News from Ted
Discovered At Last
Last September (I think it was) a friend of mine, Yvon, came to visit from the town of Orange – a lovely old town in the Rhone valley, with the smallest Opera house I’ve ever seen. He is the owner of the Touratech shop in Orange and back in 2017, when we first met, things were going great. Bikers were in and out all the time, most of them I guess with their BMWs, buying expensive gear, but also the French edition of Jupiter’s Travels.
Then Touratech almost collapsed, putting a big kink in his business. And then along came Covid, and pretty soon after that a very angry domestic crisis (how often those dismal things combine) but somehow he stays cheerful and energetic. On this last visit he brought with him a French motorcycle journalist called Pascal who, it turns out, had never heard of me. As though he’d struck gold he kept me talking for hours, and then we did some pictures. Although his magazine “BOXER” is mostly BMW, it just came out with six pages about yours truly, all in French of course. Marvellous publicity, you might think, but I have nothing to sell. There is not a single copy of Jupiter’s Travels in French to buy anywhere. All the same I thought you might like to see what they did:
Saving The World
My rallying cry to save the world last week did not fall on deaf ears. WE are now at least a dozen. Of course my Eureka moment did not come to me with quite the scientific assurance of E=MC², nor with the authority of a papal edict. I went to sleep with my tongue in my cheek. (Which is actually a bit uncomfortable.Try it some time.)
However, now that my tongue is back where it belongs, I find that I am being cheered on by a small multitude (including, I may say, a servant of the people) and I begin to wonder whether there isn’t, maybe, something in it after all – that it isn’t just a good joke.
What I think makes most of us feel powerless in the face of climate change is the unpalatable truth that no one of us, alone, can do anything to make a difference.
Of course there has always been a lot of lofty talk, to which I myself subscribe, that it’s important to do the right thing, even if you’re on your own doing it – like removing plastic waste from a stream. I have even delivered speeches on the subject. But that has generally to do with matters of aesthetics or morals or sheer humanity.
What we are facing now is something cataclysmic, overwhelming, all-consuming. It’s the end game of human history. Against this threat the individual – well this individual at any rate – feels powerless.
The only way I can imagine that one person – or a small number of people – could ward off climate disaster would be through a scientific discovery so extraordinary, so inconceivable that it would defy the sun, gobble up two centuries worth of CO2, and allow us to continue in our dirty ways. I wouldn’t bet on it.
On the other hand, just suppose you could get ten million people to agree that on a certain day they would take a certain action, that could change the course of history. They would not have to agree on anything else. They would not have to be believers, or disbelievers, conservatives or radicals, rich or poor, black or white. All they need have in common is the agreement that on a certain day they would all do something to make a difference. And they would stick WE in their windows.
Just imagine, and it’s only an idea, that ten million WE people in the UK agreed that on March first, at ten o’clock they would stop whatever they were doing and walk out on to the streets and shut traffic down all across the country, until the government did . . . .What?
So, the two big imponderables:
First, how do you get from ten people to ten million? Easy! For once Facebook et alia can make it happen. The miracle of exponential growth. It’s not like the Arab Spring. Nobody’s being asked to lay down their lives. It’s just a walk in the park to force the government’s hand.
Second: What is the WHAT? That’s the difficult one. Someone has to decide and stick to it. If it were me I’d assemble a small council of advisers, environmentalists obviously, and choose one objective with enough sex appeal.
Shut down coal-powered plants?
Ban some particularly damaging ocean practice?
You name it.
So there you are – my plan to save the world.
I’m going to bed now.
PS: If it were America, of course we would need fifty million, and I’d have them all surround Joe Manchin’s house.
As you all know I have felt a peculiar sense of responsibility for the world since I rode around it.
In a way I think of it as mine, so If I could save it, I would. Last night, not being able to sleep, I turned my thoughts, once again, to this crucial dilemma.
I struggled mightily.
What must be done? What can I do to rescue the planet from our suicidal efforts to incinerate it, and ourselves in the process. (If at the same time I can make it safe for motorcyclists – electric, of course – so much the better).
The big problem, I realised, is “we.” Wherever and whenever climate change is discussed, there is always someone telling us what we must do. We must face up to the danger. We must stop burning coal. We must stop eating meat. We must stop cutting down forests. We must stop burning anything. We must stop pigs from farting. We must cycle to work…..
Many years ago now I came sadly to the conclusion that there is no we. All we have is bits of we pathetically scattered around, but they don’t add up to anything. We doesn’t actually exist.
