TV and enjoying them on a large screen. We like to keep our small amount of funding to Apple for Apple Music purposes only. It took a couple of hours to transfer seven hundred photos and it was then time for a nap. Then, after a couple of hours watching Arabic television, in particular a show on racing Falcons (birds) through the desert, and listening to internet radio from northern Ireland, it was time for another big feed.

In the dining room downstairs again, the time had come to begin one of our favourite parts of the travel game. This manifests itself in the form of stuffing our faces full of superb food at a buffet. At this particular buffet, there were all kinds of specially prepared middle-eastern foods, and, since we are not that far away from India here, Indian cuisine. I took a small sample of the Indian chicken curry to find that it was the real deal, an authentic taste sensation. We had befriended a lovely young Kenyan girl who was seated behind us on the plane. She had just completed her nursing studies at RMIT in Melbourne and was on her way back home to Kenya. I had noticed straight away upon arrival the proliferation of Kenyan men and women working around here. The Kenyan men are so polite and helpful and the girls behind the counter at reception were two of the most stunning women I had ever seen due to their skin, their beautifully made- up hair, and their booties to die for. It’s also the case that it does not take too long to realise how pleasant these Africans are to ego-driven Western travellers. They have a beautiful way about them which is born of being outside of Western privilege. That is to say that dressed in your Nikes, or your Adidas shorts, you soon realise your Western self, which is not altogether always flattering compared to the hardships these Africans have come from. The one-day cricket World Cup was on the big screen and I was able to take in some of the South Africa versus Bangladesh game and it was a spin out to think that Mumbai, which I was viewing with interest the other night at home, was just down the road from here.

It is necessary to re-emphasize that Qatar, like Saudi Arabia, is quite hard-core Muslim with no alcohol to be consumed in Qatar. I was thinking, naturally... wouldn’t it be real nice to have a beer while watching the cricket. As is the case in the UAE however, due to tolerance and the need to maintain good business, I found that it was indeed possible to order a beer in the dining room if you liked. I refrained though since it would just put me to sleep. After polishing off a large section of the buffet, our taste buds ensconced in new flavours of the east, we headed upstairs. Apart from the Arabic channels, all very interesting, it’s always great to get some world news into you that is delivered in English. The saturation coverage at the moment was focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which had resurfaced in a brutal way after the Hamas atrocities in Israel. This was where the French 24 Hour news service, delivered in English, always came in handy. It was all rather depressing to watch, considering the shocking nature of these recent events and not the kind of thing you want to fill your mind up with when you’re on holidays. I watched as much as I could tolerate, reminded of our innocent toddler-like life in safe Australia, and then had one last nap thinking that it’s important to get out into the world where shit is happening.

The airport at midnight I find is always exciting, especially in the UAE or Qatar, which is a global hub of international activity. The first time in Dubai just before Christmas 2012 demonstrated just how truly exciting and wonderful it is witnessing the mass migration of especially African peoples, as they make their way at that rather busy of time of the year, all around the world. I will never forget being exposed to these magnificent Africans and Middle-Eastern peoples of all varying persuasions asleep on benches and on the floor dressed in their white smocks at Dubai airport as they lay over wating for their next flight abroad. It was a scene that was so different in every conceivable way from what I was used to in Australia. And this is when both your mind and your soul are hopelessly opened up to the infinite possibilities of travel, to the infinite nuances of the big world, an addiction discovered that can never be put back in its place ever again.

We also had time, arriving early for check-in, to have a walk around the airport. I have been known to enjoy mega-engineering shows on television and had recently viewed an episode on the construction of the Qatar airport roof, which formed part and parcel of the upgrade of the airport for the recent soccer World Cup held in Qatar. It really was a magnificent structure which covered an enormous area spanning seventy or more gates for flight departures. All in all, under circumstances where here in Doha they are not short on cash, it was obvious they had produced one of the great airports of the world, and despite being fingerprinted upon entry, it was a pleasure to be here. We soon boarded our flight. The flight to Barcelona was a mere seven hours, easy pickings I thought, after the first leg. It turned out to be a hard task though due to the window seat, which I detest as it stops your movement around the plane, especially when a stranger is seated beside you in between yourself and your wifey, who was on the aisle where you normally find me. Together with the feeling of weariness at being worn down at the end of the long trip from Oz when all you want to do is get off the bloody plane, it was all a bit of a drag. To put it more bluntly, the excitement of flying wears off. The consolation being that the stranger seated beside me on the flight was a stunning young Spanish girl who looked like a model, dressed in jeans, boots, and a black vinyl jacket. I discovered from wifey that she had been working in hospitality in Qatar and Saudi Arabia for the past couple of years and couldn’t wait to get back home to Spain due to not being treated too well by Arabian men.

 So, finally, here we were in Spain.

WEDNESDAY 25 OCTOBER: DAY 3: MERCREDI

We landed in Barcelona early in the morning to find a small queue at customs despite the full plane. This was something of a huge relief. Last year there was a long queue which took at least an hour to process. Barcelona is a very small town and there were, it appeared, no other flights coming in, so we were quickly through customs to the bag claim. I disappeared into the toilets desperate for a tooth brush and a change of T-shirt and underpants and we then headed out the front of the terminal where we were shunted to the front of the taxi line where a surly and shabby cab driver picked us up in a brand new yellow and black vehicle. During the trip through the Gaudi inspired yet emaciated streets of Barcelona, the cabbie didn’t say a word, which meant he possibly did not speak English, though more probably just couldn’t give a shit. Why would you, picking up another set of foreign tourists? During the drive to the main train station, our destination, I could have sworn he diverted purposefully off the main road into the tiny streets and laneways that were jam packed and full of traffic. The main road had been flowing beautifully. These other tiny cramped and ugly streets were not. I mentioned this fact to the wifey. That this prick was taking us the long way around and I was in no mood for it right now. She assured me, he was just taking a “shortcut”. Yeah, right. I know a lot more about how the world works than you do, luv, I thought.

 I was really tired now and I found myself getting angry. Angry at the thought of some Spanish fucker taking advantage of we innocent, knowledgeless suckers. Anything to do with liars, inequity, and the subject of justice really gets my juices flowing. I somehow managed to just sit there and peer out the window of the taxi as I remonstrated with myself to get a grip, calm down, and ignore whatever was going on. You’re not currently in your right mind, I kept telling myself. My mood was not in any way assisted by what I had learned about Barcelona a year ago after my septuagenarian father-in-law was mugged and had his pack stolen by two Spaniards in a park where he was sitting quietly in Barcelona. One of them had approached him, effectively distracting him. The other bloke rode up on his bike and swooped upon his pack that was sitting there on the bench ready to be snatched after being distracted. It was a well-executed, well-planned out job. In an instant, my wifey’s old man had lost his passport, phone, wallet, credit cards, and everything else in that pack. After some research at the time, I discovered what a criminally infested shithole Barcelona is. That even walking down the main mall, you had to be wary of pack snatchers, muggings, and assaults. An NRL player had lost his life out partying in Barcelona in 2022. This was not a safe place. It was a place full of scum, which is exactly how they all looked, and I had made the decision not to have anything at all to do with this city. This was the reason we had decided not to stay a night in this city in transit. As far as I was concerned, after experiencing its poxy atmosphere in 2022, there was nothing to see. A few cathedrals and Gaudi architecture. Who cares? It wasn’t worth it. No, as far as Spain was concerned, the great food could wait. I had my mind set on Madrid or the Costa del Sol. Also, last year, upon landing in Barcelona, we had booked a bus up into France. I had never in my life witnessed such disgusting, filthy, and neglected public toilets anywhere in my life as in the main bus station in Barcelona, which presented generally as a garbage dump. The bus trip itself had been a comedy of errors with a bunch of Laurel and Hardy idiots, running the show, including the bus driver. Crims and scammers had been deported off the bus at the French border, collected by the police. So, we had dropped the bus trip off our itinerary and were now taking the train to Perpignan instead. From a geographical perspective, I had also learned that one of the problems Spain suffered from historically was that it was cut off from the rest of the Europe and the world due to the Pyrenees, which stretched the entire length of the continent. This was the reason Spain, compared to France, was taken over by Muslim expansion and became Islamic. Since, historically, it was much easier to look to the south towards Africa than trading across the European continent. The reasons behind its current shabbiness and crime problem was due to its isolation, poverty worsening considerably after the 2008 GFC crisis.

The surly and dirty cabbie dropped us off at the train station where we hit McDonalds for McMuffins and coffee. We sat at a table looking out at the remnants of a dilapidated car park and a view of outer Barcelona that was not impressive. It was a sad sack of a joint and I couldn’t wait to get over the border. We joined the long queue at the platform. About ten metres in front of me was a plump blonde girl whose daggy cuteness really woke me up. She stood there next to her boyfriend fiddling with the handle of her suitcase, her scruffiness, big blue eyes, and solid thighs a carbon copy of one of my early girlfriends. It wasn’t long before we were ushered onto the platform and onto the train where I found that young blondie was seated in the seats opposite us and that, Lord Almighty, she was Australian. You see, maybe it’s all about what you’re used to. The Aussie dagginess sure has its allure. We got comfortable and dumped all our relevant belongings on the table. That’s the great thing about trains. Plenty of room compared to planes, big tables, and easy access to the toilets.  The train ride was so much more comfortable and easier than the shambolic Spanish bus ride we took last year. We arrived in Perpignan in half the time and, although more expensive, it was worth every cent.

In Perpignan it was warm and sunny, providing that first hint of Mediterranean feel not far from the coast. We were forced to stand in the shade at the bus stop, which ain’t bad for late October in Europe. Already, returning to the south of France, we could feel a comforting sense of familiarity, which to me, brought with it a great feeling of accomplishment. There was also a feeling of wizardry hovering around, in the knowledge of being directed by a higher power, since we had returned to this holiday destination but were on the other side of the world. The usual bus ride to Quillan proved less exciting compared to our interesting introduction last year when the bus driver, who had decided to emulate Alain Prost, had caused our water bottles and packs to be dislodged from their moorings, hurled down the centre aisle as he went screaming around every scenic corner. I later learned that this tendency to racing manoeuvres was a hallmark of French male drivers, probably dating back to the Le Mans. The magnificent medieval castle on the hill, half way between Perpignan and Quillan, one of the many ancient Cathar relics, was still there intact, as were the creeks and the River Aude and the huge threatening roadside rock walls, all taped up with wire, and the magnificent mountain views astonished, making this part of the trip so unique and special.

There we were at around 2.30 on this sunny afternoon standing in the large car park at the Quillan bus and train terminus, which was now a bus stop since the trains no longer ran, surrounded by serene mountains and beauty in every direction. No wonder the medieval Cathars, branded as heretics, lived in and loved this valley so much, including the rest of Languedoc, as they fought for their lives taking on the Catholic Church for what they believed in. That is, that you do not need an authoritarian church administration in order to believe in God. You can have a relationship with God all on your own. And, of course, they were right. We dragged our cases through now familiar territory, the four sets of wheels on our brand-new suitcases branded with an initiation on the rough cobblestones of the streets, past my favourite historic medieval church whose bells rang hourly, through the town square with its two pubs and café. We took a left at the medieval castle which overlooked the square and walked down our street and entered the three-storey villa that was possibly going to become something of a second home to us over the coming years. Who knows? You never know what’s waiting around in the corner in life, do you? That’s why you have to seize the day for everything it’s worth. For you never know when the curtain is going to come down and it’s your time to exit from this mortal coil. It’s a long and arduous journey from the Antipodes. It’s a marathon in every way. It takes its toll on you but fortunately, due to the human body, adrenaline would now quickly take over.

We were here again. Let the fun begin.

THURSDAY 26 OCTOBER: DAY 4: JEUDI

Waking up in Quillan is very satisfying knowing you have made it through the meat grinder in one piece. The meat grinder that is air travel in economy class, rather than the luxury of first or business class, or the ultimate luxury of the private jet, the purview of elitist “climate change” world conference attendees and elitist politicians of all persuasions who constantly fly around the world making us all sick as they attempt to dictate what we can and cannot do. Of course, they can all shove a globe of the earth up their arse as they catastrophise. The experience of making it here is a mind-numbing marathon of flights, hotels, and airports done from the bottom of the world where there is no respite and the kind of effort that only Aussies and Kiwis can fully comprehend. So, it was time to get clean and whole again, have a good wash, and hit the coffee cannister full of Lavazza, that was there waiting for me, really hard. I am also reunited with the pleasures of Korres shaving cream, which seems to just stay here on the bathroom shelf for my own personal use. It’s a Greek product infused with absinthe and the best shaving cream a man can use on this earth. The time would come, in a couple of weeks, when I would go in search of it in its natural environment. After charging the battery on high octane coffee, tea for the wifey, we headed off to check out the Spar for provisions and the boulangerie for croissants to find to our horror that the boulangerie was closed for a week due to school holidays. Oh my God, what were we going to do to get our fix of freshly made French croissants? Half the reason my wifey travels here. This is a tragedy of gargantuan proportions, I considered, as we made our way to the Spar supermarket. The wifey had availed herself to the use of a new internet SIM. I was not able to get one, I found out on the train, because my very old iPhone was not compatible and would not download this new technology. The wifey made an emergency text back home to find out where else we could obtain these treasured and necessary treats for everyday consumption, which, along with the morning bread, is such an integral part of the French experience. We were thankfully assured that there was one other secret location where croissants could be obtained. The folks back home knew all the secrets here since, before Brexit, they lived here for over a year. After scouring the supermarket, including the purchase of a couple of cans of my favourite beer, we went about finding a new café where we could enjoy morning tea and coffee, since the café in the square was also closed. We found a street café for brunch and then my first item of business was to pay homage to the awesome historic church where I liked to pray and give thanks for getting us here again.

After bowing my head down in gratitude and viewing the beautiful artworks inside the church, we wandered around the town in the mild sunshine down to the River Aude, full of history. During the time of the Cathars in the 11th and 12th centuries, the washer women did their washing at this place on the river. The history of the town is well documented with stories from the town’s history scattered around from place to place thanks to Council signage. We made our way down the main street and over the bridge that was built here in the 1930s when the town was a bustling hive of activity thanks to an enormous factory that made hats during the depression and then after the second world war. Quillan would have been unrecognisable back then compared to the laid-back atmosphere of today bred by an interesting mix of current inhabitants. These days, there is a mix of locals who work here in business and retail, together with a large contingent of British immigrants who have moved here in retirement. There is also a reasonable contingent of unemployed French people, including a large government housing estate, and in winter time there are squatters who come in from the surrounding countryside to occupy the many deserted and abandoned residential buildings here which have not yet been colonised by the Brits or other retirees. There are Australians and South Africans living in our street. It was a rich businessman, back in the day, who built the huge factory on the other side of the river, now a large expanse of deserted vacant land. The factory built, he decided eventually that it would be easier in terms of transport and logistics to get his hats, very popular at the time, out to the rest of France, and possibly Europe, through the railway station by building a bridge over the River Aude, which he did in the 1930s. This allowed direct access to and from the railway station from the factory without having to make a difficult round trip around the river’s edge via the medieval Cathar castle. We crossed this bridge past the deserted lot and made our way around the river to the castle and across a short and very old bridge back to the town square. Everything was looking as delightful as ever and I was looking forward to sitting in the town square and doing some writing. There are two hotels in the main square. Only one was open due to the owner of the other hotel being away, very sick with cancer. I was also looking forward to watching some world cup rugby, which was taking place in France right now,  in my favourite pub in the square. We were starting to get a bit tired again, so we took the two-minute walk from the town square back home.

