News from Ted
It’s Sunday and for the moment the smoke has cleared from the valley, thanks to those 3,500 amazing fire-fighters struggling with the Rocky Fire just fifty or so miles away.
But this morning it’s more about smoke and mirrors. I’m in the grip of a dilemma. I have an email list I use to send snippets of information, but it’s too long to send as a normal email, so I’m trying to use a commercial service called MailChimp. Now they say too many people on my list chose to unsubscribe. But I have had emails from people saying that they unsubscribed by accident and don’t know who to get back on again.
So can I ask you, if you read this message and want to be on my list, please send me an email to say so. Then I can put you on it. I only use it to tip you off that there’s something to read here, on this site, or maybe on FB. It’s totally non-commercial, just like me. tsimon@mcn.org
Thanks.
Other stuff? Well, it’s not all about motorcycles, you know. I was thinking, as I sipped my margarita and watched my garden grow, that I have had a lot of ideas that will probably never come to anything, So I thought I would share them with you, one at a time.
Today’s brilliant idea: How about Yellow Shaving Foam – then when you look in the mirror, your teeth will look white. Who likes that one? I’ll take five per cent.
Cheers, and watch out for new earthshaking innovations.
Almost forty years ago, on the plains of northern India, I watched in amazement as four bare-foot Indians in pale blue gowns trotted past me on a long, dusty road carrying on their shoulders the two poles of a litter. On the litter sat a young man, cross-legged, dressed in blazer and slacks, wearing an old school tie, smoking a cigarette, and gazing languidly over the landscape (which probably belonged to him).
That memory came back to me at the beginning of June when I went to a literary festive in Ireland. I couldn’t command a litter but I did have a very comfortable chair and a bearer, Jacqui Furneaux, who carried it around the festival grounds at my whim. Unfortunately she was not strong enough to carry me in it, and I had to hobble painfully behind her.
Two days earlier I had had the worst fall of my life – nothing glamorous or motorcycle related, just a stupid slip over some stone steps by the side of a pool in London. Two stone treads smote me on the coccyx and the middle of my spine and drove the life out of me. After a minute or so I began to breathe again, and slowly reassembled my various parts.
The pain was heroic, the bruises were glorious, and I went on a massive diet of ibuprofen and paracetamol but nothing was apparently broken. The tickets for the ferry and the festival were for the next day and Jacqui, who was also going, volunteered to drive me to the ferry.
The weather was wonderful, the festival was most rewarding. I met Ian McEwan, one of my heroes, and sat in state all over the place, listening to great voices say marvellous things and, in particular, watching an extraordinary young actress called Aoife Duffin (I can’t pronounce it either) doing an incredible one-woman production of a searing coming-of-age drama involving several family members one of whom I would gladly have ripped apart.
The day before the accident, Margaret Driscoll interviewed me for the Sunday Times, and in her piece she described me as a “magnificent relic.” Ensconced in my peripatetic throne on the lovely grounds of Borris House that was probably a fair description.
Certainly something separated us from the crowd. A passing artist, John Sullivan, decided to paint us in oils. It took him half an hour and here’s the result.
So that was the start of a month over there, which was crowded with events.
Naxos Audio Books had me recording an introduction to their version of Jupiter’s Travels – which was the reason for the Sunday Times interview. Naxos is a prestigious and discriminating house, and most of my fellow authors are classic and dead. I hope Jupiter’s Travels will be released soon, before I join them.
I spent a weekend in Germany visiting old friends and as a guest at the Touratech Travel Event in the Black Forest. Many thousands turn up abd at night everything happens under the most stupendous canopy
After that came a night at the Coventry Museum where I believe I entertained a roomful of the faithful with pictures and stories. We were right next to XRW964M, my beautiful and ever-more appreciated Triumph Tiger that carried me around the world in the seventies. As a result of that visit it now seems likely that the BMW R80GS which I rode on the second go-round will soon also be alongside it at the museum.
