News from Ted
When you move house all sorts of things float to the surface. Here’s one of them – a piece I wrote for the Sunday Times in 1977, just after getting back. I think it’s interesting to read now, and some of it is not a little prophetic.
It’s easy to look back and think of those days as relatively peaceful and innocent, but that’s not at all how they seemed then.
The twin track of molten tyre rubber began halfway round the bend, a steeply descending right-hander on a Turkish mountain. I kept to the right side near the rock face, and watched the tracks veer away to the left and across the far edge of the road where they disappeared. Beyond the edge there were several hundred feet of nothing. Some policemen in rough khaki with red insignia stood nonchalantly looking down. I stopped the bike and joined them. Far below, the rear end of a lorry was visible. I rode on contemplating those fresh black tracks, imagining myself in the lorry driver’s seat as he was launched into space. It made me shudder.
I thought of the various ways it could have happened. One lorry overtaking another on the way up? Steering failure? Terminal fatigue? Some drivers on this Eastern run use opium to keep going. I went on to imagine how I would react if a lorry like that came hurtling round a corner towards me, and paid homage to the dead man by using his example to stay alive. It was one of the methods I employed to survive a 65,000 mile journey on a motorcycle.
On the road from India to England there were endless chances to learn from other men’s’ tragedies. At times one could imagine there was a war on. Seven thousand miles strewn with wrecks. A TIR juggernaut sliced in two, the cab here by the roadside, the container in a river 200 feet away. How could that happen? A new white Peugeot rammed down to chest height under the rear axle of a trailer. Tankers ripped open. Innumerable vehicles upside down. All the way through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey the carnage mounts up as the traffic concentrates. On the Iran-Turkey border ( a wonderful old-style frontier where you have to pass through a stone gateway) the biggest TIR trucks queue up, two abreast, in a two-mile-long line.
At the Pakistani end I was, in a sense, lucky. Newly proclaimed curfews and martial law had reduced the traffic to a trickle. I was privileged to see a great city, Lahore, apparently deserted by all life except for the cows moving majestically in herds along the broad thoroughfares, quite independent of man.
Worst of all was the notorious Yugoslav Autoput from Skopje to Zagreb. Juggernauts and impatient German tourists bound for Greece pack these 800 miles of two lane monotony as tightly as the meat in a sausage skin. The skin of course bursts in frequent and bloody accidents.
Nowhere on the 7000 miles from Delhi to London is it a difficult ride, unless one chooses to cross the high passes in winter. (In Africa and along the South American Cordillera I had a much tougher time with rocks, sand, mud, flood, and corrugation). After four years of traveling I was glad to have this relatively easy – and often tarred – surface rolled out for me all the way home but, thank heaven, I had also acquired the road sense to survive on it.
Many people who took an interest in my journey consider that my greatest accomplishment was to come back alive. With my mind full of more positive benefits this seems like the least important achievement, though it was done with great effort. But at least it proves that the odds, however bad they may seem statistically, can be defeated. The only serious injury I suffered –to an eye – was due to a fishing accident.
I found the best aid to survival was the old truckie’s motto “drive the next mile”. to which I would add my own corollary for motorcyclists “and don’t let the other fellow get you.” Most people believe that situations can arise on the road which make them helpless victims of chance. I think you stand a much better chance if you believe that everything that happens to you on the road is your own fault. Everything.
The truly astonishing volume of traffic that now surges up and down the Great Orient Expressway has rather overshadowed what used to be called the Hippy Trail. but the Hippies still flourish. The “freak buses” still plough between Munich and Goa, Amsterdam and Khatmandu, advertising stereo sound, free tea and fully collapsible seats. In little rooms in Kandahar, Europeans wearing odd combinations of ethnic dress, from Turkish Depression gear to Gujarati mirror clothes, still fondle polished slabs of compressed hashish and dream about the price on the streets of Paris and Hamburg. And dope-hunting Iranian police still make tourists turn their camper vans inside out at the Afghan border where cornflake packets and supplies of Tampax blow away in the high wind. So it is all the more bizarre to find oneself riding in central Turkey among bountiful acres of white and purple opium poppies, their fat pods ripening for another harvest of morphine base.
The anti-Hippy crusades pursued with gusto by some Asian authorities may have been justified, but seem designed mainly to clear the way for the big spenders of tourism.
What is a Hippy?