There is now an old Sharp TV in the place. It’s not a smart TV and it’s not even connected to an aerial. It did play old DVDs. Together with reading, my first pleasure, that was enough for me. I inspected the current collection on offer. Not too inspiring. However, there were a couple of classics worth watching, including “The Book Thief” and “Born on the Fourth of July”. Born on the Fourth of July, an Oliver Stone film, is a harrowing experience in parts, especially the first part of the film where Tom Cruise is fighting in Vietnam and becomes injured and ultimately paralysed and disabled. The really disturbing part of the film is when he is trapped in a rat-infested rehabilitation facility for veterans. What is disturbing is the struggle he endures trying to save his leg and his health, an inordinate struggle, despite his positive attitude. What is also disturbing is the horrendous way veterans were treated by a government who has simply used them as cannon fodder. It’s a film that resonates with me always as I first viewed it after becoming ill myself in 1989. It always reminds me of the first years of my imprisonment in the early nineties and not so great memories of that house in Kenmore in Brisbane and my cell / bedroom under the house where I spent so much time completely disabled, together with the study under the house, newly carpeted, that smell of new carpet remaining with me forever. The room where I first began my meditation practice, eastern and Indian in nature, thanks to my instructor who had lived for thirteen years in India. It is where I first cultivated seeing the Light, since apart from music really, I had nothing else I could do apart from remaining horizontal and consuming books. It is the case that a lot of what I know now about the nature of the Truth comes directly from that time when I would spend hours meditating in that room under the house in Kenmore, a story I have documented in my novel “Symphony”.

So, with a little trepidation, I slipped Tom Cruise into the DVD player.

The intermission involved us slipping down to the end of our street to sample the pizza restaurant for the first time. The town cinema was right next door. I checked out the French films playing and made a mental note that we should attend the cinema since I have always enjoyed French cinema on SBS. The restaurant was full and we had not made a booking. This remained a problem since it was difficult to conduct a conversation in French over the telephone in order to book anything, even if you knew very basic French, as I did due to studying it at school for five years. It was the case that I found reading French much easier than talking it due to being able to take your time pondering over written French instead of having it rifled at you in the spoken form at a million miles an hour, often impossible to understand. We managed to get a table in and around a large table of Brits who gave me a chuckle due to their Norman appearance of thick necks, pale skin, large heads with fair hair, often balding, that is unique. As opposed to olive skinned, dark-haired Celts for example. It’s what you see very clearly when you visit pubs in the UK. Ain’t that right, guv?

We settled in for a great feast. It doesn’t matter where you go in France when it comes to dining. Most of the time, the food is excellent but it’s the atmosphere, the great service, and the lovely French waiters and waitresses that make it such a memorable experience. Together with the idea that the very act of dining is something to be revered. We made a note of the dessert menu for later, since we were due back here towards the end of the week when the in-laws arrived in town. I found the waitress to be especially delightful due to her putting up with, so patiently, our fractured French. I was keen to sample more French wine on this trip due to having a nasty stomach bleed a few months before our last trip here. It meant that, on my doctor’s instructions, I was not allowed to drink wine or spirits. I mean... really... imagine coming to the south of France and not sampling the reds. I had stuck to drinking beer, which I did again tonight. However, the French red wine wasn’t going anywhere.   

At home, the wifey retreated upstairs while I finished off the Vietnam War epic. This time round, due to the healing properties of time, I found myself less upset at Ron Kovic’s personal suffering and was more easily able to digest the message of the film which had to do with the question of the absurdity of the Vietnam War. Everything is easier to understand in hindsight though. Later, I crawled up into the attic to examine the latest developments. It had over time largely been rebuilt by my wife’s Dad. It contained a dusty old bed, and with the skylight and a view of the stars, would be a great place to sleep.

Downstairs, I turned in, looking forward to a bike ride, perhaps, and a fresh day containing less jet lag.

FRIDAY 27 OCTOBER: DAY 5: VENDREDI

 We were out the front of the four-level house (attic included), saddling up on the bikes that were kept in the garage. This being my first ever bike ride in the south of France, I found myself standing there gawking at the incredible scenery and architecture in our street, pinching myself in order to awake from this incredible dream to find to my astonishment that this was not a dream. It was real. As we left the house on this sunny day, it was also to my astonishment that I came across a dead ginger cat lying in the gutter not far from the house. I took the time to have a good look at it. It was a boy bleeding from the mouth, eyes wide open, and appeared to have been hit by a car. I considered this strange, since a cat of this age would be used to taking care crossing the roads around here. Whatever the case, right next to our house, there was a dog and cat grooming shop. Probably as good a place as any to drop off a deceased cat, I figured. They probably have contacts with vets who are able to deal with it, I thought. I picked up the weighty ginger, conscious of my own seventeen year old ginger cat with whom I was so close, and placed him on the mat out the front of the shop with sadness. We then set off down the street.

The bike I was riding was an old English Raleigh road bike, which, compared to my wide-tyred mountain bikes of the past I found hard to control. The tiny hard seat was killing my arse cheeks within five minutes and I realised that this was not going to change. The big test though, and indeed worry, was whether my dodgy pelvis, out of whack for several years, would cope? I reflected, as we worked our way towards the Carcassonne Road, that there was only one way to find out. We reached the main road and the time had finally come, after decades of driving on the left, where it was necessary to concentrate on right-hand side positioning on the road or footpath. This was something that did not come naturally. A small distance down the road, we arrived at the Quillan-Limoux rugby ground, an important place to me now since I had been wearing their cap for the past year, bought at Tito’s pub in the square. As we hopped off the bikes to have a look around, my thighs were afire after more than a year of no weights thanks to my crook back and pelvis. I’m nowhere near fit enough, I thought. We saddled up and rode up and down a few light hills for another twenty minutes until we arrived at the Monoprix shopping centre. I had worn an empty pack on my back as we were going to stock up, but first, the café next door would provide our first real serve of excellent French cuisine, and for me, French beer. What a pleasure to be back sitting in a cute French restaurant / café eating Fresh local produce and sipping on a gigantic Pelforth beer. I was happy as a leprechaun full of Guinness as we wandered the aisles of Monoprix. In France, a first priority is always to stock up on the prime quality personal hygiene products, so I was off to that area before checking out the clothes, all ordinary and way too conservative for my tastes. It is a fact, as my wifey had explained, that the French maintained a very bland palette when it came to fashion and clothes. The French, on the whole, and as opposed to the chic and glamorous fashion shows we are exposed to back home, actually dress in basic colours. There is, in particular, and as opposed to American, UK, and Australian culture, absolutely no words on their clothing. No English slogans, or in French for that matter, or wording on their T-shirts or hoodies. It’s a basic, bland palette, which, apart from Paris perhaps, contains no ripped jeans. Their jeans are generally a basic blue, together with sneakers of either local or American western brands. When you return home, you do notice very much the amount of wording, slogans, and insignias we place on our clothing. So, as I remembered now, I probably wouldn’t be purchasing any clothes in France, unless in Paris, so I made my way to the “alcool” aisle.

This is where it becomes incredibly frustrating, and indeed anger generating, being an Australian. It ain’t no fun having French alcohol prices rammed down your gob. Unlike Australia, the French take their grog seriously so that it remains extremely accessible and cheap to purchase. I perused the shelves to find a large bottle of Jim Beam going for sixteen euros ($25), now costing close to $50 in Australia, bottles of local red wine five euros, half bottles of spirits 4.90 euros ($8), selling for $25 in Australia, and of course 500 ml cans of beer for 2 euros a can ($3.30) but costing up to $30 for a six pack in Australia as opposed to $12 here. The fact of the matter is that there is very little government tax on alcohol in France and this is also the case in pubs and bars where, across the counter, beer is so cheap. Naturally, it is important that the world-famous wine industry, especially in the south of France, is not penalised by gigantic taxes. It’s a lesson that Australia needs to learn, not only in relation to alcohol, but right across the board in all facets of business and life. It is possible to get a large pint of Pelforth in France for less than six euros (less than $9 in Australia) where beer in Australia now costs upwards of fifteen dollars per glass thanks to the Labor government’s continual increase in excise on all alcohol every few months, especially when it comes to beer. So, I stood there seething with smoke coming out of my ears in the knowledge that this was a prime example of Labor in Australia’s lie that they were the representatives of ordinary people when the opposite on all fronts is actually the case.  

I collected an assortment of beer and grabbed a mug with a tiger on it on the way out to keep in the kitchen and, along with an assortment of provisions which the wifey had collected, shoved it all in my pack, and we set off on our bikes for home.

At home, I found to my great happiness that, after cooling off, my lower back and pelvis seemed to be functioning and well. What this indicated to me was that, after so many years of locking my pelvis continually, together with great pain, what I was now doing in terms of rehab exercises was, for the first time, working. We watched a bit of Inspector Morse and had a good feed and hit the sack. I lay there thinking about the fate of the poor ginger cat. There was a fine line between the fragility of life and death.

 SATURDAY 28 OCTOBER: DAY 6: SAMEDI

I woke up happy in the knowledge that tonight was the rugby World Cup Final and I would be watching it in France. At 10.30am, we boarded the bus to Limoux where the train would transport us through the rustic, fertile, and sumptuous vineyards of the countryside to the historic city of Carcassonne, a medieval town of great beauty. We had visited last time but had neglected attending the main attraction. The main attraction was known as “La Cite”, the famous ancient medieval castle. As we departed the train station, it was apparent that the wifey was coming down with something and was not feeling too good. There was the usual sore throat, sniffles, and feeling like shite, so we made our way to the beautiful town square for petit dejeuner of bangers and mash and flamed grilled king prawns. It was getting warm, so we stocked up on a few soft drinks and more water and began the half hour walk to the chateau, realising that today they were running a half marathon in the town. As we crossed the bridge, I noticed a girl sitting on the old stone wall in a pair of Blundstones, the Tasmanian boots I was wearing on and off, taking great care as she painted her take on the river, which shone brightly in the sun. The runners ran puffed and bedraggled around the corner onto the bridge while we continued on down the street, arriving at the base of a steep climb that was the hilly walk all the way to the entrance to the chateau. As we climbed the hill, the wifey was feeling worse, out of breath, and getting a bit faint, though stated she would make it up there. We took our time and entered a small side gate that was obviously not the main entrance after having wandered off onto a goat track at the side of the castle. We entered to find that the castle, historically significant with its Cathar history, epic, and imposing, was rather touristy. Inside its grand ancient walls were reams of cheap and nasty tourist shops full of junk, though the cafes and bars remained a high point as usual, replete with superb food, beer and wine. The whole place was bustling with activity due to school holidays. The wife was by now feeling very ordinary and in need of a good, long sit down, so we wound our way through the crowded, winding narrow streets to the centre of the action where we deposited ourselves in the café of our choice on a raised balcony for a cuppa and biscuit. I left the better half to rest and went for a wander around the castle environs to find not a lot an offer. It really was the incredible construction of the building itself that was the masterpiece on offer here. It wasn’t long before, due to the oncoming virus, we decided to call it quits. On the way out, I was fortunate to find a shop with some decent stuff on offer, leaving with a few mementos. We said our goodbyes via the impressive main entrance to find a fleet of buses engaged for the day and stopped to take the obligatory pics on a bridge across the moat. It was time to hit our favourite shop.

In the main street off the huge town square that contains an extraordinary array of quintessential French cafes, we introduced ourselves to Monoprix, the site of many products I had bought last year that had lasted me an entire year’s worth of shaving bliss. However, the purpose of our stop here was not about my needs, which were simple. No, the wifey had many rituals to perform here for her pleasure. Things which she had waited a year to perform. So I headed off in the direction of the personal hygiene section to see what they had on offer. Naturally, once again, the smell of the hair products were glorious and to my liking, as was the replenishment of the shaving cream I had come so accustomed to using. Once your skin begins to see the benefits of the low PH, moisturising lotions, both for shaving and otherwise, there is no turning back, I’m afraid. As the wifey did her thing, the visit here was very pleasing for me and my hair. We shoved the various products obtained, including provisions for dinner, into my pack and on the way out had a conversation with a Canadian to whom, out of polite conversation, I remarked what a big fan of Neil Young I was.

‘He’s just a real oddball,’ he replied.

You could probably say the same about yourself, I thought, as we made our way out, heading for the train station.

The train from Carcassonne led us back through the distinctive wineries on each side of us as we went. It is possible to see with your own eyes the reason why the wine is so spectacular in this part of the world. It has to do with the Mediterranean climate, naturally, but it’s the distinct colour of the soil that is the give-away. The wineries, full of expansive vines, took on their own magnificence in the fading dusk light. Upon arrival at the Quillan bus terminus, I was amused to see my friend Alain Prost, the reckless speedster of a bus driver who had caused our belongings to fly from one end of the bus to the other as he sped around the Le Mans track of his mind, upon our arrival last year. There he was standing next to a bus sucking on a cigarette getting ready for his next fastest lap to Perpignan. At the house, the wifey was starting to feel the full effects of the flu. I had a lie down on the couch for an hour, seriously needing a sleep myself, but was up and running again trying my best to psych myself up for the rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand. It was tempting to pass out after a long day but I knew that if I missed this game I would always regret it, so I dressed for the rising cold and headed to the pub on the square.

Tito’s Glacier bar was packed full of Kiwis and Brits who love and live for rugby. I have had a love – hate relationship with rugby union for many years, being subject to the rampant elitism of the rugby playing GPS private schools in Brisbane upon moving there at the age of 16, where I found that both rugby and rowing really rubbed me up the wrong way. It was a long way from my upbringing behind the goal posts at the MCG sitting with the Tiger Army or joining the mob in Bay 13 at the same venue in the same place during the cricket season in Melbourne. Having had that kind of egalitarian upbringing, it was pretty well impossible to adapt to this repugnant elitist existence in Brisbane. I now know that the extent of the repugnance I felt towards these elitist private school, narrow-minded chaps was not only a result of my environmental upbringing but that it was firmly implanted in my Irish and southern suburbs of Brisbane DNA. However, having spent almost the last twenty years back in Melbourne and having now lived through three Richmond Premierships, I found myself old and wise enough to enjoy the international nature of rugby union without getting worked up. It can probably be said that I am now gaining some sort of karmic resolution to all the pain I experienced back then and making the most of my knowledge of rugby union, most importantly overseas, having played this great international game for three years in Queensland.

The bar was packed and it was not easy to get a seat but I wriggled my way into a spare high chair at the back of the bar with a great view of the TV screen and of the Kiwis and Brits in front of me. I have to say I did share their excitement being here tonight. I had made it my business to view the inspiring film “Invictus” before leaving Australia. The story of Nelson Mandela’s election as President of South Africa after having spent thirty years in prison and his subsequent involvement in helping the Springboks win the World Cup in 1995. The game turned out to be a close one and there was a quiet, nervous energy emanating from the Kiwis, together with solid interest from the many Brits. It appeared I was the only person in the bar supporting the Springboks, so I kept my mouth fookin shut, as they like to say in Belfast, apart from sucking on my pint of Pelforth. It went down to the wire but the Bokkes prevailed as they should have, being in my humble opinion, the best outfit in this World Cup by far. During the game, and at all other times for that matter, Tito let his cat sit up on top of the cash register underneath a ceiling adorned, from one end to the other, in rugby scarves from all over the world.

The two pints of Pelforth I had downed during the game had me beat. After a very long and fulfilling day of which only dreams are made of, I walked home and crashed out in France.

SUNDAY 29 OCTOBER: DAY 7: DIMANCHE

I woke up with the flu, the wifey, who had been battling it for the past two days, having passed it on to me. At first, I thought nothing of it for a couple of days but that was short lived and I gyrated down into a spiral of worry due to past experiences of illness overseas, which is actually one of life’s greatest challenges. The challenge is, as opposed to home, is knowing no-one well enough to really take care of you and treat you, together with not having access to the required medications that you need to get better, including antibiotics, and for asthma sufferers, puffers. Having to keep going on your trip, no matter how bad you’re feeling. In 1991, while backpacking around the UK and doing some family history for my adoptive Dad on The Isle of Wight in the English Channel, I became very ill with the flu, which transmuted into bad asthma. At the time, I was not even aware that I suffered from asthma, something that came on much later on in life after the 1989 spinal fiasco.

We made a brief reference to becoming ill in 1989 above. This period of our life, which endured for fourteen years in all, became the bedrock of our lifetime experience and contributed in whole to who we then became.