And a couple of days later I enjoyed the hospitality of Paddy Tyson whose Overland Magazine held a hugely successful meeting just outside Great Missenden, which is not great at all, but rather small and picturesque. I was almost there decades ago visiting my other hero, Roald Dahl, in his garden kiosk where he wrote his books, but I missed Great Missenden altogether.
Paddy had the genial idea of plonking me into another comfortable armchair in a large tent and just telling me to say whatever came to mind. It seemed to work wonderfully well. The tent was full of people, and I didn’t see anyone leave.
I’m home again now. It’s five weeks since the accident and my back has almost stopped hurting. I have a fair amount of physical work to do on my place, but there are more wonderful things to look forward to, mostly to do with France, my other spiritual home. One of them will, I hope, add something new and exciting to the Foundations’s ability to promote and expand the powerful role of independent travellers. I hope to have something to tell you soon, but I can’t count my chickens, because the bobcat ate them all.
Thanks for staying with me.
PS: Uber and Out. A poignant message from Charing Cross Railway station
A season of meetings and rallies and reunions with old friends. The Overland Expo starts on Friday in the upper reaches of Arizona and I’m working overtime to finish a film that I hope to show. Well that’s a lie – I’m not working overtime, it’s my friend Mark Ordway who’s thrashing away at the Final Cut Pro machine while I look helplessly on.
May 31st will see me at Open Day at the Adventure Bike shop at Acton, in Suffolk, where we had such a good time last September.
I also have a return ticket to Stuttgart, because Herbert Schwartz – the tycoon of Touratech – has asked me to his adventure rally in the Black Forest.
But wait – there’s more. I’ve got the Coventry Transport Museum for a night of pictures and stories on the 17th of June and only two days after that there’s Paddy Tyson’s Big Bash at Great Missenden – (www.overlandevent.com) which is going to be AMAZING. Please come. He says if you do he’ll buy me a beer.
Another thing: I now have The Gypsy in Me as an electronic file. I haven’t had time to put it in the shop yet, but it costs $7.99, so email me if you’d like it, and tell me which version you want. I’ll get it all sorted out sometime soon
We’re off to Rio on Sunday – Lida and me, just like proper tourists, and not a motorcycle in sight. We’ll be there for Carnival and, to tell the truth, I’m pretty damned excited. I’ve only been to one carnival before, in Bahia thirty years ago, and it was wonderful, but the Rio Carnival they say is beyond description.
We’re very lucky. We have somewhere to stay. Lovely Lulu, ballet dancer and teacher, has lent us her apartment. She and I shared wonderful times in 1974, and again in ’82 and ’01. You can see what a joyful person she is if you look at page 121 in my picture book, Jupiter’s Travels in Camera. If you haven’t got it already please do yourself a favour. It really is a fine book.
I have lots of other things happening this year, In America, in the UK and in Europe. I hope you’ll stay in touch. I’ll be writing more about them soon.
Cheers to all, and a very enthusiastic, if belated Happy New Year.
The meeting at Gieboldehausen is not happening. I’ve been going there quite regularly since the nineties, when it was quite small. Even though it has grown to be much bigger it still feels just as relaxed and easy-going as ever, but it depends on the Hotel Niedersachsen and sometime in the last months the manager said “Schluss!!!”, posted the hotel keys in the mayor’s letter box, and disappeared.
So there are complications and they won’t be sorted out this year. Which interferes a little with the launch of the German edition of my picture book. The publishers, Delius Klasing, are looking for bookshops where I can talk and show pictures. We have one, I believe, in Hanover, and hope there may be another in Koblenz. I don’t have details yet, but I’ll tell you as soon as I can.
I’m sure everything will work out beautifully.