They on the other hand definitely exists. They is very strong. They is still digging for oil, clearing the Amazon, firing up power plants, persuading us to eat a pound of beef a day, mucking up the ocean… and telling us not to worry because money is going to make everything all right.
Then it came to me, and I shouted, very quietly because it was the middle of the night, Eureka!
If we doesn’t exist it will have to be invented. So, from my bed in Aspiran, I am now announcing the birth of an exhilarating new movement to save the earth. It is called:
WE
Anyone can join. Then when WE says WE is going to do something WE will know who WE‘re talking about. I expect everybody reading this proclamation to join me now. Together WE can save the world.
Then I went back to sleep.
The first copies of my new book will get here on Wednesday I’m told, and I’m pretty eager to see them. Angel and Teresa who have designed it and had it printed in Spain are bringing them back in their van. The rest will come next week in a truck. Meanwhile here’s the second half of the piece I wrote back in ’98 when I took a Triumph over the same route that I’d walked in ’93 to write The Gypsy in Me.
I like praise and admiration as much as anyone. Why is it my best stories always seem to be about how I made a fool of myself? Take, for example, the morning I arrived in Russia.
I went in at a place called Mamanovo, on the road to Kaliningrad, the western-most point of Russia, on the border with Poland. I had all my papers ready, or so I thought. There was the title to the Triumph Adventurer that Hinckley had lent me for the trip; a letter from the factory saying I was authorised to ride it; a green insurance paper and, of course, my passport with a visa for one night in Kaliningrad that cost me $200 because it included an obligatory hotel room.
It should have been a cinch, but Nyet. I ran up against a little fellow in a light blue uniform with one of those “Nyet” faces from the Cold War. He didn’t like where I had stopped my bike. He wanted it another two feet forward so he wouldn’t have to move himself.
I always suck up to border guards, a habit I acquired in exotic places long ago. So wearing a sycophantic smile, and with my papers clutched around my clutch lever (of course) I edged forward, found neutral, and passed the papers over. I should have put down the side stand.
“Driving Licence,” he snapped, in German. Damn, why didn’t I think of that? It’s inside my jacket. I shuffled around. Then he thrust some other papers at me. Well, you know how it goes. I reached over, unbalanced, and lost it. 500 pounds of metal fell on his foot – or would have if he hadn’t leapt out of the way, uttering stony curses.
If there is anything more pathetic than a bike lying on its side, like an upturned beetle, it’s the rider who dropped it. A spoonful of oil dribbled out from somewhere above the cylinder heads – I really don’t know anything about these new triples – as I heaved it up again, feeling pretty silly. Officer Nyet pointed grimly to another spot of tarmac out of the mainstream and I wheeled the bike away and stood there, forlorn, embarrassed, waiting for them to digest me at their leisure.
Instead I got Natasha. Have you noticed that pretty girls in uniform with the power to change your life always look even prettier? Well I have. Natasha was a dazzling young blonde with a peachy complexion, red lips and sky-blue eyes that matched her uniform. The lieutenant’s pips on the shoulders of her white blouse were very sexy, and she spoke a kind of fairy-tale English. Best of all, she actually seemed anxious to please ME.
“So stupid,” I murmured, referring to my own mishap.
“Yes, I know, it’s stupid,” she agreed eagerly, but she was talking about her own bureaucratic absurdities. It took me a moment to grasp what she was telling me. To avoid paying a bunch more money, she said, I had to write a letter pretending to be the Triumph Motorcycle Company and saying that I, Ted Simon, was riding strictly for pleasure. Then I signed it, Ted Simon. It was probably the most ridiculous letter I have ever written, but it satisfied them. In the stupidity stakes I figured we were running about even.
Naturally in the meantime I had fallen in love with Natasha. She explained that she was an electrical engineer from Kazakhstan but had to take this job because Kazakhstan didn’t have enough electricity to occupy her. I had the feeling that she would rather have just hopped on the back, and it was hard to ride away and nip our romance in the bud. Sadly, we said goodbye forever, and I set off to continue my quest.
Actually I was looking for a tank regiment, at a place called Kornevo. This whole western area of Russia – once a part of Germany – used to be crammed with military. Walking through it in 1993 I had stumbled on a “Tankodrom” and got invited to stay at the commander’s apartment. He was a very nice and honourable man, but he and his regiment were all living in unbelievably slum-like conditions. I wanted to know what had become of them.
