meish dot org: life, unfolding

In retrospect, it was probably not the brightest idea we’d ever had.

We could probably have afforded the first class train fare if we’d stretched our wallets and our patience and denied ourselves beer for a night. But we were young and stubborn and we thought there was simply no choice more obvious than the second class train.

We had arrived at Mazatlan train station at seven in the morning, ready to catch whichever train was leaving for Guadalajara, or thereabouts. The man behind the ticket counter confirmed that there were in fact two trains to Guadalajara that day – the second class train, which left at 09.25 and cost $7, taking about eleven hours, and the first class train which didn’t leave until half three in the afternoon, took only five and a half hours to arrive, but cost $19. Outrageous. There was no choice, obviously – we were backpackers, determined to rough it, so second class it was. We handed over our cash and retreated to a bench on the platform to await the arrival of the train, in a couple of hours.

It was already pretty warm. On the next bench along, a man in sandals made of discarded tyre strips noisily slept off the excesses of the night before as flies crawled over his face, licking up sweet tequila-flavoured sweat. I curled up with my head on my backpack, and Max smoked and watched people. It was December 1991, and we were in Mexico, travelling over the Christmas break, because neither of us could afford to travel back to Europe for the break.

Max was from Italy, belligerent and complicated, and without a single word of Spanish. I had a handful of words and a dictionary, but not much confidence in my ability to use them.

We were studying together in Western Canada, sharing anthropology classes and coffee and cigarettes out in the cold, and travelling to Mexico had seemed like a much better alternative than schlepping around in the snow up north. So one evening in November, over pizza in the Chemistry lab, we unfolded a huge map of Mexico on the workbench, got out a red pen, circled a few places, joined them with an unsteady line, and resolved to go. Two weeks later, we packed our backpacks in the shadow of a horrific hangover from the annual college Reindeer Party (don’t ask – suffice to say Max was convinced he was still wearing fake antlers for the first 48 hours of the trip, and kept swiping at the top of his head, as if expecting to find them there) and got on a bus to Seattle.

We spent a night in SeaTac airport, waiting for the dawn flight, watching the freaks and breathing over-processed air. We met up with a few others from college also travelling south of the border for the holiday season rather than back home to be with their families, just like us – Mika from Finland, Julia and Felix from Germany, plus Dave and Jer, two Canadians. We resolved to hook up to enjoy a margarita on the playa once we arrived. Like us, they were flying to Mazatlan via LA, and from there, we would all go our seperate ways.

When we had stepped out of the plane into the hot breath of coastal Mexico, it was like walking into another world. Palm trees. Hot, heavy, humid air. We stripped off layers, changed money and headed into town on a bus. We had stayed a couple of nights in Mazatlan at the dusty and dirt-cheap Hotel Vialta in the middle of the Zona Central, eating scary tortas ahogadas and drinking strong margaritas at night, wandering through the tatty markets and streets, and watching geckos run across the ceiling by night. We dried our swimsuits on the cranky overhead fan that swung dangerously above the bed. By the fourth day, it was time to move on, and so we re-stuffed our backpacks and headed for the train station.

By nine fifteen, there was no sign of the train. I’d slept for an hour or so, curled on the bench, and was impatient to move on. Max wandered off in search of supplies for the trip, and came back laden with goodies – well, five cans of beer and two doughnuts, which was as far as our budget would stretch at the time. I rolled my eyes at him and he shrugged in a totally Max-like way. Incorrigible.

The train pulled in to the station, and suddenly there was a mad rush for seats. People emerged from the main station building and swarmed to the train, so we joined in as best we could. The train was old american stock, dusty and showing its age. The seats were padded vinyl, with cracks which revealed the meagre stuffing. What windows there were were dirty and smudged. In some places there were no windows at all – just frames looking out onto the rusting rolling stock in the train-yard. We found seats in the last carriage, and esconced ourselves for the trip. I sat by the window (I’ve always been a window person) and Max sat on the aisle, already opening his first beer of the trip. Around us, the train quickly filled up with families and others, making the long trip to Guadalajara. At half past nine, the train shuddered into life, and we were off. Max checked his watch. I checked mine. We exchanged a look of pleasant surprise. Unthinkably, we had pulled out pretty much on time.

As we gathered speed out of Mazatlan, the empty window frames offered a cooling breeze through the stuffy carriage, and I started to take stock of the characters travelling around us. At the table in front of us was a family – a mother with three children, who stood on their seats and ignored her insistent orders to calm down. Across the aisle was a young mexican with a walkman and a stack of books. I swivelled on the seat to check out the people behind – a woman with a headscarf, young couple surgically attached at the lips, and an old man who looked like a walnut – deep brown and wrinkled, wearing a battered panama. He caught me looking and smiled. I smiled back, and he said “De donde eres?”

“Soy inglesa..de Inglaterra,” I replied.

“Ahh,” he croaked, “Inglaterra…eso es en las montañas or por el mar? – Is that in the mountains or by the sea?”

Neither, I replied, and he looked non-plussed.

He thought for a moment. “Quieres casarte conmigo? – Would you like to marry me?”

I laughed. The man was about ninety, and really not my type at all, besides being a complete stranger. “No, gracias,” I replied, still laughing. The man was not deterred.

“Tienes algunas hermanitas, primas que les gusta casarte conmigo, pues? – Well then, do you have any sisters or cousins who might like to marry me?” I thought for a beat and the shook my head. He smiled and showed a mouthful of gaps.

The train sped on through the coastal swampland, and I was impressed at the time we were keeping. Then suddenly, as if I’d thought too soon, there was a terrific pull backwards, and we were all thrown forwards in our seats as the train juddered to a sudden halt. People started to pour of the back of the train, running down the aisle next to us, while those still seated craned their heads out of the windows to see something on the track behind.