“If you are found dressed in shabby, dirty, or indecent clothing, or living in temporary or makeshift shelters you will be deemed to be a Hippy. Your visit pass will be cancelled and you will be ordered to leave Malaysia within 24 hours . . . . Furthermore you will not be permitted to enter Malaysia again”
Signed: Mohd. Khalil bin Hj. Hussein
Dir Gen of Immigration
The above definition would have included me with my tent and jeans as well as a high proportion of the native population.
In Nepal “every guest who is in Immigration for their problames (sic) should be polite and noble behaved, any misbehaved activities and discussion by the guest shall be proved a crime”.
Difficult advice to follow in view of the impolite and ignoble behaviour of the officials there.
However Mother India remains mercifully benign to all comers. A few more people in shabby clothes and makeshift shelters are not going to make much of a dent on several hundred millions in the same state. As long as India is India the Trail will live on.
These have been four crucial and violent years to travel in the world. Of the 45 countries I visited, 18 have been through war or revolution. Many of the rest have faced economic depression or internal violence. Yet my own experience has been overwhelmingly peaceful, marked by kindness and hospitality everywhere.
I have returned to find prices double, the European pecking order changed, and the political complexion of Europe much pinker than it was. Britain seems a bit chastened but otherwise unchanged. People are as oblivious as ever of their relatively great material wealth. I suppose they are right to be, since what we have here is not really important to the quality of life; indeed most of it, to my mind, is a burden. My mother’s garden, about half an acre of lawn, flowers and fruit trees, could accommodate an Indian slum of a thousand inhabitants (not that I suggest it should). I watch her move about in it alone, pruning and trimming, and I imagine she wishes there were less to do.
I used the word slum, but for me that denotes people who have abandoned hope in their squalor. The Indian slums that I saw were not like that.They were scrupulously maintained in the village tradition. Given just a few amenities (a source of clean water within reach, drainage, a supply of roof tiles, they would reach an acceptable minimum standard. Direct comparisons between European and Indian lifestyles are as fraudulent as ever.
I have spent a lot of time wondering how “they” could arrive at some sort of parity with “us”. During these four years “they” have acquired much more power to press their demands. I see no alternative: we shall have to sacrifice some of our abnormal privileges. If we did it gracefully and imaginatively we could benefit a great deal from the sacrifice, but I expect it will be a bitter and bloody business in the end. Around the world I have been asked to defend Britain in her “decline” and have tried to conjure up some notion of a British “genius” at work. Under the stresses of these last years I thought maybe new directions would be found, new social forms experimented with. I see now that this was foolish. We still carry so much fat. There is no sense of change, just an occasional whiff of decay.
But things will change. Having been among the two billions who will demand it I know they are not just images on a screen or on posters for Oxfam. They are real. We will have to accommodate them.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“How will you ever be able to settle down?” people ask. “Will you want to do it again?” I used to laugh. The prospect of stopping in one place, of doing some real work and living among familiar faces was all I could dream of. The book I have to write has been on my mind too long, but now I realise that until the book is written the journey will still not be over. And already I know what makes the tramp go back on the road. There’s a tingling vista of freedom that is as elusive as it is intoxicating , and it is peculiar I think to those who travel widely alone. There is a wild pleasure in being able to vary one’s behaviour at will, with nobody around to remind you of what you said or did yesterday.
For example, I used to take it for granted that I preferred to sleep on a bed. In these four years I have slept on all kinds of surfaces, wet or dry, hot or cold, in a prison and in a Maharaja’s palace, still or moving, in pin-drop silence or in railway platform bedlam. I now find that I would choose, whenever possible, to sleep on a rug on the ground in the open air.
Why does it matter? To me, enormously. The habits of sleeping, eating, drinking, washing, dressing that I learned in youth had great influence on my state of mind and body. But they are not habits I would have chosen and in these four years they have all changed. In many ways I find that the old ways of dong things were unnecessarily complicated and expensive. Today what I do is much closer to what I am.
It does not take much imagination to see that the same process applies to less tangible but even more potent habits of behaviour. I think I used to make great efforts when meeting people for the first time to impress them. This kind of thing obviously demands a lot of energy and creates a good deal of anxiety as well. If I had tried to sustain it through four years during which I met, practically every day, new people from whom I wanted help, often with no common language to fall back on, it would have made me a quivering wreck. Relax or crack were the only possible alternatives. I managed to relax by abandoning expectations.