The paved road soon turned to dirt, to my relief. In this part of Russia the roads were so badly broken up that dirt was much preferable. The Triumph handled fine as I wound my way along cart tracks and through peasant villages, waving at curious babushkas. After about forty miles I got to Kornevo.
The slums were still there, looking even worse than before, and so were the soldiers but they weren’t in the army any longer. The tanks had gone. So had my colonel. The men and their families had simply been abandoned to live off the land as best they could. I found all this out by talking to them. Don’t ask me how. They spoke only Russian and I’ve forgotten all the Russian I ever knew. It’s remarkable how humans communicate.
And another thing. Here I am with this shiny modern machine surrounded by destitute veterans of nasty wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and I had to leave the bike outside while I tramped up four flights of filthy stairs, but I wasn’t kidnapped, nobody took anything, nobody asked me for anything. As I’m always saying, it’s much safer than you think.
When I got to Kaliningrad I had no idea how to find the Tourist Hotel, but there was one grand hotel on the central square where I knew I could get a map and change money. The big problem, though, was where to leave the bike. Hadn’t I been warned a hundred times that criminals abound? I guessed that if I parked it on the pavement, right in the middle of the busy foot traffic, it would be hard for anyone to steal from it.
I was in the hotel a lot longer than I should have been, dealing with bad-tempered people who didn’t want to be bothered. A woman came into the lobby looking flustered and spoke to me in English.
“There is a policeman who says you must look after your motorcycle.”
I had just got everything I needed and went out. AA young cop – barely eighteen – with a huge peaked cap that came down over his ears, wagged his finger at me and put on a stern expression that looked ludicrous on his fresh, boyish face. He went on wagging his finger, lost for words. He thought I was a naïve and congenitally foolish westerner. I thought my strategy for enlisting the neighbourhood watch had worked out rather well.
The Tourist Hotel, when I found it, was like an old lady marooned and subsiding gently in an ocean of rubbish. Next to her stood a maze of eroding concrete pillars, all that was left of some entrepreneur’s failed dream. Across the road suspicious types hung out around a defunct garrison. Where would my bike fit into this picture? I needn’t have worried.
As soon as the harried woman behind the battered wooden counter heard that I had a motorcycle she swung into action. A man in a suit was dispatched immediately to watch over it while I trundled up to the third floor in a wheezing lift. Later she directed me to a piece of wasteland that probably hadn’t changed much since the Red Army pounded its way through to Berlin in 1945. A local businessman had put up a fence around this heap of rubble, built a little shack, and charged four rubles (50 cents) a night. My bike was shackled to a girder and was never safer.
See, it was like that everywhere. In Romania, which everybody knows is a nest of thieves, they love to think of ingenious ways to defeat the enemy. My bike spent three nights in hotel lobbies and another behind a barricade outside a friend’s cousin’s front door. Not only that, but my friend’s cousin cannibalised his bicycle for washers and nuts to repair my right indicator which was drooping miserably. Why? Well, you see there was this army captain at the Ukrainian border and he was determined to ride my bike. He begged, he pleaded, he cajoled. Just once around the yard, he said. He was the boss. He seemed to know about bikes. “One down, four up” he signalled, with an ingratiating smile. And so I let him. It was clear immediately that he hadn’t expected so much weight, but he recovered from that and was up to third gear before he came round among us again. Then he couldn’t resist a final flourish as he drew the bike up to a sideways slide and a smart stop. The triumphant grin was still on his face as the bike fell on top of him, breaking the mirror and snapping the indicator stalk.
He was deeply embarrassed and I was furious but there wasn’t much I could do. He probably earned all of $10 a month, and anyway I should have known better. So with one orange lense dangling I rode on into Romania.
While waiting for my new book to arrive from the printer I’ve been going through some pieces I wrote years ago, and thought I’d keep you entertained in the meanwhile. This one appeared in Motorcycle Sport & Leisure twenty-three years ago. I’d been thinking of doing another long journey after living in the USA for twenty years, and it was time to see how it felt now, at the age of 67. The long journey, of course, turned out to be Dreaming of Jupiter.
I was about twenty miles into Poland on the edge of a small town, surrounded by debris and decrepitude, when I saw a café with tables on the pavement under colourful umbrellas. The Poles know how to relax. Some might say they know too well, but I approve. In this I feel the Poles have their priorities right.
It was an unusually hot Saturday in June and I was getting thirsty. I hadn’t ridden far that day; it’s only 40 miles from Berlin to the Polish border – but border crossings and money changing take their toll. So I sprawled gratefully under the shade and reflected on what I was doing there.