 Unfortunately, due to the very large cyst growing inside my head, which I was born with and which grew with me, something I was, naturally, completely in ignorance of, due to a largely normal and very productive life up until the fiasco occurred. Due to the building pressure inside my head caused by the cyst, on the day before Easter 1989, it was the case that my spine collapsed onto my spinal cord. The large cyst had created a build-up of spinal pressure down into my cervical neck. There began my new life, along with the cyst in my head, undiagnosed by completely uncaring, elitist Brisbane doctors, one of whom, neurologist, barked at me and my mother that I was malingering. The cyst was eventually diagnosed ten years later in 1999 due only to me fighting incredibly hard at every step of the way for an x-ray of my head, since I knew in myself that something was wrong there. My spinal condition went undiagnosed until 2001, due to the uncaring, elitist Brisbane doctors produced by its elitist and myopic GPS private school system, which, with its rugby and rowing mentality, is no doubt the most narrow-minded and intolerant pond of scum in Australia, possibly the world. However, you have to live it and experience its small-mindedness built entirely upon its homegrown insecurity, yourself in order to understand this kind of inbred mentality. In 1990, I found myself down at Centrelink at Toowong where I was eventually deposited onto sickness benefits and then the Disability Support Pension in 1991, for the rest of my life. Such was the nature of my disability which I have carried now for thirty-five years. And, as such, it has most definitely been The Road Less Travelled for me.

I proceeded briefly travelling back to Melbourne in the early nineties to attend the football in winter at the MCG, staying, or you could say living, with my best friend from school and his girlfriend who was to become his wife in 1992. In 1991, after being invited to stay at a hospital with my other best friend who was working in the East End at a hospital in Grays, I decided to make this one-off trip to the UK. I thought it was possible. The point of the story is that with this spinal condition came a compromised diaphragm and a weak set of lungs, together with the onset of asthma and ultimately pneumonia twice in the mid-nineties. In 1991, I became so ill overseas that, eventually, I found myself holed up in the freezing cold and wet weather in a hotel in Renfrew Street, Glasgow where I decided to pull the plug and fly home to Australia. And the funny thing about this is that, spending a few nights in Los Angeles on the way through laying over, it just happened to be forty degrees in L.A. at the time with bushfires raging in Orange County. All of a sudden, just like that, my flu cleared, my lungs dried out entirely, and I felt well again.

These are the multiplicities of precarious situations you may find yourself in while travelling overseas. Situations that are hugely challenging and which take you right out of your comfort zone, which travelling alone does anyway. This is the kind of scenario I was worried about. You could say, in today’s parlance, that when I became ill overseas, especially in cold weather, I was “triggered”.

On this occasion, I proceeded to ignore my condition and get stuck into cold showers again. Something I had begun in Melbourne’s cold winter a few months previously, together with jumping into the twelve degree waters of Port Phillip Bay. I was determined to beat the flu and not let it get the better of me this time but as the days passed, as usual, that was not to be the case. We decided to stay put for a couple of days, resting, and slipped what DVDs we had into the machine. I also had plenty to read, from a book on the Cathars in Languedoc and Occitane to a history of the world dedicated to certain countries. “The Book Thief” is a famous novel written by Markus Zusak. The film was sitting on the shelf. I knew nothing about it. We slipped it in and watched. A couple of cats from neighbouring houses were making their presence felt on our second storey balcony outside, perhaps in relation to the dead cat I had assisted, and my viewing was often interrupted to go and play with them. I passed on a message to them from my own 17 and 14 year old cats confident they would understand it.

I was straight away interested in The Book Thief since it began as a story about adoption. It turned out to be a wonderful tale about a lovely young girl played by French actress Sophie Nelisse, adopted by her new parents, Geoffrey Rush and Emilie Watson after her brother dies and her single mother becomes unable to raise her. That is the essence of adoption. Like me, the young girl knew she was adopted, since it is much worse not knowing and then having this news broken to you later on in life, especially in adulthood, since that kind of radical news has the capacity to rip someone psychologically in half. Geoffrey Rush played a beautifully sensitive man who did his utmost to look after the girl and ravish her with love, which was magnificent in itself in total contrast to the surrounding environment where the Nazis where marching into towns and taking over, bullying everyone, and persecuting and killing Jews and everyone else in their evil path. In the end, it was a touching and magnificent film, entirely capable of dragging you in and taking your mind off reality, the reason so many of us love film. I made a mental note to obtain the book.

We made our way through town on a mild, sunny afternoon that contained just a hint of the freezing conditions ahead as the year progressed towards Christmas, until we found ourselves at the bridge at the end of the main street. The story of “Pont Suzanne” posted for public consumption on the bridge relays the story of the glory days of Quillan when the town was thriving and inhabited by bustling, employed workers. There was a prosperous hat factory directly over the bridge on the other side of the Aude River. The owner of the factory decided, back in the 1930s, to use his own money to build the bridge directly over the river with a view to obtaining easy access to the railway station on the main street of town. By doing this, he would be able to transport his hats to the railway station directly down the main street rather than having to go the long way around, circumnavigating the back of the river, to get to the station. These days, the factory is gone, having been entirely demolished. As such, the major business of the small township disappeared, in the same way we suppose, as the mines in northern England all closed. The end result was a town devoid of its main industry and purpose, hence today’s population consisting of retailers, a few hoteliers and restauranteurs, and a large contingent of both unemployed drifters and retired immigrants from the UK without whom the town would probably die a slow death. Since the English, Irish, Australian and New Zealanders are the ones investing their money, slowly rebuilding the beauty of the old French dwellings here. The wifey’s old man has slowly been doing this himself and what interests me are the exposed beams, walls, and foundations, some of which have been there for hundreds of years. This is of course, one of the grand differences between the new world in which we live and the old world. Imagine renovating an old house with beams and stone walls that date back to the 13, 14, 15 or 16 hundreds.

We made our way along the river, having crossed the rubble of the old hat factory. The river was flowing well down from the surrounding hills, a noisy torrent, though at the same time, soothing and calming. The thought occurred to me that it would be a great thing to live next to the River Aude as its soothing flow gently escorted you into sleep at night.

No matter we feel while travelling, due to the strange times spent on this planet in the nineties, every day travelling overseas is an immaculate blessing.

Feeling crappy. Dinner, TV, reading, and bed.  

MONDAY 30 OCTOBER: DAY 8: LUNDI

There was not a lot to report since we were both now dealing with the flu and I was hoping that it wouldn’t move to my chest or turn into serious asthma, which was often the case. The good news was that, on our big first trip in 2012, we learned a very important lesson when the wifey became very ill. There was no doubt that, Covid or no Covid, they sure knew how to deliver a serious dose of the lugi in the northern hemisphere. The lesson learned was that we would not be so silly as to travel anywhere without a packet each of antibiotics. I also always made sure that I had access to very strong antibiotics in the form of Flagyl, used for my diverticular infections of the bowel, and which can be used as a general strong anti-infection agent. Naturally, the problem remains that the flu being a virus means that it’s always just a waiting game. I also made sure I travelled with Ventolin and also a much stronger puffer. All of this enabled us to relax and rest easy.

We cleaned up in the morning at the house in order to move down the road since the family was due to arrive tonight. It was better, as all families know, not to cram the family into a small area, which meant preparing to move to the Gite just down the road, an Airbnb that we enjoyed last year run by two amiable gay Brits. The Gite was probably an easier space for us to stay in, being one level rather than three levels with an attic, and in that respect, the less steep flights of stairs the merrier, and it was ever so compact! as the Poms would say. After cleaning up and hauling our accumulated gear down the street, there wasn’t much fuel left in the tank. I crashed on the couch for a while with my book. There was no French TV but, once again, a DVD player with a few goodjuns on offer. I started with Johnny Depp and The Ninth Gate.

The family were due to arrive in town at around 8PM, though due to the usual “Flix” bus fiasco out of Barcelona, running late, losing wheels, busy removing criminal immigrants from the bus at the French border, or whatever, the bus ran late and they missed the connecting train from Perpignan. They decided to stay the night in Perpignan, advising us that there was only one restaurant open in Quillan on a Monday evening. We hit the Pizzeria restaurant and I was thinking in terms of a take-away joint with metal tables and chairs, to find yet another very respectable, slightly up-market joint. It appeared that the usual semi-dilapidated take-away pizzerias of Australian style did not exist here. No, it was always the full dining experience around here which included an aperitif, entrée, main, dessert, together with a bottle or large carafe of wine, and then coffee! This was, naturally, exactly what was occurring all around us. I ordered a small carafe of house red, served chilled out of a barrel, and we stuck to a main and a desert being the humble Aussies we were. At the end of the meal, as we got up to leave, the owner asked how our meal had been.

‘Manifique’, I managed.

‘Parfait,’ he said, correcting me.

I liked the way the locals always helped you with their language for the next time you attempted to mutter something incomprehensible.

We enjoyed a charming walk along the river back to the Gite. It was starting to get quite cool now at night and there was no doubt that the cold winter was on its way down here in the foothills of the Pyrenees. I curled up in bed with my book in the hope that we would start to feel more energised sooner rather than later.

TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER: DAY 9: MARDI

Although a real struggle with illness, this day proved to be a real highlight of the trip.

I awoke feeling very sick indeed. The father-in-law, Rod, and his partner, Trisha, arrived at 9.30am from Perpignan, said father-in-law, who runs marathons and is continually shimmying up the local mountain here, was full of his usual endless energy. Rod wandered off having instant business to attend to and Trisha, wifey and I headed to the sunny square where the café was now open again after the end of school holidays. We sat at a small table with our teas and coffees, the medieval castle hovering over us, a Cathar inspired reminder of the Truth. That is exactly what’s missing in Australia, I thought, as I sipped my long black. No evidence anywhere of ancient monuments to the Truth. We retreated to the Gite, feeling ordinary already, where I watched an old Dave Allen DVD and began “Rocketman”. Later, back at the house, Rod was planning some of the work he intended do on this trip, including stripping back the ceiling beams to their natural state, a project he had already started to great aesthetic effect last year. We had had a good chat with our English neighbours, Ian and Pat, from across the street while staying in the house. They had emigrated from Bournemouth just before Brexit occurred and therefore were able to live full-time in France while their daughter had moved to Queensland to her great satisfaction. Ian had been restoring an outside beam of the three-storey house, though they lived only on the first floor. Since Rod and Trish had now arrived, they invited us all in for a cuppa and a chin wag.

After a discussion about the south coast of England, Cornwall, and Portsmouth, where I had viewed both the historic Lord Nelson’s “Victory” naval vessel and the Mary Rose, what followed was something that will stay in my mind for a long time. For the past six or seven years, Rod had been slowly and meticulously restoring this old house to perfection. A builder by trade, he had removed an entire ceiling in the newly renovated five-star kitchen and replaced it with glass. This was possible because there was a gap in the architecture allowing for light to penetrate the otherwise dark first floor of the house, even though the back of the house continued up three floors where other owners resided. In the lounge room, he had stripped centuries of accumulated facades off the internal walls to expose the original stone, or what could more rightly be called rock walls, which dated back to the sixteen hundreds. The enormous lounge room with its stone walls provided a view through large glass French doors out onto a deck Ian had built over the Aude River, which trickled away in its mellifluous way down below. The main bedroom, also with a new spacious window installed, provided a view of the Aude and its beautiful surroundings, floating ducks included, from the bed where they ate breakfast each morning. The main bedroom’s stunning accoutrement was a brand new ensuite also built by Ian. The rest of the house allowed for a couple of bedrooms, together with another newly built bathroom fitted out with magnificent brass fittings which matched the history and tone of the house. There was also a kind of tiny closet bedroom where kids could camp out easily enough in bunks.

We wandered back into the lounge area where Ian explained some of the major problems he had encountered when it came to the ancient plumbing both in relation to the main bathroom and the kitchen, all of which he found very entertaining. All the original floorboards had been cut back and polished, a new cement floor shining in the kitchen where he had really gone to work on the installation of state of the art appliances, since wife Pat was an excellent cook from the north of England. This was a truly remarkable and mind-blowing effort when it came to renovation, I thought, compared to the hundreds of renovations I had seen. The funniest thing about it was that none of this work of art could be seen from the street. Ian explained that one of the most important aspects of living in these beautiful old French houses was ensuring that there was enough natural light entering the building, otherwise the cold and claustrophobia could make life hard to bear. On this subject, father-in-law Rod had already gone to reasonable lengths installing sky lights in the attic and had also made some headway removing sections of the ceilings and installing glass blocks in their place. It was also necessary to instal windows and glass French doors in order to allow as much light to filter in as possible from external windows. I was learning all about architectural matters the import of which we, as a general rule, did not need to worry about down in Australia due to the abundance of light.

We left Ian and Pat’s remarkable house with the feeling that it was possible to engineer the perfect existence in the south of France on one level alone. It sure beat continually walking up and down four flights of stairs between basement and garage, lounge room, bathroom, and bedrooms. We had arranged to have dinner at the house but neither of us were well and the oldies were now dead on their feet with jet lag again ravaging them into submission, so we returned willingly to our Gite. While watching a bit of TV and mucking around, we ignored Halloween door-knockers, though there were not too many in this small town. It had been a quiet day but most definitely an extraordinary day in Paradise.

WEDNESDAY 1 NOVEMBER: DAY 10: MERCREDI

We were feeling slightly more ourselves this morning after a long sleep. Rod and Trisha arrived after breakfast (petit dejeuner) to accompany us to the mid-week market. The market may provide a few handy odds and ends but is generally full of rot, as is the case with many markets all over the world. I could see no sign of any small, stove-top Italian coffee makers, which I was hoping for. The clothing section offered no sign of life so we left empty handed. In the main street in autumn, Antipodean eyes could easily sense the autumn weather turning towards a northern hemisphere winter on this first day of November. As opposed to the ridiculous celebration of “Halloween” now in the southern hemisphere due to pressure from greedy retailers like Woolworths, Halloween marks the start of the northern death. That is, as opposed to the southern hemisphere where autumn begins late, in the northern climbs it starts early.

It is a fact that you can see right before your eyes that winter up here in the northern reaches of the earth begins at the start of November, even around the Mediterranean in the south of France where the freezing wind, known as the Mistral, can slam down from the north east all the way from Russia through Germany through the Rhone Valley and all the way to the Cote d’Azur and the beaches of the Mediterranean. The Mistral, increases in force as it makes its way down through the narrow tunnel of the Rhone Valley so that, by the time it reaches the south of France, a jet effect may increase the velocity of the wind to 130km per hour. This cold wind can blow for several days at a time at an average speed of 75 km per hour.  Already, it was damp and cold on this very day and it became evident to me that being stuck at the foot of the Pyrenees in the freezing cold, trying to heat a three-storey house during the Mistral in winter was perhaps not for everyone and certainly a vastly different experience to summer on the Cote d’Azur or the Costa del Sol. They don’t call it the beginning of the “dead season” for nothing and celebrating Halloween in the southern hemisphere was, of course, an absolute absurdity, lacking any true meaning. However, as I thought about this while the weather continued to deteriorate, my mind always returned to the sad situation the education system in Australia now found itself in. Nothing but a Marxist’s Paradise for Stalinist morons and apparatchiks containing feminist idiots and their harem of male eunuchs bereft of any intelligence, rationalism, or reason. So, what else would you expect.

It was time for a cold and flu break back at our place avec The Ninth Johnny Depp Gate together with coffee before heading off on another walk with Rod to the other side of town over the railway tracks, the home of the local French housing estates and the high school. The mission for this afternoon was to view his friend Mona’s classic Citroen deux cheveau (2CV) car. 

For those not in the know, this is the famous French car that was produced as an economic vehicle that came off the production line between 1948 to 1990. The car contains an air-cooled engine and, like many French cars over the years, including my own Renault 12, which I proudly drove around while at university, is front wheel drive. The 2CV, as was Citroen generally, was renowned for its brilliance in innovative engineering, particularly Citroen’s development of hydraulic suspension which changed suspension in all vehicles worldwide forever. Citroen’s hydraulic suspension also became an integral part of building engineering on large scale projects worldwide. 

We wandered back through the bus terminal and crossed the overgrown, unused train tracks, since for some very sad reason, those in charge had decided not to run trains down here anymore. A picturesque walk found us climbing a steep set of stairs that led us from the street up to the housing estate where Mona lived. Her apartment was small, though tidy and clean, providing an astonishing view of the surrounding mountains around the town, that were snow-capped in winter, giving us a good idea of how struggle-street lived in France, which wasn’t as bad as it could have been. We walked the bad streets on “the other side of the tracks” through town to a storage facility which acted as a garage full of cars, made our way inside, and there she was. Mona’s pride and joy, her “baby”, as she liked to call it.

