Travels Incontinent

I pop my head back through the fine film separating blogosphere from activitysphere after a long absence, and what do I find? Nothin's changed. Particularly in regard to this blog. So to avoid charges of static and whiffs of ozone, I thought it time for an update. Before I drop the straggling metaphor, I'd just like to clarify that no globes were warmed in the non-making of this blog. Slightly more were warmed in its making, but that's a detachable story, not to be confused with the tale of how I came to write...

this. Since I left you, full of delicate dreams and fragile bank accounts, three related things have happened. Some of the dreams have been fulfilled, others have been shattered, and my bank account has been transformed into a blushing communist: heavily in the red and nothing to its name. First of all, exile update: I've officially passed the masters and been admitted to the doctor stream, which means I'm digging heels into the cow-pat sodden British earth for another three years at least. That's if I don't piss around. But the piss-around is the fiercely guarded prerogative of PhD students worldwide. The forms may vary over space and time - my dad fondly preserves his doctorate by recalling a sample average day in which playing cards and pure maths overlap like venn diagrams - but it's always paid procrastination. Relax, you're trying to become a doctor of philosophy. So-crates wouldn't have worn himself out. He would have taken some afternoon walks in the shade and left it to his good-for-nothing secretary Plato to transcribe the pearls of wisdom dropped orally and casually. That's what it's all about, I imagine. (Check out philosophy of leisure, according to a philosopher, here - thanks Slav for the tiptop-off. Only part I'm not in sync with is the second p'graph: leisure may have been a high good for 'Ancient Greek philosophers', but that was because it was the preserve of the aristocracy. Work was for chumps.)

Where's the blank time gone then? What sort of 'doing' have I done to colour in the space between then and now? Experimenting with exile-from-exile, that's what. I'd never thought about it much before, but living abroad adds a second coat to the old identity. I was staying at a hostel in Krakow (Poland) a few days ago: a wonderful place where the young ladies in charge rise to make you a full Polish breakfast and clean up the remains of your pig-out as you digest. The hospitality and intimacy factor made it feel as if you were crashing one of a long-lost Polish relative's many spare beds. Anyway, the breakfast ritual took place around a long wooden table, long enough to house ten people, not long enough to let them avoid conversation with one another. Talking to my fellow travellers, above all I felt older than I did in my memories of similar situations hostel-hopping around Europe five years ago. The end of youth is indeed nigh. But the stranger sensation arose when I was forced to grapple with the 'explain yourself' question of the international traveller: 'where are you from?' My tagline response, I noticed, had thickened to double the size. 'Sydney, Australia' it once was - aah, the simplicity of youth! - but now it had accrued the cumbersome barnacle 'but I study in England.' This may all seem trivial. A literal snapshot of your living arrangements condensed into a terse sentence might have nothing to do with 'identity.' But in my head, it was bizarre. 'Australia...England' - the terms bounced around like flicked elastic. My homes multiplied before my eyes. I was a one man Ashes. I was Flintoff bowling to Clarke, I was Clarke hitting it back down Flintoff's throat, I was Flintoff dropping the catch, I was Clarke running down the pitch, I was Flintoff completely missing the stumps and conceding four from an overthrow. So I suppose I was still Australian. Like the Ashes, there was the ever-present (though slight) danger that it could go either way, combined with the overwhelming statistical probability that Australia would win. But I was still a little thrown by the threat.

As far as split identities go, you couldn’t get more training-wheels-level than ‘English/Australian’, so I’ll pay it no more angst than it deserves. Back onto the continent. My six days in Poland ticked all boxes of hedonism listed on the standard western ‘holiday’ form. I took loads off in the presence of my loveable Polish friend by putting loads in: delivery trucks queued before dawn through the outskirts of Krakow to feed our collective appetite for Pierogi (Polish dumplings), potato pancakes, stew, sausage, cabbage, beetroot soup and schnitzel. Buckets of schnitzel, single-handedly putting the abbatoirs back in, and completely out, of business. The best ice-cream I’ve ever had. The best beer I’ve ever had. The best glazed jam donut I’ve ever had; the best I’ve had which wasn’t that good. It spiralled into a mess of consumption bests, the stomach’s short-term memory constantly effacing itself as it expanded into eternal presents of more and better, carpe diem and carpe pierogi, a bulging feast of Trimalchio which didn’t know when from when in order to say it.

Actually the indulgence was fairly moderate, but it was a running joke between me and Marts that everything was the best we’d ever had, culminating in a sub-par Warsaw ice-cream, of which Marts: ‘This is the best mediocre ice-cream I’ve ever had.’ There were times of unrestrained sensory pleasure, but there were also some stone-cold sobering moments. Marts refused to accompany me to Auschwitz, so I went by myself – well, with four innocent but douchy Alaskans to be precise. They were nice enough, but I couldn’t help cringing a bit at their automatic douchy tourist reflexes, which they tried to suppress for my sake but failed, charmingly. I was bitching to one of them about people being disrespectful and taking photos inside the buildings (converted into museums) when it was prohibited, and he wholeheartedly agreed with me, until it came out later that he’d taken a few himself. Guiltily…but who could resist a pose with a tangled mass of spectacles which had been plundered from victims for reuse? Surely it was beyond Hitler’s wildest dreams that mass-produced, mass-culled monuments to murder would one day form the main attraction in a digital photograph alongside the camera's owner: to be explained with relish to his Alaskan friends back home, a pause in a slide show, filled by an oral caption which would omit the part about how he wasn't allowed to take a photo but he did. Or don it as a badge of honour.