It was twenty-five years since I had kicked down on the old Tiger 100 and begun my 78,000 mile journey round the world. Then the Triumph went into a museum and I succumbed to an R65 just to give myself a holiday from motorcycle maintenance. I still have the same BMW and in all these years I have only put 20,000 miles on it. But there are rumours floating about that I might want to go round the world again – not surprising really since I started them. So what would it feel like after all this time? Obviously I needed to hit the road and find out. A rehearsal if you like – but where? After 18 years in the USA I chose Eastern Europe.
Hinckley Triumph lent me the bike. I rode around England’s green and pleasant land selling Jupiter’s Travels and Riding High until I had enough cash for the adventure. Then one fine day in May I took a boat across the Channel, wandered around France, Holland and Germany for a few weeks, and went East.
On the whole it had been a wonderful experience so far, but that particular day did not start well. On my way out of Germany’s scorching and dusty future capital I stopped to refuel, packing in as much gas as the 15-litre tank would hold. Coming back from the cash register I saw an ominous pool spreading under the bike. Petrol was running freely down the side of the engine, appearing from some hidden source below the tank. I turned off the tap. the gusher slowed and stopped. I turned it on, and the petrol ran again. I turned it off once more, moved the bike to a dry place and started the engine. It ran fine. I turned on the tap and petrol ran out again. This was not good. I had no idea what to do. I was NOT going to ride through Poland on a crotch rocket waiting to ignite. On the other hand I had just paid $200 for a 24-hour visa to Russia, valid on Monday only. There was no time to waste on motorcycle mysteries.
In desperation I called ADAC, the German equivalent of AAA, hoping they knew more about Triumph triples than I did. It was a national holiday in a heat wave. They were very busy. While I waited for the man, I took off various bits of fairing to see if I could detect where the juice was flowing from. My efforts were futile, so I screwed everything back on. After ten minutes of impatient waiting I turned on the tap again. As mysteriously as it had begun the hemorrhage stopped. I cancelled the call for help, pretending I’d fixed it myself, and set off feeling rather foolish.
All these things contributed to my thirst and I meant to take a long, lazy break. I had hardly begun on my Orangina when along came a crazy man. This short, shabby peasant ambled up, mumbling, with a loony smile, and I was his new best friend. He was prematurely aged, probably more by vodka than the weight of his responsibilities, and he stood at my table gazing at me with a kindly expression as he gibbered non-stop gobbledygook at me, one calloused hand outstretched, in greeting or supplication. I gulped down my drink, climbed back on the Triumph and headed in the general direction of Gdansk.
I was on a less important two-lane highway, but the surface was quite good and the traffic was light. All around me the Polish countryside was moist and lush. Sheets of water gleamed through gaps in the trees to remind me that in this northern stretch of Europe forests and lakes shared the landscape equally. To tell the truth it was beautiful. There was no industry, only small towns and glorious country.
People sold fruit and fish at the roadside. Along one stretch, where an unusually long lake extended langorously behind a curtain of forest, there were people standing at the mouth of every cart track dangling what looked like long brown sticks from their outstretched hands. They were people of all kinds – young, old, men, women and children, and they dropped behind me as regularly as telegraph poles from a train window. Only after I was long past them did it strike me that they were selling smoked eels, which I happen to relish above most other things but it was too late. One can never go back.
Gradually the heat and humidity built up, and by mid-afternoon I was pretty sure it was going to rain. The sky was a bustling arena of clouds, some silvery bright, some dark and drear, chasing each other through shafts of sunlight. I don’t mind riding through rain, but I don’t choose to. It seemed to me I had come far enough for one day and I started to look for a place.
Near Walcz – which I pronounce “vouch” because the L has a cross on it which I can’t type – I saw a hotel shouting at me from across the road. It boasted a huge sign covered in boxed illustrations of people engaged in Olympic water sports. It was like an IKEA user manual, and behind the hotel, on the edge of a lake, were many sporting types dashing about following the instructions. The driveway to the hotel was protected, military fashion, by a guard house and one of those pivoting poles. A severe-looking couple emerged from the little house, and you could see immediately that their lives centred around this pole. They did not want me to get past it. I drove up and waited while they raved at me. Finally, due no doubt to the superior force of my personality, they raised the pole. I parked and walked to the reception desk, where I met a nice-looking, English-speaking young woman.
The Eastern bloc has a vast army of nice-looking, English-speaking young women. Presumably they all used to spy for the KGB but now they don’t and they are just as nice as before. She told me that a room cost 80 Zlotys. 80 Zlotys is about $25. That would have been very cheap in Peoria, but I was being even cheaper in Poland.
