News from Ted
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.
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
