Now I know that reading it on a kindle and having an electronic copy is not quite the same as holding a real book in your hands and having something to feel, smell and own, but it is the next best thing.
Kindle has not suppressed my book! It is available to download! You can even get it for free on the Kindle Unlimited! (Though don’t do that – please pay the price. I only get a small amount per book sold but it enables me to purchase stale bread every now and again so that I have the energy to type)
All I ask is that you do not take your life because the paperback is being temporarily suppressed. It will be available again shortly!
Satisfy yourself with my extensive back catalogue!
We sailed north for two more days as the temperature remains steady between 25 and 30 degrees. There are few things better than a cool beer on a hot day, particularly if you are lying back in a bubbling Jacuzzi with the sun beating down on you, or sitting on the deck, with your feet up on a rail, reading a good book and glancing out over a smooth sea to check out an interesting bird or sign of marine life. Your mind settles into a different rhythm.
We were heading for Salvador de Bahia. It was a city with a UNESCO seal of approval; this was the old colonial capital of Brazil. It was supposed to be particularly beautiful. I had high hopes.
We arrived in the early morning. It was just beginning to lighten as we slid into the port. I stood at the rail and looked up at the city. It was on two levels. Up on the high I saw the silhouettes of a number of cathedrals and other historically interesting buildings. It looked intriguing.
We docked and as the light improved I could see the architecture of the buildings around the dock from the deck of the boat. There were the characteristic blue tilework along with the bright colours. But even at this distance I could make out the shabbiness. However, it was the city at the top of the hill overlooking the port that had UNESCO status. I still had hope of something special.
We disembarked and were greeted in the foyer of the immigration hall by a large jolly lady with huge colourful skirts and turban. She was a candomblee priestess – a weird voodoo queen – a hark-back to African roots. She was exceedingly friendly and gave us a ribbon each which had some coded message on it. This was a candomblee blessing. We were a bit bemused but very polite.
Close up the old colonial buildings were majestic but in even greater disrepair than they had looked from afar. They were the epitome of shabbiness.
We walked along to Saint Anthony’s fort. It was prettily situated on the headland and one of many such forts. It reminded you that the city had been built at a time of war, pirates and privateers. It was very heavily defended.
The fact that it now looked picturesque was unimportant to the men who built it. It was there, as was the Sao Marcello fort in the middle of the bay, to repel warships. We walked past people swimming and fishing in the enticing sea. Standing at the fort we looked out over a packed sandy beach. But we did not have time for bathing. There was a lot to see here.
We boarded a bus to head off for the incredible Bonfin Church at the far extent of the city. We passed by a lake in which there were huge statues of Candomblee gods and goddesses arrayed with weapons and colourful garb. There were favelas on the hill, old people sitting around playing cards and talking, markets and lots of poor housing. The impression I was getting was of a lot of extreme poverty.
The Bonfin church was very impressive on its hill. In the square in front of the church there were lots of tourists and pilgrims. There were also a number of male and female Candomblee priests with bunches of herbs and ribbons of blessing willing to give you a blessing for a small fee. They seemed to live in harmony with the Catholic Church. Many of the denizens emerging from the church were hedging their bets by buying a voodoo blessing. Superstition was alive and well in Brazil. It demonstrated how the Catholic Church was willing to accommodate all the local religions and beliefs.
All around the church was a fence that was festooned with a colourful sea of brightly coloured ribbon blessings. It was a unique sight. We could not resist adding our ribbons to the mass.
Inside the church a priest was reciting scripture to a massed audience. Religion is still big in Brazil. They’re still a bit behind Europe. One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve travelled around the world is that the greater the poverty the greater the piety. People living in hopelessness are willing to put their faith in anything. Superstition rules the poor and oppressed.
I noted the ornate gilded interior and went out to allow myself to be impressed with the ancient blue Portuguese tilework.
There was a room at the back, aptly named ‘The Miracle Room’, full of false arms, and various other prosthetic devices, dangling from the ceiling and walls. It was extraordinary. I presumed I was supposed to believe that god had cured all these people. I felt like marching in to the priest and demanding some verification of these miracles. I found it amusing on one level and disturbing on another.
Heading back to the dock we made our way to the café in the market building. It was full of various tourist tat, cadomblee instruments, coffee, Cachaça, Caipirinha, cashew nuts and candomblee dolls. The café was nice. It overlooked the bay and the fort. We had a snack and a beer served by a delightful waitress with a big grin.
We took the lift up to the top of the hill and peered out over the bay.
