A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

When they arrived in the late afternoon, I was snoozing. Like an old person. Or a Spaniard. Actually more like an Italian, as I’d been up till 5am on a hostel-organised pub crawl with a bunch of young Sicilians, one of whom was 20 years younger than me, but on whom I had quickly developed a highly inappropriate crush. Nothing massive, you know. Just desire. Just bad, old man’s desire.

They turned on the light – if I remember correctly – and we said hello. More often than not, the second question after ‘where are you from?’ is ‘what are you doing in Valencia?’, or wherever you happen to be. (We were in Valencia.) And more often than not, when it comes to whose reasons are the more interesting, I win. George, Mike and Stephanie, however, gave me a run for my money. (But I still won.)

‘We’re hitching from Brighton to Morocco to raise money for charity,’ said one of them, probably Mike, the mouthiest.

‘Ooh, now that’s interesting,’ I said, slightly pompously, because it was, and not just because at the time I was still considering hitching from Hampshire to Chiang Mai.

George, Mike and Stephanie are studying at Sussex University. George is studying something with ‘bio’ in it, Mike and Stephanie something with ‘business’ in it. They are all 19.

(l-r) George, Stephanie, Mike

I remember when I was 19. I was just beginning to get over my fear of going into shops for the first time, which more accurately, was actually a fear of all other human beings. George, Mike and Stephanie had no such fear. They were – at least on first impressions – everything you’d want your kids to be: they were bright, cheerful, adventurous and totally unintimidated by life. At least on the surface, which is where it counts. Part of me would like to say that they made me sick, but only for the cheap laugh. In reality they didn’t make me sick at all. They made me happy, and I liked them immediately. So much so that I offered them red wine and chocolate biscuits. Just like Jesus would.

The charity for which they’re raising money is Link Community Development.

‘The Hitch’ has been an annual student event since 1992 and has raised more than £2.5million for LCD’s education projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. A very worthy cause then, which Mike, who specialises in event management and also wishes to market an article of clothing called ‘the Gareth’, admits was more of an excuse to go on a bit of an adventure, culminating in a week in Morocco.

In order to take part in the Hitch, each student has to pay a £28 registration fee and must raise at least £375. When I met them, Stephanie had almost reached her target, Mike wasn’t too far behind and George had barely got going, having just been given €20 by a guy who sold energy drinks across Europe and had given them a lift to Valencia.

Poor George.

Stephanie – perhaps predictably (because boys are useless) – was the organised one, and the only one of the three with any languages. Stephanie speaks English, Danish, German, French and Luxembourgish, which she actually expected me to believe was a real language. She also made her bed first and went sightseeing on Friday (which was their first day off from hitching), whilst George ate paella and Mike accidentally ordered the roast chicken. (‘I thought it was roast chicken paella.’ Even in English, his language skills are lacking.)

All in all, they were really sweet kids and I thought it would be wonderful to patronise them here on my ill-read blog and maybe generate some interest in their adventure. I don’t know where they are now, however. They should really by now have arrived in Morocco and be sunning themselves in Marrakesh or what-have-you, but their Facebook status updates have dried up, so who knows….

I refuse to worry though, because LCD have lots of safety mechanisms in place and when all is said and done they are all big boys and girls with bags of charm and wherewithal….

But what if…?

No, no, no, what am I, their mother?

Speaking of which, Stephanie’s mother didn’t want her to go. Not because she feared that George and Mike are a pair of sex pests (well, not George)…

…but more likely that she feared her daughter might end up sending the kind of text that Mike received on Friday afternoon. That text was sent by another female friend who was also doing the Hitch. It said that she was currently in a lorry in which the driver, whilst driving, was taking surreptitious photographs of her with his phone.

Eww.

Fingers crossed that nothing hideous has happened. Or indeed happens. To any of the young people risking their lives in the name of adventure and charity. Mostly adventure. God, I love young people, and not in that way, although on Friday night I did tell the Sicilian that I was a little bit in love with her. (It sounds much better in Italian.) A little bit cooked. I didn’t expect anything – I mean, I didn’t expect her to jump into my arms or anything. I just wanted her to know (just in case she jumped into my arms or anything). But she didn’t. Rather, she told me that… well, essentially she told me that she’d never been fancied by someone quite so old before.