It was a classic indeed. A late fifties model purchased by her in 1982 and the last of that design to come off the production line. Rod showed me under the hood and then showed me how to start her up. He took the driver’s seat and revved her up prodigiously as I sat in the passenger seat playing with the cute and possibly unique fifty/fifty split windows and other unique features, including the choke under the steering wheel. Memories began to emanate of my precious 1970s yellow Renault which I saw and fell in love with instantly in a car yard at Mt. Gravatt in Brisbane a couple of weeks before starting at the University of Queensland. There is no escaping the reality that these French vehicles are truly beautifully made, comprising a very simple yet functional design. In fact, my Renault, amongst other refinements, possessed the most succulent real leather seats, front and back, the leather getting softer and more pliable with age, which added an element of invigoration when my girlfriend and I skipped lectures to have it off in the back seat of my car, the true leather so comfortable on my buttocks as she climbed on top of me in her light summer blouse and 1980s court shoes. Yes, it was either in the back seat of the car, down by the uni river bank, or in the dark laneway outside her house, since, like so many young teenagers, we had nowhere else to go. I hauled my mind back to the present for fear of producing a lump in the front of my pants, examined the car some more with a grin on my face, and we exited the garage, said bye to Mona, and headed back over the train line to the swanky side of town.

Today, as well as being the true start of winter, was All Saints’ Day, the day in the Christian Church when all saints, known and unknown, who have reached heaven, are celebrated. So, it was a great idea to take a walk through the cemetery next to the river where, on this day, flowers are placed at grave sites of loved ones. There were many families and relatives in the cemetery doing tidying up work on the graves of their loved ones. The bunches of flowers left in honour of relatives were magnifique. Towards the end of the long walk through the cemetery, Rod came across someone he knew. An old bloke riding an old bike. The old fella, who was in his mid-seventies, told us he was visiting his family. He and Rod had a chat until, as the old bloke set off on his bike, Rod hit on him on the back, something of a goodbye pat on the back, but with such force that the old fella spun off the gravel track crashing into a grave site. Somehow, he stayed upright and just managed to keep going. Rod was already off, having begun his next marathon, and saw none of this. It occurred to me that Rod’s often over the top exuberance could have resulted in the old fella smashing his head on a grave site after being belted off his bike by an Australian, in which case he would only have had to travel about fifty metres down the cemetery path in order to join the rest of his dead family members. As Rod sailed off into the sunset, I took an exit out of the cemetery and began heading for home. Food, DVD, book, night night.

THURSDAY 2 NOVEMBER: DAY 11: JEUDI

Awoke (Australian brainwashed and anxious Millennial idiot once told me…) feeling ordinary still, spluttering and coughing up shite. Rod was over very early again, which is something he enjoys while we are here though it can be extremely annoying and I had to be very patient with him, as everyone does. I had learned recently that Rod was actually on the spectrum and did not fully relate to people’s emotional cues, as is the case with so many mental illness clients I dealt with at work. It was only to be dealt with for a short time, so patience was always paramount. He was trying to light the stove gas top with the Airbnb lighters that were not working and was adamant he was going to get matches from his house. I said “ca va”, it’s all okay, we won’t be using the stove top again” and texted wifey, who was out, to come and rescue me. The typical family scenario, I supposed. While this was happening, the door knob on the door to the living room happened to fall off, which was something else Rod needed to fix. I found myself floundering, as it was very difficult showering, using the bathroom, and getting dressed in a tiny space, while wandering around half naked in the process, while someone else is piss farting around when they shouldn’t even be there. This was of course the reason we moved to the Gite in the first place. Rod had probably already run half a marathon up the Pyrenees by 8am, I thought. Trisha and the wifey arrived to escort Rod back to the house.

The rest of the morning was spent loading up on coffee and hauling ourselves into a manageable state, given we were under the weather. We decided to try somewhere new for lunch. In Australia, lunch does not usually constitute an extraordinary affair. A sandwich usually does the trick. The French, however, knock off at midday for two hours. Everything closes between midday and 2pm, apart from the restaurants and cafes where the large lunches occur. We were now used to going to the supermarket or the pharmacy or wherever else before midday if we needed anything of importance, since after midday there was the mandatory two-hour delay. We arrived at the Terminus Hotel, opposite the bus station, naturally, where the servings were enormous and exquisite. I ordered a verre (glass) of house red to find there were no glasses of wine served. Instead, as I probably should have known by now, we received the cutest and most delightful half carafe of truly excellent tasting wine you could imagine, which equated to at least two glasses of wine for the price of one combined with the pleasant mid-afternoon inebriation to boot. How anyone was capable of going back to work for the afternoon after their usual bottle of wine at lunch was beyond us. Local produce was always sourced here so the wine I was enjoying was no doubt sourced from a winery just down the Carcassonne Road. It really is not possible to explain how the experience of dining, including wholesome, fresh local produce forms part of the glorious tapestry of French country life.

On wobbly feet and full of gunk and phlegm, it was now time to inspect a new pharmacy we learned about yesterday for purposes of fresh Ventolin and any other kind of over the counter medications we could muster. Mission accomplished, I set off around town to check out the reading glasses situation at other pharmacies and venues after Trisha had lent me her reading glasses, which seemed to be an improvement on mine. My first port of call was the combined supermarket, newsagent, bottlo where I purchased a first-class pair of Zippo reading glasses last time. Yes, the makers of the famous Zippo lighters we have all used as smokers at some stage of life have branched out into other healthier products. No luck this time round. I made a note to stop by on the way back for a couple of cans of beer, if I could stomach it tonight. The other two pharmacies in town, one located back over in the mean streets across the railway line, were disappointing. A new pair of two-plus reading glasses would have to wait. Walk home, and feeling rather philosophical, I dropped in to the church for one final prayer and mooch about, since our time in this divine little place was coming to an end. It was sad to leave again and, as I sat in the pew of this historic ancient Cathar relic of worship, now much maligned by our fast, secular society in the West, I was left with thoughts of wanting to stay on here for a much longer visit, in the form of months rather than weeks, in the future. Living so far away from historic civilisation way Down Underneath the rest of the world, once realised, is hard. Australia will always be home, as Peter Allan sang, but to branch out into the rest of the world for a certain period of your life, several months or years, was probably, or should form somehow, part of the Bucket List. I sat in the pew for a while considering this, as though forming a part of a request for advice from God. Something I often did. Long overseas stays were easier said than done though, I considered finally.

Out in the square, I bought my two cans of beer and sat down on the bench outside the hotel where I had viewed the rugby World Cup, staring out at the castle in front of me. Due to illness, I had not managed to climb further up the hill located behind the castle, something I had intended, along with bathing in the cold waters of the Aude River. I had planned a half-day climb up that mountain but it had not been possible. Plans have to change, unfortunately, when you find yourself crook. The weather was deteriorating again with a light rain beginning to fall, so I retreated to our place just around the corner to read and doze for the rest of the afternoon with a box of tissues.

The last farewell to this beautiful place of enchantment involved dinner with Rod and Trisha at the pizza place next to the cinema where the wifey and I had dined earlier on in the week. I never did get to the cinema, I regretted, as we entered. Tonight, it was entrecot (steak) all round for us all. After such a big fat lunch, I was stymied but managed a superb ice-cream Sunday for dessert and as I ate more divine local food, I was left thinking how on earth do the French manage to eat so much for lunch, followed a few hours later by the full several course dinner? How do they stuff so much food and wine into themselves and yet remain so trim, compared to other Western countries whose inhabitants are obese? They call it “the French paradox”. The answer lay in the Atkins theory of eating or dieting. Simply eating great, wholesome foods that are all natural foods in themselves, rather than being processed in any way. No added sugar is the major factor. And nothing processed. The food is whole food. The resveratrol in the red wine also helps in many ways. The waitress, who served us last time, was a jolly young femme fatale. Someone who you would actually miss as being a regular part of your dining experience. The ambience was fading away now as French and British punters rolled home. We said our goodbyes to all the Brits who were dining there tonight and saw Rod and Trisha back to the house in the light rain. I managed some TV at home base Gite with a can of beer and tissues.

We were ready for the next leg of our journey and to see what it would bring.   

 FRIDAY 3 NOVEMBER: DAY 12: VENDREDI

We moseyed on over to the bus terminus where I had a look around the beauty of this magical place for the last time, wondering when we would return again. Possibly next year. It was hard to say given the always challenging state of my health. As I sat in the bus, I did know one thing, and that was we had not spent enough time here. This week, Rod had been encouraging, even urging us, to take a longer stay. He had said on our walk around the cemetery that we were ready. It was, of course, easier said than done. The wifey had a solid job. I still worked when I could. And we had three beautiful animals in our care, all of whom we loved. Leaving for months at a time was logistically possible but extremely difficult to organise, which left me thinking, as we pulled out of the terminus, that the answer lay in renting our house out and doing a longer two or three year stint where we could live in the UK on my wife’s British passport using that as a base. Although it didn’t seem to bother Rod, who spent much of his time running and doing marathons, I personally found the long trips to and from Australia difficult. One of the problems with travelling during the cooler or cold northern months was the lugi. It would be so much easier travelling in summer. I tried to put these considerations to one side in the knowledge that, as you start to age, the whole concept of carpe diem becomes more significant in your life.

At Carcassonne, it was time to hit the platform convenience store and stock up on fun provisions. Tea and coffee, sandwiches, fancy boxed salads, chips and chocolate. Rod had advised me that it was a good idea to start reading French newspapers. It was true. I found it much easier to read French than speak it, although the only way to improve spoken language is to keep speaking it. I was happy that I had managed to put together a few sentences on this trip here and there and be understood by the locals. However, for a Bogan speaking Aussie, I had a long way to go.  

We jumped on the train to Toulouse for another whack in the face of magisterial southern French countryside, the beauty of which never ceased to astound. I grabbed a coffee from the cart and read a bit and soon we were transported into the outer regions of Toulouse. As we collected our gear and left the station and hopped in a taxi, it became obvious that this city was another aesthetic masterpiece, something of a mini Paris. They had recently enjoyed a major tourist boom here due to the rugby World Cup so things were looking smart. It’s was a cold day, though. At the hotel, the rooms were tiny, yet like Menton, very functional and well thought out in terms of maximising use of little space. There was just enough room for a double bed and a bathroom. It was a cheap joint, so we had a tiny room each. There was no time to waste in getting out and about, the wifey keen to do some shopping in a larger town. I threw my gear down on the bed and we were off.

What can be said about a place that you only visit for one afternoon and evening? Not much. The streets of Toulouse are remarkably perfect in that French way of seeing things from a historical and cultural perspective. The first port of call was a large Monoprix. I was looking to improve my wardrobe, once again, in a certain colour palette, so I tried on a mustard pair of jeans that seemed tres de rigour. In a crowded tiny fitting room where we had to line up for too long, I remembered that French clothes are generally way too small and built for lean frames and that it takes too long to find the right size compared to UK sizes. The same problem is found in Japan where clothes are designed for midgets. The wifey had collected an array of beauty prizes, so it was on down the mall in the light rain to Yves Rochet for a bottle of after shave, something I had been very patient with, applying the principle of delaying gratification, since I could have purchased it online after having been exposed to the unique scent last year. However, what’s the bloody point of doing that when you can experience the thrill of visiting the shop in France? It meant delaying my gratification for an entire year in order to get the twenty minute thrill of being served by an exquisite young French girl in unique surroundings. I suppose that’s what travel is all about. Outside, the weather was really starting to deteriorate, it was now very cold and wet, so it was time for a spot of afternoon tea.

We set off down the mall sizing up the many cafes until we found a charming establishment known as Chez Richard which offered the delicious mainstay French treats known as crepes and waffles which you will find at stalls all the way up the Champs Elysees. Replenishment complete, I was really starting to deteriorate myself, but it was onwards for more shopping, perhaps. There stood in front of us a magnificent historic building on a corner. In France, you will often find an incredible building standing at the bottom of a V where the streets branch off on either side of it forming a V shape. There stood Primark, a three storey shop that could not be ignored by any curious human. I had not been into Primark, otherwise known as Penny’s in Ireland, for about five years. It’s a store, at least in Eire, where the jeans fit me like a glove, as though I was indeed the model for the cut. This is also the case with Dunnes stores in Ireland. It’s the perfect fit. The wifey hit the women’s section and I headed upstairs. Yes, the greeny grey jeans I found fit me perfectly at a bargain price of sixteen euros. I could see the weather was getting pretty ordinary now and I was in need of a jumper. On a Friday night, the stock of this store had been absolutely ravaged to a pulp with only a few items left in L or XL. A warm fleecy blue hoody would do the job though.

At the check-out downstairs, up to a dozen lanes of registers were busy. We negotiated the long queue, and once through this customs-like arrangement, found ourselves standing at a set of grey aluminium doors that, when I pushed on them, would not open. I kept pushing on them but nothing was happening. It seemed to me that something was amiss. That’s when I noticed a round, green button on a post to my right. This must be it, I thought. This was our ticket to Open Sesame. I jammed my right palm into the button, and straight away, to my horror, a piercing alarm rifled through the store. It was very high pitched, extremely loud, and it occurred to me that I had set it off, though, at the same time, the grey metal doors swung open. All of a sudden, I was filled with the kind of guilt that soon transitioned into strong fear.

“I think you’ve set off the fire alarm,” the wifey stated.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

We took off like sprinters out of the blocks down the few stairs towards the street and I could see then that the actual entrance and exit to the store was about ten metres to my right. It was a large opening with dozens of people streaming in and out of it.

“Bloody hell,” I said, walking as fast as we could down the street, thoughts of policemen or security guards chasing us down filling up my head.

After a block or two, I realised that no-one was pursuing us. I had done a stupid thing and I could hardly believe what an idiot I had been. Perhaps it’s the case that you do stupid things sometimes when you’re out of your usual environment and out of your comfort zone, I pondered.       

We had made our great escape. We walked a few more blocks. Outside, the rain had stopped and it was ten degrees, though it would be much colder where we were heading. I put the mishap behind me. Despite our grand departure from Primark, I was pleased with my purchase. It’s not necessary to depart overseas with a suitcase full of warm clothes that you can buy once you’re overseas. Though purchasing new clothes, one of the great travelling pleasures, does mean having to dump some older items of clothing out of your suitcase as you go.

We were absolutely spent. The flu and the asthma were knawing at me. But we had to eat dinner. We returned to the hotel to drop our purchases off. I could have simply lay down there and then and crashed but it was better to eat now. We were straight back out the back door of the hotel to find a strip lined with plenty of gorgeous cafes, pubs, and restaurants. When you’re travelling sick, this is where the adrenaline kicks in. The sight of so many phantasmagorical eating and drinking establishments in a beautiful foreign town just seems to kick in so that even if you were on your last legs, you would stumble on in order to ingest that final meal or drink in an aesthetic heaven. We found an Irish pub where we could get a decent meal, or so we thought. The food being served looked a bit ordinary. We sought out a chicken curry from the menu but it was no longer on offer. I resorted to drinking a pint of Kilkenny, followed by a Paulaner Munich brew before we left for the Italian restaurant down the road. To our surprise, there was a stunning Japanese restaurant on the way. It’s always a good choice. Very clean surroundings. Tasty, wholesome food with rice. Here, it turned out to be mouth-watering teriyaki. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I could have slept for twelve hours but my alarm went off at 7AM.

SATURDAY 4 NOVEMBER: DAY 13: SAMEDI

A massive travel day that would hammer us down into the ground. We hitched a ride with a sturdy female cabbie to Toulouse airport. The duty-free department on the way out of France was packed with excellent products of the perfume, clothing, and alcohol kind. I was looking for some decent rugby World Cup merchandise but there was nothing except rugby balls so I decided to help myself to a cheap Toulouse T-shirt and scoured for decent grog. Since we were on our way to Belfast, I went for a half bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey since my days of knocking off entire bottles of whiskey were now over unless I wished to be comatose the next day. At the counter, the French woman asked me if I wanted her to speak in English. I said yes please. She read my boarding pass and put my two purchases through the scanner and was very rude in a condescending sort of way. She handed me the bag and I headed off. There is a French person who hates the English, I thought, since no doubt she thought I was English. We helped ourselves to breakfast in a café overlooking the tarmac and soon were called to board. It was to be a short flight to Heathrow where we would endure a five-hour layover, followed by the short flight to Belfast.