All around us were the fading splendour of the town with its tiles, colours and a number of cathedrals. It was a beautiful colonial town and I could imagine it in all its splendour in those days when the old sailing boats would have been moored in the harbour loading and unloading their goods. It must have been majestic.
The dark side was there with the armed police. They stood in pairs on every corner with submachine guns at the ready. It turned out they were especially shipped in to protect the tourists. The Brazilian government was short of cash. They wanted to make sure we were safe. However, it indicated just how dangerous the place would be without them. A later lecture on board ship picked up on that. It was pointed out that if we had left something at one of the cafes and had to go back for it after all the police had withdrawn – how safe would we have felt? The answer was – not very! We wandered through the backstreets and soon reached a point where we were beginning to feel decidedly edgy. You could feel it.
We went back and walked around looking at the magnificent buildings, had a coconut juice in a café, a beer in another, looked at the churches and topped it off with a wonderful ice-cream. There were candomblee queens all over the place. It was a strange mixture of cultures and races in Brazil.
Back down in the lower town we walked around but it was getting dark and felt a bit threatening so we headed back.
In the harbour there were two dug-out canoes – that’s a sight you do not often see – and a raft with a tent on it – I think it was a houseboat!
Back on the ship we learned that a few people had been robbed – one at knife-point.
Salvador had lived up to expectations – a beautiful place full of danger.
I stood at the stern and watched it slide into history.
‘Not spiritually,’ Rich said, chuckling at the startled expression that had come over my face. ‘We live on in the people that knew us, our family and friends. We live on it their memories and the effect we have had on them. Like the ripples in a pond. Our thoughts, ideas and attitudes go on to affect people down the generations. We are altering the future. We live on. Our words and deeds will live after us. Our personalities will affect all the people around us. We change them and the things they do. We change the future.’
‘I really like the idea of that,’ I said enthusiastically.
I’m rewriting this early novel of mine. Shortly I will be republishing it! Hold on a little while longer. I know you all want to buy it now. But wait!
Nurses, Teachers, Posties, Civil Servants, railways, you name it! Thirteen years of pay cuts for ordinary workers. Thirteen years of pay bonanza at the top!
How much do Sunak, Cameron, Osborne and Johnson earn? Really!! You can’t be serious!
It was a night at Les Cousins that I remember well. Roy had just signed to EMI on the prestigious Harvest Label. He was in the process of recording the Flat Baroque and Berserk album and wanted to record what was his most powerful song of the moment ‘I Hate The Whiteman’. He did not want to record it as a studio song as he thought it would lose the dynamic and intensity.
Roy had recorded ‘McGoohan’s Blues’, his previous epic, live in the studio and had not enjoyed the experience. He had the idea of recording Whiteman live at Les Cousins. Les Cousins, a small basement club, was his own arena. He was at home there. Roy could see that the intimate setting, full with the faithful who had been with him from the beginning, would create exactly the right atmosphere to give the song the lift it required. Somehow he persuaded EMI to set up their portable recording facility and the date was set.
I remember being very tense. I managed to get my usual seat at a little table right at the front and waited nervously. Somehow the importance of the evening had transmitted itself to me. I wanted it all to be perfect and Roy to produce an exemplary rendition. Whiteman was one of Roy’s major epics and I felt that the world needed to hear it as good as it could possibly be. I’d heard him sing it many times and it was so incredibly powerful. Nobody else was doing material like this. The nearest to it was perhaps Dylan’s ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’. (Sacrilege!).
We waited nervously in the dim light, sweating in the smoky, sauna atmosphere, ready to give Roy every encouragement. I find it incredible to think that an incredible evening in Greek St, in the heart of London, was going to set me back just 25p. But that was par for the course back then. You could go and see bands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin for 25p or less. This was the 60s. There were many venues and top gigs every night and ridiculously cheap prices. Les Cousins was a superb venue putting on the likes of Roy, Davy Graham, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, John Martyn, Jackson C Frank and Al Stewart. You could go to all-nighters and see a string of brilliant singer-songwriters.
This was 1969. Roy was right at the forefront of what was happening, comparing the free concerts in Hyde Park, featuring in the music press, signing to the top underground label. He was motoring. This album was going to have the weight of EMI behind it. They’d brought in Peter Jenner to produce it. It was going to be massive.
Not only did they record The Whiteman but, fortunately, recorded the whole evening. Apart from losing part of a song when the tape had to be changed the whole gig was recorded. This was a young Roy Harper at the peak of his powers, giving his all with a string of his early material, eager to communicate with his friends.
