We step through the doors (modern, efficient, out of place) and into Hexham Abbey…and the world goes silent. (more…)
york
Austria: Gone In 60 Seconds
Here’s a true story about how I nearly didn’t go to Austria a few weeks ago.
It was a really close thing.
60 seconds.
5.30am
Stumbling. Coffee. Cannot. Think.
Things, fanned out on the floor in an order than made perfect sense last night – or more correctly, earlier this morning. Most of everything is already packed, but these are the things I’ve made an extra list of, the things I needed overnight: electric toothbrush, washkit, phone, asthma medicine, Kindle, pinstripe pyjamas, bowler hat etc. Amidst these items are the Things I Cannot Forget Under Any Circumstances (e-tickets, passport, non-e-tickets, wallet, pinstripe pyjamas, bowler hat). They’re all arranged in an order that will make me think about them as I pack them, ingraining that memory to help stave off panic that I’ve forgotten something.
Item 1. It’s….what is it? It’s like a – long stick thing, in some baffling material that isn’t wood and isn’t metal…..plastic, yes, that’s it. I pull the end off, exposing a transparent tube half-full of a dark blue substance. Further investigation uncovers the presence of a very small ball-bearing at one end that seems designed to “roll” the dark liquid out, for reasons currently beyond me. I experiment fruitlessly.
Ten minutes pass.
Clearly I’m in no fit state for rational thought – I just need to act. I scoop everything into my bag that’s currently within reach including, as I later discover, a small Thai cookbook, a stapler, a credit card statement, an adjustable spanner and a bag of lemons. The coffee is starting to kick in, but it’s only making me more alert, not smarter. I throw some porridge at my face, brush my teeth, slap myself a few times (no reaction) and lurch out the door.
Well, at least I’m early.
I have plenty of time to spare. You know – in case something goes wrong.
6.05am.
The morning air hits me like a something of something. (I’m too tired for metaphors).
I breathe deeply. In – and OUT. And gradually, miraculously, the fog clears. It starts to dawn on me that life is good. I’m about to leave for Austria, starting with a Megabus service that leaves the city centre at 6.55am. I have just under an hour to get there, it’s a half-hour walk and I’m playing it safe by taking the bus (transit time 10 minutes). Another deep breath. My spirits lift. Ah! Yes! Let’s do this.
With a light heart I lift my rucksack and heave it onto one shoulder.
It bursts.
6.15am
I’m sweating enough for my glasses to keep sliding down my nose. I’ve just spent 8 minutes frantically stuffing my gear into another backpack, and 2 minutes kicking my ruined rucksack around the garden, shouting at it like Basil Fawlty.
It’s still going to be ok. I still have 40 minutes. I could still walk – and yet there’s a bus.
I walk to the bus stop, ignoring my pounding heart and wobbly legs.
6.22am
I’m at the bus-stop.
People are looking at me oddly.
Perhaps it’s the madness gleaming in my eyes. Perhaps it’s the way my glasses keep sliding down to the end of my nose. Or perhaps it’s the way I’ve disgorged half of my rucksack into the ground and I’m sifting through my possessions, muttering “no no NO NO NO“, louder and louder, like a kettle of negativity coming to the boil.
My passport is gone.
6.27am
I’m outside my house again. I’ve just done something akin to the 4-minute mile, proportionally scaled down to my non-Bannisterian level of fitness. I totter up, pluck my passport from the stretch of pavement where my rucksack exploded, and turn around. My luggage is back at the bus-stop – I’d asked my wary companions to keep an eye on my possessions, hoping the bus wouldn’t arrive before I got back.
I’m utterly, utterly exhausted. There’s just no way I can run back.
My Megabus to London leaves in 28 minutes.
I run back.
6.31am
My rucksack is alone. The bus came, and the bus went. The next one will be around 6.45am. That’ll probably be too late.
What are my chances of making a run for it? Slim. I’ve tried sprinting with a fully-laden rucksack before – I remember it clearly. I remember the way my knees ached for a week, I remember the accompanying asthma attack. And that was when I was 20. I’m truly too old for that shit.
Hitch-hiking is my only hope.
6.40am
“Oh come ON. COME ON!”
Perhaps hitch-hikers shouldn’t be so aggressive. I’m scowling at the cars whizzing past, jabbing my thumb at them like a Roman Emperor sentencing them to death. None of them are stopping. I curse the British and their inability to make new friends, even ones as scary as I must look right now.
I know it’s probably too late, but while there’s a chance….
6.45am
It’s a 10-minute drive to the city centre. And traffic is picking up. There’s just no way I’m going to get there in time.
How am I going to write this up, I think to myself? People know I’m going to Austria. Sure, it’s common knowledge that I attract disaster, but usually I find a way to muddle my way through. This is different. Not only am I losing hundreds of pounds in tickets, missing the chance to meet someone I admire immensely and not returning to a place I’ve reminisced about for 20 years – I’m not even leaving home this time. I can’t put a funny spin on this one. It’s not funny. Not at all.