“That’s rather too much,” I reflected sadly.
“Yes,” she said sympathetically, “it is, isn’t it.”
I rode back to the guard house where the two trolls, unable to disguise their glee, raised the pole with alacrity, and I rode on for a few miles. Pretty soon, next to a small shop, I saw a hand-painted sign. All it said was HOTEL, with an arrow pointing forward down a rutted track. A hundred yards further on was a similar sign with the arrow pointing back down another track. My willpower crumbled under the persuasive power of this brilliant advertising campaign and I turned to follow the arrow.
It led eventually to a large building of modern Gothic appearance. From a high peak the roof swept down almost to the ground and from under its formidable overhang little windows peeped out. The first strange thing about it was that the roof was divided in two at the crown. The halves were at least twenty feet apart and it looked weirdly vulnerable, like a crustacean with its soft parts exposed. Under the heavy sky, which was now descending like a lead blanket, I wondered whether some Transylvanian thunderbolt had split the building down the middle.
The other strange things were that it had no name, and that there seemed to be no entrance. I walked around it twice, and finally went in through the kitchen where a not-so-nice looking non-English-speaking older woman received me with rapture and guided me through a culinary labyrinth to find the inevitable nice-looking English-speaking young woman.
“How much for a room,” I asked. She thought for a minute.
“25 Zlotys,” she said. I was sure she had just invented the number, but $8 was fine by me.
“How about dinner?” I asked. She turned to the N-S-N-L N-E-S lady and they chatted.
“25 Zlotys,” she said.
I should have asked to buy the hotel.
Dinner she told me would be at seven because they were catering for a wedding that evening. I said that seven would be fine and went to my room, which contained three single beds, a wash basin and a radio. It was small but cute, walled with naked pine like a ship’s cabin, with a window that peeped through the roof.
Then I went outside to admire the view – the hotel had its own lake with boats and swans and a tennis court – when the N-L E-S young woman appeared. It was six o’clock when she announced brightly, “Your dinner is ready.”
“Why not,” I thought. “At $8 for all this, I should be a slave to time?”
Dinner was also small but cute. It was the same delicious stuffed chicken they would be serving the bridal party, and I was the absent guest. Afterwards I took my umbrella to the store on the road, bought my favourite beer, pronounced Jiviets (you don’t want to know how to spell it) and sat down outside under the awning to drink it. I had barely swallowed three gulps when a crazy man came and sat next to me. He clearly knew me intimately because he muttered secrets into my ear and patted me. It seemed to me later that whenever I sat down to drink in Poland a crazy man would appear, to engage me with a mad monologue of which I understood nothing.
A bolt of lightning shot through the cloud cover and the rain came pelting down. How unpleasant to be trapped in a thunderstorm with a mad man, but – A-HAH – I had my trusty umbrella. With another bottle tucked under my arm I returned joyfully to the no-name hotel, and while nature went berserk outside, I spent the night listening to Cole Porter tunes on the radio.
The moral of this story? Always carry an umbrella. Don’t get on your bike without it.
Next morning I was on my way to the Russian Border.
More next week.
It’s quite hard to explain to others why I persist in wasting my time doing things that other people could do much more efficiently. Take this book I’m publishing as an example. I’ve spent hours wavering between different types of envelope to send the book out in. Should it be bubble wrap? But then the corners might get damaged. Or cardboard? More expensive, but safer, perhaps. There must be a reason Amazon uses them. I bought small samples of each and decided to spend the money on cardboard. I get the envelopes a hundred at a time from some guy called Kurt in Germany. The Amazon man brought the first lot to my door cursing because the village Mayor has torn the road up, and he has to back out down a very narrow crooked street, and it’s raining.
I need a system that will work on the day the books arrive at my door, because they will come, if all goes well, just nine days before Christmas. They’ve all got to go out immediately so that people like you, dear reader, have time to send them on as gifts. And I’ve got to sign them all and write stuff in them. I’ve already got a list of three hundred and I hope it will be closer to four hundred, because that’s the break-even point.
Obviously the answer is to have all the envelopes ready, addressed and stamped in advance. So I’ve been typing out hundreds of addresses on my Mac, and with most of them a note about dedicating the book “To my dear old Auntie Gussie “ or “Keep the rubber side down, Chuck.” And then I transfer the addresses to shipping label templates, and then I run the Avery labels off the printer and stick them on the envelopes, with a Post-it note about Aunt Gussie or Chuck.