Tourists aside - herded from our story like the obedient group they are - Auschwitz was the most affecting museum trip of my life. That's no idle 'best' claim. I'd had an average holocaust education: seen Schindler's, read Night, even been to Dachau, the other famous camp near Munich. But the familiarity of the stories didn't detract from inhabiting their setting. There were details I'd forgotten, or never known in the first place, such as the figure of the Sonderkommando: a fellow prisoner who, in exchange for better living conditions, discharged the grisly tasks of hauling the dead bodies from the gas chambers, stripping them of their gold fillings, their rings, their hair - anything of remote value - and putting them in the incinerator. On liberation, the Soviets found a mass of human hair waiting to be reused in pillows and bedclothes. It's now in a display case, behind glass: aged and dry, but unmistakeably hair. It wasn't just the mass slaughter, but the ruthless efficiency with which the resource expenditure of performing that slaughter was recouped by any means possible. In this narrow, perverse sense, the Nazis were the greatest proto-environmentalists of their time: they recycled everything. That was the emo part. But it also got a little more detached and academic. Thankfully I had the chance to talk to the tour guide on her own - a patient Polish woman whose eyes I could see swelling in exasperation every time she had to tell someone not to take a photo - about the afterlife of Auschwitz. She had done her MA in Jewish Studies on the symbol of Auschwitz and the fierce contests still surrounding it. Proportionally, of course, the Jews were dealt the worst hand. But so potent has Auschwitz become in contemporary imagination that it has completely eclipsed the appalling number of civilian deaths in wider Poland during WWII - a couple of million at the least. The guide talked of her problems with retaining the attention of Jewish tourists in the camp, who visibly lost interest whenever 'Polish' suffering came up. But she also tussled with other extremes: the American tourist who was offended that none of her spiels contained mention of German suffering. Along the paths of this still-overcrowded death camp, the politics run on, and refuse to die.

Far from the horrors of Auschwitz in distance and character - though only a paragraph of text away, and that's what an unplanned blog will do to you - was my Italian jaunt. Before meeting up with me mum, I imposed a bit of scenic purgatory-by-exhaustion. A silly idea popped into my head: I would walk a marathon 120 k's along the Ligurian coast of Italy, from Genova to La Spezia, in three and a half days. I trekked with a heavy burden of a rucksack on a hard back (the tent came in handy, the Hemingway didn't, but at least that was a softback), which made the steep ascents and descents fairly taxing at times. The first half stuck to the road, the only option on what must be one of the most densely holiday-settled stretches of coast in Europe. The villas never stopped, but only oscillated between compression and rarefaction as I moved from town to (nearby) town. Then, finally, I hit rugged national park, doing my best to navigate maplessly by the cheery proverb 'If the sea's on your right, she'll be right.' It's a proverb now. The coast really started doing spectacular things with itself at this point: growing pine trees, crumbling rocks, dropping away to the sea at an almost vertical gradient. Tiers of olives, citrus and grapes appeared every now and then, a living reproach to any farmer that thinks they have it tough on flat land. I walked the famous 11km run of the cinque terre on the last day, the sun flashing its pearly whites and breathing oppressive warmth as much as ever. Each of the five towns, evenly spaced along the stretch, is encrusted on its own bit of rock in its own way. As the rock permitted, so the towns formed, until they froze in their current state: rainbow lego villages of pastel pinks, blues, greens, yellows, oranges. My shoes have smudged errant tracks over all, now visible only in my poor memory - a lonely life and death, but I'll keep them walking for a while regardless.

Having moaned about multiplied homes, it was nice to return to another place I'd 'lived in' (if only for a month) five years ago: Padova. Mum's longstanding friend Antonio, with whom I stayed last time, was in stellar form. Quite literally: he's a prof of astronomy at the university of Pads. But he's also the jolliest, plumpest Italian bawd I know. When he meets his male friends on the street, he playfully whacks them in the testacles as greeting. I'm all for it. But if I introduced it here, I'd probably have to get people to sign clearance forms. And then I'd have to tweezer out the fine points like the scale and frequency of whack; and destroying fun with tweezers is a decidedly non-fun way to do it. Anyway, I had great fun listening to Antonio discourse on every subject under the stars. Stuff he knew about (elementary optics, telescopes, obsolete measuring instruments from the fifties) and stuff he didn't (the historical roots of south Italian sloth). Five years older and I felt a little better equipped to pick him up on his good-natured bullshit; but I'm yet to learn how to fling it back effectively.

So there you are, punters: put that in your punt and punt it into the racing course where you can take a...never mind. Back in the Bridge, I'm poised to make a grab for the last shreds of summer: penniless. Paying the price for not enough continence. But content.