(It sounds much better in Italian.)

Actually, no. It sounds the same. As Shakespeare might have said, a restraining order by any other name would smell as dodgy.

Misdirected lust aside, however, my love for young people is generally limited to those with gumption and spark and giant figurative balls. Same as old people really. Same as all people. But younger people are younger and therefore, increasingly in my opinion, worthy of some kind of special praise. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s an awful lot to be said for wisdom and experience and all the good stuff that comes with being older (and there is a lot of good stuff that comes with being older), but frankly… oh, I don’t know – maybe it just stems from the fact that in the last two months I’ve realised for the first time how old I actually am and I’ve grown misty-eyed and rose-tinted about the whole cult of youth thing. Those that waste it upset and sadden me and they always will because I see myself in them, but those that get out there and do stuff and use the gift of their youth as best they can thrill me. And you see a lot of them travelling around, and I have nothing but respect, awe and admiration for them.

Little cunts. Oops, sorry – that slipped out. Sorry about that. Cheap laugh for coarse swine. Pretend it never happened.

Now, if you would like to support George, Mike or Stephanie in their efforts to bring decent education to poor foreigners by hitching across the world not getting murdered in the process, well… you can’t I’m afraid. Not individually. That’s because Mike wrote down the wrong information for their individual pages and LCD haven’t got back to the email I sent them earlier today. Ah well. I was going to suggest you vote for George, whose fundraising abilities I suspect, are probably as bad as mine. Poor George. But now all I can suggest is that if you want to support them, you can make a donation to LCD direct, which you can do here.

If you don’t want to make a donation, however, at least join me in hoping that they’re OK.

I was kind of joking earlier, but now I’m starting to actually get worried.

I should never have kids.

Or attempt to date them.

…

Come back tomorrow for something about Ryanair.

In Hampshire, you know. England. It’s not very exotic, no. Unless you’re from Kuala Lumpur maybe. Which I’m not. I’m from Sunderland.

Anyway, I can’t believe that when I first started talking about this idea of visiting 80 festivals around the world and writing about them as I went, I actually imagined I could do it all in one year. Not only that, I imagined that somehow I could multi-media blog it as I went.

It would never have worked.

Doing it in one year would have meant visiting a new festival every four and a half days. Apart from the fact that some festivals last longer than four and a half days, there is all of the travelling from one event to the next, not to mention the time it takes to write everything up, sort through hundreds of photos, edit a ridiculous amount of film, and so on. I am only one man, and not a very organised one at that.

I was awfully naïve. But I’m not anymore. Now I’m merely disillusioned and negative.

I haven’t a hope in hell of carrying on.

Or have I?

Oh, come on. You never know. Keep positive!

Balls. I’m having a nervous breakdown.

Oh, shut up. One man’s nervous breakdown is another’s epiphany.

Shush.

I’ve been back from the first leg since Sunday and I’m still working on writing up the third festival, the Battle of the Oranges. And because of time constraints and mounting panic, I’m already cutting corners.

All of which has made me thankful that no one gave me the money to do the against-the-clock adventure version, because there would have been precious little fun in it, and I would have had a nervous breakdown – a proper one – by June.

However, if no one gives me the money to continue, then I will be really quite peeved, because four festivals in, I genuinely think I’m onto something.

Unfortunately, I still don’t think I’m any better at selling myself.

Oh, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!

Calm, calm, calm.

So this is the plan: the next festival I would like to visit is Songkran. Songkran is the Thai water festival. I have been advised to head for Chiang Mai for the 12th April. Which is in exactly two weeks. Hmmm….

So, I have two weeks to raise some funds. Substantial world-travel funds this time too. Not the crappy small-fry European funds I failed to raise the first time round.

My current back-up plan, if I haven’t managed to raise the money by Songkran, is to run away and live in Spain, go back to teaching English, learn Spanish, get a tan and sporadically carry on trying to get people interested in the festivals project over the summer. Then give up and write a comedy novel about life in hostels that no one will publish and no one will ever read.

But what if I can’t even raise enough money to go and live in Spain?

Ay carumba.