At Heathrow, I endured another small travelling snag. We were making our way through the customs area into the UK where we had to have our hand luggage (packs in our case) scanned through the machine, which means emptying all liquids out of your pack including water and anything else. Naturally, in my pack was the half bottle of Bushmills I had just purchased in Toulouse. I removed my duty-free purchases. The young Indian fellow instructed me that I was unable to bring that bottle of spirits through customs and that I could only do so if it were wrapped in a sealed bag upon purchase in Toulouse. I was dumbstruck. I told him that the woman in France had not bothered to put it in a sealed plastic bag.

“Yes, I’m afraid they do that to you on purpose sometimes,” he said.

A conversation ensued which involved this young customs lad telling me that it’s not an uncommon practice for the French not to cooperate unless you specifically request them to put the bottle of alcohol in a sealed bag. He told me that it was something they did on purpose since they thought it was funny and because they did not like anyone who was not French.

“I find that hard to believe,” I said to him.

“It’s unfortunate but I have to confiscate that,” he said.

I handed my prized bottle of Northern Irish Bushmills over to him and watched him place it in the rubbish bin behind him. I made my way through customs absolutely furious that anyone could do this and cursing the French bitch who had done me over. Soon enough, I found myself back in the frame of mind that says you live and you learn, especially while travelling.  

The five hour wait at Heathrow was a drag but it was good to be back. Our travel plans had included thinking about taking a quick cab ride up the road to the small town of Richmond where they filmed “Ted Lasso”. However, it was too much trouble exiting through customs into the UK to do that. There was the usual wander around Boots and the W.H. Smith book store but the books were total rubbish, which said a lot about the current state of intellectual affairs right now since there is only one thing that matters at the moment and that is being “carbon neutral”, the greatest lie ever perpetrated on humanity. Which meant the only relevant book I found was the “Surrounded by Idiots” book on how to manage difficult and conflicting personality types, but even that was commercialised broad-brush crap. We decided to have lunch in a massive eatery. There was a young couple sitting at the table beside us. The girl got up and disappeared and I could see the young fellow getting more and more distressed as time went by as she did not return. He addressed the waitress about going to look for her and got up and left. When they returned together, they did not say one word to each other in the hour we sat there next to them and I could tell the girl was very distressed, anxious, and worried. It was one of those very strange situations and I wondered if she was being escorted somewhere against her will because that is definitely how it seemed.

We went for a walk to find a peaceful “quiet” rest area overlooking the tarmac where you could stretch out in a hard chair with your legs up. I kicked my shoes off and read before going for another boredom induced wander through the duty-free area which caused my anger levels to rise as I thought about my bottle of Bushmills. We packed up and went to the toilet and made our way to the gate to find that the flight had been delayed for half an hour and we were forced to stand in a long queue without a suitcase to sit on. At this point, I felt so exhausted and worn out that I could have screamed so I decided to sit on the ground, like many others. After forty minutes pretty much lying there on the ground, we boarded with all the lovely Belfast people whose accent I adored. On the flight, the wifey was coughing profusely. I was in a coma listening to my iPod and feeling like shite, pleased that it was a very short flight. Upon landing, all the Belfast residents clapped.

The wifey’s best friend, Rooney, was waiting for us outside the Belfast City Airport. The best thing about landing in Belfast is that we often found ourselves at this Belfast City Airport, which is the domestic airport, since there is no need to go through customs when you are already in the UK at Heathrow. The wifey had met Rooney, known as “Roons”, while at university in Canberra. Roons’s Dad was a Belfast man, and had lived through a large part of the Troubles before he moved his family to Australia. Roons’s Dad had recently passed away. She had ultimately met and married a Belfast lad. This was our fourth visit to come spend time with them, first in the Belfast suburb of Newtownabbey and more recently in Glengormley where they now lived. We piled our gear into Roons’ Honda and were off. As we drove through Belfast city centre, I remembered our first trip when, on the way to their house and in fact in their street, the wifey did not have access to their house number except on her phone. We needed wi-fi for that, so we had been forced to drive all the way into the city to get access to wi-fi where we decided to frequent a pub near the city hall. The old fella sitting at the bar began talking to us and told us that seeing we were from Australia, we shouldn’t have any problems but “make sure you keep your mouth fooking shut” he had instructed. He had told us that if anyone from either side of the Belfast equation, either Catholic (Republican) or Protestant (Unionist) heard us “saying the wrong thing” then they would wait outside for us outside and then “get us”. That’s just how it is, he told us. This had been our very first experience of Belfast back in late 2012. On our second trip, we had stayed at the Hilton opposite St. George’s Market, which we enjoyed, before moving to Roon’s house. Our third trip involved staying at a delightful BnB, myself attending a jam packed Liverpool versus Manchester United football match at Robinson’s pub right opposite the infamous “Europa” Hotel (the sight of bombings during the Troubles) where I spent the night with a Dublin fellow whose wife had been out doing Christmas shopping. We got drunk together on many pints of Irish beer watching the football, before I stumbled home.

This time round we were a stone’s throw away from the city proper staying at a BnB in the beautiful St. Anne’s Square precinct opposite St. Anne’s Cathedral. Roons found a park in the multi-level car park above the square which was full of bars, cafes, and restaurants. At the door of our apartment, the wifey entered the lock code but the door refused to open. It seemed to me that something was missing. I said “why don’t you try adding a hash to the code”, since that is usually the way it worked. Sure enough, as I did this myself, it was hey presto and the door opened to reveal a spacious unit with a view directly over the magnificent cathedral. There were two immediate priorities. The first was to get the TV working. The second was to crack open a can of Guinness Roons had so kindly brought with her. There is the usual problem of tech blandness when it comes to AirBnbs. These days, always a total lack of interesting local TV stations, replaced with boring, always the same wherever you go, streaming services like Netflix (great for braindead women and young chicks), Paramount, Apple, Disney, Yawn. Thankfully, here there was access to the British streaming services BBC and ITV. I spent some time setting up and ITVX account using my email account under the name of James Royston, the lawyer in one of my novels, “The Defence Strategy”.  As I went to work organising tech matters, Roons and wifey were in the kitchen organising dinner out of the shopping Roons had brough with her for our stay. I thought how lucky we were to have her here in Belfast and also how appreciative she always was to have us here.

We ate dinner at the kitchen table catching up on recent events. I left two girls to do some more catching up in order to explore ITV over a can of Belfast Lager which Roons’ husband Gerry had so kindly organised for me. I considered it a superb brew as I viewed some disturbing news on the Israeli Palestinian situation. It wasn’t long before we were spent and ready for bed. Roons organised to pick us up in the morning. We were going to do a trip to Crumlin Road Gaol. I watched a bit more local TV as I finished my can of local beer. It certainly was a goddamn great effort to be back in the UK / Ireland considering my health battles of the last two years, including the life-threatening stomach bleed that coulda done me in for good.

But I had made it back!  

PART 2

SUNDAY 5 NOVEMBER: DAY 14

After an extremely tiring day of travel the day before, and a can of Belfast lager and Guinness, we slept uninterrupted and woke up surprisingly refreshed. There is always so little time spent in one particular city at a time, so it is always necessary to make the most of it. There is always the pressure on to do that. My wife’s friend, who goes by the name of Schoons due to her fondness for schooners of beer in Australia, had stocked up on some much-needed groceries for us. We started by hopping into large serve of bacon and eggs and strong coffee for me made on another one of those Nescaf machines, this one a Bosch. The plan for today was for to meet our friend downstairs but before it was. Necessary to take in the extensive views from our balcony door, which of course, like much of the UK and Europe opens on to a balcony that you cannot at all stand on. It’s what I call a “thought balcony” of a gesture of a balcony, built only for aesthetic purposes on the outside of the building. Here, I looked out below me at the magnificent St. Anne’s Cathedral. Further around, were the city buildings, all low to the ground with no significant high-rises, and the Belfast Town Hall a short walk away. In the distance, the autumn mist hung low over the mountain. Straight away, the sight of the mountain top in the distance once again, caused me to reflect on this mountain’s oversight of so much past devastation involving The Troubles. Perhaps others do not reflect on these matters, but I find it impossible not to.

Downstairs, next to St. Anne’s Square, I could tell, having been here before in the middle of winter at Christmastime, that it was cool but not yet cold. I considered, however, that being in Ireland for a week, the time had come to purchase another solid windbreaking overseas coat, as has become one of my habits. Wandering around the shops in either London, Dublin, or Belfast and taking in the pleasures of Selfridges, Debenhams, and Marks and Spencer looking for relevant apparel is both something to be enjoyed and a practical endeavour, especially when the Christmas songs are playing. Was it too early on for the Christmas songs? We would soon find out. First though, we had a plan for the morning. Our friend Schoons arrived in her car and it was time to head over to the historic Crumlin Road Gaol.  

This venture had formed part of our plan since the last time I was here. I was standing in the line at Boots chemist in the city in Belfast waiting for them to open. The queue at the checkout was getting longer and longer but they did not seem to be opening the registers. I asked the fella standing next to me “what’s going on? Why aren’t they opening the registers?” He replied by telling me that it was Sunday and on Sunday they did not open anything until midday. It has to do with the long tradition of attending church on Sunday mornings, especially Mass. He told me he was from Lancaster and that he thought it funny too and he proceeded to instruct me in all the places I should attend as a tourist in Belfast. The Crumlin Road Gaol was at the top of his list.

So, there we were driving down Crumlin Road. The first thing I noticed was this magnificent old dilapidated building, a truly great British building in its day, but now obviously inhabited by rats or squatters of both, I thought. I asked Schoons was that was. It was the old Court House, she said, and then before I could reply, we were turning into the gaol carpark. In the carpark, to my surprise, two other members of the Clan turned up, in Schoons’ husband Gerry and their daughter and soon we were all walking into the dark realms of the historical abyss.

During the last couple of years, I had slowly worked through reading an important scholarly book on The Troubles. It had taken me about two years to complete reading it since, during this time my health had often been quite poor, and terrible abyss which this book kept dragging me down into as it described in vivid detail certain aspects of the Troubles caused me to put the book back on the book shelf for months at a time. It was, you could say, a hard read. The book, “Say Nothing” by Radden O’Keefe referred often to the prison at Long Kesh. This was the place where the hunger strikes occurred, led by Bobby Sands in the early 1980s. I had informed Schoons that I wanted to go there but was duly informed that it was gone, which I thought was probably a good thing. So, Crumlin Road it was. The first thing I learned was that this British gaol dated from the mid 1800s and yes, it certainly did house political prisoners in the form of Republican IRA types. It had a whole wing dedicated to locking up those who disagreed with the British government, and that, as was the case with Long Kesh, if you were even suspected of being a member of the IRA or the “Provos” then you would find yourself here.

What I had witnessed on the way in on Crumlin Road in the form of the Court House, I would soon learn was an integral part of the whole set up. One of the first things we did was go down the dark, dank stairs to view the narrow tunnel that passed under Crumlin Road connecting the court to the gaol. Once convicted of whatever crime, or being a political rebel, prisoners were taken downstairs and through this horrible underground tunnel straight to the abyss. There was so much going on at this hell hole that I came to understand why the Lancastrian had recommended it. There were kids wings for children prisoners, a female wing for suffragettes, all sorts of strange and nasty rooms which operated all the way to the mid-nineties. So, this gaol had history. I viewed the turning machines which the guards used as punishment. For example, a misbehaving prisoner would have to turn the knob on this circular machine fourteen thousand times as punishment. And what would happen is that the guard would tighten a screw on the machine in order to make the rotations harder and harder as the prisoner progressed. Hence, the name “Screw” came into being. There was an extremely fair and detailed short film of the history of the Troubles before the cream on the top of the horror cake, the Execution Room. This is where about fifteen prisoners were executed by hanging. We witnessed the small room where the priest administered last rights to the prisoner before being escorted into a larger room where another film played on a screen on the wall. We stood around the walls watching the noose hand down in the middle of the room before, just like that, the floor fell away where the prisoner was left hanging. This was the last piece of the horror story inside the abyss and we then wandered out into the prison grounds where we were left to think about what we had just witnessed. I for one was left contemplating the book I had read during the last couple of years and how it had just been savagely brought to life. In the grounds, we wandered past an old British army helicopter and one of the vehicles which were essentially tanks. Those British army tanks which we all saw on television during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. My friend Gerry explained to me casually that these vehicles were constantly roaming the streets of Belfast when he was growing up. He’d actually seen it all and experienced it all first hand, which gave me a new and real perspective on the life he had led in this city. Then, in the bookshop and kiosk, just before we exited, there was the book “Say Nothing” sitting there on the shelf next to only a few other books on the Troubles. I bought a Crumlin Road bookmark to keep me on my toes for the rest of the trip here and left, breathing a deep sigh of relief with the same kind of feeling of relief I used to experience upon leaving Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane as an Articled Clerk in the late 1980s, after interviewing a client there when I was working with a law firm.

I left my friends and wife in the city to go and do my own thing, to begin my search for a warm coat. My first priority was to combine this task with finding something to eat and downing multiple pints of Guinness. The mission involved going to Dunnes first, one of Ireland’s great stores. Great waterproof coats there but all sold out in my size. Next on the agenda was a tour around Victoria Gardens, the huge shopping centre in the centre of Belfast. H&M, M&S, River Island. All way too expensive. I asked a couple where Debenhams was, since I had always had success there, but was told there was no Debenhams in Belfast any more. So, that was that. I would have to buy a coat in Dublin. We had driven past a corner pub the night before, which Roons told me was a famous pub where the publican refused to serve any beers smaller than pints and also refused to serve Coke or any other soft drink he didn’t like. It was a short walk to this pub. There was the famous obstreperous publican right there standing behind the bar together with a young fella. I ordered my pint of Guinness and found a seat outside next to a barrel where I planned to write in my diary but it was cramped and I was surrounded by many youngsters and I was too self-conscious to write, so I sat there in the cold just taking in the scenery and the passing characters, which was a much better idea anyway. After one pint, I thought I would do a pub crawl and stop in on a few places on the way home. I bought a sandwich and ate that while walking and then stopped at Tescos for a couple of packets of chips when, at the counter, I was confronted by a series of half bottles of whiskey behind the chap’s head at the register. After having lost my duty free whiskey in such an intolerable way, I bought a half bottle of Bushmills, shoved it in my back pack, and was on my way, happy in the knowledge that I could sip on a whiskey tonight. On the next corner, I found a store called Frasers which included a men’s clothing section. The coats here were priced from five hundred pounds upwards, which is around one thousand dollars for a cheap coat, which started me thinking about the cost of living crisis. I ran out of there quick smart. It was getting close to 5PM, the time I was due back at the BnB. All of a sudden, as I crossed the road, I saw the Irish sporting goods store O’Neills. This is the brand which you will find on Gaelic football jumpers, rugby jumpers, and everywhere else. Well, this is interesting, I thought. Fifteen minutes later, I was back on the street carrying a huge bag that contained my new O’Neills coat with mission accomplished.

On a side street next to St. Anne’s Square stood a very inviting Irish pub called John Hewitts. It was right on 5PM, so there was not much time for a drink. I ordered a Guinness and asked about wi-fi and sent my wify a message to meet me here as I sipped on another superb homegrown pint and wrote in my diary to my heart’s content. On the walls there was much Belfast paraphernalia. I made sure my pack and coat were safe and took a tour of the pub’s contents to find a signed letter by Gerry Adams as government minister on the wall right next to my table. Well, I’ll be buggered, I thought, considering all the history I’d consumed these last several years on Belfast.

We were in the Uber on the way to Roons and Gerry’s house. Little did I know what a mind-blowing evening it would turn into, which was not unusual given previous hilarious and unruly visits. As is often the case, I cannot remember the food on offer. We had tit-bits and snacks, the main focus being on the cans of Belfast Lager and wine for the girls. Over the course of another night with Gerry chatting about Belfast’s history and the Troubles, Gerry, who owned many books on the subject, showed me his favourite book on Martin McGuinness, the great Republican leader, possibly in response to a comment I had made that morning upon reading a story about a prisoner called McKee. In the dark halls of the main prison wing, I had mentioned that my birth mother’s maiden name was McNee. I was explaining, as we shuffled through the various torturous rooms of the prison, that the name McKee comes from the Irish McKaigh, as McNee is the anglicised version of McNaigh, and that deep down I was genetically a McNaigh and that my Ancestry DNA profile pronounced me as forty percent Irish, thirty percent Scottish, and ten percent Welsh. This, I explained, was a solid indication that my genetic history resided in Northern Ireland, which was also something I felt intuitively. I spent some time examining the writing and photos of Martin McGuinness’s book and made a comment about the recent film featuring McGuinness and the Reverend Ian Paisley on a long car ride together, which was typical grand Irish humour.