Game over.
6.46am
A white van pulls up in front of me and the passenger door swings open.
“Where are you going?”
Bob (this isn’t his real name, I was way too panicked to ask) immediately understands the situation, and hammers his van to its limits. We power through two sets of greened traffic lights. Hope starts to flame within me once more. And then, with a minute’s driving left and a minute before the Megabus departs – we hit a red light. Hope gutters. Have I really come this far to have this happen to me? Is this fair?
Two minutes later, it’s amber and we’re through.
It’s 6.56am – and the bus will have gone.
6.57am
I’m running again, with a fully laden backpack, a 39-year old man running down the side of the road, dignity in tatters, stumbling, breath whooshing in and out. And then I’m off the path, across a patch of ornamental gardens, my knees like jelly…
“HOLD ON!”
The Megabus driver later told me he always gives late arrivals a couple of minutes. When he saw me explode out the side of a white van and come dashing down the road, those minutes had passed. He’d been ready to go.
Another minute and he would have – and the next 5 days of travel, of mountains and cake and elk and castles and Mozartkugeln and un-fun airport lounges and good conversation and amazing roofs…all of those things would have vanished.
But incredibly, and against the odds, they didn’t.
And I still can’t quite believe that.
(Note: all of this is true. Even the lemons).
Images: wwarby and Mike Sowden.
Bless Me: 5 Surprising Sides To York Minster
York Minster, from the city walls past Bootham Bar
York Minster dominates York. Arguably, it is York, having been its social and geographical focus for over a thousand years. It’s a Gothic-style cathedral (the largest north of the Alps) of a scale and intricacy that will punch the breath right out of you at first sight – and it’s beautiful because of – rather than despite – its many architectural imperfections. This is a building that has clearly evolved.
As you might expect, that evolution has a rather colourful history.
Here are a few highlights. (more…)
All Change At Cyprus
For a change, I took the bus to work today.
My daypack bulged with books: the Rough Guide to Cyprus, Colin Thubron’s Journey Into Cyprus, Tim Boatswain’s A Traveller’s History of Cyprus, and a number of careworn notebooks with “Cyprus” scrawled on their covers.
The more observant among you may spot a common theme. But alas, no, I’m not off to the eastern Mediterranean right now. Just refreshing my memory about my childhood home, for reasons that should become clear another time. And as usual, Rough Guide, Traveller’s and Thubron are my starting points.
I scrambled up to the top deck of the no. 1 bus to the York train station, eventually found a seat not occupied by teenagers so bleached by fast-food malnutrition they looked like extras from The Walking Dead, ignored their innocent, carefree 120dB banter about who shagged who last night, and buried my nose in my books.
Ten minutes later, I nearly missed my stop at the train station.
Not quite. But nearly. I suddenly became aware we’d stopped, swore, scooped my books into the air in the general direction of the stairs and tumbled out the door like a crash-test dummy. Pausing just long enough for everyone to laugh at me, I crossed the road and dove into my connecting bus.
Ten minutes later, I completely missed my stop at the University.
If you were wandering across campus today and you saw a smartly-dressed man run past, wearing shoes that would have been sensible for anything but an attempt on the unassisted world landspeed record, a bulging rucksack whirling around him like a slingshot scaled up for siege warfare, cursing his life, cursing the buses and cursing you, then we’ve met. Briefly.
(Hey, I hope next time it’s under better circumstances).
The reason for all this running is simple. I fell through a hole in my own mind. Ever done that? You blink and suddenly it’s Much Later, and you’ve been sat there all this time, except you’ve really been elsewhere?
Well, I’d been in Cyprus. Suddenly remembering things that had been buried deep inside my head for more than 20 years. Joining together vivid bursts of light and sound and smell and taste to passages of Cypriot history in front of me, and then to things I’d seen in 2006, when I was last on the island. Remembering when I went to a fancy dress party as Captain United Nations (saving the world since the age of 7). Remembering geckos. Remembering when I drowned. (Long story, that one). Remembering things with such powerful longing that I was tugged right out of my own skin. Remembering them so hard I felt a little sick.
(Homesick).
And this precious ability to be utterly focussed and transported, this gift of the imagination of pure, selfless escapism – I thought it had gone forever. Nibbled out of existence by my attention-shrinking digital habits, the ruin the Internet has made of me.
So, that was nice.
But it still hurt.
Lost. Lost. Lost. And then I looked up, and the University looked a bit strange, which was because I was seeing it from the wrong angle. I ran out the door, and through sliding doors in succession, college after college after college – back here, back in England yet again, not elsewhere, yet again not elsewhere.
But somehow…
Changed.
Yeah. I think that’s the word.
Photo: M. Sowden 2006