“Que pasa? Que pasa?” I asked “una fuego? – a fire?”

“No, no,” one said, “una vaca! – a cow!” I was confused. A what?

Looking out the window, I could see that we had hit a cow, and that meant it was a free-for-all for the meat. The crowd who had rushed off the back of the train were using sharp knives to butcher the cow beside the track, stashing the meat in crumpled carrier bags. Their movements were precise and efficient, and within ten minutes, the conductor blew his whistle and signalled that the train was ready to leave again. The crowd cleaned the blood from their hands on the sand from the track, and re-boarded the trains, carrying wet red bags of meat, smelling of sweat and blood and heavy air. The train moved off again. Max and I stared at each other in amazement.

Twenty minutes later, the train pulled to a sudden halt again. Another cow? No. This time I leant out of the window to see a man sprinting along the track before losing himself in the ramshackle huts that lined the track, stretching for miles in a thin cling, like a membrane. He had pulled the emergency cord to get off the train, and was hotly pursued by the conductor, who lost him within moments, shrugged, wiped his brow, straightened his waistcoat and reboarded the train. And off we went again. This happened periodically throughout the journey, and each time the same comedic and fruitless pursuit occurred.

We sped through the flatlands, towards the Sierra Madre. By now it was coming up to lunchtime, and I was hungry. All around me, families were unpacking parcels of strong-smelling food, wrapped in newspaper and cloth, and my stomach was rumbling. I ate a doughnut and drank a warm beer, which did nothing for my thirst and just gave me a headache. Max dozed beside me, and I started to play with the children from the family in front of me. Luckily, my Spanish was about the same level as a seven year old child, so Gustavo and I got on very well. He had wide round eyes and a mess of dark curly hair, and he laughed at my attempts at his language. He counted up to twelve for me in English, and I copied him, in spanish. He pointed at things – my shirt, the strap of my backpack, my eyes, and asked the names of the colours in English. Red, I said. Green. Blue. The young man across the aisle had been watching us for a while, and suddenly chipped in “Azul es mi color favorito – blue is my favourite colour.” That’s nice, I thought, before surfing on a wave of my own confusion through the undulating torrent of his rapid spanish which followed. I caught the odd word – university, christmas, girlfriend, english, food. I nodded in an all-encompassing way, though I’d understood practically nothing, and he reached for his thick sandwich, tore it in half, and gave me some. I wolfed it down with enormous gratitude.

Throughout the journey, people passed up and down the aisle, through the carriages, hawking food, drinks, music, religious pamphlets and the ubiquitous chewing gum. Small boys would practically run up the aisle, clasping a box of gum to their chest, intoning “Chicle-mil-pesos-chicle-mil-pesoooooos” while men with hefty moustaches and sweat-stained vests would serenade the entire carriage with a quick mariachi number, before proffering their hats for donations. I was enjoying the colour and light and life of the journey. This was good.

By mid afternoon, I had switched my attention to the outside. Many people, including Max, were sleeping in the warm afternoon, and I was frustrated and a bit bored. I took my camera from my bag and went to the back of the train to watch the world slide by through my viewfinder.

The conductor stood guarding the back of the train and smoking a thick cigar. He shook his head forbiddingly “No no,” he muttered “no se puede tomar fotos, lo siento – you can’t take photos, I’m sorry” I switched on the charm, albeit stilted by lack of linguistic ability. I wittered on about how much I was enjoying his country and how I wanted to show people at home how lovely it was. He remained unmoved. “No no, lo siento,” he repeated.

I stopped and thought. Well then, I asked, could I possibly take a photograph of him instead? Of course, he said, beaming. He brushed the dust from his blue waistcoat and wiped his aviator sunglasses on the hem of his shirt. He straightened up and looked very very serious. I framed him in the very far left of the picture, with the tracks receding off into the distance taking up the majority of the frame.

Click.

Take another, he ordered. I did, this time facing to the side, whizzing past a cemetery. He pointed at a lake coming up on the right of the train. Take one of that, he insisted, and pushed me into a good position. Click. And them, he said, pointing to a group of boys playing football on a dusty pitch on the left of the train, among run-down shacks. Click. Soon, he had retreated to his post in the doorway, smoking his stogie, sitting straight and beaming with pride, leaving me to take pictures as I wished.

I’ve always been a keen photographer, and part of my desire for this trip was to try and build up a portfolio of pictures taken in the field, heading towards a flighty goal of becoming a photojournalist. Time and experience have demonstrated that I’m not good enough for that, and besides, my studies pushed me in a different direction, but at the time, I thought that’s what I wanted to do. So with typical Meg pig-headedness, I snapped away, convinced that every photo could be a potential prize-winner.

And then I saw him. In the distance, on the left of the train, in the distance I could see a man riding a white horse laden with panniers. As he came closer, I could see that he had an impressive moustache and was wearing a string vest and a battered cowboy hat. The train was crawling along at this stage, and so I leant off the side, trying to reconcile the focus as best I could as we slid towards each other slowly. I framed him in the centre of the picture, riding towards us, the quintessential picture of Mexican rural life. In my mind’s eye, I could see the National Geographic masthead dropping in above his cowboy hat, the yellow of the lettering contrasting beautifully with the darkness of his skin. He was only about fifty metres away. I focused and refocused, determined to get that one perfect shot I was dreaming of. Suddenly, through the viewfinder, I saw him reach down to his waistband, pull out a gun and point it directly at the lens. I snapped and ran. I hid under my seat, as the train crawled along, convinced that at any second the man would hop off his horse, hop on the train and then put a bullet in my head. I had never been so scared.

An hour later, we had picked up speed, and I was still alive, so I thought it was safe to emerge from the sweaty depths of my hiding place, though my heart was still going like the clappers.