Now full of cans of Belfast Lager, we all made an excursion into the expansive back yard, which was narrow and long, typical of the local blocks. Gerry showed us all the work he had been doing and the studio he had created for Roons. On our return to the living room, Roons opened a cupboard and proceeded to pull out three bottles of Irish whiskey and some shot glasses.

‘Shit,’ I thought. ‘Here we go.’

Roons poured the first shot into three shot glasses and handed one to me and Gerry and downed her own. This was followed by three or four shots of the other whiskeys at which she asked me which one I preferred. It was the Jamiesons Crest I favoured. After that, I sat on three glasses of Jamiesons Crest with ice for the rest of the evening.

MONDAY 6 NOVEMBER: DAY 15

In the morning, lying in my bed at the B&B, I was a complete wreck. I hauled myself out to the kitchen for breakfast feeling okay. We were destined to head up to Belfast Castle today with Roons. It wasn’t until I had showered and was down on the street in the morning sunshine that I began to feel very whoozy and also began feeling a large amount of back pain. Roons picked us up. I was in the back seat of the car on the way to Belfast Castle when I pronounced that I did not feel well and, having carried the flu for a week or so, with the pain I was feeling in my back, I was worried that I was ill. Thoughts of bronchitis passed through my mind, considering my asthma had worsened in the cold air. The decision was made that I would spend the morning at home. Back at the B&B, I downed some antibiotics, and some painkillers, which instantly knocked me out. I was back in bed, a total wreck, worried about being ill overseas. I woke up later and realised that I had two problems. The first was a dreadful hangover from the whiskey, that had done my head in. The second realisation was that it wasn’t my lungs that were hurting, it was my torn rotator cuff that was stuffed from hauling my suitcase and pack around. The end result was a quiet, somewhat wasted day in Belfast.

TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER: DAY 16

We were due to take the train to Dublin. Having recovered from an overwhelming night of whiskey consumption, not to be repeated for a long time, probably until the next trip to Belfast, Roons picked us up for a drive around Belfast. I wanted to refresh my memory of the Shankill and Falls Roads, which we had toured all the way back on our first trip with Gerry. Roons kindly took us to some of her favourite places and then we made our way back to where I wanted to go. This was the Divis Flats, the building I had read so much about in ‘Say Nothing’. The building where Jean McConville had been kidnapped by the IRA, since they believed she was a ‘tout’, leaving her several young children to fend for themselves at the Divis Flats. The building where Billy Hughes, Gerry Adams 2IC and prison companion and fellow IRA comrade had lived the last years of his life after the Troubles ceased after the Good Friday Agreement. The Good Friday Agreement had left many old Republicans isolated and shattered and left behind, though living in peace, believing they had fought many years or decades for nothing. I simply got out of the car and took a few photos of Divis Flats thinking about what this city had been through and how perhaps time does provide a window of opportunity for healing. I took a dozen or more shots of the amazing Catholic and Republican murals along the Falls Road as we drove along, which I planned to study once back home. We arrived at Belfast train station after a short stay. We said our goodbyes and hugged Roons. At the station, as we stood in line waiting to go through to the platform, it seemed the same thoughts always crossed my mind. Would we ever be able to come live in this town? Something we had previously considered, given my wife’s Father’s British passport? It was always food for thought but I wasn’t getting no younger.

Northern Ireland from the train is simply a magnificent spectacle. All the shades of green at this time of year, which paint the quaint little towns and villages all the way to the Irish border and well beyond, have to be seen to be believed. On the train, I enjoyed the best cup of coffee I had experienced for a long time, while munching on chips and a sandwich. We crossed the border to the Republic of Ireland, down through Drogheda and Malahide. There we were in Dublin again for the fourth time. Something I could never have foreseen, let alone dreamed of, growing up as young man.

We jostled for a taxi out on the crowded street, beaten by a bunch of young blokes heading to another central train station which could take them all the way to Galway, and soon figured there were no more taxis. The wify called a Taxi Uber on her you beaut internet sim card, which was proving more than handy. The taxi ride took is into a new, unknown part of Dublin called the Liberties, an inner-city domain nestled in about half an hour’s walk from the Liffey, as opposed to Parnell Street last time, St. Stephen’s Green, and O’Connell Street on previous occasions. The B&B buildings are all the same. Tall, narrow buildings containing the narrowest stair wells to the top floor imaginable, to the extent that one has to be extra careful hauling a suitcase up these steps for fear of doing ones’ knee in, an injury I was still carrying from a previous trip. It was agreed that the wify would haul my case up the stairs for fear of re-activating this injury, which would completely ruin the trip. Inside, it’s freezing, and the first priority is to get the heater going, which I did. On these trips, I am always the TV cable guy, the washer and drying machine guy, and the tech guy generally, including the heating and cooling guy. We unpacked by 4.30pm, by which time it was beginning to grow dark. I took a gander out of the now frosted up window down into the street where Dublinites were going about their usual business and, despite the overwhelming tiredness, could not wait to get out there. We settled into the comfortable couch and arm chair to examine the streaming services. The name Farage came up on the TV sign in, which was disconcerting. It got me thinking that given the lack of normal rental accommodation in Dublin, all outrageously high-priced, we were enjoying an Air B&B building owned by a foreigner, someone like Nigel Farage, since it was clear that this entire building had been converted into six Air B&Bs. This was not something I was comfortable with but something I would be forced to totally ignore. We settled in for some excellent RTE viewing.

We discovered that the pub we were keen on for a chowder dinner, a few blocks away, was closed. Dudley’s Pub was directly across the road from our digs. We did ourselves up, me in my new O’Neill’s coat, and made our way there, the main priority being to get Chowder and also a pint of Guinness, which travels from a few mere blocks away, into me. We are shocked to find no Chowder on the menu, which causes the wify considerable disappointment, since finding as much chowder as possible to digest in Ireland is part of her mission here in the same way that Guinness, Smithwicks, and Kilkenny frame my experience here. However, after a great feed of chicken and leek pie and other fabulous stodgy winter Irish fare and a couple of pints, we are well and truly in a food coma and ready for more of RTE’s Love in the Country, Mrs Brown’s Boys, The 2 Johnnies, and The Late Late show. On the Late show, we were treated to a revealing and honest interview with Adam Clayton from U2. In the same vein as Shane McGowan of the Pogues, whose passing Ireland had recently celebrated, Adam told the story of his decent into the abyss of addiction during his heyday playing the bass in Ireland’s greatest band. I was left thinking that what you see in the world is most definitely not what you think is going on, and was also left with a remarkable insight of, if only for a tiny smidgeon of time, feeling like I was a local in Dublin as I took in his tale of growing up in Malahide.

After a Bushmills, the time had come to pass out.

WEDNESDAY 8 NOVEMBER: DAY 17

After a good, solid sleep, we were up for the walk into the centre of town, the first stop being Grafton Street. We made our way down the main drag past a magnificent Polish church and the Dublinia Viking Museum in the freezing cold, navigating our way through familiar inner streets to our Holy Grail and first stop, Marks and Spencer on Grafton Street. Our habit was to order toasties and tea and coffee and sit in the window staring out at the people of Dublin. It was a handy spot that served as our base since we could stock up on provisions later on in the day and the toilets up on the third floor were clean and accessible. After breakfast there, we split up. The wify was keen to check out St. Stephen’s Green shopping centre while I just felt like going walkabout, as is often the case. I headed down Grafton Street in the Liffey direction taking photos and roaming in and out of colourful side streets. The touristy shops certainly no longer interested me but I wandered through one or two of them anyway to see if there was anything new on display. There wasn’t. T-shirts I already owned, mugs, flags, keyrings, pendants, and bracelets. I decided that on this trip I would avail myself of some Irish rugby paraphernalia instead. We met up again outside M&S. The time had come to get real, to get into the groove, and to go for a decent adventure, starting at Temple Bar, the beating heart of Dublin to be sure. It had been a few years since I’d been there, somehow bypassing it last time round. The square where the market was held was being revamped, full of scaffolding and building rubble. We checked out the shops briefly, a record shop the only interest, and soon found ourselves around the corner confronted with the sparkling lights of Dublin’s most famous pub in the Temple Bar, which could quite possibly be, I figured, the perfect spot for a bite and a pint or three or four or five...

Though still late November, we entered to find the large music area packed full of punters listening to the guitarist who was into Christmas songs, all played in that relaxed acoustic Irish way. The room was done up in sparkling red and green Christmas decorations shiny brightly, their reflections produced in every pint glass in the room, a sight to behold. Timing is everything. As a table of punters in the outside beer garden stood to leave, we snatched their table and settled in, as happy as two clams in a bowl of chowder. The O’Neill’s coat was dumped on the chair beside me and I was happy to finally be able to do some much-needed updates to my travel diary while scoffing my first pint of Guinness. In front of us and beside the statues of various Roman gargoyle heads adorning the walls, was a table full of loud young Brits. They were all about twenty, raucous, and full of youthful drunken bravado, and the thought occurred to me that this kind of loud, drunken hoo-ha was probably just how we all acted at that age, often. One of the two blonde girls of the Scouse or East End variety, probably the older girl’s sister, couldn’t have been more than fifteen. The increasingly loud, attention-seeking behaviour of the main bloke reminded me, however, that I would never in my wildest dreams, have ever been so arrogant. I was left thinking that those with the most to say often contain the least substance. The table full of girls on our left were also very young and of some kind of South-American descent. As we approached Christmas, it was party time in Dublin.

I continued my writing, the snacks arrived in the form of chips, and I found myself, as I sipped on my favourite beer, Smithwicks now, not available in Australia, pondering, as I did so many times while travelling, how we could keep working on the proposition of “one day” living here, at least for a short time, like a couple of years. It wasn’t possible to live continually in France, despite access to the house there due to French laws. My wife’s father had a British passport and before Brexit had been allowed to live continuously in France but, after Brexit, that was no longer allowed. He was allowed three months at a time and had to then exit back to Australia. However, it was entirely possible for us to live in the UK. This was due to my father-in-law’s birth in England, and his British passport, which gave my wife access to a British passport also. We most definitely could live in, say Belfast, near our friends, or in Northern Ireland and it always seemed to me that, as far as the Republic of Ireland was concerned, it wouldn’t take much to just sort of slip over the border and rent a place for a while. As I mulled this over Smithwicks, the joie de vive in Temple Bar increased exponentially as each pint was consumed. All kinds of different kinds of decibels were piercing our eyes now, so we decided to make a move since there plenty more to see on this short stay. We wandered out into the narrow street and took a few photos and I wondered when we would be back here again.

It was time for a walkabout. Up to the Liffey and our favourite walking bridge over to Henry Street and the shopping district. We wandered down to the O’Connell Street bridge and crossed over heading towards the GPO where we took a left down Henry Street with the intention of doing some shopping in my favourite store, Debenhams. The street was alight with, as usual, with the most tasteful Christmas decorations. We passed Arnott’s to find an empty, desolate Debenhams, the cloudy windows smeared with stains. What a disappointment. Oh well, I thought, I’ve already purchased enough clothes from this store. They had exited Belfast, although they still had an online presence, so we figured they must have, for some reason, left Ireland entirely.

‘Let’s get some chowder’, my wife said.

‘How about we walk down to Murrays?’ I suggested.

That made her happy.

Murrays was situated on the corner of O’Connell Street pretty much opposite the B&B where we stayed last time. It was the site of many grand Irish breakfasts that had stayed in our mind now for many years before we were all hit by Covid and the accompanying authoritarian governmental assault. As we headed around the corner into O’Connell Street, I came to the conclusion that this was most definitely my favourite part of Dublin. Dublin, like every city, had its wealthy, well-off suburbs, the not so well-off suburbs, and the poorer struggling suburbs. I didn’t know much about the intricacies of this, but what I did know through film and past experience here was that the southern suburbs around Dublin Bay, was the well-off Dublin. We had been down to Wicklow, Bray, and Greystones last trip and taken a drive to the town where they had filmed some of Ballykissangel and we had discovered that the suburbs around the bay down south, like Black Rock and Dalkey, were beautiful, leafy, and gorgeous on the eye. The inner northern suburbs which were not that far from where we were now standing had a harder core to them. It was evident when you travelled from in a taxi down to O’Connell Street from Dublin airport. The inner north was more hard core. As were its people.

Murrays was all lit up outside with the kind of beautiful Christmas decorations only to be found in the Northern Hemisphere. Inside, we found our usual table and began the feast. This time round, I ordered a pint of Murphy’s, which is the Cork equivalent of Guinness, a stout which when drink in Ireland gives Guinness a run for its money. A superb Irish stout that is different on the palette but just as great. I spent some time wandering around the massive beergarden at the rear of the establishment, the place with a huge screen, thinking how packed it would have been in here during the rugby World Cup. There were dozens of historical photos of O’Connell Street and thereabouts from over the years, which included the 1800s and the 1916 Rebellion, all of which were fascinating. I took my own photos of these great historic pictures. It was then time to head home, as it was getting dark. Dinner took place at our original destination of the night before, Arthurs Hotel. Back home at B&B HQ, where there was an interesting look into Robbie William’s life on RTE.

THURSDAY 9 NOVEMBER: DAY 18

When you are walking over ten kilometres a day at least, day after day, there comes a time when you have had enough and your body needs a rest. We rose pretty sore and tired, the general consensus being that today it would be taxis or Ubers all the way.

We grabbed a taxi back to Murrays for breakfast since the wify had for many past years been looking forward to a great big serve or two of their famous porridge for breakfast. Setting ourselves up near the window with a view of O’Connell Street, we were informed that they don’t do that no more. My wife was shocked and upset and in need of another good lie down but we managed to keep on going, ploughing through the morning with great resolve! I was happy enough with an Irish breakfast of eggs and bacon and such with endless cups of coffee to get me going. A young Frenchman sat down at the table next to us exhibiting a strong disability when it came to communicating with the waitress for his order. I felt great empathy in reverse, having many times been chastised by French restaurant and shop owners for not expressing myself clearly or having my pronunciation corrected. It occurred to me to give him a helping hand with his English but it was probably best not to interfere. My journeys had led me to conclude that it’s probably best to figure out these things for yourself. We are lucky these days to possess smart phones with translator apps but that can always be a problem overseas when you do not have access to wi-fi since your much-needed translator app will not work. I had been of the habit of carrying around with me a tiny little English-French dictionary on my person in France these last trips there (including in 2012), a dictionary I used when studying French at school. I decided that this young bloke would have to come to these conclusions himself.

I had decided that the next port of call would be a shop known as Penny’s on O’Connell Street since I had the pleasure of finding and buying jeans there that fit me like a glove as though made for my bottom and legs alone on a couple of occasions. Let’s see what we can find this time, I thought. We had a look in at the historic GPO building on the way. This was the site of an important part of the 1916 Rebellion against the British, which failed, but lead to Irish independence a few short years later in 1922. The whole of O’Connell Street told the same story, replete with statues of important men who had led the way, including men from decades before the Rebellion. St. Stephen’s Green park would also serve an important role in that respect, but that was waiting for us up the road. The GPO sports a large copy of the Irish manifesto of independence at its entrance. I took in the ambience of the place and we made our way to the all-important clothing factory, Penny’s, which in other parts of the UK is known as Primark. As is always the case, it did not fail to disappoint, providing me with two pairs of jeans the fabric and fit of which cannot be found anywhere in Australia. This alone would keep me going for years, jeans I could also wear at work. I had come to the place where I only bought my jeans overseas, which I found quite amusing, as was the case with so many personal hygiene products that we searched for on our mission like hunting down of certain products in certain places, which was also incredibly funny to me. Did that make me a Citizen of the World? I considered, as we made our way back into the crowd in the street where you did not need your own bong to suck on due to the intense infiltration of cannabis oil vaping, which stank to high heaven. It seemed you could not go anywhere in Dublin anymore without the disgusting sweet stench of marijuana riding roughshod over every single ounce of fresh air thanks to the vacuous, brainwashed, “climate” obsessed Snowflake generation. It seemed that they were the same moronic Millennials wherever you went in the West, from one end of the world to the other. Philistines and troglodyte Marxists all of them. I continued on trying my best to breath any tiny amount of fresh air on O’Connell Street but no success. It was worse than being in Amsterdam. It was time to get the fuck out of here. St. Stephen’s Green would be the perfect escape from the stench of mediocrity.

