The Hole

I went to London on a whim. I basically sat here and decided I wanted to go somewhere really soon, and London was it. I thought I was mad, because I have a craving for green and for countryside and the noise and dirt of Barcelona is getting to me. I knew I had been irritable and scratchy lately and withdrawing from people. Suffering from fatigue, on edge, nervous, and on top of it all unhappy but not sure why. I had already decided that I would stay in Barcelona til about October, and then if nothing comes of nothing then I will move.

I stayed in London with my friend Gary Dunne and his girlfriend Lynnea. They were so relaxed and their flat was white and warm, like a healing capsule. I got up early every day and sat by the window reading and watching the poor mangey foxes and squirrels outside. Even though it is now 20 degrees, and yesterday was even warmer, my flat feels cold because the Catalans don´t do heating. Funnily enough it was cool in London but bright and sunny like a truly crispy spring fresh that you only seem to get in Ireland and England and although cold, it felt somehow less biting, less gnawing, than the cold here.

Gary lent me a book called "Soil and Soul" by Alastair McIntosh.It was just what I needed, and I think he knew. It is a book about a kind of eco-passivist in the Hebrides who undertakes a struggle with the local people of one of the islands to stop a superquarry (i.e. Crater) being made out of an island, and another island to free themselves of their laird (landlord). It is a strangely spiritual book which has traces of prosaic passages about his childhood, about singing by the sea, about his study in Edinburgh and how they kicked him out after 8 years as a professor because of his success with the islands even though he was doing ecology. But most of all there is an undercurrent of the old celtic social ways and without seemingly meaning to he explains how old communities work and why they worked without problems and how corporations´mindsets and plantations have destroyed that and why it should be reawakened. He has none of the defeatist attitude of "the old way is dead", rather he stresses how the celts have always worked new stuff into their way and improved it, but how everyone old and young had a role to play, and they never felt left out.

It made me realise a few things. First of all "The Hole", as I think of it, that we always feel needs to be filled, is a hole due to life these days not being the way I want it. It is partly a feeling of no control and partly a feeling that I don´t really understand why things have to be so difficult and complicated and unfair. This is a heritage and an upbringing I have inherited and you know what? I love having these morals. People have told me for so long that I can´t do this or that, that it is not practical to live in a mutually benifiting society, that each person has to fight the other to get on, that ambition is necessary (something that my best friend's stupid ex told me once and I couldn´t comprehend), that eating your neighbor beating your neighbor is normal, that violence is inevitable, that irresponsibility is wrong, that nature is dead. Sorry, I don´t mean to preach, but who the fuck decided that? I discovered that I CAN live the way I want, maybe not right now in Barcelona except for in my own head, but that you don´t need to own, that I can sing in the sea,that buying things serves to make me just more insecure, that violence and impatience comes from frustration. I feel I know who I am, where I came from, and that actually my needs are much more simple that ever and I feel relieved. I was trying to take other people´s advice when all along I should have heeded my own.

I went to a concert in the Venezuelan embassy while I was in London, of Ricardo Iznaola and Giovanni Guzzo. Iznaola is a classical guitarist born in Cuba, but brought up in Venezuela. Guzzo is a violin player who dances when he plays and with whom I fell in love immediately. At the wine reception afterwards Gary and I sat taking the piss out of the upper crust of London, while I tried to avoid the Venezuelan Violin player as he went round to everyone one by one. We just about managed. I went home feeling a bit lost and super-aware that despite anything anyone says about "things work this or that way" that I am still in love with my ex and that Mr Guzzo is somewhat like him. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I have these feelings still for my ex because I have a very clear idea of what I like. That maybe I am attracted to people like him only because we were quite well suited, not because I can't get over him. This made me feel a lot better.

Eventually the time came to leave the bright and sunny place that London provided for my stay. I went and visited my last museums and bought my last lunch which I shared with a friend of mine who is Austrian and who happened to be in London that day. Then I went and sat in a traffic jam to go to Luton airport, and of course missed my plane. But it was great. I booked into a hotel with a Swedish girl who also had missed her flight, and relaxed for 24 hours with baths and tea and food and beer and books for the modest price of 25 pounds, excluding the food of course.

The following day, as I flew home, I realised that I was coming home, at least for the moment, and that being alone here in Barcelona is not so bad for me right now.