The train rolled on, towards the Sierra Madre. Late in the afternoon, we pulled into Tepic, a station we should have been at three and a half hours earlier, according to the sketchy timetable. We were now running officially very late. At the station, there were swarms of women selling food and drink from icy coolboxes. I was parched. A dusty seven hours on the train with only a beer for refreshment meant that I felt as if I had licked the road. Max had polished off the remaining beers while I was hiding under the seat, and it had been a long time since lunch. I hopped off the train and bought maiz with cheese and chilli, passing the food on sticks through the window to Max, minding the bags. I headed off to find something to drink.

I saw the woman I was heading for from about ten metres away. The crowds parted like Jesus-clouds, and my eyes fixed on her icebox, dripping with condensation, packed with ice and bottles of coke. Yes. Oh yes. I headed straight for her and asked how much – three thousand pesos, she said – a dollar, way over the local price for coke, but at that point I would have probably given her my left arm for a cold drink. I asked her for two, and she opened the bottle tops with a chilling hiss of escaping bubbles. Genius. I held out my hands to accept the drinks, but ignoring them, she proceeded to pour the contents of each bottle into a clear sandwich bag, and then pop a straw in the top of each. She passed me two bags of coca-cola, and took my money, leaving me standing, slightly confused, beside a train ready to depart.

I boarded the train, clutching the two bags around the top, like goldfish from a funfair, realising what had occurred, and why. There is a deposit for all bottles in Mexico, and this, presumably, was the only way of ensuring that she didn’t lose the precious few pesos each bottle cost her in deposit. Makes perfect economic sense. However, in the heat of the late afternoon, and with a jerking, lurching train to contend with (not to mention the added complication of corn on sticks), Max and I struggled to reconcile economic sense with the reality of a bag of tepid, sticky and rapidly-flattening fizzy drink. We had to hold the bags because we couldn’t put them down, and that meant that they warmed up even faster. Our fingers were covered with a sticky residue, and there was no bathroom on the train. I cursed myself for not buying water at the station. Moron.

As we climbed higher into the Sierra Madre, there was a palpable drop in temperature, which combined with the onset of twilight, meant that the open window-frames in the carriage now blew in chilly air and discomfort. We struggled with our backpacks to find jumpers not worn since Canada, a week ago, much to the amusement of the rest of the carriage.

By mid evening, the time we were scheduled to arrive in Guadalajara, we were clearly nowhere near the city, still climbing through the Sierra, on a track which in the half-light we could see consisted of many twists and turns, tunnels and perilous bridges over steep canyons. Max got out the cards to play solitaire, and I shut my eyes for a nap.

Ten minutes later, I was woken by a strange sensation of pressure on my head, almost like someone was pulling my hair. I opened my eyes, and found a man wearing a dirty shirt and jeans, with a tattoo of a tear just below his right eye, looming over me. His calloused hands were playing with my hair. I sat up with a fright, waking Max beside me, who had also dropped off halfway through his game.

“Por favor, no me toca – please don’t touch me,” I asked, politely. The man laughed. “Dejeme en paz! – Leave me alone!” I insisted, through scared, gritted teeth. The man ignored me. He spoke to Max in Spanish, explaining that his name was Chino.

Max didn’t understand a word – he was Italian, and although his latin colouring meant he had frequently been confused for a Mexican in the last few days, the reality was that he couldn’t speak a word, and was dependent on me and my limited grasp to get us through. This had caused us some trouble in the first few days in Mexico, as people automatically addressed the man first. This meant that in restaurants, or the hotel, someone would say something to Max, who would look at me to translate, then he would say something in English, which I would try and put into Spanish, which he would then have to partially repeat to the person addressing us, whose eyes would never have left Max at all. Men did the talking, even if they didn’t speak the language.

I told Max how to say he didn’t speak Spanish, and Chino snorted, drawling that he spoke some English. His accent was strong, with an American twang. Max asked him where he had learnt Spanish. Chino replied he’s learnt in jail in California. We didn’t ask what he’d been in for. Max asked Chino politely to please stop touching my hair “stop it, she doesn’t like it”

“Sure,” said Chino, “women, they always say no an’ they mean yes. My girlfriend, she says she no like making fucky wit’ me, but I theeenk she doss. When she say she don’ wan’ making fucky, I give it to her anyway. She don’ mind. She need to learn.”

I blanched, looking at Max with panic in my eyes.

“No,” said Max, “she really doesn’t like it. Please stop touching her.”

Chino whipped his face to within centimetres of Max’s, and poked him in the chest. “Are you fucking with me?” he roared. You could smell the tequila on his breath. “Are you fucking with Chino?”

“No,” replied Max, with more calm than I knew he was feeling, “I am not fucking with you. I am serious.”

Chino stared at him. The moment dragged on and on and on.

“Nobody fucks with Chino,” he said, finally, poking Max in the sternum for added effect, “You wait here. I’m going to go back to my carriage,” he continued, gesturing towards the other end of the train, “and I’m going to get my knife and my friends, and then I’m going to come back, and I’m going to kill you.”

With that, he turned quickly and stalked off up the train. Max was pale under the tan he had acquired so quickly over the previous few days. We looked at each other. Then, in a moment of tacit agreement, we split up and we hid. I tucked myself in next to the student whose favourite colour was blue. Max fled up the train. We agreed to rendezvous outside the station in Guadalajara when, and if, we made it there.

We hid for another five long cold hours, well into the night, as we sped across the desert towards the city. I have never known waiting like that, where every footfall among the noise and the clatter of the rumbling train felt like it was coming for me. I was fucking petrified.