We made our way back over the bridge and walked along the Liffey until we reached Poolbeg Street and Tara Street train station, the scene of my first ever flirtation into bars of Dublin at O’Reilly’s. Once again, on my very first night in Dublin, about twelve years ago, the wife was very sick with the flu and so I set out on a solo adventure crossing the Liffey from our hotel, the Jury’s Inn, which is no longer there. Five minutes later, I was standing outside O’Reilly’s at Tara Street Station where I descended down a narrow set of stairs into an underground pub where a band was playing. I noticed straight away that night that all the punters were dressed exactly the same as me in faded jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, a pile of winter coats piled up in a heap on top of each other in the corner of the room. I discarded my new heavy winter coat purchased at Debenhams in London and threw it on top of the pile of coats, thinking this was a masterfully casual way of avoiding a “cloak room” and also displayed a measure of Irish character in the trust of others and a certain inescapable friendliness. I made my way to the bar in my T-shirt to find buckets of ice placed on the bar, which I also thought was a very practical thing to do. After settling at a stand-up table, I sucked on my pint and enjoyed the music and then proceeded to hit a few more pubs around that area noticing how everyone seemed to be wandering around in the streets from bar to bar carrying their pints as they went. This was also another practical measure and something you would get arrested for in Australia. It was just before Christmas time at the height of the festive season and the streets were jammed packed full of revellers wandering the streets of the city with their pint glass in tow. How wonderful. How ingenious! I thought.

Soon enough, wify and I entered the front gates of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a perfect late autumn day, the sky blue full of drifting white clouds with not a hint of wind or rain. As we trod the path from one end down the middle, I noticed, at the bridge which crosses the lake, how the view from the bridge was now almost entirely blocked by the growth of trees from the bank. I made a mental note of the last time we were here, pre Covid, and thought about what the world had been through these last few years, and what we had suffered and endured in Melbourne during that time at the hands of a sociopathic, Stalin-like, authoritarian dictator, who, like all below par human beings had now left the scene, never to return again, except on boards of Labor industry funds and golf courses in Victoria from which this filthy braindead coward had not been banned.

My thoughts returned to the happy present and we made our way to the fountain area where I read the sign that explained the important history of the Green during the 1916 Rebellion. Sitting in the sunshine rid of the stench of cannabis was glorious. On the park bench, I attached my new five euro Celtic bracelet to my wrist. We took a few happy snaps under the boughs of a golden autumn tree and walked back to Grafton Street on the footpath opposite a host of foreign embassies to Starbucks where we had a direct view of the buskers doing their thing.

The Guinness Storehouse provided the perfect end to another trip to this part of the world, which was all too short in duration. Imagine drinking a couple of pints of the world famous drop at the place where it’s made. We decided that next time round we would get out of the cities of Ireland and return to the magisterial countryside, which is the heart of Ireland.

PART 3

FRIDAY 10 NOVEMBER: DAY 19

It’s always sad to leave Ireland because it’s so far away and such a long, gruelling trip to the other side of the world. Which necessarily means it is never clear when one is going to return, if at all, given the randomness and comedy of life that dictates anything can happen and there are no certainties in life. In 2022, I found myself nearly shuffling off this mortal coil due to a stomach bleed from a strong painkiller. We are constantly at the hands of other’s mistakes, be it on the roads, or when it comes to doctors, for example. The painkiller I was prescribed should have always been accompanied by a strong antacid. I was not given the necessary antacid and so the strong painkiller taken for shoulder pain at the time, since I had just torn my rotator cuff, ripped a hole in my stomach. Such is the fragility of life. You just never know. There was blood from one end of the house due to putting the dog out in the back yard before the ambulance arrived. Looking back, I’m not sure how I managed to do that since I was only semi-conscious, waking up after passing out. My advice is most definitely to strike the iron’s hot, to seize the day, because you never know what’s around the corner. Ever.

It was a bitingly cold morning as we jumped in the taxi to the airport to the white noise of the Chinese driver who was busy telling us that his daughter was studying right there in that building, as we passed through the northern suburbs. At the airport, we boarded a plane to Greece for the first time. It was going to be a reasonably long day of travelling with the roughly four hour flight and it was going to be a case of ultimately crossing off a couple of things from right up the very top of the Bucket List. The history of Athens was inspirational. I was excited.

At Dublin airport, I noticed the young girl standing in line in front of me had both a suitcase and a backpack with the Google insignia inscribed into it. As we stood there waiting to check in, I could not help a feeling of real hatred and utter distrust emanating from inside my being. Here was the elite of the Big Tech elitist scum who, for multi-billion-dollar profits, were systematically trawling through all of our private information and personal details, engaging in an outright personal theft. The apathetic majority do not seem to give a damn but we were not one of the apathetic majority. We take great offence that Google and Facebook and the rest have based their multi-billion-dollar business models on stealing people’s personal information in a way that is exactly the same as breaking and entering your into your house, rifling through all your files, and then setting off down the road to sell all of it for a massive profit. It is personal, private information and they are stealing it and selling it to the corporate world. It is fantastically outrageous. So, here was one of the little cows who worked in the Dublin Google office. One of those stupid little Millennium bitches who had no concept or understanding of the law, or of greed, or of how science was destroying so many great things in society (music being one of these) due to their obsession with robots or what is euphemistically called “AI”. The robots are coming to take over the world. Yawn. I felt like giving her a good shellacking from behind.

As we made our way through the airport in Greece to the luggage carousel, it became obvious to me that many people standing around seemed very fit and very slim, many of them in runner with great calf muscles. I looked around to see the Marathon signs scattered around the airport. Well, I’ll be buggered, I thought. It was the weekend of the Athens Marathon. Very fitting, I thought. I could believe, yes, that on the one weekend I finally found myself in Athens, it was the marathon event. I could believe it because so much of my life had been a marathon to the extent that it seemed unbelievable to me that I had even made it through the nineties. So, I figured little Miss Google and the rest of them were all here causing a packed flight from Dublin on a Friday afternoon for a great reason. Outside, the air was warm and the busy airport jam packed full of waiting taxis. We joined the burgeoning taxi queue with all the cardio fit runners and were on our way within five minutes. This was a well-run operation. The driver turned out to be a very lively “Greek” kind of person. We know this coming from the city of Melbourne which was for a long time the second largest Greek population outside of Athens due to immigration to Australia after WWII. The taxi driver seemed happy to have Australians for company and for the entire forty-minute drive acted as our tour guide info man. He gave us the run-down of the area we were staying in – Koukaki – right next to the Acropolis area. He showed us the twenty-four hour bakery just a stones’ throw from our apartment and dropped us off, telling us how grateful he was to us Aussies. “You were so good to us after the war,” he said.

The first thing I noticed was the massive apartment buildings which were similar in size to the buildings in Rome. They were not, however, similar in design. Rome is a magnificent city architecturally. Athens’ beauty lay in its obvious history, its superb climate, and from what I could see, its practicality. Soon, we were in and upstairs. We threw our gear down in the huge living room, part of an enormous apartment on the third floor and checked the bedroom and bathroom. I wandered out onto the large balcony area to be confronted with one of the most astonishing, gobsmacking views of my entire life. In the darkness, not more than a few kilometres away shone the bright lights of the Acropolis. After everything that had occurred up until now in the more than strange journey that had been my adult life, this was a seminal moment. Given what had transpired during 1989 and into the nineties and early 2000s in relation to strange and unique illness and suffering, never in my wildest dreams could I ever have imagined that I would be standing here on a balcony staring at one of the most iconic historical views in the world. It was truly an amazing moment in my life.

Coming from Melbourne and the delicious Greek food served up in Oakleigh, there was no time to waste in hunting down a Greek Taverna or restaurant. We trod carefully upon the rough cement footpath that led us down the hill towards Zacharista Street, though half way down we came upon a delightful looking restaurant, which, upon examination, was going to fit the bill. We stuffed ourselves full of bread and authentic tzatziki drowned in olive oil, followed by a huge chicken meal, its unique Greek flavour, whatever it was, making our taste buds dance. I was handed a huge bottle of Greek Mythos beer, which, as is the situation in France, was as cheap as peanuts by the pint. Once again, I was full of consternation and anger at the price of beer back in Australia, which just kept being taxed to the hilt by an uncaring, socialist government. After a long day, the meal (at such a cheap price) placed us in a food coma. There was no more energy in the tank for exploration today. We took note of the supermarket nearby, which I had spotted from the taxi, and made our way back up the hill for the usual streaming services which always appear at AirBnBs instead of local television stations, something I was getting entirely sick of. So, it was a case of more Netflix bullshit, the same old shit that we watched at home. We signed in and began doing a re-examination of the Irish series “Bad Sisters”, a series my wife had finished viewing but not myself. The wify was happy to view the last few episodes again. After a brief attempt at viewing, we crashed out again, utterly exhausted. Yes, it was the weekend of the Athens marathon and we were most definitely running our own.  

SATURDAY 11 NOVEMBER: DAY 20

I awoke to view my phone and noticed that it was the eleventh of the eleventh month. It was not yet eleven o’clock.

The wify woke with a bad migraine due entirely to exhaustion. I had crashed out and slept for about ten hours and didn’t feel too bad. As my wife lay down in the dark bedroom on painkillers, I decided I would venture down the hill and pick up whatever great Greek food I could find and hit the supermarket half way down the hill in order to buy real coffee as I was now in need of my good whack of caffeine. As soon as I left the building, I noticed the athletes and runners. Some of them had already been out and about and were in possession of a marathon pack which was hanging on their back. I knew all about this since my father-in-law was an avid marathon runner and it was the case that the day before the marathon, he would collect his marathon pack which contained all the necessary equipment for the run, including numbers to wear and maps and such. The supermarket provided me with all the essentials, much of which would last us for the three full days we were here. Bread, milk, coffee and beer were definitely the main priorities. Chocolate for the wify to munch on for her headache. A few doors up the road, I found a bakery serving all the wonderful looking Greek pastries we were familiar with. Spanakopita was on the menu, thank you very much. All the items I purchased were fresh as a daisy and still warm. The wify was going to be very pleased. I munched on a pastry as I climbed the hill, taking in the antiquity above me in the form of Philopappos Hill, as climbers and no doubt runners scoured its nooks and crannies. At home, as I dumped my shopping in the kitchen and headed out onto the balcony, I could see now in the daylight that there were monuments up there on the hill to be sought out. I had luckily found a great map (of the hard copy type) at the luggage carousel at the airport, so I sat down at the table in the living room and began studying it. The plan emerging in my mind was that if the wify was up to it, we could have a good scour around Philopappos Hill today and tomorrow would be the big day. The Acropolis Day.

My wifey was up and on her feet after a couple of hours and was more than happy with my shopping efforts. We sat down and had brunch and it was decided that we would take it easy for a couple of hours and then go walkabout. It was the perfect plan considering that, after carrying the flu around for much of the trip and not really stopping for a second to take a breath on the trip, we felt as if our batteries were finally starting to run out after three weeks on the go without a break, even though we had been lucky enough to be able to stay in the one place in Quillan while being quite sick. Even though our terminals now stained with battery acid, we would carry on on full throttle as hard as possible. We watched the Bad Sisters getting up to no good in Dublin as I pumped myself full of coffee, often retreating outside to view the Parthenon on top of the Acropolis. It was as though I could reach out and touch this magnificent structure that was two and a half millennia old and pondered over how much work must have gone into keeping such a magnificent structure in such good tact for so long considering we in Australia had not the ability nor the desire to preserve any of our two and a bit century old heritage and now, as a nation, having to face up to unparalleled hatred of our national history by a bunch of brainwashed Marxist negative youngsters who had no knowledge of anything but their own woes. As I drank my coffee and pondered real history, the feeling of escape from Australia’s obscene intellectual plundering of our country by climate obsessed morons, if even for s short time, left me with an immense feeling of relief. The relief from the doomsayers and negative catastrophisers would be short lived however, since in two days we would be returning to the wilderness of world class negativity, pessimism, and narcissism.

The hills from our street were forty-five degrees straight up as we climbed our way up to the start of Mount Philopappos. To my surprise, we had made it to the start of our hike within ten minutes. The gradient of the small mountain was nowhere near as steep as the city blocks and we wound our way around gently to the rear of the hill which, along the way, sported some thousand year old rocky cliff faces and rock structures. It wasn’t long before we had made some height and were afforded our first real view out over the city of Athens towards the shimmering Aegean Sea. It was our first glimpse of the enormity of this city. We stopped for photos, as you do, even though I was aware by now that most of these photos were rarely looked at again over the years. It wasn’t the photos that were important. What you did remember, however, were the memories deep within your mind, which seemed to float around forever. As such, all these photos taken so easily now by virtue of our smart phones, were secondary rather than primary memories. I took the photos anyway. As we continued around the back of the hill, winding our way up, we came upon the most beautiful and remarkable tortoise crossing the dirt path in front of us. I was happy to come across one of my totem animals. I had a special relationship with both tortoises and owls. I had, due to unique circumstances, made my way down the road less travelled in life at tortoise speed, often, lately, and at important times, coming across the presence of owls, who visited me at night by sitting on the back fence or elsewhere in nature. This tortoise was an old guy with a shell that looked thick and hard and impenetrable to any jackhammer. I got down on my haunches as it stopped on the dirt mound at the side of the track and gave him a pat on the back, this magnificent creature beautiful to the touch as I studied carefully how his head and neck connected to his body. What a marvel of God’s work, I thought. I told him I loved him and to have a great day and a greater life and we went on our way.

We kept working our way up the hill and it wasn’t too long before we hit a major concrete path that would take us all the way to the top where we were astonished yet again, gobsmacked by the view bearing down in front of us. Right there in front of me, at this spot where I had made this pilgrimage, was the Acropolis and the Parthenon. There were no words to describe it. I could see that, as was the case this morning, there were still hundreds of humans wandering up and down the hills below towards the Acropolis and I could also see that this Philopappos hill was connected to it and that this whole area in fact was an interconnected tourist walkabout, so that it wasn’t that far at all to walk down this hill and then venture down the road to take on the walk up to the Acropolis. The map I had collected from the airport told me that this entire area was replete with dozens of historic monuments, which I would study for further exploration. I made the decision that, even though there was still a couple of hours of daylight, that would wait till the morrow. We made our way up the path to the monument at the very top of the hill. This time, the view of Athens in 360 degrees and the view of the Aegean Sea was incomparable. As we sat on a rocky outcrop overlooking the density of Athens’ suburbs in all directions, I was stunned at the beauty of this city, its 5C BC Golden Age history always nagging away at the forefront of my mind. Since, when you peered out at the shimmering blue of the Aegean, the thought of the Athenians doing the same thing with the exact same view 2, 500 years ago, was a ravishing thought. And, having studied an entire year studying Greek History at Mentone Grammar all those years ago, I could never have imagined that I would finally make it here, even though I did very much want that to occur... one day!  On the way down, we stopped in a courtyard for a drink and chips and I cracked open the can of Mythos Greek beer I had in my pack in celebration.

We made our way back down the hill. The cement paths featured slabs of concrete inscribed with the most beautiful traditional artwork. At the base of the hill, we were back on the main road which separated Philopappos Hill from the Acropolis ascent and which ran all the way back into the main part of our suburb. Along the way, there appeared to be many more historic sites. I stopped at a barred hole in the wall where some people were congregating. After they had left, I was able to get in and read the accompanying historical literature on the sign. To my astonishment and happiness, I had stumbled on Thucydides’ tomb. Thucydides just happened to be one of the great Greek historians from the 5C BC’s Golden Age of Athens whom I had studied comprehensively in Form 5 / Year 11 at Mentone.