We’ll see. For now I’ve got to get on. I’ve got too many windows open at the moment. I need to focus.

Tomorrow there will be focus. You see if there isn’t.

I am still in Valencia.

I am sitting in my dorm room at my half-broken laptop. The window is open behind me. The smell of slightly burned toast and citrus cleaning fluids floats in on a chilly breeze and makes my stomach rumble.

I’m waiting for a little money to arrive. There is some on its way. In the virtual post. In the meantime, I’m staying in a cheap dorm and living on salami, bread and red wine. Wine costs between 55 cents for a dodgy box and €2 for a half-decent bottle. Obviously there are more expensive bottles, but I don’t waste my time looking at those.

I’m feeling doubtful at the moment. Doubtful about my future and doubtful about my ability to turn it into something I really want.

The doubt is making me afraid, frankly, and the fear is making me want to run away and hide – to switch off the internet and henceforth forevermore shun the company of peoplefolk whose approval I crave but will most likely never achieve.

I ignore it. The fear. I half-ignore it.

There is one other guy sharing my dorm. He works for a private equity company in Sydney. He is not sitting in the dorm feeling doubtful about his future.

He has gone to the aquarium.

So – anyway – for the rest of today, I will write hard. Some time around 4pm I will buy salami, bread and red wine. After I eat the salami and bread, I will smoke a cigarette on the roof. I will hear the laughter of foreign women and I will despair at the poverty of romance in my life. Then I will have another cigarette, maybe another brick of wine and I will pretend to be heartened by the romance of poverty. But I’ll only be half-pretending.

Yesterday I lay in the hot sun for two, maybe three hours. I knew I would burn. And I knew it was dangerous and potentially very bad for me. But I did it anyway. I did it because I also knew that within a couple of days, the redness would turn to a half-decent tan and I would feel better about myself.

Today it is cloudy, with rain on the horizon.

I came for Las Fallas.

Las Fallas is a salute to the Spring, a celebration of creativity, destruction and rebirth. It is a festival of burning art, ear-splitting noise and the prettiest sky-castles you ever did see. It is also an excuse for insanely rich people to parade around the city like they own the place…

…which of course, yes – yes, they do. But on the other hand, according to quite a few people who live here, Las Fallas is nothing less than complete anarchy.

Well, whatever it is, it’s over.

It ended on Saturday night with the Burning of the Art, but because of a hopefully temporary cash-flow problem, I’m staying on a couple of days till I can afford a ticket back to the UK.

I’m returning to England to regroup. Is that the word? To write up everything I’ve done and seen so far and to try my damnedest to make this whole cockamamie project seem like something people might want to invest in. I want to be in Thailand for Songkran (the water festival) by the middle of April. Ideally somewhere else before then. But we’ll see. Oh, and I’m thinking of hitching to Thailand. Is that practical?

If the worst comes to the worst, however, and I’m unable to make this pay, I think I might move here to Valencia for a while. I love it here. It has orange trees. And it has freaky marble frescoes…

…and excellent graffiti…

…and even better clothing slogans…

Oh, and heart-breakingly beautiful civil protection women…

I’m glad I’m stuck here too, because I want to see what it’s like when everything is back to normal, when all of the festival-people have gone back home and the Valencians have gone back to work. Yes. I think I might go to the beach. Hmmm, yes, I do believe I shall. And if I’m feeling particularly fearless, I may strip to my feathers and gallop into the sea like a mad dog.

We shall see. The future is bright either way though, isn’t it? Of course it is….

I am sitting in a roadside trattoria about a mile and a half outside of the centre of Ivrea drinking fizzy white wine and wearing another man’s trousers.

Yesterday I took over 300 photographs of people throwing oranges at one another. Then I went back to my hosts to kill some time before meeting a man called Maurizio. While I was waiting for the bus back into town at about 8pm, a black cat ran across the road to my right. Instinctively, from my mouth fell the following word: ‘Kitty’, the tone the same as you might use for a small child who was approaching an open flame.