Chino didn’t come back. My guess is he went back to his seat and found distraction in his friends, a bottle or some sleep, or all three. Regardless, when the train finally pulled into Guadalajara in the pre-dawn light, nearly ten hours late, I was nervous and skittish. My backpack felt suddenly like an enormous neon sign over my head, pointing and screaming HERE SHE IS. I dawdled by the carriages as the crowds loped sleepily off the train and homewards, frantically scouring the scene for Max. I muttered under my breath, “donde donde donde, dove ‘stai, Massimiliano�.” until finally I saw him, crouching on his backpack near the door to the station.

There was no time for self-congratulation or conversation as we frogmarched each other in silence to the nearest hotel, the Flamingo, where the desk clerk grumpily checked us in at dawn, to a room which had gold swirly wallpaper and a bare lightbulb, but was still way beyond our budget, and meant we had to eat quesadillas from street-vendors for the next week and a half. We simply didn’t care.

In retrospect, we should have taken the first class train. We should have recognised that a little extra money often translates into a lot less hassle. We should have blown the budget and got the faster, easier train to Guadalajara. We should have foreseen problems, and acted in advance to avoid them. We should have, but we didn’t. Instead, we woke up in Guadalajara, frazzled and glad to be alive on a balmy December morning, in a hotel where the lift played muzak mariachi versions of Christmas carols, and the lobby contained a plastic fir tree, complete with fake-snow frosted baubles.

One night in mid-February 1992, when I sat in Pagliacci’s restaurant at the heart of downtown Victoria, waiting for someone to show up, and hurting.

We were friends, good friends, and I had an eighteen-year-old-girl crush on him, which never amounted to anything. We’d made an arrangement the night before, or at least, I thought we had. Over coffee on the balcony of the common room, over looking the sea, he’d mentioned going into the city the next night, and I’d murmered that I had similar plans. He said something about maybe getting some food, and I, being eighteen and blinkered, took that as meaning “See you in Pagliacci’s, our favourite restaurant, for a romantic dinner at eight, then”.

Neither of us realised the significance of the date.

Pag’s was (probably still is) a popular place, with great food and an amazing atmosphere. I used to go to all the time when I was studying over there. Used to love the anticipation, queuing down the block – there was always a big line-up. Used to enjoy getting there early enough to get a good seat for the jazz later, sitting elbow to elbow with complete strangers, gorging myself on Caesar Salad, Manhattan Transfer with real walnuts and real New York Cheesecake, so good it made everyone shut up when savouring it, so rich I might as well have rubbed it directly on my thighs. Used to love trying to get served beer (and usually failing), and settling instead for frothy cappuccino with soy milk, before I even knew what soy milk really was. Used to enjoy the repleteness of an enormous dinner, more filling and satisfying than anything the college cafeteria could ever have dreamed up, the company of friends (or not) in the city, the guilty pleasure of a meal we couldn’t afford, the slow wander back to the bus to take us back out to the boonies.

The night after our conversation, I showed up at the restaurant at a quarter to eight. As always, there was a long queue outside to get in, made up mostly of couples. The women clutched Valentines roses in their pale hands; the men clutched their women. The queue inched forward, and when I got to the front of the line, I told the waiter that I was expecting a friend. He seated me at a table for two in the window, and I waited.

When half eight came, the waiter asked if I would like to go ahead and order – so I asked for salad, which came and went, though I barely touched it. At nine, pasta, dipped with crusty garlic bread, and by quarter to ten, dessert – chocolate cheesecake, rich and smooth, like the other customers in the restaurant. Throughout the evening, I asked the waiter if he wouldn’t mind sticking his head out the door and checking in the queue outside to see if my friend was waiting there, trying to get in. The waiter would peek outside, and then shake his head and shrug as he came back inside. There was no-one outside waiting for me, and I was waiting inside for no-one. During dessert, they took away the chair where my friend would have sat, because they needed it for another table. He wasn’t going to come.

I had nothing else to do while waiting – no book to read, no walkman, nothing, which is very unlike me. No-one likes to sit and look lonely, so early in the evening I borrowed a pen from the waiter and wrote tiny words on the fronts, backs and insides of four Piet Mondriaan cards I’d bought to send to friends back home. A letter of frustration. A letter about waiting in a busy restaurant. A letter about coming to an uncomfortable realisation. I still have it – sellotaped into an old diary, printed on the front with the words “the Pagliacci Notes”.

By ten o’clock, I was out of excuses. He hadn’t missed the bus, he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t just running late: he wasn’t coming. The waiter asked if he should bring me the bill, and I nodded silently. He disappeared into the back of the restaurant, and appeared a few minutes later, empty handed.

He couldn’t do it, he said. I looked too sad to pay. No-one should wait on their own in a restaurant on Valentine’s night, he said. He’d paid for my dinner out of his tips for the evening. He told me that the guy I was waiting for was obviously a moron, and that if I wanted to go out for dinner sometime soon, he’d be happy to take me. He scrawled his number on a napkin, and told me to call.

I left the busy restaurant, smiling through the nearly-tears.

Poem, written at the table, waiting: Loving Me Not

[Post-script about the waiter:

His name was Scott, and we met a week later for coffee. He was a sweet guy, and probably perfect for someone - but not me, at that point.

I was smarting from the realisation that nothing was every going to happen between me and my friend, and I couldn't focus enough to be involved with someone else, even someone as kind as the waiter.

He was also a classic closet case.

We kept in touch for a few months, meeting for coffee every few weeks (I think we may even have been to a Grapes of Wrath concert together) but nothing ever happened between us except friendship, of which I was very thankful.]

[Post-script about the friend: we lost touch for nine years, and met again in January 2001. Nearly a decade after that night of waiting in Pagliaccis. I told him I'd waited, and he confessed he hadn't even known we'd agreed anything, and had ended up playing pool with a friend in some bar.]

I miss my guitar.