Personally, I thought he was a little uptight, not quite as relaxed as usual. Not surprising really. The fact of being recorded creates stress. We in the audience felt it maybe more than Roy did.
What we get here is a very rare early concert in all its glory, warts and all.
Listening to this takes me right back to those early gigs and times, in the days when things were real and we thought we were really changing the world.
Unfortunately, Roy was unhappy with the final recording of Whiteman and I believe he used a different version, but he kept the intro on the record.
The tapes for the concert sat on the shelf in EMI until 1996 when Roy finally got back the rights to his material. At the time I was working on a book of lyrics with Roy and Darren Crisp, his manager, asked me to write the blurb for the back cover. That was an honour.
So here it is a full Harper concert with a surprising range of material and much of his usual infamous rambling.
A Roy gig was a sharing, an experience, an insight into his mind and a thought-provoking challenge. This was no concert.
There was another day sailing north further up the coast of Brazil towards its largest port – the fabled Santos. Santos was famous for two things – coffee and Pele.
Unfortunately El Nino was exerting its power and unsettling the weather. We had been plagued with unseasonal rain on this trip and Santos was no exception. We headed up the inlet towards the port to find the hills around shrouded with low-lying clouds and the stilted shanty towns along the edges of the inlet all enveloped in mist.
In a coach with windows festooned with droplets we set off to the football ground that made Pele such an international star. On the way we passed by the picturesque bays with islands and sailing boats, long tree-lined promenades and parks. You could see that with the sun shining it would have been beautiful. Even today, in the rain, there was beauty.
Personally I was not enamoured by the shopping centres with their promise of cheap merchandise due to the weakness of the Brazilian currency but I was taken with the leaning apartment blocks. Some architect had miscalculated the ground stability and need for deeper piles. The foundations were not sufficient. In a few decades they’d start falling over. It looked to me that there was a disaster waiting to happen.
At the stadium we looked at the statues, plaques, art, cups and photographic homage to the great Pele. We went out to see the pitch and I marvelled at how small the stadium was. I had imagined a great stage for such a football genius to display his wares. This place was very modest.
Then it was off to the famous coffee house. Back in the day Brazil had been the centre of the world’s coffee supply. In 1922 the Coffee Exchange was built to facilitate this market. The building looks much older with its unique architecture, brilliant stained glass roof and paintings depicting scenes from the very early days of Santos. These days it is a museum and well worth a visit. I thought the architecture was great. It looked brilliant.
We walked back to the railway stage and boarded one of the newly renovated trams to take us round the old town nice and dry. My mistake was sitting on the outside so that I could take some photographs. Half of me was soaked through. But the ride was interesting. My tram was named Pele.
The old town was old. It was a mass of decaying colonial buildings. It seemed to me that the Brazilians did not value their old buildings. Everything was rotting and falling down. Perhaps there was a psychological factor at work here? They secretly wanted rid of all the vestiges of colonial control.
Back on the ship we headed off back out of the inlet passing the masses of wooden shanties housing the poor and looking far prettier, on their stilts, than they really were. Alongside them was a marina for millionaires’ yachts and huge expensive apartment blocks. That seemed to summarise Brazil – a land of extremes of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ which was responsible for the crime and violence.
I was reminded of that Bob Dylan sentiment about when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.
The light was fading as we pulled out. I didn’t think I’d caught the best of Santos. But as we sailed out between the bays and hills and passed the ships moored outside the inlet I was taken with the brilliance of light as it brought everywhere to life. It was magical.
We sailed away from the rather sad town of Puerto Madryn – the drizzle in Patagonia and the majestic sea-lions and cormorants. While the town was a sorry place I would have liked to have gone off into the interior to penetrate Patagonia and see more of those rolling deserts with their unique habitats. I would have liked finding more of the wild-life – the rheas, armadillos and pumas. I would liked to go as far as the ice covered Andes and see something of that beauty.
For now we were heading off into the ocean for two days of sailing. The giant petrels and albatrosses gave way to the boobies as the temperature rose. The shirt and jeans gave way to shorts, T-shirts, shades and sandals.
Up on the top deck the Jacuzzis were bubbling madly and the sun blazed once more. There were books to read, books to write, lectures to attend and meals to eat. The sunsets were great.
Out in the middle of the ocean once again we were travelling north towards Brazil once again. There was nothing to see apart from ocean. It was endless. There were no other vessels in sight. At night I stood alone on the deck as the boat surged forward, parting the waves in a fluorescent bow-wave. It felt as if I was alone, apart from the rest of humanity. The breeze created by the ship’s progress was warm and satisfying.