I imagined the cat getting hit by a car and I felt bad. I love cats. I don’t like it when they get hit by cars. As it happened, I was chanting at the time. These days, when I’m waiting at bus stops or hanging around somewhere where I can’t write, rather than smoking a cigarette, I chant. If any of my old friends are reading this, their instinct will be to mock me. They will imagine me twittering away like Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. As it happens, that’s pretty much spot on. But it isn’t a joke. And it isn’t gibberish. I’m probably not doing it right though because my mind is all over the place. But I’m doing it anyway. I enjoy it. And you never know.

I think the idea is that I’m stockpiling spiritual energy. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing. But while I’m doing it I try to think vaguely of being a better person. My old friends would mock me for that too. So be it.

So I saw this black cat crossing the road and I didn’t even think about luck and about whether it was good luck or whether it was bad luck. I just thought about the fact that it was a busy road and that the cat was risking its life darting across it like that. I also thought about my friend Andrea in Bologna and his horny little black kitten, Magda. He doesn’t want to let her outside because he lives on a busy road and he’s afraid she’ll be killed. But he also feels bad about keeping her indoors because that’s no kind of life for anyone. It’s a difficult choice, and one we all face. Do we leave the house and risk our lives? Or do we stay home and have no life at all?

So I chanted for the black cat. Or rather, whilst devoting myself to the mystical teachings of the Lotus sutra, I hoped that the universe would keep that black cat safe. Free from harm. Alive and happy.

Then I met a man called Maurizio who gave me a pair of trousers because mine were covered in dried orange pulp.

This morning I wasted, kind of. I stayed in the unused apartment of my hosts, organised some photos and slept for two hours more than I should have. It was magnificent.

Then I headed for town for the final day of the carnival. I stood at the bus stop for a couple of minutes, maybe less, then I started walking. It’s only a couple of miles and it’s a beautiful day. It’s cold but the sun is shining, and the sun breathes life into everything.

Or so I thought.

I’d been walking for less than a minute when I saw this on the grass verge to my right…

I felt sad. I felt awful actually. It was definitely the same cat. I recognised it. I knew it.

I walked for another three or four minutes, stopped at this trattoria, ordered wine and food and wrote all of the above in my notebook. Then I went back and took the photograph that at first I had resisted. It seemed wrong. But then when I’d written it up, it seemed like I had to. It reminded me of this moment in my life, which was even sadder.

By the way, someone left the following comment on last week’s Venice post: ‘If you don’t like it in Italy, why not try just fucking off back home again, eh?’

What I was going to do was approve the post and then leave some withering reply explaining how wrong he was. After this experience, however, I have decided merely to chant for him. God rest his soul.

This blog post then, cost the ninth life of one Italian cat, and believe me, if I could, I would give it back in a second.

But life goes on.

Anon.

Stranger: Buongiorno.

Me: Buongiorno.

Stranger: You speak English?

Me: Sí.

Stranger: Where are you from?

Me: England.

Stranger: I knew that. I saw your face. I knew that you were English.

Me: What can I do for you?

Stranger: You a tourist?

Me: No, I’m a writer. I’m travelling through.

Stranger: You a writer?

Me: Yeah. I’m a writer without any money.

Stranger: It’s not possible. You can’t be a writer and not have money.

Me: I didn’t say I was any good. Anyway, I write on the internet. Anyone can write on the internet.

Stranger: This is true. You are right, you are right.

Me: Thank you.

Stranger: I have a PhD in economics but there’s no work. I have a wife and two kids at home and I can’t find work. So I come here, walk the streets, ask people for money.

Me: Where’s home?

Stranger: Huh?

Me: You said you have a wife and two kids at home. Where’s home?

Stranger: Torino.

Me: Oh, right.

Stranger: I have two kids.

Me: I know. I’m happy for you.

Stranger: Why are you happy?

Me: Because you’ve got kids. That’s nice.

Stranger: Yeah, it’s nice, but it’s not nice that I can’t take care of them. I have to ask people for money. It’s…

Me: I know. I had to ask people for money recently. It’s embarrassing.

Stranger: It’s embarrassing. Yeah. Fuck.

Me: What’s your name?

Stranger: Moses.

Me: I’m Karl.

[We shake hands. I take some money out of my pocket. There is a two-euro coin and some smaller ones. I think about putting the two-euro coin back in my pocket but I don’t want to appear mean. Plus, I have it. I have two euros. Moses has two kids.]