“Whatever it is you want” I told myself, “you don’t need.” Whether it was a visa or a pound of rice, or permission to sleep on somebody’s land, I prepared myself in advance to be content with refusal. The result was a revolutionary illumination. I was almost always given what I wanted and at the same time I found I wanted much less.
These personal discoveries once begun, became the foundation for a philosophy which, while in no way startling, is intensely real to me, having arisen out of my own personal experiments.
Towards the end of the journey the power I had built up in this way began to fail. There is obviously a limit to a learning process like this; in my case about three years. After many months in India I began to wish I was home. I knew the wish was dangerous and debilitating. To hurry now would invite the accident I had avoided for almost 60,000 miles
In Delhi I became absurdly frustrated by a delay of two weeks in getting some spare parts. When I finally climbed out of Old India through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan I experienced a psychological dizziness that astonished me, and kept me in Kabul days longer than I intended. It had a lot to do with the way I had adapted to the pressure of Indian life, the permanent exposure to people, their curiosity, hunger and clamour. Coming out of that was perhaps like decompression for a diver, but earlier in the journey I would have taken the transition in my stride.
On the long route home I made mistakes attributable only to apathy. For the first time I looked for companions to ride with, and used them to support my faltering spirits. And finally, in Istanbul, I lost all restraint and I rode for home almost non-stop, getting to Munich in three days although I dared not take the bike over 50mph.
Somewhere along the way I wrenched my back and so, having spent four years in almost perfect health I managed to arrive home a physical wreck. And my imagination having worked overtime for so long went into a coma. For many days I could hardly recall, with any conviction anything that had happened to me “out there.”
For a while I felt as though those four years had never happened at all.
I’m only two weeks away from moving to France, and there will be much more about that soon. I hope to be riding my little MP3, the one I used to roll around the isles. I’ll be able to go to all those great European meetings, and especially Paddy Tyson’s wonderful event in August near Oxford. But first I need to unburden myself and seek guidance from those who understand my perplexity.
There are people who don’t like me to talk about politics, or religion, or anything else important except bikes. But I can’t go against my nature.
As I prepare to leave California I think more and more of my reasons for coming here in the first place 35 years ago.
It wasn’t really America I was coming too, it was very specifically California, and not even the star-struck beach-boy Southern California that most people envisage when they think of the West Coast, but very much the under-populated land of mountains, streams, forests and bears in the north of the state, where I had spent such happy months in 1975.
I remember clearly that one of the great attractions for me was that it was only a hop, step and jump from South America. The truth is that, but for some real, practical difficulties, I would have moved to Colombia, and I imagined riding down there every now and again.
In those days the prospect of hopping on a bike and riding a few thousand miles through several countries was no more daunting to me than a trip to the nearest Costco. Quite honestly, that is no exaggeration. I was so confident of my ability to negotiate all the little obstacles that might come my way that they didn’t figure in my calculations. It was just a question of taking the time and a bit of money.
Perhaps that’s why I never did it. It was too easy. It could wait. There were other things to do first. I was newly married, with a baby on the way, and was looking for a fresh start in life. It was less than three years since I had come back from my big journey, 18 months since I had finished writing the book, a year since I had married. The idea was that we would begin something new, far away from the problems that had shadowed our life in France.
Of course I did do that Latin journey in reverse, when I went round the world again twenty years later, coming up from Chile to Arizona, but by then a whole new lifetime seemed to have elapsed. In the meanwhile Mexico and several other countries south of the border had come to me.
My valley in California, and indeed the whole county of Mendocino, is full of Mexicans. The fact that marijuana flourishes here naturally attracts some less savoury types as well, but that’s equally true of the indigenous white population. On the whole I have to say that I really like Mexicans. Both here and in Mexico I find them to be very nice people – nicer even than white Americans, and certainly nicer than me, because their niceness is achieved without effort. Watch them in a crowd. They are happier, because they wear their empathy on their sleeves.
And they work hard.
So, as I prepare to leave this country I find myself utterly bewildered in the middle of a quite outrageous and bizarre primary election season, and one of the things that strikes me most forcibly is the farcical nature of the arguments about immigration.
Now that Marco Rubio seems to have gathered strength and looks like having a chance, my only reason for writing this is to point out the absurdity of his position.