In the day I sat reading on the deck. Squalls appeared off to the side. I could see discrete areas of ocean where the rain was teeming down and the wind blew. Sometimes there was thunder and lightning. On a couple of occasions we passed through a squall and the winds dashed rain over the decks causing everyone to run for cover. For half an hour the loungers and chairs were empty.
We nosed along the long causeway – a long line of rocks piled up separating the port from the beaches. We were back in Brazil – back to the heat, the vitality and inequality, the samba beat and steamy jungles. It felt good. We were full of expectation.
It was carnival time. We had been told that everything would be shut. Carnival!! That sounded exciting. I started to imagine myself in a huge crowd, drinking, partying and enjoying themselves as the floats, music and costumes swamped the senses. It was a pointless reverie. Unfortunately we were due to head out in the early evening. There was no carnival for us. It was a delicacy offered but not given.
As we docked at the jetty in Rio Grande I was full of excitement. Rio Grande! I had thoughts of Gary Cooper and a stand-off in Main Street. It wasn’t like that at all.
On one side of the river was the town of Rio Grande, on the other was a green swathe of natural swamp and mangrove. I could make out birds that looked like white egrets on the shore. The twitchers set up their telescopes and were enthusing about the sightings of egrets, herons and a spoonbill. They proudly showed me this magnificent bird wading in the shallows – much too far away to photograph but still exciting to see.
We were taken through the dock area on a shuttle bus and dropped off in the main square. I peered through the window at the decaying buildings. Brazil was decomposing before our eyes.
The park in the centre of the square was full of great trees covered with epiphytes, the usual statues and tropical flowers. We wandered through. There was not a soul to be seen. Around the square there were the pleasant gaudy coloured buildings.
We headed off through the town.
They were right. Everywhere was shut. The only places open were the pharmacies. One street had a whole string of competing pharmacies. Not only that but it was all completely deserted. We wandered through those empty streets taking in the brightly coloured houses and the old churches. At least there was no problem about having crowds blocking your shots. I was able to photograph without annoying intrusions.
We later heard of some of the fellow voyagers being robbed in the square we walked through and others in those deserted streets. I found that incredible. We did not see anyone who could have robbed us.
We assumed that everyone was sleeping off the excesses of the previous night’s carnival. We imagined them sleeping off their hang-overs and recuperating for another night’s revelling. We hoped to at least discover some evidence of the carnival. There was nothing to be found.
This place was so strangely empty that it felt as if the place had been evacuated.
We found the cathedral and walked around the two sides on offer. It was firmly locked up. Then we headed back to the dock. There was a fishing port to discover. Reaching it we toyed with the idea of catching a ferry to the other side. I was tempted. Perhaps we might be able to get close to those birds? But I doubted it.
There was a little activity in the market. Some people were gutting a small number of freshly caught fish. On top of the roof a number of white egrets and a big heron were patiently waiting. The fish entrails were thrown out for the birds who swooped down from the roof, strutted, enlarged their plumage and fought over the scraps.
There were a few boats and nothing much else to see. Carnival time was certainly a slow time.
We negotiated with a taxi driver to take us out to the beach. It was famous. Praia do Cassino was the longest beach in the world being 250 kilometres long. We were extremely thirsty and dehydrated. Nowhere was open to even get us a glass of water. The beach was the only place open.
We hadn’t counted on it being so far away. It was a 30 minute drive. When we arrived we found exactly where everyone was. The beach was packed. There were lines of cars. Everyone in Rio Grande was on that beach. At the head of the beach there was a goddess on a pedestal – the goddess of the beach. Lots of offerings had been placed at her feet. Once again there was the strange mixture of voodoo, Catholicism and superstition.
We arranged with our taxi driver to pick us back up. He chose to sit in his car with his head back and feet up on the steering wheel and catch some zzzzs.
We found a beach café and ordered litre glasses of liquidised fruit juice. They were delicious. The locals tried to get us to try the delicious lemon alcoholic Caipirinha cocktail. We were too dehydrated and took another litre of delicious fruit juice instead. Then we wandered along the beach. We caught up with caipirinhas later!
It turned out that there was no carnival that night. The time of carnival was a holiday. That’s why they had all been at the beach. I suspect that the cruise was avoiding real carnival. They last thing they wanted was for all their passengers being exposed to a proper Carnival. There was too much risk of robbery and violence! A missed opportunity.
Back on board we headed back up along that causeway and gazed longingly at that beach that lay beyond. It would have been great to have spent a few days swimming in that warm sea and test out a few more of those Brazilian cocktails.
These are a couple of other of my poetry books.
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