Cheers,
Ted
Just in case you’re interested I’m on a bit of a whirligig this year, just trying to cram as much in as possible before the world as I know it flames out. I’ve already been to India (January), England and Spain (June). In May I lavished my own particular brand of nonsense on a batch of lovely students in Pittsburgh, and in July I inflicted the same punishment on a bunch of supergrads in Colorado. Now it’s August and in ten days time I’m back on United for Heathrow again, the beautiful new Terminal 2. I am to be greeted by Bike Magazine who plan to sweep me off my feet on a Super Scooter and ferry me to my billet in Tooting Bec. There will be intensive interrogations along the way, they say. And all this before breakfast. They’ll do anything for a scoop. And I’ll do anything for a free ride.
Next day I’m taking a train from Waterloo to Sherborne where I believe I will be sleeping for three nights in a girls’ school. Sadly I am too old to find that thrilling, but the thrills will be provided by Austin Vince and his priceless sidekick, Lois, who are running an Adventure Film Festival – so if you don’t have your tickets yet, hurry up. You might catch a glimpse of me, jet-lagging in the corner somewhere.
Next, to Germany. My poor old Fundura 650 has gone to Valhalla – or so Dirk Erker says, and without his permission I can’t ride it.He says it’s Kaput! It’s all about the Tüf (yeah, I know). So I will rent a Kawasaki ER5. Dirk says it’s little, and has no boxes, so I will take the soft luggage I got made for me in Australia, and sling it across the saddle behind me. Oh, and talking about BOXES ….
Und dass könte auch für ihr Deutsche interessant sein …
… the 650 has a set of Jesse luggage on it, and somebody ought to find it useful. It’s been knocked about a bit, but it’s still perfectly serviceable, strong, and very well made. Two side panniers and a top box. It’s waiting for you in Duisburg so somebody make me an offer.
Jupiter’s Boxes. They’ve been all over Europe. Now they can be yours. tsimon@mcn.org
So, to continue, I’m planning to visit friends in France, especially those bits where the wine is, and then at the beginning of September I will go to the meeting at Gieboldehausen where Delius Klasing are presenting my picture book in German. And in a couple of bookshops too, in Hanover and Koblenz. And then back to San Francisco – but wait! There’s more.
Because on the 25th there’s the HorizonsUnlimited meeting at Yosemite – –
And on October 3rd there’s the Overland Expo in Asheville – –
And on October 19th I will be in Colombia to for a two-week tour with Mike Thomsen’s Motolombia – man, I really love that country – and I plan to finish the year off with a week in Chile in November.
You may be wondering what I’m going to do with all that spare time in between. Yes, I’ll have to think of something. I’ll let you know.
Have a lovely summer and please buy my picture book. It’s too good to languish in my shed.
Cheers all.
Ted
Back in 1976 I was riding up the West coast of India towards Goa when I came to Karwar, an interesting fishing port with boats that might have sailed there from 18th century England.
I stopped for a meal at a truck stop and the cook asked me where I was going. I told him.
“Ah,” he said, “Goa going. Nice place. My from is Goa.”
For some reason this phrase, which I thought hilarious, has stuck with me for almost forty years. I can almost hear him talking now.
Goa used to be a Portuguese colony and, unlike most of India, you could consume pork and alcohol openly without shame. It also had fine beaches and already drew holidaymakers, but I was visiting an illustrious British art director called Maxwell who had expatriated himself there along with all his Hi-Fi London sophistication, and seemed rather lonely when I found him.
It was the wrong season for fun on the beach, and all I took away from Goa that time was a picture of a goat, but I’ve always wanted to go back and last year I got my wish. From Orangefish Entertainment in Bombay came the invitation to open the second annual India Bike Week, in Goa, all expenses paid.
How cool is that. I mean Orangefish, yeah!
And there was an extra. Would I mind, they asked, riding to Goa from Bombay (you can call it Mumbai if you like) to inaugurate the proceedings. Would I mind a nice, leisurely 400 miles in two days on a pretty fair road in good company? Hell no.
