News from Ted
It’s that day again, MayDay; and not for many decades has life on earth been in such need of saving from distress, but I needn’t remind you of that. For me it is a day of joy, a birthday, and most of all, thank heavens, I am NO LONGER NINETY.
For a whole year I have been labouring under the weight of that zero, so from now on I’m shooting for 99, but save me from the dreaded double zero. That would really finish me off.
For the last month, more or less, I have been trying to wind up my affairs in California and I’ve come back with my affairs as unwound as they’ve ever been, but in a much more pleasing pattern so I shouldn’t complain. I’ve had the company of my son who presented me with another grandson two years ago. His name is Wyatt and he shows great promise with the skate board, sliding down a mountain of sand. Every kid’s dream.
Meanwhile my bike sits in my garage, lonely as a cloud, and I must admit that the time for our parting seems to be drawing close. I’d be much happier on that MP3 I rode around the UK twelve years ago. Sadly it fell apart last year, and I’m thinking of getting another one. So if anyone’s interested in a lovely old Funduro with scratches but only 45,000 km let me know.
Now we’re off to the seaside for oysters and champagne – and let the world go hang, for today at least.
In 1993, when I was on a long journey through Europe, mostly on foot, I walked through a part of Ukraine, between Poland and Romania. Ukraine, newly liberated from the Soviet Union, was deep in crisis, but the crisis was economic. I can’t think of anything useful to say about the tragedy unfolding there now, so I thought I’d offer you a short extract from my book about that journey, “The Gypsy in Me.”
I arrived in Ukraine from Poland by train, to the city that was then Lwow but is now L’viv.
I joined the human tide that swept into the station building and swirled around inside it. There was not a calm spot anywhere. Almost every arriving passenger had brought huge bales, boxes, and baskets, and they were bobbing about in the confusion as though two columns of porters on safari had met in head on collision.
I searched the station walls in vain for any sign of a language I understood, or a map that might tell me where to go. Outside the station, to my disoriented eye, all was frantic chaos. There were buses and trams, but I could not know where they were going and the competition to get on them was fierce. I should have been patient, followed my own rules, sat it out quietly somewhere until the crowd dispersed and I could get some kind of grip on the situation. Instead, anxious for a quick resolution before it turned dark, I asked a policeman.
Two of them were moving through the crowd. They wore pale blue uniforms and I swear it was the colour that seduced me. I confused them subliminally with the United Nations and equated them with peace and security. I walked up to them and said, “Hotel?” One of them turned to me and I saw immediately that I had made a mistake. He had the kind of face I personally detest, a lean, jocular, ass-kicking face. He managed to grin and bark simultaneously.
“Passport!”
I showed it to him. He scanned it, marched me briskly out of the station, and yelled at a crowd of disreputable men gathered around some vehicles that even a wrecker’s yard might have refused. The call was answered by a burly and villainous looking man in the standard black leather jacket, and the cop addressed him with an offhand, joking remark. To me it sounded something like:
“Here’s a little gift for you, Georgi. Don’t forget to cut me in on it later.”
Georgi, if that was his name, ushered me to his taxi, if that’s what it was. There was not really enough of it left to tell. We were able to squeeze in at the front somehow. A comrade of his already occupied the remains of the back seat. I had just enough of my wits about me to remember the Russian for “How much?” so I said “Skolko stoit?”
He raised both hands.
“Dyesyat dollar. Ten,” he said.
Outrageous as I knew this must be, I felt like paying a penalty for my own stupidity and let it go. The contraption ground into motion and we set off. Georgi spoke about ten words of English, and the same number in German. He quickly came to the point, and I understood him a lot better than I let on.
He did not want to take me to a hotel. Hotels are expensive. He had a room. It was somewhere called Ternopol. He would take me to the room. Hotel bad. Room good. Ternopol. He wanted to imprison me in a room, take all my dollars, and then sell me to a laboratory for radiation experiments.
Reasonably enough, I refused.
“Hotel”, I kept insisting. In frustration he slammed his fist on the steering wheel, which I thought a risky thing to do. He held frantic conference with his mate, then started all over again. Actually, as I watched him perform I began to warm to him. Scurrillous and unshaven as he appeared, there was a soul in that bulky body, and it was strained to bursting with resentment over my thick-headed obstinacy. I could sympathise, having endured hours on the train with much the same emotion, and I had to admit he expressed it much better than I had. Fuming with impatience, slapping at everything near him, he tried again and again to get me to surrender to his plan, and we seemed to drive around forever while I wondered whether he really needed my permission.