I’ve had the same twelve-string acoustic since 1990, when I bought it in a small music shop while on holiday in North Wales, and then hauled it over the long ocean to Canada. I chose it because it made a lot of noise – twelve strings always sound more accomplished and polished than six, and you don’t need amplification to busk. I did a lot of busking. On the ferry from Tsawassen to Swartz Bay, I pulled out the guitar and busked Indigo Girls tunes to pay for the bus journey into Victoria.

In 1990, I discovered that the best acoustics were to be found in the bathroom of my college residence: I sat on the counter with my feet in the sink while the steam swirled around me, and I strummed along to my showering peers.

In 1991, I jammed with Valdy beside a cedarwood fire. Later that winter, sitting in the art studio of a friend who was completing his exhibition, I doodled with acrylics on the sides of the instrument – swirling patterns of colours combining. What I didn’t realise is that the paint constricted when dry and changed the sound of the guitar completely. The next day, it sounded like I was strumming on a biscuit tin. I spent another long evening easing the paint off the curves of the guitar with the edge of a plectrum. Peeling away acrylic skin, layer by coloured layer.

I’ve always had a thing about travelling light. I try to take only the smallest backpack – just hand luggage if possible – and few clothes or posessions. Books can be exchanged along the way, knickers washed, sarongs or sarapes bought in place of sheets, towels, skirts, shawls. Taking a guitar was a big thing for me, because it was big instrument – it had to be checked in on planes. In 1992, the guitar travelled with me wherever I went; from northern Canada to Central America via a Great American Road TripTM, a voyage to the Outer Hebrides and extremes of temperature and humidity, extremes of music. I picked up tunes along the way, music to entertain crowds in any and every place – a bit of Nueva Canci�n here, a touch of Leonard Cohen there, a few Scottish folk tunes to roudn off the mix. And my own stuff too, which I was constantly twiddling with. My guitar was my constant travel companion.

Until I met Tom, and settled down.

Tom was an accomplished guitarist, and he knew it. He did twiddly things with his fingers while I was still plodding away without phenomenal skill, but with enormous, infectious passion. That had always been my thing; to inspire others to participate, rather than to bandstand. Tom preferred the limelight – and our relationship wasn’t big enough for two guitars. So he kept playing, while my Tanglewood sat in the corner, gathering dust. I still sang, though the tunes were his choice. He held the melody, and I would tack on a harmony, improvising as we went. We were good together. Our music made sense. It was logical, accomplished, rational. But it lacked passion.

In 1993 I moved to Liverpool, where I ended up living with Sam, who played the guitar in a series of terrible bands with a terrible names. Sam was more into Hawkwind and Hendrix than Nick Drake and John Martyn, and our flat resounded nightly to his elaborate and lengthy riffs. My guitar had made the move with me, but the time between my caresses seemed to get longer and longer.

By 1994 I was barely playing at all. It seemed futile and embarrassing to hammer out my crowd-pleasing run-of-the-mill stuff when those around me could stun and amaze with their talent and virtuosity. Better to keep quiet.

In 1995, I moved to Spain, and then Bolivia. Guitars weren’t nearly as commonplace as they were on the student scene in the UK, and I gradually found it easier to do my turn at parties, borrowing any guitar to hand. I made no pretence to be able to play with the skill of the flamenquinos or charanguistas, but I had a clear advantage in my favour: I could hack out most REM and U2 songs – in English. I cannot count how many times I heard the phrase “sabes tocar…?” followed by the name of a song by anyone from Bryan Adams to Alanis Morrissette.

By 1996, I’d figured out how to deal with requests. They’d name the song, and I’d then transpose it to three basic chords (all great western music is written on three chords; don’t let anyone tell you different). Then after the second verse and chorus, during the bridge, I’d translate the lyrics on the fly, or make up a rough approximation:

“…�se es yo en la esquina, perdiendo mi religi�n….”

“….deseo ejecutarme…deseo ocultarme…deseo rasgar abajo las paredes que me sostienen adentro…deseo vivir en una pampa alta, donde las calles no tienen ning�n nombre…”

“no es ir�nico, no pienses?”

“…era seis pies y cuatro y lleno de m�sculos….le dije ‘habla mi lenguaje?’ y �l sonri� y me dio un bocadillo del vegemite…”

“…sabes que si…todo lo que hago, lo hago por ti…”

“…en tu cabeza….tu cabeza…zombi…zombi…”

By 1997 I was back in the UK and though my guitar still moved with me from home to home, it had become more like a piece of furniture that helped me to define my living space than an instrument of creative expression.

In 1998 a close friend of mine said she was thinking of taking up the guitar, and I pressed my own into her hands willingly, as an extended loan. I wasn’t really using it, I reasoned, and she’d be doing me a favour. Guitars have to be played, just as much as pearls need to be worn.

We lost touch in 1999, when she moved away.

Now it’s ten years since I bought my lovely tanglewood twelvestring – it’s a little worse for wear, and there are probably more knocks and scratches on its smooth surface than a decent guitar should have. The soundboard is a little warped from too many journeys through extremes of climate and if you look closely, you can probably still see a few flecks of coloured acrylic paint around the body. But I would know its sound anywhere. The feel of its hard strings on my fingers is like a familiar lover’s touch. It’s been two years since I last picked it up. And I miss it.

Words I never thought I’d hear myself say: I miss going to the gym. I learnt so much there.

I used to think it was the perfect place to study – all the way through college and uni and my MA, I would head over most evenings at about eightish, prop up my book (Nietsche, Kant, Sexual Objectivism in Anthropology, 500 Spanish Verbs – books so dull that I simply couldn’t bring myself to read at any other time, because there would always be something better, more interesting, more active to do) on the handlebars of the stationary bike, and ride twenty miles while reading about man and superman or radical changing verbs.