I took my helmet and gloves. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and they found me some boots. From the airport we drove for two hours to a hotel they said was on the outskirts of the city. Bombay was just as chaotic and extraordinary as I remembered it, with the addition of an impressive cloud of sulfurous pollution that hung over everything
In the morning we all gathered in a large parking area for the grand send-off, and that’s when I learned that I was supposed to start the parade on a Harley. Well, one of my best friends rides a Harley and I don’t want to offend him. I wouldn’t say that Harley was the most appropriate bike for India, but hey – it’s a life style, I guess. But THIS Harley was something else. The saddle was about two inches off the ground, the bars were somewhere over my head and my elderly legs wouldn’t rise to the occasion. I gave it a go, tottering around the parking lot in an agony of apprehension and told them: No way.
Luckily there was Jay Kannaiyan, an Indian adventurer who has ridden halfway round the world and is a lot younger than I am, and he volunteered to assume Harley duties, so I was off the hook and they gave me an Enfield Bullet instead.
There were about a dozen of us, most of them Indians, on a variety of bikes. There was even a Ducati which, sadly, didn’t make it though the second day. I had my own “riding buddy”, called Sharang, the brother of Mr Orangefish himself, who was charged with protecting me, and we were led by a big cheerful ruffian called Vir.
Well we set off, rather late, and it took another astonishing two hours to get out of Bombay. In the city itself the roads were pretty good, but then it turned out that Vir had a treat for us. Instead of the boring highway, he had planned a scenic route, and gradually as the scenery improved, the road crumbled away beneath us. It got so bad on that first day that I relapsed into my Colonel Blimp persona, huffing and puffing and grumbling to myself, “How dare they take liberties with an octogenarian celebrity. I didn’t sign up for the Road of Bones,” and so on. By nightfall we were still hours away from the hotel, manoeuvering around potholes and wriggling through bazaars.
“How do you feel about riding at night,” asked Sharang. With icy politeness I declined, claiming my right to sit in the chase vehicle while the mechanic rode the Bullet. The night grew long. There were incidents. At one point we were surrounded by agitated villagers, and I was whisked away like POTUS in a shit storm. We arrived after midnight and – curses – too late for beer.
Next day was much the same. Somewhere about halfway to Goa they are building an airfield. The site lay right across the route we were following, and we had to ride round it. I only remember it because immediately afterwards the road surface changed from terrible to atrocious. We were crossing a broad, barren expanse of land and this abominable road seemed destined to go on forever.
It’s always difficult to do justice to a really bad surface. This one was composed of splinters of asphalt arranged three-dimensionally in layers, left by several generations of road menders, and it resonated perfectly with the suspension of my Bullet to produce the absolute maximum of jarring. If there had been any way at all of stopping, I would have stopped, but what made this purgatory almost unendurable was the Aussie bloke riding behind me.
The night before I had mentioned that the going seemed a bit rough and his face lit up like a pub in the outback.
“I just love this stuff,” he said, and somehow the idea that this fellow behind me was having a whale of a time was more than I could bear. He had great riding posture, sitting beautifully erect and sweeping effortlessly over this road to ruin. Watching him ride was insufferable. I could just imagine his face inside the helmet, grinning from ear to ear.
And yet somehow, amid my spluttering resentment and indignation, I remembered who I was, who I used to be, and why I was there. Despite the horrible road I began to recognise what a privilege it was to be riding this bike and to be doing this “stuff”.
What’s more, I was falling in love with the Bullet. For the first time in forty years I was riding a bike very much like my old Triumph, with no fairing, beautiful handling, and just the right size for it to be part of me and not me part of it. In fact it dawned on me that I was reliving the best time of my life. I really began to enjoy it, and it would be hard to express what a gift that was.
There were many stops along the way, but I could never understand why these particular places were chosen. This one, at least, had an exhibition of the machines Indians have been riding to work on for the last few decades.
We rode on into the night again, but I had no qualms now, zipping in and out between rickshaws, cows and pedestrians as if born to the trade. We arrived late again, but not too late for beer, and there was rum as well – a lovely smooth rum called Monk, or some such name. And then the Aussie admitted to me that although he did enjoy dirt, these roads were a “pain in the ass”.