Me: Here you go.

Moses: Thank you.

Me: But I take your photograph, OK?

[My camera is already round my neck. I am a tourist really.]

Moses: OK.

[I take his photograph.]

Moses: Let me see, let me see.

[I show Moses the photograph.]

Me: Ti piace?

Moses: It’s cool, it’s cool.

Me: OK. Good luck, Moses.

Moses: Goodbye.

[Moses moseys on down the road. I sit down and write. A writer writes. This blog post cost me nearly three euros. A snip.]

Specifically I’m in the middle of day two of the Battle of the Oranges. I have found a bar with a large Wifi sign in the window. I wish I’d found it last Friday but not to worry. I have just uploaded 158 photos from the last couple of hours. There’s got to be a couple of good ones there, surely to God. I’m going to eat a sandwich and get back into it. Yesterday I was throwing oranges. Today I’m taking photos. It’s like being a war photographer, without the death. Having said that, the family I’m staying with fa parte della morte, therefore, by extension, io sono la morte. La Morte is one of the nine teams of official orange throwers. The second oldest. From 1954. This carnival is really, I mean really insane.

The family I’m staying with are the kindest, loveliest, funniest family I could ever have hoped to have been hosted by. Within two hours of arriving on Thursday, I was dressed like this…

The next night I was a pirate in a parade.

Ivrea is beautiful. The carnival is complex and multi-faceted. And genuinely hilarious. I could not have enjoyed myself more without, you know, lying down with someone. And despite the main thrust of the carnival being a battle, I have not seen one moment of unpleasantness. Actually, that’s not true – I did see one, but it was caused by a slightly unhinged American woman who has a terrible habit of hitting men in the face when she doesn’t like their energy. She’ll get over it, hopefully.

Anyway, I’ve got to get on. This was just a little catch-up. I’m staying here for the funeral of the carnival tomorrow and then – I think – on to see a virtual friend in Belgium. Then Las Fallas. Then maybe a couple of weeks writing everything up properly and trying to sell myself again. We shall see. I can’t keep relying on the kindness of virtual strangers. And friends. More of which later.

In the meantime, stammi bene. Ti voglio bene. A presto. x

I wanted to be Indiana Jones, kissing a gorgeous Nazi in an amazing apartment overlooking passing gondolas. Not that I’m into kissing Nazis, don’t get me wrong. Particularly after Sunday. But Indy didn’t know she was a Nazi at the time. So neither would I. Actually in my version, she wouldn’t be a Nazi at all. She’d be a pianist. And a painter.

I didn’t particularly want to be Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now, except of course, for that one scene, but the whole drowned daughter, spooky old lady, Little Red Stabbing Hood scenario I could do without.

And as for Dirk Bogarde, let’s not even go there.

But then again, I didn’t particularly want to be myself. Not at that moment. Those moments, those two or three hours, in Venice.

Getting there was fun. Kind of. A claustrophobic sleeping cabin with a lugubrious Russian and cheerful chicken wrangler from Bristol University. (Actually he didn’t actually wrangle chickens, but he did work with them, so on occasion, there may have been some wrangling involved.) Then a couple of hours on a bus through the Alps, which was staggeringly beautiful.

Being there, however, in Venice, was not so much fun. In fact, for a city so utterly beguiling, Venice is a strikingly cold-hearted place. It’s hard, unfriendly and extremely rapacious, particularly – I’ve no doubt – at carnival time. Which doesn’t seem right. It isn’t right. It’s dreadful.

I had a list of hostels recommended to me by a woman who worked in one of the tourist information cabins. She’d marked three of them as woman-only hostels, so I chose the cheapest of the rest and set out to find it. I figured there was a good chance there’d be space as lots of people were heading out of Venice after the first full carnival weekend. It took me just over an hour to find it.

Venice is not like other cities. Although it has ordinary streets, they don’t function like the streets in other cities. Which is to say, if you’re looking for ‘Santa Croce, 561’, as I was, don’t expect to find a street called Santa Croce. Rather, Santa Croce is an entire area of Venice, with a couple of thousand numbers. And so, in order to find 561, you have to trudge through the whole zone. It’s like the whole city is designed to cause problems for strangers. And when you ask for help, no matter how friendly and smiley you are, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how well you speak the language, people are generally dismissive, if not outright rude.