Later, I progressed onto paying people (undergrads, gullible freshers) to record themselves reading chapters of the same books, or chuntering away in Spanish, to which I could then listen while doing bench-presses or whatever…

And then I discovered the joy of running through a forest, and was spoilt forever. Springy floor, soft blanket of pine needles and earth, clear path through the trees, sound of leaves falling or rain in the treetops, high above. Running on a Rotex was never the same. And as for city streets….

The same is true of cycling – backwoods trails or gentle pottering along country roads has spoiled me for city riding, and certainly made me tire of the stationary bike. Who wants to ride nowhere, working up a sweat, watching your world stay stagnant, ending up where you started? Not me.

Swimming, too has been spoilt. The Holmes Place pool is too chlorinated and stings my eyes – and the relentless ploughing up and down of serious swimmers desperate to get in forty laps before their two o’clock meeting is offputting. I’ve been spoilt forever by wading out into the surprisingly warm waters of Port Ban or Market Bay at sunset, spreading the clear water with my arms, shimmering the incandescent sunset into the ripples, or completing long lazy laps of the crystal blue bay in Sifnos as the Greek sun beats down. No pool can possibly compare.

What I learnt in the gym was not how to correctly conjugate caer or the difference between a posteriori and a priori knowledge. I learnt to think of my body in terms of function rather than form.

Ask me what my favourite bit of my body is, and I’ll tell you. Hands, because they let me tinker and type and create. Mouth, because it lets me communicate, taste, love. Ears, because they open the world of music to me. Feet, because they let me explore. Function. Not form.

It’s about physical potential and power in the raw sense. Can you run for the bus? Can you fix things? Can you communicate? Can you use your body to live, laugh, love to the full? That’s what’s important to me. More important that BMI or callipers or whatnot, more important than doctors’ charts or arbitrary numbers. Potential, not perfection.

I could get fit again. I just need the right environment the right context, the right lifestyle. Trust me, the life of the passionate noomeejahoor is not compatible with jogging around Hampstead Heath at dawn. Unfortunately.

I once travelled by Amtrack from San Francisco to Seattle, just after new year. The journey took forever, and we got delayed in southern Oregon because of snow, so my reading matter quickly ran out and I became bored and frustrated. I retreated to the viewing car to watch Pretty Woman for the eighteenth time (they had it on a loop) and stare out at the rolling landscape. A guy asked if I could do him a favour. I said sure. He asked if I could draw something onto his jeans, which seemed like a completely normal request, given that I was 17, impressionable and had just had a fairly eventful and trippy month in California. Sure, I said. Anything in particular?

He introduced himself. His name was Eric Pfeiffer, like the numbers, he told me, five-four, which I thought was strange – not like the famous actress, I asked? He just laughed. He was 19, on his way home to Vancouver, Washington, where he was at the local college. He was a part-time firefighter, and had just had a tattoo on his left shoulderblade. Could I copy it onto his jeans for him? Sure, I replied. No problem – though I’m not an artist, I warned. Fine. He gave me a biro and hoiked his shirt up, and I started to draw.

There’s something quite weird about drawing on denim, especially when it’s wrapped around warm flesh. The ink heats up easily, and the surface takes to the design readily. The design was an aztec sun motif, outlined in black and filled in orange and red tones on warm tanned skin. Eric was about 5’11″ and skinny, with sandy brown hair, grown too long, so it got in his kind green eyes. As I drew on his leg, constantly checking between shoulder and thigh, he told me about his studies, his family, all sorts of random things. He talked about himself, and I listened and concentrated, but said little. I didn’t talk about myself.

Time passed. I drew in heavy biro on his warm thigh. We talked. Sooner than we expected, his station came up. I walked him to the train door and watched him disembark, a new drawing on his legs.

I didn’t think about him again until six or seven weeks later, when a card arrived addressed to Meg, Lester B Pearson College, BC, Canada. I’d been wearing a college sweatshirt that day, and he must have remembered. Inside the thick envelope was a card showing a school of dolphins from above, surfacing through crystal water. His schoolboy scrawl read “To Meg;- because some things in life are too beautiful to ever forget. Eric.”

There was no return address. He did not require a response, and I couldn’t give one even if I tried. This was a random act of randomness. I never heard from him again, but I still have the card…why? To remind me that random things happen, random brief encounters can occur, and they don’t have to be complicated. They can be good, and fleeting, and simple, and just be.

I’ve got a new alarm clock. It’s not very restful. I realise that the point of an alarm clock is to wake the user up, but really, this is just ridiculously offensive. Where my old alarm went

bibbiddy beep bibbiddy beep bibbiddy beep

…my new one not only tells me the date and day and temperature, but also lights up its enormous display in mysterious blue glow. But it also goes

BEEEP BEEEEP FUCKING BEEEEEP GET UUUUUUP BEEEEEEP

…which inevitably means that these days I wake up in a bad mood.

Davo suggested hurling it aross the room, and while I’m sorely tempted, the last time I did that, chaos ensued – understandably, I’m loathe to repeat the experience.

Just before I went over to study in Canada in 1990, a relative gave me one of those alarm clocks shaped like a tennis ball/baseball/rugby ball etc you’re supposed to switch off by throwing at the wall. The idea is that it then falls to the floor and goes off again, forcing you out of bed to retrieve it. So I used it for a couple of weeks before I left home, no problem.

So anyway, after the first night in my new room in the student residences at college in BC, the alarm went off; I threw it at the wall; it stopped; I went back to sleep.

At least that’s what I thought had happened.

In fact, the alarm went off, I, in my jet-lagged state had hurled it through a (closed) window, which shattered, sending shards of glass and a foam rubber cricket ball hurtling down two floors to the ground outside, where it lay beeping feebly.