On the last morning there were ferries to cross, and coastal vistas to admire.
We swept into the festival grounds on the third morning and by this time I was feeling more like Peter Pan than Colonel Blimp.
The Indian Bike Week did not surprise me. There was enormous Harley-type noise from enormous speakers, and I was made to ride up a ramp onto a vast stage lit with enough kilowatts to herald the second coming. And there to greet me and share the honours was Nick Sanders, who does very fast what I do very slowly. He looked very happy in the limelight, wearing a Union Jacket he says was made for Roger Daltrey of The Who. The presenters were whipping up a frenzy of enthusiasm and the general mood was more like a political convention than the kind of biker rallies that I’m used to, but it obviously suited the new generation very well.
Of course it shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that bikes have become a big thing in India. There is a middle class now that can afford them, and they are not all café racers. Some Indians are using them to discover their own sub-continent, and some, like Jay, have battled through the almost impenetrable thicket of bureaucracy to get the visas Indians must have to travel the world.
Jay is a Jupiter’s Traveller and I don’t doubt that there will be many more from India before long. He certainly saved my bacon. He rode that Harley all the way like a champion though he said it left him pretty sore. I have always maintained that you can go round the world on anything, but that’s not what I had in mind.
Sharang and his brother, Shrijit, became very good friends over those days, and their friendship was tested later because I hung out on the beach for a few days and got into trouble. But that’s another story . . .
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Note to British readers: I’m looking for a dry space within reach of London where I could store a few hundred copies of Jupiter’s Travels in Camera. My guess is that they would take up about 12 cubic feet, and they might have to be there for while.
Please email me if you can help. tsimon@mcn.org
Also, I would like to go on a little speaking tour in the UK later this year, partly so that I can sell those same books. I’ve been asked often when I’m likely to be over there, so I know there are some who want to meet me. If you would like to help with this I’d be very grateful. Again, email me please, and we can work out the details.
Although Khatmandu is many thousands of miles away I think of it as being next door. I have been there twice, important things happened there and I know the road. When I remember it, follow the streets in my mind’s eye and see the faces I knew, the immense distance from there to here simply melts away and I feel I could slip effortlessly across the divide. The same is true of Melbourne, Nairobi, Santiago, Cape Town, Medellin or Maputo.
But when it comes to places I don’t know, have never been, like say Tahiti or Tokyo or Beijing, the feeling is quite different. What first comes to mind is the huge distance I must travel, the bureaucratic obstacles I must overcome, the cost in time and resources and all the myriad possibilities for pain and pleasure along the way – in other words, the journey rather than the destination.
All of which made my small adventure last summer rather confusing.
It has bothered me for some time that I didn’t know Greece. After all, that’s where Western civilisation began. How could I go to my grave without climbing the Acropolis and visiting the Parthenon? And how about those Greek islands everybody dreams about. And isn’t that where writers I have most admired, Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, spent so many of their years? I was determined to go while I was still mobile and, after all, I knew the road. I’ve travelled it twice; once in ’77 when Jugoslavia still held most of the Balkans together, and again in ’03 when the memory of the Bosnian war was beginning to fade. Nothing to it, I thought. A doddle.
So I decided to go to Greece and I compiled a list of places I would most like to see. As for getting there, I had my bike didn’t I? What else could I need? My main concern was the big meeting in Northern Germany where I was going to introduce my new book, Jupiter’s Travels in Camera. Picking up the bike in Duisburg has become so routine I hardly gave it a thought. Plane to Frankfurt; train to Duisburg; taxi to Dirk’s shop; there she stands, the old scarred and battered Funduro, and I know Dirk will have gone over her carefully. He isn’t there this time. It’s Sunday, and he’s moved to Düsseldorf, not too far away. The bike is re-registered too, in Düsseldorf, but he’s left all the papers for me.