So I was quite pleased at last to find ourselves outside the Grand Hotel in the heart of town. It was too grand for me, but at least the clerk spoke English. With sorrowful disdain he spoke of another, cheaper establishment and sent us and our jalopy a few hundred yards farther along the road.
It was called, curiously, the “George’a Hotel”. What the “apostrophe a” meant I tried later to discover, but it dated back to Polish times, and nobody seemed to know. The name was up there, in stucco, on the facade, and that was almost all that could be seen of the hotel, for the rest of it, including the main entrance, was obscured by scaffolding.
The side door, the only way in, was more like the entrance to a jail than a hotel. People entering and leaving had to run the gauntlet of a bunch of tough-looking men who were gathered round it, laughing and smoking, while watching them from the side street was an even bigger crowd of soldiers or police with a military vehicle. There should have been an air of crisis, or at least some tension around this unusual scene, and it was puzzling that all the players were evidently treating it as a normal everyday occurrence.
It struck me, not for the first time, that I had spent the greater part of the day being mystified by one thing or another. The explanations I gave myself were pure speculation. Without language, passing through societies in catharsis, I was no better able to account for the phenomena around me than an illiterate peasant resorting to magic and superstition. I was schooled to be forever explaining things, and to be miserable unless I could understand and interpret what was happening around me . . . and yet, the kaleidascopic images I had witnessed that day were all the more fascinating for being inexplicable. Ignorance might be more hair-raising than blissful, but I had survived, and there was a certain joy in simply recording how things were, rather than forever asking why?
Feeling unduly magnanimous I gave an extra five dollars to the rogue who had brought me there. He wanted more and I laughed and squeezed through the hotel door. The receptionist was just as haughty and abrupt as I expected. It would have been more correct to call her the interventionist, but I already had a sense of the local style, and laughed it off. The price of the room was $14, with no bathroom and a suggestion of occasional hot water. She made it clear that only a fool would not know that the restaurant was open until eleven, and she thought me stupid for asking whether I could call Germany from my room. Then her phone rang and she had no more time for me.
I climbed a fine staircase with elegant curving bannisters to the first floor, where the rooms were arranged around a central well with a broad domed skylight above it. Tall carved doors opened on to big rooms with lofty, molded ceilings and high windows. Clearly this hotel had once had a lot of class, and maybe one day would again. Meanwhile, it was a disaster. I managed to squeeze a meal of sorts out of the restaurant and walked out into the night.
The tough guys round the doorway wanted to buy dollars, and from them I discovered that the unit of currency, for want of a better name, was actually called the Kupon. One mystery resolved. The hotel was close to an intersection of several big and busy streets. The statue of a local hero, Shevchenko, stood in the middle of the road. Beyond it, in the direction from which I had been driven, I saw that the street broadened out into a great open area, about a hundred yards wide and very long. Down the middle of it ran a broad, cobbled carriageway and at the far end stood a fine, ornate building that looked like, and was, an opera house.
On each of the four days and nights I stayed in Lwow, I spent some time walking around this splendid esplanade. I joined the enthusiastic audiences that gathered to watch chess players with time clocks hurling joyful insults at each other as they slammed their pieces across the board and their palms on the clocks at breakneck speed.
On the afternoon of Saturday, the big market day, the benches were packed with peasants resting under the bright sun. There were many stout women, past their youth, firmly seated on the benches with their legs apart, skirts smoothed tight over stockinged knees, in blouses, wooly cardigans and scarves round their heads, weathered faces fixed in expressions of satisfaction. Done with the market, it was their chance to claim the freedom of the city for an hour or two before the long road back to their farms. Some of them had a man alongside, bucolic, slightly tipsy and grinning like a jester.
Other older men, pensioners maybe, in faded nondescript suits with stiffly pressed pants like the post-war clothing of my parents’ generation, walked carefully with canes, upholding their dignity. Farther along towards the opera house, the crowd became younger. The racing chess virtuosi were there that day too and a dense knot of men watched and listened to their good-humoured taunts, but many other, quieter games were in progress, attracting less attention but creating pools of tangible reflection alongside the mainstream of people ambling to and fro.
I was there on Sunday, August 14th too, which happened to be Ukraine’s National Independence Day. Up and down the esplanade fiery impromptu orators draw small crowds into loud and lusty argument, while ancient veterans paraded in pale blue uniforms and little boxy caps, larded with operatic piping and medals.