His parents were Cuban. They left Cuba for the USA, before the the time of Castro, presumably because they wanted a better life. No doubt they immigrated legally, but there is also no doubt that Rubio would defend all those Cubans who fled Castro’s Cuba and arrived in Florida illegally, to be greeted as heroes. Given a different accident of timing, his parents would probably have been among them.
Almost all those people were economic refugees, just like the millions of Mexicans and others from south of the border who came here to support their families. Yet, according to Rubio, these people from the south are all criminals who should be given hell and sent packing. Cruz is no better, and Trump’s xenophobia is so obviously manufactured (trying to whip up up this anger I’m supposed to be feeling) that it’s beneath contempt.
Right now, Europe is struggling to welcome a few million refugees from the most bitter of wars, where civilians are routinely bombed, gassed, starved and enslaved. Absorbing them is a difficult and painful process. Generally speaking, most Europeans recognize that they have a responsibility to help, but there have been powerful reactions, and demonstrations. Obviously, among these millions, there are bad apples, and there have been some well-publicized crimes committed, which have forced several governments to put new limits on the flow. Nobody yet knows how it will be accomplished.
The United States, on the other hand, has unintentionally absorbed about eleven million people, most of them Latinos, in a relatively peaceful process – people who have adapted well and work hard. They have become a cornerstone of society. There are many who believe that if the undocumented were all magically spirited away (I imagine a sort of Trumpian Rapture) the American economy would all but collapse.
You would think that America – the USA – should be proud of it’s ability to offer these millions a safe life, an opportunity to work hard and prosper, and to contribute to the American economy. Instead we have a trio of bombastic, self-righteous, puritanical (you can pin the labels where they belong) men proposing the most preposterous and unworkable schemes, and screaming in the face of reason.
And the worst of it is that a lot of people seem to believe them. This isn’t a matter of liberal versus conservative. It’s common sense versus lunacy.
It snowed on Christmas morning in Covelo and again on New Year’s Day. Snow in Covelo is a pretty rare event.
I’ll take it as a good omen, which is my usual way of greeting any new phenomenon. It’s worked for me so far.
Since I last wrote about Aspiran a few more people have come in with late contributions, so that’ll be some extra sheets and pillow cases for weary travellers. I have to say I’m beginning to get quite excited about it, although to tell the truth I still can’t quite imagine my life in Aspiran. All I can think of at the moment is all the things I won’t be able to do – like gardening and building; these physical things have been very useful in keeping me fit, but they also serve as displacement activities. Over here in the Wild West whenever I feel I ought to be writing a book I think of a roof that needs fixing or a bed that needs digging, and it’s so much easier to do something than to write about it.
I think what I must do, as soon as I can, is get the use of a small piece of ground somewhere outside the village where I can start a vegetable garden. Then it won’t be in front of my eyes, begging to be looked after, but still there to keep me active.
I have tickets to Paris for March 2nd (my son Will is coming over with me for a few days) and we’ll go down on the TGV to sign all the papers and take over the house. And then . . . .?
It’s quite possible that for the first weeks (or months?) I’ll be going slightly stir-crazy before I get my head into shape. My visits to the cafe will probably be quite frequent, but I do also have Teresa and Angel to keep me connected to the real world, and Patrick has promised me my first game of tennis in several decades.
I should sell tickets for that. The humiliation could be severe.
But of course that will all change as soon as people come visiting, and working. I look forward to that so much.
Thanks, all of you who made it possible. I hope in the end you will find it was all worth while.
Who says bikers can’t speak Latin (badly). Everything around Aspiran used to be Roman, so it seemed appropriate.
The deposit is down. In three months or so the house should be ours.
Montpellier – a big and beautiful city, only 40 minutes away
My report is long overdue, I know, but there were nine days of travel, and then there was jet lag. Doesn’t always hit me, but this time it did. I flew to Paris from San Francisco, seven days after the massacre (their massacre, not ours). The plane was half empty but Paris, thank heavens, seemed unchanged. It was cold, and wet, but I had to spend a day there and I treated myself to a hotel just opposite the Gare de Lyon where I was going to take a train the next day. The Hotel Terminus was a bit pricy for me (170 euros) but really nice – quite luxurious. They treated me very well. I went for a long walk along the Seine, and nobody looked at me in case I was a Muslim.
The train to Montpellier next day was my first experience of a TGV, and it was amazing. I used once to drive that 600 mile stretch from Montpellier to Paris and it took all day. To arrive in under four hours, in total comfort, was phenomenal – and because I’d booked ahead it cost me only $50. Just imagine, San Francisco to Los Angeles in an armchair in 3 hours, for $40!