A few minutes later, the Director of the college wandered past the residence on his way to the welcome meeting (which I was supposed to be at), and noticed a cricket ball beeping on the ground, surrounded by glass. Looking up, he saw my window, and the next thing I knew he was knocking on my door, holding the alarm clock and saying

“Morning, we haven’t met: I’m the Director of the college. You’re late. And does this belong to you, by any chance?”

Not a very auspicious way to begin my long academic career, I assure you.

Well, this is interesting.

A kind soul wrote to let me know that a person going by the nick “Irishlass” has posted a rather winsome poem on the arts and literature forum on a site called facethejury.com. Here’s the poem in full. I’m sure she won’t mind if I post it here:

They have taken away the chair
where you would have sat

My fingers are cold
wrapped around an overpriced tea

The waiter asks if I need the bill
and I am still waiting to begin

(Perhaps you have forgotten
perhaps dead, or asleep)

The busy smooching of valentines cloy the air
and I have picked your rose bare

you are not here

I silently gather my warrior words
and wait

Bravo, that girl. Quite the evocative little poem, no?

Later in the thread, someone asks her to explain the meaning of the poem. She states:

“The scene is in a cafe in the city centre. It’s Valentines Day, a personal anniversary and also a ritual meeting place. They haven’t left his chair because he hasn’t been by for a long time, and they don’t see the significance, they think I’m alone. (In Dublin if you are not sitting with company they take any extra chairs) Its not closing time, there are still couples canoodling in the cafe. They ask me if I would like the bill because my tea is now cold which would mean I have been sitting a long time and not purchased anything else.

I am waiting because if I give up waiting I have to admit to myself that he’s not going to come. I’m protecting myself, or denying myself the truth because it makes reality easier to cope with.

That’s basically a simple summary. I’m waiting for someone who is never going to come.”

…which is interesting, because when I originally wrote the poem in 1992, I wasn’t writing about a cafe in Dublin at all – and I wasn’t drinking tea, but coffee – plus the poem was called Loving Me Not.

In fact, I was writing about a night in mid-February 1992, when I sat in Pagliacci’s restaurant at the heart of downtown Victoria, waiting for someone to show up, and hurting.

We were friends, good friends, and I had an eighteen-year-old-girl crush on him, which never amounted to anything. We’d made an arrangement the night before, or at least, I thought we had. Over coffee on the balcony of the common room, over looking the sea, he’d mentioned going into the city the next night, and I’d murmered that I had similar plans. He said something about maybe getting some food, and I, being eighteen and blinkered, took that as meaning “See you in Pagliacci’s, our favourite restaurant, for a romantic dinner at eight, then”.

Neither of us realised the significance of the date.

Pag’s was (probably still is) a popular place, with great food and an amazing atmosphere. I used to go to all the time when I was studying over there. Used to love the anticipation, queuing down the block – there was always a big line-up. Used to enjoy getting there early enough to get a good seat for the jazz later, sitting elbow to elbow with complete strangers, gorging myself on Caesar Salad, Manhattan Transfer with real walnuts and real New York Cheesecake, so good it made everyone shut up when savouring it, so rich I might as well have rubbed it directly on my thighs. Used to love trying to get served beer (and usually failing), and settling instead for frothy cappuccino with soy milk, before I even knew what soy milk really was. Used to enjoy the repleteness of an enormous dinner, more filling and satisfying than anything the college cafeteria could ever have dreamed up, the company of friends (or not) in the city, the guilty pleasure of a meal we couldn’t afford, the slow wander back to the bus to take us back out to the boonies.

The night after our conversation, I showed up at the restaurant at a quarter to eight. As always, there was a long queue outside to get in, made up mostly of couples. The women clutched Valentines roses in their pale hands; the men clutched their women. The queue inched forward, and when I got to the front of the line, I told the waiter that I was expecting a friend. He seated me at a table for two in the window, and I waited.

When half eight came, the waiter asked if I would like to go ahead and order – so I asked for salad, which came and went, though I barely touched it. At nine, pasta, dipped with crusty garlic bread, and by quarter to ten, dessert – chocolate cheesecake, rich and smooth, like the other customers in the restaurant. Throughout the evening, I asked the waiter if he wouldn’t mind sticking his head out the door and checking in the queue outside to see if my friend was waiting there, trying to get in. The waiter would peek outside, and then shake his head and shrug as he came back inside. There was no-one outside waiting for me, and I was waiting inside for no-one. During dessert, they took away the chair where my friend would have sat, because they needed it for another table. He wasn’t going to come.

I had nothing else to do while waiting – no book to read, no walkman, nothing, which is very unlike me. No-one likes to sit and look lonely, so early in the evening I borrowed a pen from the waiter and wrote tiny words on the fronts, backs and insides of four Piet Mondriaan cards I’d bought to send to friends back home. A letter of frustration. A letter about waiting in a busy restaurant. A letter about coming to an uncomfortable realisation. I still have it – sellotaped into an old diary, printed on the front with the words “the Pagliacci Notes”.

By ten o’clock, I was out of excuses. He hadn’t missed the bus, he wasn’t lost, he wasn’t just running late: he wasn’t coming. The waiter asked if he should bring me the bill, and I nodded silently. He disappeared into the back of the restaurant, and appeared a few minutes later, empty handed.

He couldn’t do it, he said. I looked too sad to pay. No-one should wait on their own in a restaurant on Valentine’s night, he said. He’d paid for my dinner out of his tips for the evening. He told me that the guy I was waiting for was obviously a moron, and that if I wanted to go out for dinner sometime soon, he’d be happy to take me. He scrawled his number on a napkin, and told me to call. I left the busy restaurant, smiling through the nearly-tears.