Eventually, however, I found the hostel I was looking for. It was directly opposite the train station where I’d started out, on the other side of the canal. There was no sign. There was just a number, above a large open door. Inside, in a little box, was a nun. Not like a shoebox, but a tiny reception, with a desk and a phone and some files. The first thing the nun explained to me was that this hostel was for young girls only. Ah. She said that most of the hostels in Venice were for young girls only. Ah. She said there was a place on the other side run by the monks, but she didn’t think they would take me. She said I should have booked ahead. By telephone. Or, she added, the internet.

In Venice, I am reminded, internet cafés charge six times what they charge in Madrid, four times that of Bologna. Six euros for one hour. That’s on a par with BT. A couple of places claim to have wifi, but in the one place I tried, it didn’t work. Hostels, the nun explained generally charge about 60 or 70 euros, which is four times what they charge in Madrid.

I love Italy. I lived here for four years and often think about moving back, but at times, there’s no getting around it, it’s like living in the Dark Ages.

You can’t use an internet café or buy a SIM card without handing over your passport. Anti-Mafia, they say. Or anti-terrorism. Depends who you talk to. Either way, it makes no real sense.

You can’t enter a church with a rucksack on your back.

It’s difficult to find a single room in Italy where all of the plug sockets take the same size plugs.

When the nun – who was by far the friendliest person I spoke to in Venice – chastised me for not having used the internet, it was then that I thought, no. Carnival or no carnival, Venice is not the city for me. Not now. Plus after an hour of having been there, it had started raining. It always rains in Venice. It’s like Manchester. But less friendly.

So, after less time than I’d spent in Auschwitz, I caught the train back to Bologna, where I was informed that Venice is famous for being the unfriendliest place in Italy. Worse even than the dodgiest areas of Sicily. Apparently, there are two Venices: the Venice of the Venetians, where everyone speaks the Veneto dialect and is charged one price; and the Venice of the outsiders – which even includes other Italians – where everyone is charged a different price and is kept very much at a distance.

This made up my mind for me. I am now prepared to say it, loud and proud: I don’t like Venice. I just don’t like it. Like the Nazi in the Indiana Jones film, it may be beautiful, but it has a cold, inhuman heart. That’s all there is to it. Basta. Done with Venice.

Next stop, in two days’ time, Ivrea, and the oranges of death.

21:00. Train station waiting room.

After Auschwitz, I picked up my rucksack from my host’s house and I made my way back to the centre. I went to a restaurant I’d been to yesterday because I knew they did fantastic soup and free wifi. The restaurant is called Chaczapuri by the way. It’s on Floriańska Street, it has very pretty waitresses who sometimes actually smile and it plays one CD, by The Lost Fingers, on a loop. ‘People always ask for it,’ the prettiest waitress told me. ‘But it must drive you crazy,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You are right.’

I checked my bank balance to see if I could afford more than just one soup and one beer. I blanched. I sent a message to the people at Nationwide asking them if they might stop charging me quite so much interest all of a sudden. I guess it’s because I’m using cash machines in other countries. Administration charges. It’s very annoying. It meant the difference between a bowl of soup and a bowl of soup and SOME MEAT, which I really fancied. Ah well. That’ll teach me not be a very poorly organised idiot. (It really won’t.)

22:30. Night train to Vienna.

Back at the train station, with an hour to wait, I smoked a cigarette outside and was approached by a man who was, at a guess, in his 60s. He said something to me in Polish. I said, ‘English. Sorry.’ He said, ‘Ah. Weh weh weh.’ Then he thought for a moment and very very slowly he said, ‘May I have a cigarette?’ I showed him that I only had tobacco, established that that was acceptable to him and that he couldn’t roll his own, so I set about making him one.

He had short white hair, a thick white moustache and glasses. He looked quite respectable. The only thing that made me sure he was homeless was the bag he carried in his left hand. It was the usual laundry-type bag filled with what looked like sheets of cardboard from broken boxes.

