I left work early so that I could do the stuff I wanted to fit in to my life. Thirty-six years in teaching felt long enough. I loved teaching but running a school was hard work. When you were putting in fourteen-hour days there’s not much time for anything else.
I wanted to see more of my family and friends.
I wanted to write and develop all the ideas that I’d been sketching out. I had thirty-six novels I had roughly written and wanted to complete.
I wanted to travel. The world is an amazing place, full of amazing people, incredible culture, fauna, flora, architecture and geology. Nature and beauty. I wanted to see it all.
I wanted to read. There were hundreds of books that I wanted to savour.
Time and age were the enemies.
Well, I’ve travelled the world from Australia to the Falklands. Seen and touched komodo dragons, cobras and casawaries.
I’ve seen many of the wonders of nature.
I’ve seen some of the greatest works of art, architecture and fashion.
I’ve shared meals and good company with friends and family.
Enjoyed hundreds of memorable gigs, theatre and film.
I’ve read 378 books.
I’ve written 123 books.
That’s a lot to pack into a short fourteen years! There has not been a second wasted.
I was 18 when this album came out. I had this and Roy’s Sophisticated Beggar. Loved ’em both but this one received more needle-time. I lost myself in the philosophy as much as the music. It hit me at exactly the right time. I was taking my A Levels with a lot of pressure from teachers and parents dangling careers and money when all I cared about was music, girls and gorging on ideas, books, travel, poetry and an alternative type of life that had opened up before me. I was impervious to the pressures. I had no interest in careers, money or this narrow path on offer. I was reading Kerouac, getting into Beefheart, Dylan and motorbiking off to catch Roy playing two or three times a week. The London underground scene was in full swing and, blindly, I wanted in. The future could look after itself.
Consequently songs about pressures, infinity and possessions hit me right in the centre of my cerebrum. I wanted a life full of meaning and adventure, not boring security. Life for me was a quest. I was after something more fulfilling and meaningful. What Roy and this album had to offer was far more exciting than A Levels, a university place and some future career. I was ripe for it.
While this is not one of Roy’s favourites it still hits home every time I play it. Those words still resonate. The music is adventurous, melodic and captivating. The whole concept pushes the boundaries. Roy’s creative juices were on fire!!
Isn’t that something we’re all doing in one way or another?
Is happiness the same as fulfillment or are they just related?
I find my happiness in love, my partner, family, creativity (writing, photographing), nature, travel, music, reading, good food and wine, and sharing with friends.
We were heading for Mexico City by van. I’d sorted the route. It was left at the top of our road.
We were going to travel from Los Angeles to San Diego and then straight along the main pan Mexican highway to Mexico City. We had three kids in tow and a tent but that van was going to be our home for a couple of weeks. It was a thousand five hundred miles.
The Mexican border was the first spot of interest. We went in on a six lane highway and out on a dirt road.
At the customs hut we were pulled over by three surly guards. The first guard told us that he might have to search the van for drugs. I protested. I was hardly likely to be smuggling drugs into Mexico, was I? The guard was unmoved. He pointed to a bunch of cars and vans that had been previously subjected to a similar procedure. They had been ripped to shreds. All the seats, upholstery, roof, panels had been ripped out and slashed to pieces. They had even had their engines removed. It did not bode well. I was imagining what I was going to say to the American teacher we had borrowed the van off.
But then the guard suggested that for a small fee he could make us exempt. I slipped him twenty dollars. He told me that there were three of them. I passed the others notes across.
Petrol in Mexico was half the price of the US so we’d come across with an empty tank. When we’d exchanged our dollars the miserable Mexican exchanger had refused to give us any small notes. We had been given large denomination notes worth fifty pounds. I thought that we would get some change from the garage. We filled up with petrol and I handed one of the notes over. A full tank had only set us back about ten dollars. He gave me around five dollars’ worth of change in a bunch of small currency notes. I protested vehemently. I couldn’t speak Spanish and he pretended not to understand English. I pointed to the price on the pump and demanded the rest of the change. Unrepentant and without a hint of embarrassment he handed me a few more notes. It took another three protests and a lot of angry exchanges before he finally coughed up the right money. He was totally unfazed by the whole scam.