So that’s what I was thinking when I wrote that poem, in February 1992. I wasn’t in Dublin. I wasn’t drinking tea. It was a legitimate experience, a hurtful, personal experience, and some random person on a message board has tried to steal it and pretend it happened to them instead. God that’s irritating.

Quick lesson for would be experience thieves: if you’re going to run off with a piece of writing and pass it off as your own, bear in mind that Google knows all.

My ears hurt from too much feedback and crappy earphones. My bum aches from sitting in a hard chair. My back aches from leaning forward to a mic with a cord that wasn’t quite long enough to stretch from the back of my computer.

I’m suffering from two hours of talking with people via webcast at my college reunion, over on the west coast (wet coast, apparently today) of Canada, miles and miles and hours away (eight, I think).

The connection was poor, the video was crappy, the conversation was stunted by a twenty second delay, but I’m glad I did it.

Above all, it reconfirmed my feeling that I really was better off not going. Two hours of trying to make stunted conversation with people seen through a fuzzy camera was strenuous enough. God knows what it would have been like for a week, through fuzzy eyes.

Once the initial curiousity had been scratched, what would we say then? As little as we had during the last decade, maybe? Sometimes it’s hard to find something to say, really, despite this wonderful gift of technology. You think a twenty second delay is bad? You should try twenty seconds and ten years.

Now that’s a serious lag, a definite conversation killer.

A little over 7,700km away from where I sit writing this, a hundred people are gathering under tall trees for my college ten year reunion. I am not there.

It’s weird. Ten years ago (well, twelve if we include the years at PC) each of us at college reserved a little chunk of mind space for wondering what we’d be doing by the time the ten year reunion swung around – we knew about it even when we were attending, and we relished the thought of such a distant, exotic future point.

The Ten Year Reunion. It morphed into this gigantic, intangible thing that loomed distantly, shadowing our eventual departure from the college, and colouring our future plans. “By the ten year reunion, I hope to be… In ten years, I will… In a decade, I’m going to have…” It became a future marker, something to define ourselves and our activities by, something by which, by when we somehow needed to prove ourselves.

In the first while after college, as we embarked onto bigger adventures than we can possibly have anticipated at college, ten years seemed a long way away. 2002 was in a completely different century. We looked over our shoulders (Wistful? Relieved?) at the college experience, fading into the distance, and tried to live in the complicated now, wherever it found us – university, travelling, home, work.

Years passed and the reunion got closer, as the college experience got steadily further away. It became hard to believe that the looming distant reunion of the future was somehow closer now than the actual reality of us, there and young, idealistic, naive and complicated under the tall trees.

The reunion was creeping up. A few years ago when the year 2000 ticked over – that significant date which had loomed in our futures since childhood – I experienced a jolt of excitement and quasi-panic at the realisation that our own ten year reunion was actually just around the corner, chronologically speaking, and that there were only a couple of years left to achieve all those things we vowed we were going to, only a handful of months left to prove…. what?

Though it had no doubt happened before, it was at that point that some of us may have have realised that there is actually nothing left to prove – at least not to our college contemporaries, peers or faculty. We may have wanted to return to the college triumphant – educated, employed and settled, with beautiful child or partner (or both) in tow (Healthy, happy and succesful: isn’t that the dream?) but we probably knew, by summer 2000, that time had pretty much run out to do anything extraordinary, except continue to exist.

I wanted to go to this reunion, though I have had mixed feeling about it for a few months now. Despite misgivings, I had every intention of attending. But one thing and another has got in the way, and conspired to mean that I won’t be attending after all. So today, as strangers who were once friends gather under tall trees in western Canada to get re-acquainted and coo over wedding/baby pictures, new haircuts and highflying lifestyles, I’m here in London, trapped by work and health and ambivelance and lack of oomph, all of which make it difficult to travel at the moment for various reasons.

But I’ll be thinking of them under the tall trees: older, but still just as complicated.

For a decade, this reunion has been an identifiable milestone for those who graduated with me back then. But every day is a milestone. We have nothing to prove to each other now, except that we made it this far. When we left our little hothouse of education, emotion and experience, we thought we deserved a pat on the back for getting through two years of college, but the real congratulations and celebrations are for making it through the last ten, which must have been much more complicated, difficult, passionate, challenging and exciting than we could have ever hoped or feared.

In many ways, I’m sad to be missing the reunion, because it was a definite marker, something anticipated for such a long time. But in another way, philosophically (and the particular irony of that choice of word will not be lost on anyone who had to suffer my inane ramblings in Philosophy lectures back then) I’m sort of secretly glad I won’t be there, because sometimes it’s good to let things pass, especially those things we thought we would need to measure ourselves against; the events we turned into vast towering milestones.

In realising and recognising that these markers are not as enormous as we once believed, we turn them from stumbling blocks to stepping stones, on our way to the wider future.

Dahil sa iyo, a cheesy Tagalog love song, going round and round and round and round….

Dahil sa iyo, nais kong mabuhay
Dahil sa iyo, hanggang mamatay
Dapat mong tantuin, wala ng ibang giliw
Puso ko’y tanungin, ikaw at ikaw rin

I’ve just discovered (after knowing this song for a dozen years) that the words are in fact so saccharine as to make one’s teeth hurt when singing. Well, there you go.

I used to sing in an international choir – songs in funny languages our speciality, though we did a cracking Jerusalem once.

Anyway, this has meant that I can churn out passable lyric phrases in Russian, Swedish, Kiswahili, Japanese and a number of other languages, as long as you don’t expect me to actually have a conversation or say anything beyond “work, love, like the song of a bird, your heart, my love…” or “I can row a boat, but I cannot sail without wind” which is fine if you want people to think you are enigmatic and/or a bit mad, but not so handy when it comes to purchasing plums.