When I handed him the cigarette I’d made, he took it without a word and lit it with his own lighter. Then he walked off a short way, stopped and turned and said, ‘Goodbye’. Then he continued on his way. ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘Good luck,’ I shouted after him. He kept walking. I watched him, relighting my own cigarette, and suddenly, in something of a flash of insight, it hit me.

‘That’s me,’ I thought. ‘That’s me in 20 years’ time.’

I finished my cigarette, looking around the giant square in front of Krakow Główny, breathing in the cold.

It was nothing like the Auschwitz blubbering – thank God – but in a moment of self-pity, my eyes moistened. This is how it starts, I thought. Maybe. It could be. It’s as good a starting point as any.

In the station waiting room, a couple of young homeless guys – probably half my age – were moved on by station security guards. They complained as they left and were back inside two minutes later.

I had two zlotys left in my pocket, giving me a choice: a bottle of water for the train, or a spare pen. The pen I had was fine but it would be dreadful to run out and have nothing to write with. Plus there is  something rather romantic in choosing the pen over water. So I did. I bought a spare pen, wrote for 20 minutes and headed out to the platform.

Monday 28th February. 06:40.

My spare pen didn’t make it through the night. It fell down the side of my bed before I went to sleep. The guy below was sleeping so I couldn’t ask him for it. In the morning I forgot. Ah well.

I’m currently sitting on the 06:29 from Vienna to Villach, where I will disembark and take a bus to Venice. This is the first train I’ve been on with a working electricity point, so I’m actually able to use my laptop in motion for the first time on this trip. No wireless though. Probably just as well.

Leaving the centre of Vienna just now, just after 6.30, I saw a long line of three lanes of commuting cars at a standstill at some traffic lights. I have to admit, it gave me a brief moment of pleasure that I wasn’t in one of them, on my way to work. I’m not saying I’d rather be that old homeless guy wandering the streets of Krakow in sub-zero temperatures asking tourists for cigarettes, rather than some Viennese commuter up and out but 6.30 of a Monday morning, but I’m not saying I’m not. I really don’t know. The jury’s out. I’m not sure which of them has more freedom, more choices. I guess it depends on the individual.

…

A couple of times recently – including last night – I’ve woken up with very sharp pains in my chest. That’s nothing to worry about, is it?

…

I’m glad I got the train out of Austria in the daytime this time because Austria is absolutely breathtaking and a strange thing happened as I was travelling through the Alps, which I’m glad I was awake to see. After four days of constant snow and ice, the bus I was on disappeared into a mountain tunnel and when it came out the other side, everything was green. There was still snow on the peaks of the mountains but the ground was without a trace of snow. It felt like a good sign. It felt like I was moving forward. I’d be in Venice by lunchtime.

Aaaaah, Venice….

It’s been a very emotional day.

I got up at 7.15 to be sure of catching the 08:25 train to Auschwitz. On the way there, I wrote this…

…

The train to Auschwitz is on time. Actually, it’s early, and for 8.20 on a Sunday morning, it’s surprisingly busy. Everyday annoyances – a woman sending a long text message with her beeps switched on, a man listening to loud music on his iPod – seem, under the circumstances, particularly inappropriate. But of course, the circumstances are my own. This is an ordinary train going to an ordinary town that just happens to have been the venue for one of the greatest atrocities in human history. Maybe not such an ordinary town then. But life goes on.

The train is heated and comfortable, and it’s impossible not to make comparisons between this journey I’m making and the journey made by… you know. I feel bad even saying the words, like I’m so vastly underqualified to talk about this subject that mentioning it at all will appear to denigrate it.

As the train moves out of Krakow, the scenery becomes much more stark. The snow and ice which was stomped away by city life here dominates the landscape. Buildings give way to vast swathes of tall, naked trees. Stripped bare by the vicious winter, their branches stand out like dead veins against the milky white sky. Under different circumstances, I have no doubt I would be marvelling at the beauty of it all. But I’m not, and even when the sun comes out 20 minutes into the journey, it still isn’t beautiful. It’s bleak, apocalyptic, soulless. It feels like a Martin Amis novel.

The sun doesn’t hang about. When it goes back in, the sky turns to a smoky grey. The heat on the train, because it only comes out of the grill under the window at specific points and therefore only warms certain patches of the body, somehow makes you feel colder than you might if there was no heat at all.