All this took a couple of days – there are three hundred envelopes to date – and on the third day I notice that the labels are beginning to unstick themselves. A nightmarish vision of labels flying free in the post office and attaching themselves to other people’s packages of Viagra causes me to spend another day taping the labels down on the envelopes – how inefficient is that? Then someone says, “What about return labels?” Oh. Yes. Another few hours with Avery and the printer, and 300 envelopes. By now the names are getting really familiar; remarkable how many of them are good old Anglo-Saxon names. Where’s the diversity?
Anyway, the idea is that on D-Day I sit at a table, pen in hand while one acolyte to my right holds the book open for my precious inscriptions and the other to my left slips it into an envelope and seals it.
I have yet to find out what happens at the post office when I arrive with three or four hundred small packages. I hope to have them stamped before I get there but I can’t yet figure out how to print the right stamps at home. And what will my credit card say about a sudden 7,000 euro item?
People say: “Why doesn’t he just stick to writing, which he’s quite good at, instead of messing about with things he doesn’t understand?” I don’t have a very good answer. It could be a kind of laziness. I find it a bit boring to do what’s expected of me, but I do enjoy trying things for the first time and understanding them. That’s why I built my own house, and why I started an organic vegetable farm forty years ago, and why I rode a motorcycle round the world before everyone was doing it. I could have hired experts but where’s the fun in that. And anyway, what would I have to write about?
So remember, when the book comes to your door, I’m not just the bloke who wrote it, I’m also the one who stuck on the labels and the stamps. It’s all very personal.
You’ve been wonderful. Almost 200 of you have come through already with orders for Don’t Boil The Canary. And that’s only half the number who said they’d buy it, so I can dare to hope that by the time the books arrive at my doorstep there will have been enough sold to make it all worthwhile.
This week has been like a taste of the Fifties. That’s the last time I did old-fashioned office work, with lists and labels and stacks of envelopes and endless checking, and tea-rings on the tabletop, and heated discussion with the French post office about how to get hundreds of small packages stamped and delivered in one day.
I’ve been promised delivery on December 15. It’s later than I hoped, but still in plenty of time to get it to you and even enable you to send it on before the holiday if you want to. I’ve signed a lot of books in my time but this will be a marathon, especially as so many of you want more than just a signature. I’ve figured out an elaborate system with post-it notes, and with my happy helpers, Ann and Hilary, on either side of me it should go like clockwork. Well it should, shouldn’t it?
If you are among those who promised to buy the book I hope you’ll place an order soon. I want to be sure I’ve got enough supplies to deal with it all, and they might become uncertain as we get closer to Christmas. And need I remind you that Jupiter’s Travels in Camera also makes a very desirable present if you’re looking for something that offers much more than just pictures. What’s more, I’ll put copy of the CD in it for free. It’s much under-rated and offers a huge amount of stuff about the second journey.
Some of you have accompanied your orders with extraordinarily moving accounts of the influence Jupiter’s Travels has had on their lives. I can’t begin to tell you how comforting that is to me and how proud it makes me. This is a time when so many destructive forces seem to be gaining in strength, and it’s hard not to feel helpless in face of them. You allow me to feel that I’ve done my bit, and that we’re all on the same side. For that I am deeply grateful. We have to win, or my grandsons will never know the joys of our wonderful world.
Now that my book has finally gone to the printer I find it hard to believe that it’s taken me almost four years to write. I started on it in 2017, soon after my last visit to New York which was also the last time I saw Harry Evans. He gave me lunch on the East Side at what I suppose was a favourite restaurant since everyone there knew him. Later in the year, with some trepidation, I asked him to read the first 20,000 words which were about my early childhood and the war. He wrote back:
“Ted, I read it all at one go. It is enchanting. Beautifully observed. It will resonate with many who lived it and charm the rest.”
Since he was a truly great newspaper editor and then the boss of Random House his opinion was clearly valuable, and I determined to go on with it, but knowing how lazy I’ve become in my old age I thought publishing it in chapters on my website might keep me going. It worked I guess, but awfully slowly. Harry died three years later, and I still hadn’t finished it. I’m still grieving. I know he would have loved the title.
Anyway, it’s done now, and I’ve promised quite a lot of people that I would do an audio version. There are already recorded versions of Jupiter’s Travels and Dreaming of Jupiter, and they’ve done well. The reader, Rupert Degas, is brilliant and they are both very classy interpretations, but I think this story of my life doesn’t need to be that sophisticated. In fact, I fancy doing it at the kitchen table, and if there are occasional noises, well, so be it. I’ve noticed how rowdy my village street can be sometimes. There aren’t any juvenile scooter sods roaring up and down the street now, partly because the police took an interest after one of them knocked me flat on my back. But it’s the mayor who inadvertently spoiled their game. He has torn up the small square at the end of my road and exposed the village’s entrails.