Overlooking the scene from all sides were the great ornamental buildings of the nineteenth century. In this vast precinct from a bygone era there was a peaceful atmosphere which I thought would be impossible to reproduce among modern buildings, however carefully designed or placed they might be. Those massive old stone blocks, dinosaurs from the age of czars and emperors, were once as potent and aggressive as the concrete power structures of today. They had housed the great corporations and institutions of empire, and must have been hot in the pursuit of profit and the prosecution of control. They had been raised up over the labours of millions. In their time they were overbearing symbols of the powers that ruled the throng, that chained armies of clerks to their desks, labourers to their gangs, and soldiers to their batallions.
The polished black cobble stones I walked on, like the billions of others that paved Europe during that century, were laid by hand, and cleverly too, to form a pleasing fan-shaped pattern. Rich men in carriages could look down and see their superiority illustrated in stone beneath their horses’ hooves. But that was all in the past. Today, the pattern in stone was just that, a pattern. The big buildings had taken their toll and were paid for long ago; the heat had gone out of these monoliths of a hundred years ago, their force was spent, and a cool serenity remained. The art survived the loss of power and became benign. In Lwow, where the war passed them by undisturbed, they now shed their benevolence over the newly liberated population. Time matters. Time changes things. Time can’t be faked.
That was the best of Lwow (which I learned to pronounce L’viv*, as the Ukrainians do). The rest was hard scrabble. I began immediately to look for a map to guide me between L’viv and the Romanian frontier at Chernivtsy, but without success. The hotel clerk told me categorically that there was no such thing as a map of Ukraine. Of course I didn’t believe her, but proving it was another matter. I spent Friday in fruitless efforts, and gave up. All I could think of was to find an atlas of some kind and make a copy or tracing. At least I would know the names of some towns along the way and have a rough idea of the distances between them.
The main library, as it turned out, was nearby and close to the market, and I went there on Saturday morning after looking round the stalls and buying a few odd things I hoped would keep until I was on the road. It was a modest library, with very little on open display, but the woman (Why always women? What do the men do?) at the reference desk was nice, and helpful. She found a school atlas. The 200 miles I intended to walk were shown on three inches of map, but still it was a lot better than nothing. I tore a page out of my notebook, did a rough tracing of the roads south and began to make dots for the towns. The cyrillic script was printed so small that I had difficulty reading the names. It was an old atlas and the roads were indistinct and undifferentiated as to importance or condition. I foresaw having a great deal of trouble.
It was then that the usual miracle intervened. A chubby, balding little man in his sixties bustled into the reading room, and stood next to me at the counter where I was working. As he was talking to the librarian I saw his eyes wander my way, and then he asked if I spoke German. So I began to explain what I was up to, and he said he could help.
“Come and sit at the table”, he said. “You see, I am a geography professor, retired actually, but I have surveyed every bit of this territory you are going through, between here and Chernivtsy.”
He gave me the names of the towns where it would be best to stay, where he thought there were hotels; and he knew from memory how far they were from each other.
“But why don’t you get a map?” he asked.
I laughed. “That’s what I was trying to do, all of yesterday. It’s impossible. There aren’t any.”
“Come”, he said. “I’ll show you”.
We went out together and he walked me to the very first and most obvious shop I had gone to, just a hundred yards from the hotel. Within minutes he had procured a road map of Ukraine. I was astonished and a little humiliated.
“How is that possible?” I asked. “Why didn’t they give it to me yesterday?”
“Ach, don’t blame them,” he replied. “They only came in today. By Monday they will be all gone. Do you want a small scale ordinance survey map? They have those here too.”
But the flow of miracles had dried up. They had maps of everywhere but the area that interested me. And as for dictionaries, phrase books or guides, there were none. Still I pushed my luck.
“Do you know anyone in the English department of the university?” I asked. “It would be a great help to talk with someone there.”
My cherubic factotum, whose name I wrote down, lost, and later couldn’t remember, was more than willing. We walked the streets behind the hotel for fifteen minutes to arrive at a classic example of a nineteenth century temple of learning, not very different from my own alma mater in London, lavish with brown marble and granite, echoing flagstones and neo-gothic windows, where thoughts fly heavenward while the feet freeze. L’viv has a typical continental climate of hot summers and long freezing winters. During the summer months, when the building is largely empty, the architectural environment is ideal. It was pleasantly cool and breezy as we clattered up the long flights of steps and down the galleries to the small rooms where the English department was tucked away. Luckily a secretary was working there to tell us that one of the professors was probably in town. She phoned his home, and then told me to call him later when he would be back.