The owners of the house I’m buying came to meet me at the station and carry me back to Aspiran. Patrick and Aileen Naylor are both British. From the day I stumbled upon their house back in September I felt their warmth and friendliness immediately, and that as much as anything made the house attractive to me. When I decided to buy the place, we fixed a date to begin the process, and they invited me to come back and stay there for two nights. They also invited Angel and Teresa so that they could get to know the house they are planning to share with me. So we were all there together, including the dog, Betti. Teresa has a Labrador with a diploma. They are both super qualified to make children feel secure and happy, and they have the same effect on grown-ups.
In France house sales are handled by a Notaire, a combination lawyer/notary, and we spent an hour next morning in the office of Maitre Julien Ducarne, a very grave young man, who determinedly went through the whole ceremony in English. I signed what I had to sign, and put down the 5% that commits me to buy. Then we went off to celebrate at a nearby vineyard, the Coté Mas, which I must say is a pretty nice place, to put it mildly. The food was delicious. Some Americans might find the servings a little skimpy, but if that’s life in France I think I will benefit from eating less.
Anyway, I got back to California (on another half-empty plane) last Tuesday but had people to see before I could get home again. So we’re now well over the deadline I set for the Aspiran fund, but no matter. We didn’t quite make the 40,000 but I scraped some more money from the bottom of the barrel, and there’s enough to buy the house and pay the notaire.
Sixty-one contributions have come in – some high, some low, mostly in the 100 euro range. The total is 30,972. There’s about 350 in Paypal fees to come off that, but it’s a wonderful achievement and I hope those of you that helped will feel very happy about it and part of the enterprise. The house will be up and running in the Spring of next year. It’ll be bare-bones to start with, but as soon as I can get beds and a kitchen table with chairs, we’ll be in business. I hope some great work will be done there during the coming years, and of course I hope I will have some part in making that happen. Thank you all, very, very much.
If there’s anyone still desperate to get their name on the brass plaque you can squeeze in now, but I shall declare it all officially done and dusted by the end of this coming weekend.
Please don’t bombard me yet with your travel plans. I need to figure out the rules of engagement and there’s still quite a lot to think about, but the main thing is – It’s done. Mission really accomplished.
We are all conditioned to jump to to the tune of the news. As you perhaps know I am buying a house in France and am about to go there to sign the first papers. My flight to Paris is booked for next Monday, and of course when I first heard what had happened there I wondered how it would affect me. But my decision to move back to France is no better or worse now than it was two weeks ago, despite all the horror.
Statistically, in France I will be 15 times less likely to be murdered by gunfire than where I am now (though five times more likely than in the UK), but I also know that these figures are meaningless. I have a huge amount of control over my circumstances and the infinitesimal risk of my being shot to death or blown up is probably no different here in Covelo than it will be in Aspiran.
Somebody recently posted a protest in Facebook – which migrated onto my page – that we are only deeply moved by terrible events that affect us closely, and not by far larger human disasters that occur far away. I’m afraid it’s human nature, and reflected as always in the media. I wrote about it in Dreaming of Jupiter, because I was in Brazil when the planes hit the World Trade Centre. From that distance – cultural as well as geographical – it seemed at first more a spectacle than a tragedy. I knew very well, from my days as a newspaperman, the rough rule of thumb the media used to decide the importance of a disaster; its proportional to the number of dead, and inversely proportional to the distance away.
So Parisians are in profound shock. The people of France, one step removed, in general feel violated. Normally, thousands of miles away here in the States, people would have said “How sad, how terrible,” and gone on with their lives. But this time it’s different because the perpetrators (ISIS, ISIL Daesh, whatever) are on everyone’s radar screen, and so, of course, is the fate of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Most Americans, left to their own opinions, would feel nothing but pity for the torrent of families driven out of Syria by the violence of warfare, but the attack on Paris has become fodder for the spin doctors on the Republican campaign trail.
Nothing could be more repugnant than the way it has been used to pander to the xenophobes among us. Defying all logic, whipping up all the paranoia that is all too latent here, 30 or more Republican governors cry, “Not a single Syrian will cross my threshold.”