The plan is to renovate and beautify the Placette as it’s called, but for now it’s a mess of deep holes with a quite bewildering substrate of pipes of all ages and dimensions to be pondered over by bewildered workers, although they seem now to have figured it out. For traffic – and drunken pedestrians – it’s a no-go area. We’ve been promised to have it back before Christmas, with water in the fountain as a bonus, but for now there are drills and compressors and things that go bang, and some of that noise might well be recorded for posterity if I go on with my plan.
You may recall that my partner’s house, where I was mainly living, burned down on New Year’s Eve with the guinea fowl in the oven (it wasn’t the oven, and we did rescue and consume the dinner while the house burned). They are still rebuilding it, otherwise that would have been a quieter place to record in. We were promised to have that back by Christmas too, but we all know about mice and men and supply chains. It seems there’s a shortage of windows, among other things.
So along with my book you might get a slice of recorded history, written by pneumatic drill, of the restoration of beautiful old Aspiran. It’s all to come, and more…
The book is ready and about to go to the printer. I am pleased with it, and I’m sure you will be too. Most of you have already promised to buy a copy, and I very much hope I can count on all of you to pre-order it as soon as possible. Here it is – a paperback but with flaps, front and back. And I hope the title amuses you: It’s in the book, of course.
The book will be in my hands well before Christmas. It has 448 pages, which makes it even bigger than Jupiter’s Travels, and the cover price is $25. I will sign every copy you order and, if possible, dedicate it to whomever you choose.
You could say I’m a multi-national but I don’t have a tax haven (pathetic, really) and I am not Amazon either, so the postage to get my book across the water safely is rather high and costs as much as the book itself. Because so many of you have committed yourselves, I will reduce the shipping cost to $20 until Christmas. It’s a bit of a gamble but in my experience I think I can count on you. If most of you come through I have a chance of breaking even.
Most of you I have never met, but a strange thing happens as I laboriously type out the lists of your names and email addresses. Many of them I’ve seen before, and I feel a curious familiarity with you. Although all my books up to now have been published by big companies I have always offered to sign and sell them directly. Many of you have written to me afterwards to thank me for writing them so I recognise a lot of the names. These interactions have been important to me, and I have devoted a lot of time to them, much more than would normally make commercial sense. I think I have a good feel for who you are, and I think you know I’m not in it for the money.
So that’s the deal. Pre-order the book now, or as soon as you can, for expected delivery before Christmas. There will, I hope, be several hundred books to send out quickly, and that involves a lot of work signing the books and addressing envelopes and I want to be ready for when the books arrive.
PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY OF THE BOOK HERE
Here’s the blurb about the book:
“Ted Simon was 42 years old when he began the motorcycle journey that the world knows as Jupiter’s Travels. In a book that was unusually revealing he laid his life and his emotions open to everyone. Yet readers across the globe who have been touched by his openness know virtually nothing about those earlier 42 years.”
“Estranged from his father since childhood, and without brothers or sisters, Ted’s point of reference in the world was inevitably his mother. Yet it was only after she died that he realised how many questions he had failed to ask her. At the same time he became aware that his own son and grandsons were also too involved in their day-to-day lives to think of asking him much about his own life. He resolved to write an account for them, so that they might later know the answers to some of the questions they were too busy to ask. This account inevitably grew into the book to be published this month, under the title, DON’T BOIL THE CANARY.
“Born in 1931, his childhood was dominated by the second world war, and his reminiscences from wartime London will resonate with those who lived through those dark times and enchant those who came later.”
“As the post-war world expanded Ted takes the reader through all the turns and twists of an ever-changing career with an unabashed account of the rich and varied life he led before the journey that defined him.”
It was good of you – quite a few of you – to come back to me with answers to my impossible question; what to do about climate change.
It seems most unlikely that if I were to ride an electric motorbike from Glasgow to Beijing, or the other way round, that I would arrive in time to make a difference. And if I didn’t arrive at all (most likely) it would send the wrong message.
Extinction Rebellion would not take kindly to my doing a burnout in front of the conference hall (thanks Andy) and I might become extinct myself.
