Back In Blighty (A Toast To Water)

I still need to write a great deal of my travels, from the time I completely devastated the good-grief out of a completely innocent squid aboard a boat in Hao Long Bay, to the time the Lady Boys of Chiang Mai dressed me up and very much so down again.

The issue is that these experiences have become like cardboard boxes in the house of hoarder, mounting ever higher and further to the point of which I don’t know where to begin.

Some might say beginning at the beginning is the natural place to take the first step, but the natural thing to do is simply not how I write.

Being home is still yet to stimulate that strange sensation of ‘home’.

It is as though the my travelling never took place and I am simply as I was, 7 months prior, with relationships and routines falling right back into place like a two-piece jig-saw.

There are sure as heck some pleasant benefits to being home.

Clear, clean, unoccupied water out of a tap, merely a matter of feet away, in multiple locations throughout my house, with the possibility of fruity squash cordial as an option; is a delight of a right (well – perhaps there is no ‘right’ to tasty fruit cordial, but imagine the effects of a proletariat without taste-bud stimulus; the world needs tasty).

This, added to the fact that the merciless heat of Oz’s red-centre and the suffocating humidity of Vietnam’s jungles are but a memory that causes me to sweat in only a few regions, means that I wander around feeling hydrated; and this is dandy.

I dehydrate and overheat easily; a problem I’ve suffered since turning all-apey as a teenager, with hair sprouting all over me whilst a thick frizzy mop of the stuff rides my head and keeps all that heat in (unfortunate in that I’m largely sane and see no benefit to keeping alien mind-probes out).

I recall terribly (in that really I wish I wouldn’t recall but YOU brought it up) an occasion of heat stroke as I leaned against the wall of the Vatican, wondering if years of devoted atheism were condemning me and, should that be the case, was I now a believer and so free to walk?

Heavy sun, penetrating heat and really far too much hair for a gentleman to be able to hide beneath anything less that poncho and parasol, I suddenly staggered towards a lamp post, clutching it and feebly fondling the idol of Baby Jesus I’d liberated from a shop’s wicker basket (like a battery of mass produced Messiahs all wishing someone less meek would come along to break a commandment or two) and held on.

The world swirled as it feels when one is drunk and in love, though on this occasion I was touched only by the sun on my overly exposed brain, confusing me via heat, rather than love’s devastating effect on via chemicals of the swooshing and panging nature.

I hailed a cab and escaped the Vatican, the near 40 degree heat have defeated me so that I was humiliated by it, with the sun having it’s hat on and then taking it off owing to it being such a scorcher of a day (I’ve always though the sun a tad slow. The moon seems far more with it, more subtle, more nuanced. I’d definitely rather take the moon to dinner than the sun. In Paris. The sun deserves fast food and wheat, whilst the moon is quite appetized by the mere glory of wine and music. The moon drinks red, or an ‘eau-de-vie et limonade’, can’t dance but does, a wears killer shoes as a matter of morality. I feel I’ve found in myself a most wolfish adoration of the moon this evening – how appropriate – or perhaps I’m simply to grudged-up about the sun and that sweltering day in Rome).

Scarcely returned to the room, I spun a dial to bring the room to a more pleasing freezing temperature and stationed myself in the shower for what was then the foreseeable and what became the rest of the day. Still swirly, still delayed in vision and thought and speech, I just wanted to be laying down in the Antarctic, with my head in the soothing cool jaws of some abominable snowman.

I don’t like the heat.

I do, however, adore water.

Water is medicine, cures when you’re ill and saves when you didn’t realise you were ill.
I feel water could honestly raise a fellow’s IQ and improve his standing in life; such is its power.

Therefore it’ll surprise none that on many days, through jungle and desert and canyon, beach and mountain, city and hut; that I longed for a tap’s worth of easy, bargain priced water.

Slosh me with it.

Drown me slightly.

All I wanted so nearly every-single-moment was nought but a familiar glass of the delicious tasteless water that is home to me.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about squash – or ‘cordial’ to those who wish to continue a use of a fine word that isn’t in much use unless supping the elderflower variety.

Whilst I might love water as a matter pf product and principle, I’m afraid I’m a terribly 21st century boy and I tired of the taste of water decades ago. I need a bit of jazz in my glass to encourage it down; otherwise it can become just a tad too dull to really become an option.

That is, unless of course you throw me into a large Mekong-sized river of the stuff (such as the Mekong River). There – with floorboard-stiff dogs floating past you, bloated enough to really flatter your own figure, and with waterfalls strong enough to take your spectacles from your face (as happened to my good pair) so that they might wander down stream and inadvertently choke some innocent swimming dog, there – with squid hunting your fishing line and then becoming latched about the hook, through the brain, before being accidentally spun by in attempted to release so that it should revolve like a frigging roulette wheel as it ejaculates ink over everyone there but me….in these cases water can be a little more fun than a tasty fruit cordial; although it is the latter you’ll when reading a sentence this long out loud.

What else am I glad to be home to?

I think that might be it.

Immediate water.

Although I do miss the bum guns.

Next time?

My issues with monkeys and apes (I think it might be the beard).

Sam