Then there’s that moment of thrill and apprehension I always feel when I get on a bike after a long time away, and then off we go to a small hotel nearby to deal with the first night of jet lag.
I wasn’t giving Greece a thought. I had some family and friends to visit in Hamburg and Kiel before the meeting. On the last days of August the weather was kind. The meeting went well. I sold a lot of books, and then I started thinking about Greece. It began to rain, but not much, and I started off south. On a perfect surface, 30 miles down the road as I was just about to get on the autobahn from a little round-about at 10 mph, the bike fell over. Just like that. The front wheel simply decided to go horizontal.
I didn’t get hurt, just a little bruise on the ankle, but suddenly my picture-perfect vision of the trip became seriously skewed. There was nothing on the road surface to give the slightest indication why the rubber should glide away. If it could happen once, it could happen any time. Forty years ago I would have shrugged it off as one of those bizarre things, but I was shaken. Shit! I’m 82 years old. Should I be doing this? A large part of me was yearning to go back to the hotel.
The bike seemed to be OK more or less; a broken indicator lens and slightly twisted forks. On the other side of the road, a small bunch of bikers were gathered and came over to help me lift her up. The same thing had happened to one of them, only ten minutes before. I should have been comforted, but I wasn’t. That fellow’s bike had to be towed off to a shop. I could almost wish to be towed away myself. Instead I had 200 miles of dubious weather ahead of me.
I was gong to Schwabmuhlhausen, the unlikely name of the village where a friend, Doris Wiedemann, lived. Along the way the odometer packed up but otherwise everything worked well enough, and I began to regain my confidence. When I got there the skies opened up and I was pleasantly stuck for two days. We ate at two good restaurants, and I had this delicious dessert at one of them:
On the third day it was still raining so I buckled on my courage and we made plans for me to get another odometer cable from BMW in Munich. A mile down the road the bike stopped. Then I remembered, the bike had a reserve which I hardly ever used, so I flicked the tap across. Nothing happened. I looked in the tank. There was petrol. Shit! Again. I phoned Doris and she went to all kinds of trouble hitching a trailer to her car to rescue me. So we went to Munich BMW together.
When we got there I looked at the bike on the trailer and realised, with a burning sense of shame, that instead of switching to reserve I had switched it to OFF. The full weight of my 82 years descended on me. Doris was very kind, and the chief mechanic didn’t allow his feelings to show.
Perhaps an older man would have decided than and there that enough was enough, but I soldiered on, and in fact everything was fine until I got to Zagreb where I was just leaving a hotel when half a pint of oil fell out of the bottom of the bike. It was Sunday, of course. By Monday afternoon some willing youths had fixed it (though I never properly understood why it had happened). On Tuesday a huge thunderstorm engulfed Croatia. On Wednesday I entered Serbia on my way to Thessaloniki. Halfway down Serbia the motorway ends and it’s back to the old Autoput, a two lane road winding among the Balkan mountains – once Europe’s deadliest highway. I came up it in ’77, riding in the face of a tidal wave of German and Dutch holiday makers desperate to hit the sun-drenched beaches of Greece. The verges were strewn with wreckage left by impatient Beatle and Kombi drivers hurtling full-tilt into the TIR trucks from Turkey.
Now, in September, it was relatively quiet. I pulled over to a petrol pump perched on a shelf carved out of the steep hillside. A happy young woman filled me up, and I parked over by a picnic table thinking I’d get a snack. Two impassive Serbs registered my existence with indifference. I came out of the shop with a chocolate bar, climbed on the bike, kicked back the side-stand, started the engine, let out the clutch, and shot up in the air doing the first wheelie of my long life before collapsing to the ground with the bike almost on top of me.
Never in forty years had I parked my bike in gear. Now at last I knew the reason why. And they call me the Godfather of adventure biking! Oh, how have the mighty fallen!