Nor, judging by your response, am I likely to raise a million followers to descend on Glasgow, Where would we put them, anyway, and fewer than a million would be a pin-prick. Besides, I’m told, Covid is rampant on the Clyde.
I’m afraid it looks like I’ll just be staying home.
Meanwhile I’ve been rewriting chunks of my book. It’ll be going to the printer at the end of the month and I should have it by the end of November. I think it’ll cost $25 or the equivalent in your currency. I’ll try to keep the postage down.
I’ve changed the title, but I won’t spring it on you yet. Instead here’s the new last chapter, for your reading pleasure.
I asked you last week what I must do about climate change. So first of all I need to apologise for dragging you into this quagmire, when what you really wanted was happy tales of adventure and twisties in paradise.
Secondly I apologise for asking an impossible question.
Eighteen of you were kind enough to indulge me, but we all know that there is nothing I could do or say as an individual that is going to change the course of events. If Greta Thunberg can’t do it, nor can I.
The things some suggest – generally individual choices, small sacrifices, lower consumption – can mitigate, and delay the crisis, but won’t avoid it. Only overwhelming pressure on the politicians gathering at Glasgow this November might have an effect, and that, in my opinion, would mean millions of people physically surrounding them and holding them hostage.
Glasgow in Winter?
Actually the whole idea hardly bears thinking about.
Andy White (Andy Strapz) thinks I could do a burn-out outside the conference. My subsequent assassination by the Extinction Rebellion people would get some publicity, The wrong kind, I think.
Most people think the combination of over-population and over-consumption will eventually make earth uninhabitable and I’m afraid I agree.
Here are a few choice quotes:
Rene van Eynde:
Please don’t do stupid things.
Nothing we can do will alter the future.
Enjoy the years that are left to you.
Joe Lews:
A Tesla has to be driven a hundred thousand miles before it starts to benefit the planet.
Joe Crennan:
Ride your motorcycle to London. In winter rain, cold & hardship that would floor other 90 yr olds (you don’t have to mention the relay of fine hotels & friends along the way to warm your path)
Barge into C4 or the BBC. Someone will give you an audience once you can side step the initial security. Attenborough is in Richmond; easy to find. Pound the pavements with a couple of your books as passports. A retinue of readers will eventually accumulate.
Seamus Gordon:
Just keep writing. You’ve done enough for three or four lifetimes.
Matthew Lee:
Maybe a combination of your fame and Long Way publicity plus ninety electric bikers aged ninetyish led by you on a 90-kilometer ride showing the world that electric transport is the way to go. Sponsored by Harley Davidson of course. I am only in my 69th year, so am not ninetyish! Maybe you could get President Biden on a bike – he looks one hundredish!
Fabio Colpani:
I think you could plan a conference by streaming (i.e. Zoom App) in which you show pictures, tell stories about your incredible travelling around the world. You could ask for a minimal conference registration fee to donate to some organization engaged in some project related to climate change.
Mick McMillan:
Could you ride an electric bike around or back and forward around Glasgow in November? A motorway, you may know cuts through the centre of the city. A fair contingent of local bikeys could more or less be guaranteed to escort on their conventional bikes but perhaps you’d only want other leckie bikes?
Joe Zeller:
A gallon of gasoline weighs about 6.3 lbs but when combined with the combustion air necessary for a ICE to generate power produces about 20 lbs of CO2. That factoid caused me to pause and think. So, my Sunday ride to the coffee shop, a 120 mile RT produces 50 lbs of CO2. Yikes! That caravan of Viagra fueled Harley riders that roll through Tucson bedecked with American flags and MIA POW banners (and the occasional faux Nazi helmet) is creating enough CO2 to smother their grandchildren?
Russell Schuetz:
The World’s population increased by a factor of four (2 billion to nearly 8 billion) in only the last 100 years, 2. Our leaders are always focused on the short term, and long term problems can be left to the next guy, 3. Capitalism is designed to sell us more and more stuff, making sustainability almost impossible, and 4. We have already passed the tipping point on Climate Change (our daughter is a climate scientist, so we get the real scoop) and are snowballing down the other side. … For me, that combination of things is the perfect storm working against a bright and sunny future.
Of all of these Joe Crennan’s idea has a chilly fascination, as a starting point.
If I did the journey to Glasgow in 100-mile increments, and at the first stop there would have to be ten others starting off from somewhere in Europe for me to continue, and at the second stop, a hundred, and so on until there were millions making their way to Glasgow. Well, is that crazy? Who would organise it? Am I insane?
Think about it. Meanwhile, please buy my book.
Cheers