I nod off for a while and when I wake up, I have an erection. Again, under the circumstances, this seemed highly inappropriate. I flinch from myself. I flinch from life and try hard to prepare myself for what is to come.

…

From the train station, which of course is called Oświęcim – I say ‘of course’, although I didn’t know till today that Auschwitz is merely the German version of the town’s name – I walked to the museum, the concentration camp, the death camp that was, which is just over a kilometre away. As I walked, I thought about what I know about the Holocaust, most of which, if not all of which, is informed by books and films, mostly films if I’m honest. I thought about that scene in The Pianist, for example, when the old man in the wheelchair is thrown from a second storey window for not standing up when the Nazis storm into his apartment. It’s a scene that each time I’ve seen the film – three times now – sends a shock through my system and brings tears to my eyes. I found myself getting a little emotional then, as I replayed it in my mind on the road to Auschwitz.

When I arrived, I bought a pamphlet guide to the museum in English for five zlotys (just over a pound), but I haven’t looked at it yet.

Then I walked around the camp, eavesdropped on a couple of tours and looked at things. I looked at the infamous gates. I looked at the fences and the barbed wire and the slogan: ‘Arbeit macht frei’. I looked at the blocks that housed the prisoners, the purpose-built gallows and the ovens where the corpses were burned. And I read the plaques. And I must admit, I felt strangely unmoved. It was like, they were just buildings. Ghastly, hideous, horrifyingly wicked buildings, but just buildings nonetheless. I felt disappointed that I’d felt more on the walk on the way here than I did in the camp itself. I felt disappointed in myself, but also slightly disappointed in Auschwitz. I wondered briefly if perhaps I was some kind of monster.

Then I went into one of the actual exhibitions. Many of the blocks in Auschwitz have been turned into permanent exhibitions dedicated to the different nationalities that suffered at the hands of the Nazis. It was in the Dutch room that I realised why I’d been unmoved, and really it’s rather obvious. It’s because buildings – no matter what happened in them – are still just bricks and mortar. What I respond to – what everyone responds to I guess – is people. As well as the facts and figures, the exhibitions are full of photographs and, most importantly, stories.

I was probably about a fifth of the way through the Dutch story – about 25 minutes in maybe, reading everything – when I began to lose it.

You know what they did. The Nazis’ total disregard for non-Aryan human life is very well-documented. I knew before today, for example, that they killed children, but it’s the stories, and the photographs, and the names that really brings home what it all actually means. Once you begin to absorb the stories, you begin to feel the pain of them intensely, and it’s impossible not to react to that.

What surprised me about Auschwitz was that there were not more people convulsed by great juddering sobs. It even annoyed me rather that people were walking about the place smiling and laughing. But that was unfair of me. Probably if I hadn’t been alone, I’d have been smiling and laughing occasionally too, if only to alleviate some of the overwhelming sorrow. (I maintain that I was right to feel angry, however, at the woman walking through the Polish exhibition chatting loudly on her mobile phone.)

In retrospect, I’m glad I was alone. It allowed me, forced me even, to immerse myself, and gave me nowhere else to turn for comfort. Which seemed right.

I was in Auschwitz for four hours and I probably saw about a tenth of the museum. Actually probably much less, considering all the words that are in there. There is a lot of information to absorb, and lots of stories. Although not all of the stories are of atrocities, they are all affecting, which is to say that the stories of heroism and resistance – and there are many of these – are the most affecting of all. After a while, however, it all becomes somewhat overwhelming. I had to leave an hour before it closed because I just couldn’t handle it anymore. It is incredibly harrowing. It has to be one of the saddest places on Earth.

After Auschwitz I caught the train back to Krakow. It was already full of people, having come from some other town, on their way somewhere else. They were all going about their lives, chattering away and laughing and having a good time. It was good. It felt right. It was what people were supposed to do, what life was supposed to be.

Before I went there, it felt like a duty, to go there, to learn more about one of humanity’s darkest chapters. Now that I’ve been, it feels like a duty to go back. To learn more. To feel more. You have to feel it. Because – although it’s still sometimes difficult to believe – it happened. So I hope to go back. One day. When I can.