One of the Serbs, still totally unimpressed came over to help me lift the bike. Apart from twisting the forks a little further the fall didn’t damage her, but the luggage was severely disarranged. On the next shelf up from the pump stood a ramshackle mechanic’s lair, where its grizzled proprietor was holed up, attended by a small boy. He was very skilled with his hammer and, together with an adjustable spanner, he managed to knock everything into a more or less acceptable shape.
Whatever my existential doubts I obviously had to go on and by the time I got to Greece I began again to believe that I might actually survive this journey, but all my bearings had shifted. I was so used to rumbling around Europe without incident that this unexpected sequence of mishaps was deeply shocking. All of a sudden my presumption of easy mobility was seriously challenged. If I could no longer depend on myself to stay out of trouble my world would shrink alarmingly – catastrophically even. To lose that freedom would be, for me, giving in to old age, and there would be no way back.
It was not very sensible of me to plan a journey that would mean travelling north through Europe in October, and I got very cold, wet and windblown for three days doing it, but there were no more incidents. Dirk says I need to get a better bike. I’m thinking about it.
Oh, Greece?
Greece was marvellous. I saw the Parthenon and the caryatids. I took a ferry to Naxos, and spent wonderful days there in Apollon, at the hotel Adonis.
There is a law that nobody can build over three stories, and all the buildings must be white. I am not a fan of laws, but this one is pure genius and the effect all over the islands is lovely to behold. I met great people and had lovely evenings in Thessaloniki and in Athens. I am so sorry that Greece is in such trouble, and I really hate the fact that it’s their northern neighbours in Europe who are administering such painful doses of austerity. All those Germans, Belgians, and Dutch(not to mention the British) have been rushing down there to soak up the sun and the Mediterranean way of life for six decades, and now they want to punish the Greeks for their loose ways. What ingratitude.
Prices are low, and of course I profited from the crisis, but I deserve it, don’t I?
PIC
Just like Obama I’ve been struggling with my IT. I’ve never tried selling a book this heavy before and it introduces postage problems. Here’s how things stand. I have books here in California. Iain Harper has books in England which I signed. He can be reached at Iain@jupiterstravellers.org by anyone n the UK who wants the book signed by me. If you want it dedicated as well, I can do that when I visit London in week’s time. Anywhere else in the world you can get it from me in California. The book costs $45. The postage to most places outside the USA is $30, because it weighs three pounds. Within the USA, postage is $10.
Please note that I won’t be here to send it for most of January. I’ll be home again on the 28th.
There, that was easy, wasn’t it. Why didn’t I do it a long time ago? Because unlike Obama I’m a doddering old fool, maybe?
Ted Simon’s picture book has finally come to fruition. All three pounds of it have popped out of the printer’s womb, and I couldn’t be more delighted. Creating it, over the last six months, has been like living that wonderful adventure all over again. Writing fresh words to accompany more than 300 pictures took me back as nothing else could. And seeing those old Kodachrome slides turn into spread after spread of glorious colour, under the brilliant direction of Erdem Yucel, was truly exciting.
Please forgive a father’s enthusiasm. The book has been a twinkle in my eye for nearly forty years. In the year 2000 it almost came to life, but there were technical difficulties that couldn’t then be overcome. Now at last, and just in time for the 40th anniversary of the journey itself, technology triumphs and the dream has become a reality.
The book is in a square format, ten inches by ten inches, and has 256 pages. It is already on the market. The cover price in the UK is £30 and in the US as close to $50 as dammit, but Amazon of course has its own ideas.
As I write I am actually on my way to the Greek Islands, riding that same old Funduro that I’ve been using – and crashing – in Europe for many years. When I come home in October I’ll have the book on my web site at the proper price because that’s what you pay for my signature and dedication. I have no illusions that Amazon won’t outsell me.
However we, the Ted Simon Foundation, have plans to create a limited number of special editions to bolster our funds, which are currently somewhere close to zero. So if you are looking for a way to help us along, you might want to hold off for a bit. There will be goodies.