The road, the main arterial road through Mexico to Central America, was a two lane job. It was the major highway for all commerce. There were big trucks roaring up and down it. But it was lousy. You would be driving along at full pelt, round a bend and it would disappear into a dirt track. We would bump and career along for a while before the tarmac would reappear. Obviously some municipal council had not paid their taxes. It was no wonder the whole road was punctuated with shrines to dead motorists. The drivers using that death-trap of a thoroughfare were crazy.
In way of illustration, one day we’d stopped at the side of the road to grab some lunch. A car travelling at high speed, swerved off the road, careered through the undergrowth right to the side of us without slowing and then scuttled back on to the road in a screech of wheel-spin, enveloping us in a cloud of dust. We were in shock.
But hey, much to the amazement of our neighbours, who were sure we would be killed by bandits or smashed to pulp on the road, we made it to Mexico City and back in one piece.
Cape Verde receded into the past. We were now headed for Brazil.
For four days we steadily ploughed our way across the Atlantic through the calm of the doldrums. The sea was spread out like a skein of billowing silk and our bow cut through it like a ploughshare cutting sods. Ships used to become marooned in this placed but our fifty year old diesel engines throbbed as they powered on relentlessly into a rhythm to which I had become accustomed.
I had all the time in the world. There were no chores and no internet. I walked the deck for exercise as it gently pitched, I read with my feet up on the rail and broke off to gaze out over the endless sea. I went to lectures on the wild-life or social/political situations in South America. But mostly I stood at the bow in my shorts, T-shirt and sandals and stared out, partially in hopes of seeing wild-life, but mostly because it was mesmerising. The sun was scorching and tropical and the breeze from the ship’s steady 15 knots was cooling. Ahead it was unbroken. The nearest land was hundreds of miles away, there wasn’t a ship in sight. Behind we were leaving a trail that stretched off to the horizon. I imagined it as a long elongating snake stretching back to that bay in Mindelo.
Occasionally we would see whale blows, a pod of dolphins would check us out and have a leap through our bow-wave or a leatherback turtle would drift past raising its head out of the water to gaze at us with those reptilian eyes. I was quite shocked to find how little life there was. Once life used to teem and now it was a rarity.
Sometimes I would lie in the hot Jacuzzi on the top deck with my floppy hat, sunglasses and suncream, under the blazing sun with a beer in hand.
In the evening it was good to check out the sunset as it sank slowly into the sea.
Late at night I would go out on to the deck all alone and stand at the front with the warm breeze ruffling my hair. The ship’s lights were behind me and the moon shone brightly leaving a bar of shimmering light across the sea. The stars filled the sky with the Milky Way like a thick wisp of smoke in a band above my head. I felt all alone. As I looked around I knew that we were about as alone as you could get on this planet – no land for days and the nearest ship well out of sight beyond the horizon. It gave me a sense of what it must have been like thousands of years in the past for those early men before the machine of civilisation was created. I felt an affinity.
Of course there would have been a lot more wild-life back then.
I watched flying fish for hours. The scooted out of the way of our bow-wave fleeing the huge metal predator bearing down on them. Singly or in swarms they would scud out across the waves for hundreds of metres before plunging back down. I found them fascinating.
Behind me was Europe, England, Spain, Gran Canaria and Cape Verde, ahead was Brazil, Argentina, the Falklands, Uruguay and Chile.
I knew what was behind me and I could smell what was to come. It smelt like adventure.
Alter Do Chao is a holiday resort on the Amazon. It floods to form a large lagoon with sandy shores. Families come to enjoy a ‘beach’ holiday. The water is fresh water and very warm. Extremely pleasant to swim in.I was more taken with the incredible wildlife of the flooded lagoon.
Voodoo came straight out of the African superstitions via the Creole population. It has gone in the music that comes out of the region – the Blues and Cajun. It has its Mojo bags, Gris-Gris and John the Conguero – spells, amulets, potions and dolls designed to solve all your problems, raise your sex drive, do in your enemies and make people fall for you – the real Love Potion No. 9 (a Leiber & Stoller number made famous by the Clovers and covered by the likes of the Searchers). Mojos and John the Conquero were made famous by Muddy Waters and when I was young I always wondered what he was talking about. It then went from Blues into Rock.
Dr John is the epitome of Cajun/Voodoo Rock with his gris-gris and voodoo paraphernalia.
The most famous Voodoo Queen has to be Marie Laveau. So we had to go and visit her grave and pay our respects.