I thanked my guide profusely – he seemed not to want anything else – and buoyed up by my good fortune I went to the post office, thinking I would write to my son William. I had sent letters from Russia, and postcards from Poland, but I didn’t know how long they would take, or whether they would get there at all.
It was an intimidating challenge to write something comprehensible to him about my experience. A vast chasm separated it from anything he could have known. I wasn’t sure how to make the bridge, and thinking about it made me uneasy. Even though we lived a rather simple life by American standards it distressed me to see him already taking for granted so many things, in the way of food, leisure and entertainment, that I regarded as luxuries. It made me equally uncomfortable to watch his growing addiction to electronic imagery, junk movies, and cool clothes. At home in California I used all the cliché arguments on myself to restrain my objections:-
The world has changed out of recognition since I was a boy.
So I wrote down a few anecdotes I hoped would amuse him, and returned to the George’a. I found the hotel full of bicycles. That is to say, the hall was packed with them, some assembled, some in parts, big bikes, little bikes, baby bikes, flowing up the staircase and through the doors. Accompanying them were a number of men who resembled the cop at the station. By now the receptionist was talking to me – as I found in Szczecin and later, it takes time to develop a relationship – and she told me that the bicycles belonged to a party of Serbs. Their buses were waiting outside and would be leaving soon. They came twice a week to buy bicycles. Two years before it had been the Poles. Last year it was the Romanians. This year, it’s the Serbs.
It was revealing to observe how conventions give way to necessity. This once luxurious hotel condescending to act as a bi-weekly goods depot brought home how close to the bone the knife of austerity had cut. Yet people behaved with dignity and spirit where the Russians, I thought, were more stoically enduring. I supposed that Ukrainians were feeding off the joys of liberation, while Russians viewed their new freedom as a mixed blessing.
As for the Serbs, I could not restrain the foolish reflection that one should not be dealing in bicycles while one’s compatriots were out raping and torturing [in Bosnia]. Of all people, I should know, in war or peace, life goes on in all its trivial detail. Wasn’t I the one who, at the age of thirteen, looted the bombed ruins of a block of flats down the road from my school and came away with a caged canary?
I had hoped to get the English professor to have dinner with me that evening, and on the phone he said he would be pleased to meet me, but not until tomorrow, at lunch-time. It seemed worth spending another day. On my walk back from the university – more correctly, the Polytechnic Institute – I had passed a restaurant with huge plate glass windows and majestic purple velvet curtains drawn inside them, so I thought I’d try it out.
At first the headwaiter wouldn’t let me past the lobby. It was not for foreigners, he said. The menu was only in Ukrainian. How I understood him I don’t know, but I took the menu from him and read out some items I recognised, like kotleta, salat pomidor and kartofel.
“Dobre“, he said, half-convinced, and let me through. It was an enormous space, two stories high, with pillars, dim wall lighting and chandeliers. Carved wooden partitions discreetly separated the tables, visible through the gloom only by their small table lamps. They covered most of the floor, but there was a curtained stage on the left and a small dance floor in front of it. The atmosphere was one I love, of mysterious shadow and suggestion. I was halfway through a pretty good meal when the lights went down even further and a hilariously bad cabaret struck up on the stage, consisting mainly of girls writhing in swathes of chiffon without the benefit of choreography or dressmakers. Coloured spotlights wandered about looking for something worth lighting, and I think the music was being poured out of oil drums.
It was an evocative, if unintended, throwback to the improvised nightclub scenes of the forties, and I enjoyed it immensely. Back on the Esplanade, though, something else of a much superior quality was being offered that night. A slim young man, with refined features, sat with a guitar in front of the opera house, singing songs of great dramatic range and depth. Behind him, in the deep embrasure of the main entrance, a girl danced. She also was wrapped in long black chiffon, but hers was consummately well designed to follow every nuance of movement. What had been ridiculous in the restaurant was made sublime. A crowd of hundreds stood around them in a large arc of silence. It was clear that the words matched the music in importance, but even without them this was a performance of great merit. His songs had the force and delivery of Jacques Brel’s, but were distinctly his own, and her inventive improvisations kept fresh and alive what might easily have become tedious. Like everybody present I felt a great joy at being surprised with such a wonderful gift. People were generous with their coins and surrounded the couple with congratulations.