Regardless of the fact that this is a futile boast in itself – States don’t have defensible borders – they completely ignore the fact that these were not Syrians who smashed up Paris; these were Belgian citizens who were perfectly entitled, if they wished, to fly to the USA without a visa. Syrian refugees, on the other hand, having gone through who knows what kind of hell to get to Europe, then have to endure yet another year or two of investigation before they even catch sight of the statue of Liberty, a bureaucratic nightmare which is in itself a travesty.
I m not the first to point out what a ridiculous notion it is that ISIS would send it’s murderers on that bitter, dangerous and uncertain trail through Eastern Europe to get to America. ISIS have plenty of money. They clearly have connections. They could as easily fly to Alabama tomorrow.
But no, these sinister Syrian families and orphaned children must be kept out at all cost. Hysteria and paranoia are ugly phenomena in themselves but not nearly so repulsive as the men who manipulate them for their own purposes.
The excitement mounts. Twenty more people have chipped in with another 1560 Euros.
What makes this project so extraordinary – so different from most crowd-funding – is that I know personally almost half the 43 people on that Paypal list of contributors. It reminds me of just how many people I have built some kind of relationship with during the years that I have been travelling around. It also makes me all the more determined to bring this thing off as I intended.
Already I feel I have one foot in Aspiran, and I must admit that at times it is hard to imagine that I will no longer be living in this house which I built with my own hands, looking down on the vegetable garden that I planned and created, and have tended over so many years.
It will be a wrench, no doubt, and I’m sure I’ll be writing much more about it. Yet I am quite certain that this is the right thing for me to do. So thank you all, for helping me to make the move in a way that will allow me to be useful to other writers.
I’m hoping that there may still be some heavy hitters waiting in the wings, but I am sure now that, one way or another, we will get the brass up on the door.
So today’s total stands at:
Go to Jupitalia.com/Aspiran for the full story.
The road to Aspiran got shorter last night, thanks to a hefty wad of euros from a mate in the Antipodes. So now the total stands at
3,503 Euros
But for those who don’t know what’s going on, please click here
I know, I know, I said I’d keep a daily score, but I suddenly ran into huge IT problems and it’s taken all week to clear it up.
Anyway, here’s the great news. The week started with a flurry of donors and well-wishers, enough to convince me that you like what I am trying to achieve.
So here’s the tally to date.
Since last weekend
20 people have put 2,995 euros into the pot.
And plenty more have told me they wished they could.
It’s exciting to know that there are people out there who share my vision.
More tomorrow. I promise.
This is a rather special week for me.
For many years now people have been telling me how Jupiter’s Travels has changed their lives, and of course I am very proud of that.
On my website I am offering you a chance to change MY life and at the same time help returning Jupiter’s Travellers to tell us the truth about what the world is really like.
Click here to read all about it…
I hope you will take time to look it over. Even if you can’t help I would really appreciate some feedback from you and perhaps you’d be kind enough to share it on Facebook and elsewhere.
Thanks.
I forgot to mention last time that I was going to France for a month to look for a house, although I did talk about it on Facebook.
Well, I’ve been and I’m back.
The search did not start well.
I’d booked and paid for two weeks in a rural place in the area where I thought I wanted the house to be, on the edge of the Cevennes. This is a beautiful mountainous region, but I soon realised that it was really much too far north.
The place I’d booked turned out to be a lot more rural than I’d bargained for. It was hidden in the middle of a forest, with no service to my phone, and no internet. And to top it all, I arrived at night, in pelting rain, at the beginning of an incredible thunderstorm which immediately knocked out the power and lasted three days.
Virtually immobilised I felt pretty stupid, until I woke up to the fact that there are millions of over-stressed office workers who would like nothing more than to be totally cut off from the world with nothing better to do than eat, drink and sleep.
Well, the clouds lifted, my friends Angel and Teresa arrived to keep me company, we drove all over the place together, and eventually I did find the house I wanted.
It’s in a lovely village called Aspiran, which has a suitably inspiring sound to it. Of course you might be more inclined to go to Aspirin, but I don’t think it’s guaranteed to be a headache-free zone.
Anyway, the house is big enough for all the great plans I have for it, and in the garage there’s a WC in a vertical box that they say also functions as a Tardis for Dr. Who.
Buying the house is not without its problems, but more of that later. For the moment, Ta-Da:
I promised you more inventions, so here’s another one. Office workers, I’m told, should get up and walk around every two hours, so this is a cushion that vibrates every two hours with enough of a kick to thrust them to their feet. I’m expecting a McArthur Genius grant at any moment.
Cheers.