This was just before being kidnapped and hauled away from my Melbourne school existence and being transported up to Brisbane with my parents, who wanted to go home to Queensland. The idea was to get me back to Queensland before I really settled in as an adult to Victoria. However, I was forced into losing everything at the time, including my impending captaincy of the 1st 18 football team on the back of being scouted by Essendon, who had asked me to sign a Form 4 contract as a rookie where I would have been joining the new coach there who was the ex-Richmond back pocket player in Kevin Sheedy. I also lost my place in the 1st XI cricket team and my role as a Cadet Under Officer (CUO) in the cadet corps. Most of all, according to my Dad, the school psychologist, I also lost being school captain or Head Boy, as they called it. This was the first of three the great seminal challenges in my life that would dictate my life.

Studying Greek history and history as a whole was something that was deeply a part of me and deeply ingrained in me. At my new school, where, due to the two-year Queensland system at the time, I was forced to repeat Year 11 and then do Year 12, which, for some reason which is now beyond me, I agreed to do. I would not agree with it today. Nevertheless, I went on to study both Ancient and Modern history and continued on in French, where I won the French prize at the end of those two years. It’s hilarious how things work out in the end! At the time, I threw myself into study in order to save my soul. As I approached the Parthenon, all of this was jiggling around in my mind.

As I stood there thinking about these things that had transpired in a very ugly way back then, once again, I simply could not fathom or understand how I now found myself standing there peering into where Thucydides was buried and where he had been lying entombed for the last 2,500 years. It was mindboggling. Down the road, we then came upon a magnificent chapel from the same era. It was tiny and full of old dark beams and wood panelling from the Golden Age. I placed a tip in the tip plate where a young fella sat keeping an eye on things. This time, I was hit with the force of yet another thrill. It was the face of Christ, the exact same face of Christ which I had been carrying around with me on the bookmark in my diary for the last several years. It occurred to me that this particular face, which adorned the entrance and the walls of this ancient chapel was the Greek Orthodox Jesus Christ, perhaps the face of the Byzantine Christ after the fall of the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity to Constantinople. It was perhaps more of an Eastern impression of Christ compared to the face of Jesus that we are used to seeing in the West. I sat in the pews of this magnificent time machine of a building and contemplated the face of Christ before me, considering all the obstacles that had been overcome over the years to somehow place me right here in this spot. Being here was truly a spiritual experience. I had run my own marathon in a unique way and here I was today side by side with the Athens Marathon runners. Go figure. Life can often be a tragedy. It is also most definitely a comedy. It probably depends on how once looks at things.

In the main street a few blocks below Zacharista Street, we walked under the leafy lemon and orange trees that lined the streets of Athens. I stopped to pick up what looked to be an edible orange and placed it in my pack. We ate a satisfying dinner in a Tavern, followed by another major coup. In 2023, while in our new digs in the south of France, I came upon something which I considered to be special and unique in the bathroom of our three-storey with attic French villa. It was a can of the most superb and fine smelling shaving cream I had ever come across in my life with what could only be described as a divine aroma. I soon learned that what I had been using on my face each morning was Greek. A Greek shaving paste of balm rather than the usual foaming stuff. It contained absinthe, was low ph, and left your face fully moisturised as opposed to dry. In Australia, it was possible to purchase this Korres shaving cream online. However, when it was decided we would make Athens a priority earlier in the year, I decided to wait and track this down myself in Greece. This is due to one of the principles which I abide by always, a principle that I keep in the forefront of my mind, which is known as delaying gratification.

In this case, as is the case with drink or food or anything else in life, the end result is always better, more important, and carries more spiritual weight when you delay consumption. In a way, delaying one’s gratification is similar to fasting but in a different way. It was my mission tonight to track down this Korres shaving cream after a year’s long wait. We had discussed where we may find some of this Holy Grail over dinner. In the main drag, we began with the supermarket. No deal. Surely, the pharmacy, I said. Two pharmacies and no shebang. At the third pharmacy, we struck gold. I purchased two very large tubes of this golden facial balm which made the morning shaving process a delight, and I headed across the road to the gelato café with a huge beaming smile on the inside.

At Athens HQ, it was time for some of Dublin’s Bad Sisters. I drank a can of Greek beer and tumbled over onto my side exhausted after a truly remarkable day I would never forget.

SUNDAY 12 NOVEMBER: DAY 21

I awoke in the morning in the happy knowledge that today was Athens’ Marathon day. There would be many runners doing it tough but, from the luxury of our balcony, there was no sign of them yet. I filled up on a light breakfast and began pumping fuel into my body in the form of strong coffee. Though struggling with exhaustion, today’s agenda was rather important. Today was Acropolis Now Day. It was agreed that after yesterday’s reasonably strenuous climb up Philopappos Hill, the wifey would stay put and let me do my historical thing. I stuffed my pack with a few necessary items. A sandwich, a bag of chips, and two cans of Greek beer rolled up in a heavy tea towel to keep them cold. Plus my map. I punched in Socrates Prison into my Apple maps as the first important item on the agenda for the day, one of the really spiritual matters to be settled in my mind. I was aware that Apple maps did not work once I left the confines of the wi-fi apartment but it would still help. I placed the hard copy map of the area in the side pocket of my pack and headed out into the Golden Age of Athens once more in the same direction as yesterday waving to the wifey on the balcony as I left. A forty-five degree climb led me up the street to the top of the hill where, instead of turning left, I took a right and walked down the hill the length of the windy street taking the now familiar road up to the entrance to the Acropolis’ ascent. Passing the road that led up to the top of the Acropolis, I kept going in search of Socrates. Both my Apple maps and my hard copy told me to climb up Philopappos Hill again. Soon I found myself half way up another steep climb but when I arrived at my destination, there was absolutely nothing there except scattered rubble and a few people hanging around in the sun. I scoured the area for five minutes in all directions but there was nothing to be seen. Oh well, so be it, I thought, disappointed as I wandered back down the hill.

I stood at the ticket office to the historic, or what I like to term the ‘hysterical’ site. As the runners were still negotiating the marathon course, down closer to the Aegean Sea then inland, I stood in line with a host of eager tourists. After being informed that tickets were cheaper online, as is the case everywhere these days, I sucked down the first of my water supply. It was a hot day, though not scorching. There was another steep ascent from where I stood and it occurred to me that it was a good thing that I was reasonably cardio fit thanks to my dog and the huge amount of walking we did together. No days passed in my life when I did not think about my dog. Up the hill, man.

The kind of elation a seasoned history junkie feels under these circumstances of historical mainlining cannot properly be put into words. I had experienced it in Rome at the Colosseum and at the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel but to me, this was the pure stuff, man. As pure as the driven snow. It’s not possible I supposed, without the aid of coke or speed or ice, to get this kind of adrenaline hit. And as I approached the first of the massive limestone beams of the Parthenon, I considered that perhaps only the Pyramids could compete with this mainline experience. I wanted to touch everything but refrained. As I approached the steps of the entrance to the Parthenon at the top of the hill, there were a few tourists taking a selfie of themselves. I offered to take their photo, which they were thrilled to accept, and returned the favour for me.

Inside the compound of the Acropolis, there was ancient rubble everywhere. Huge fallen boulders lined the ground like massive slabs of cement. I wandered around what seemed like a time capsule suspended in time with my mouth agape, possibly drooling, taking photos of ancient stuff. The Temple of Athena was impressive, though it was impossible to get close enough to get access to its overgrown interior. Nevertheless, nothing could compare with the view of the Parthenon, the afternoon sun sitting atop its rooftop pylons bathing it in a golden glow, as had been the case for the past 2,500 years. I made my way across the rubble to the lookout which was flying a huge Greek flag. Once again, there was a magnificent view over Athens impressive ancient metropolis. I sat there on the stone wall taking it all in, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the city fanning out in every direction. Satiated with a good drink of water and satisfied with the view of the city and many beautiful female tourists from all over the world, I descended the lookout to find a black and white cat sitting on top of a rock, casually welcoming we multinational tourists. Having seen enough, the rear of the Parthenon led me around the back in a circle to the front steps. I descended to find an amphitheatre of Roman proportions to my left. Just another day in Paradise, I considered, as I made my way down the hill towards the main road. The afternoon had been reasonably hot. I drained my water bottle and filled it up at an ancient fountain on the way down but it was definitely time for a beer. I will find a nice quiet spot somewhere around Philopappos Hill, I thought, and began walking up the hill for the third time. I wandered off onto a random track in search of place to drink my can of beer to find a group of people admiring something ancient. I made my way over to read the accompanying historical blurb. To my astonishment and chagrin, I had just stumbled upon, completely by accident, Socrates Prison. The maps had it up on top of the cliff face. It was, however, down below, the prison itself carved into the rock face where there were two parts or cells. It was an important moment in my life. Since this man had endured hatred, mockery, and ultimately death, for speaking the Truth. It’s a fact of life, in whichever century or millennium you’re living in, that those in power do not like those human beings who dare to tell the Truth. Jesus did it. There have been many others. Many attempted to do the same, including myself and many in the medical profession during the fiasco and travesty of justice that was Covid. Socrates stoicism would not be subject to censorship by the Greek and Roman authoritarian troglodytes of the time. He insisted on telling the Truth and paid the price with his life. I wandered off down the track to find a camping table. A good place to crack open my beer, and meditate on universal themes of justice and how we appear to have lost our way in this regard in the West. It seemed to me that truth and justice no longer mattered in the West. What mattered instead were vacuous, meaningless, and superficial axioms and dictums born of the love of the communist cultural revolution during the now irrelevant Cold War. A special kind of negativity promoted by Feminists in education, obliterating all past rationality and reason. Matters of race, gender, and climate were all that mattered now, all meaningful knowledge of the past 2,500 years, born from where I now sat, dumped into the moron’s rubbish bin of history. During my time of suffering in the 1990s, I had gone deep into the realms of knowledge of the Truth, of the eternal, deep into the light, and deep into the realm of God.

All of this ditched by brigade of ovarian based troglodytes and barbarians.

I wrote some travel notes and finished my Greek beer and decided, that since there was plenty of time, I would keep going up the hill to the place we had been yesterday. Up the track I went. At the top of the hill, the Aegean Sea was gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight. I cracked open my second can of Greek Mythos beer and sat there in awe, still finding it impossible to believe what I was doing and where I was.

At base, I had no more in the tank. We ordered takeaway, watched the Bad Sisters from Dublin, and crashed.

MONDAY 13 NOVEMBER: DAY 22

 The time had come to hit the shiny blue and sail to a Greek Island. The taxi ferried us all the way down the freeway to Piraeus, a half hour drive. We bought a ticket to the island of Aegina and were told to hurry aboard. We ran up the gangplank and found a seat outside in the shade. Straight away I could pick out the athletes who were yesterday’s Marathon participants, one of them sporting a leg brace. Hats off to youse all, I thought, admiring a very sporting and beautiful girl wearing active pants. We hit the kiosk for supplies as it was a leisurely hour and a half ride across the Aegean.

It isn’t possible to describe the natural beauty of the Aegean Sea or the Greek Islands. I will not attempt to do that. You will have to go and see it for yourselves. We took a long walk around the island and visited the historic church on the waterfront, had an early dinner in a café as we watched the sun set. I wandered down to the Aegean and lay down and splashed water on my body and face so that at least I had experienced its waters. At dusk, we took the ferry back to Piraeus and finished our very short stay stocking up on a few more personal hygiene products purchased from pharmacies in Koukaki. I purchased a pair of Zippo reading glasses, which I was happy to find, since last year I lost the pair of specs probably on the plane ride home. We packed our suitcases, did not get to finish Bad Sisters. I drank a can of Greek beer out on the balcony overlooking the Acropolis, which, all aglow at night, was one of the most stunning sights I had ever seen.  

TUESDAY 14 NOVEMBER: DAY 23

The taxi driver to the airport didn’t say a word. It was an opportunity to savour more of the sights of the city in daylight.  At the airport, it was the usual scenario. Through the gates and into the café for breakfast and coffee before a short flight to Doha.

Doha, as opposed to Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is an incredibly annoying airport. It’s busy and the lines at customs seem to always be over-crowded, while there are nowhere enough staff on to accommodate the crowds. It seemed to me that this was something they did to annoy Westerners. The other aspect that is not only annoying but really pushing human rights and privacy to the limit is their requirement that everyone who passes through customs into Qatar be fingerprinted. I took an extremely dim view of this as being an outrageous intrusion into my rights to privacy. However, this is the kind of crap that one has to simply put up with when travelling. Being stuck in a long queue and then waiting an inordinate amount of time to be let through as everyone is thoroughly inspected and fingerprinted led to my thinking that I would never return to Doha and they could shove their over-zealous intrusion into Westerners’ lives up their arse. It is a far more relaxed and enjoyable process entering the UAE where, once you are on their records at customs, they simply let you straight through. So, in future, it would definitely be a return to Dubai for the layover.

What occurs at the airport amid unfriendly and harassing police at customs is not repeated elsewhere on the accommodation front. Doha has a number of very friendly and hard-working Nigerians and Kenyans who will do all they can to please you and the women in this regard, the Nigerians and Kenyans, are some of the most beautiful women you will ever the good fortune of dealing with. They are a credit to their race and a credit to Africa. This time, we were staying in a Radisson Blue not far from the airport. We wanted to keep taxi rides to a minimum and we were now so exhausted that all we cared about was getting back to Oz asap. They upgraded our room to an executive suite free of charge for some reason but only for the night. The two rooms were huge, the bedroom the size of a normal room. Two bathrooms. We hit the buffet for a massive feed at dinner, inducing a full tummy food coma, and after watching Abbey Cornish in “Infinity”, hit the sack, indeed comatose.

The next morning ushered in a day where we would check out of this room into a smaller room downstairs. The adrenaline of travel was starting to quickly disappear and we could not be bothered swimming or walking or doing anything else but sleep and watch TV until our flight at around 11PM. We ordered room service and I took to watching the rest of the Abbey Cornish film and then was fortunate enough to catch the live court decision of the British Supreme Court in London as it related to the important question of the Rwandan solution to immigration. The British government had attempted to do an Australian Nauru, whereby they sought to process the reams of immigrants into Britain by off-shore processing. This was an incredibly important decision for the current Tory government now headed by Rishi Sunak. The Supreme Court came to the decision that the processing of immigrants in Rwanda was inherently unsafe. To me, it was a fair enough decision and, although unfortunate news for government in their attempts to help solve the massive immigration problem brought about by out of control and unregulated illegal immigration, especially from African countries, the decision addressed the inevitable fact that many of these illegal immigrants could easily be sent back to the very dangerous African country from which they were being persecuted. The risk was that in such a case, they would be killed upon returning to their native country. This was the correct decision since it was based on important humanitarian concerns. It is a fact that we in the West have an important role to play in displaying our global moral leadership when it comes to humanitarian and human rights matters, in contradistinction to what goes on in authoritarian dictatorships like Russia and China and the rest, all of whom ignore and trample upon global human rights.

         I sucked some revolting instant coffee while watching this decision on Sky News. It was now time for another sleep. We called room service and ate a late lunch and crashed out and soon, after a bit more television of the movie kind, our day had come to an end. It was time to head back to the airport.

WEDNESDAY 15 NOVEMBER: DAY 24

 Another fourteen-hour flight. You never really get used to the exhaustion these flights induce, especially after such a jam-packed, arduous but worthwhile adventure. After securing two 1.25 litre bottles of whiskey, we met up with our car in the long-term car park once again and headed for home. I slept some days for fourteen hours, the first week at home being a blur. Little did I know, until well into the second week at home that I had contracted Covid on the flight home. Due to asthma and bronchial matters, it took me six weeks to recover, back on my feet just in time for Christmas.

For the next year, I will transfer all my photos from iCloud to USB stick and plug that into the TV at home to re-experience the journey. Then, somewhere around the same time next year, we will jump aboard a plane and do it all again. The south of France has become our second home. We will use it as a base to see Europe. As much of Europe as we can fit in in the pursuit of Carpe Diem for the rest of our lives. New York, the last of the major cities of London, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, and NYC is now on the menu. We plan to celebrate major birthday’s there and I am  keen to trapse around both Brooklyn and Jersey.

I will naturally spend a huge amount of time taking meticulous travel notes in the future.