When I came back to the hotel and walked under the scaffolding my happy mood was abruptly broken. A sinister figure was lurking in my path, hiding stock still in the shadows. At the other end of the scaffolded tunnel a small girl was crying out for her mother:
“Gdzie jest Mama? Gdzie jest Mama?“
At her feet a little poodle was scurrying around in a panic. Then the hiding figure burst into peals of laughter and stepped out from her hiding place. A horrifying kidnap in progress was transformed into an innocent game. They had wanted to see if the poodle could find Mama.
On Sunday I took the professor, whose name was Yuri, to lunch at the Grand Hotel. It was a cheap gesture. I was getting a very good rate for my dollars from the tough guys outside the hotel, and I could easily afford it. For him, as he admitted, it represented a small fortune. I was beginning to realise that the modest amounts I carried with me in dollars made me a plutocrat by Ukrainian standards, a heady but disturbing phenomenon. I told Yuri of my incredulousness when I discovered a loaf of bread cost only a small fraction of an American cent. He interjected a sobering thought. I might be a Kupon millionaire, he said, but by the time I left Ukraine I could also be a dollar pauper. He warned me that outside L’viv I would be forced to pay my hotel bills in dollars. This was the exact opposite of what the receptionista had told me, and so I was inclined to believe him.
I would not be able to get dollars for them, he said, and there would be nothing to spend my Kupons on, unless I intended to invest in bread. We calculated that I had enough Kupons to buy 50,000 loaves. I said that although I had the highest regard for Ukrainian bread, it would be difficult to get so many loaves out of the country while they were still edible. But we agreed that if they could be dried in the right conditions they would make excellent bricks; light, strong, durable, with a high insulation factor, and of course a valuable resource in the event of a siege.
I live in a whirlpool of email. I have 94 mailboxes, and lots of them have long strings that trip me up when I go searching. The other day I followed a string and there, twitching at the end of it I found an ancient, buried email from Carla King telling me that Google has archived one of my books. Google didn’t ask my permission, but then I don’t expect such courtesies anymore. It’s a different world and monster corporations can do what they want. Carla gave me an extra bit of string – well, a URL really – to see for myself.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dtSzIBwbAAAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+River+Stops+Here:
+Saving+Round+Valley,+A+Pivotal+Chapter+in+California%27s+Water+Wars&hl=en&
sa=X&ei=mjvYU4vNC46qyASryIGgBQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
So I fed it in and started reading my own book. It’s called The River Stops Here and I couldn’t stop reading. It was gripping. It’s thirty years since I wrote it and now it’s as if it was written by someone else and I’d come across it in a library. It’s a modern-day Western and I challenge you to read the first pages and then put it down.
I remember that it took me the bigger part of three years to research and write it, and that when it was done I had spent so much time sitting at my tiny Macintosh computer that I was desperate to do something physical. That’s when I conceived the idea of walking across Europe, and that led to another book “The Gypsy in Me” which isn’t half bad either. And there isn’t a motorcycle in either of them, unless you count the time I got a lift on the back of two-stroke in Poland and very nearly fell off.
I hope everyone who ordered Don’t Boil The Canary has got their book. I just heard from Steve Villinger, who lives in the Australian outback, that his book has just arrived, ten weeks after I mailed it. Here he is with his wife and his dog.
I’ve had to send quite a number of books twice because the address labels came off the envelopes but I hope that’s just a bad memory now. I’ve had some rave reviews but if you want to add to them don’t let me stop you.
WE reach around the world. I got a nice message from Colombia, from an area I remember well. It’s not too far from San Agustin, which I visited on my first go-round. They had only recently disinterred the remarkable “guardians” that protected graves (as I understood it then). Here are a couple of them. The one in the top hat always makes me laugh.
Here’s the message:
Greetings from the Valley of Sibundoy, Colombia.
I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your view of the world, all that you’ve experienced as you’ve inched your way upon its crust. I appreciate your outlook and encouragement of “WE.”
I’ve been living on a motorcycle more than six years now, a biologist and conservationist, currently traveling South America by motorcycle. I follow a “map of hope,” writing about the positive efforts to help wildlife and the environment and lending a hand in any way I can.
I am filled with hope to meet the people and projects on the frontlines of conservation, to witness firsthand their efforts and the challenges they are up against.
There is so much beauty on our planet and we mistakenly think we are separate from nature, somehow, when we are inextricably linked.
Thank you for being a voice of connectivity in the motorcycle world, of reminding us to get lost in the wonder of existence.
Peace, Love, & Adventure,
Janelle (motogypsy)
So WE is everywhere already. Perhaps someone with more youth and energy than I have will take hold of the idea. It’s a gift.
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…
