Some people never learn. I should not have drunk three quarters of a bottle of cheap red wine last night. Restless night and all the symptoms of a hangover as I dragged myself out of bed and got myself ready for a trip across the country at seven o’clock the morning after.
Some systems were beginning to function normally and I was firing on two cylinders by the time I caught the 0954 Ashford train from Rye. By the time I emerged from Charing Cross station to look for a Number 11 bus to Victoria Coach Station at a quarter to twelve I was starting to fire on three out of my four cylinders. I could have done with all four though as the bus driver refused to let me into the bus without a ticket and refused to sell me a ticket.
So I played the lost tourist routine until he felt sorry for me…or came to the conclusion that he could not move off while I was standing by his window without a ticket…and directed me to the ticket dispensing contraption on the pavement next to the bus stop. Well how was I to know? That wasn’t there four weeks ago when I last passed through London. Fortunately I had the necessary £1.50 of coinage to deal with the ‘no change given’ apparatus without suffering significant loss. Even more fortunately the bus driver was in good humour and waited for me to finish my transaction with the machine and return to the bus with a valid ticket.
On my £36 000 yacht the previous evening…before the intoxicating brew took its toll…I calculated that I would have an hour to spare in Victoria before my two o’clock bus left for Swindon were I to forego an hour of computer access at Rye Library from 0930 to 1030 and took the ten o’clock train rather than the eleven o’clock. Prominent on all my mental town maps is the location of internet access points and watering places…cafés for liquids in and toilets, restrooms, gentlemans or public conveniences for liquids out. The best places are where the three coincide.
I had plans to use my spare hour profitably at the Internet Café on Victoria Street to write my Thursday weblog. Duly done and duly posted I had time for my planned 20p shave at the facilities in Victoria Coach Station before settling down with half and hour to spare to enjoy two large vegetable samosas and a cup of coffee. Back firing on all four cylinders again.
Samosas remind me of Nairobi. On my two days a week teaching at the University of East Africa in the mid-seventies I would often take lunch with Dan McDonald, a Canadian Professor of Accounting at the Faculty of Commerce. Some days we would take a beer beneath the jacaranda trees of the old colonial-style Norfolk Hotel. On other occasions we would wander over to the African commercial area next to the university and lunch on samosas.
Samosas also remind me of Buckminster Fuller. It’s their shape. Triangular. In Bucky’s World of Synergetics a pyramid was not a mausoleum but the biggest piece of disinformation ever built. The real secret of the universe was the three sided tetrahedron…from this the universe is constructed. The Egyptian priesthood understood this secret cosmic accounting but wanted to keep the knowledge to themselves. So they organised the building of all these four-sided pyramids to throw lesser mortals off the scent of true enlightenment.
Nowadays you can get quite a good quality of traveller on the National Express buses…young foreign tourists and old English pensioners. And they all talk to you…sometimes quite intimate life stories. Today there was the nice well-spoken lady from Cirencester who had been to Eastbourne for a trip down memory lane. She had lived in Battersea when she was very young and remembered going to the seaside at Eastbourne for her summer holidays. Her father came from Liverpool and flew with the Royal Flying Corps…biplanes…in the First World War.
Then there was the gentleman with the Guardian under his arm and no luggage who put my empty coffee cup and discarded samosa packaging in the waste bin while I guarded his guardian. He had left Cheltenham the day before to visit an old aunt in Southend. His trip had been in vain and he had got up at four that morning to make his way home. When he got to his aunt’s house he found she had been moved into a home. He left a large bunch of daffodils with the neighbours and turned around. His aunt had Alzheimer’s and so we talked about that for a while; how the sufferer seemed to be happy enough inside their world of forgetting but that those around them…the nearest and dearest…seemed to be the real sufferers not knowing what to do for the best and remembering the person they once knew.
We all know there is a very much better way of looking after the elderly than simply shovelling money in the direction of strangers in the hope that they will look after them in a retirement home run for business not for pleasure. It is only at Christmas and Easter that the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the inmates of England’s retirement homes come in any number to visit their elderly relatives. When they arrive most have a pious and dutiful look about them of martyrs going to a grim fate. When they leave, they are all smiles of relief at the thought that they won’t have to go through that again for another few weeks or months…or even another year. The very old in the Third World have a much better time of it. They are looked after by their families in communities bustling with life…and hope.
