random thoughts on travel and being in europe

Random thoughts and happenings:


Yesterday evening Sabine and I celebrated our tenth year of friendship and knowing each other, at an Italian restaurant around the corner from where she lives, with Proseco (a kind of ersatz champagne) and a glass of wine. Years of fun, laughter, and MAJOR CONFLICT and making up, of the kind that more or less convinced us we are family. This last year it has been good, we have both loosened up a lot, are infinitely more open to each other and there is this feeling that we are moving in a new direction perhaps. New glimpses of what intimacy really means. A lot of hard work on one’s ego to start with!

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Something is definitely happening at Sahar airport. The check in took about 10 minutes altogether, the wait at the immigration counter was even less than 10 minutes and the officials did not ask a single question about my father, mother, grandmother, where they live and work, where they are from, what they like to eat for breakfast, and so on. They didn’t ask any questions. They even SMILED at one or two foreigners whose passports they were looking through. If it doesn’t last long it will at least leave me with a nice memory.
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Modern travel and technology is strangely disorienting. Before you know it your body has arrived in a place thousands of miles away from home but by the time your soul has caught up you are already getting ready to return. Maybe that is why, as the bus rumbled around Charles de Gaulle airport I found myself still caught up in thoughts about home until I rapped myself and went, ‘Hey, you’re in Paris now, no longer in flat 11, Rewa Apts!’ But then it could be that everything looks so much the same. Yes the airport seems a bit futuristic with its tube like structures, looking alternatively like a spaceship and a huge soulless factory to help with putting up more factories and more goods and more technology. The ads are the same, the billboards look the same, the people at the airport look like people at any airport, coming and going with this look of intense preoccupation on their faces. I think I must now stop coming to Europe every year and start going to really new places – like China or Chile.

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One of the highlights of the five hour wait at the airport was that I saw Sir Cliff Richard. At first I wasn’t sure it was him but I heard the older man by his side calling him ‘Harry’ and then I knew it was him, because his real name is Harry Webb. I felt energetic enough to hoist my backpack on my shoulder and follow him around a bit and even considered going up to him and saying, ‘My childhood hero and prince, you have come!’ But eventually opted to hang around in the background as he and his friend waited at the Air France desk, and until they walked away.
For one short moment our eyes met and I had this feeling he would recognise me and come and shake my hand ("Hallo! My earliest most loyal fan!") but they seemed to be both confused and in a hurry. For those of you who have never heard of him for various reasons (including perhaps the fact that you were born long after his heyday,) Cliff was one of the major singing sensations in the sixties, with a huuu...uuuuge fan following. He wrote his autobiography at the age of 19 (!!!). I read it when I was about eleven or so, and knew it literally by heart.