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It had taken me a long time. I'd realized, ever since i began to learn about the land from aboriginal people and had begun to see it the way they do, that i must have a stronger connection with the land i was born on than i was conscious of then. I looked for it on a couple of other visits, but for the life of me i couldn't see it. I don't know why, or what had changed in me, but the last time i was there it had become glaringly obvious. It was much stronger than i'd imagined and i'd discovered it could be a source of strength, or power, or energy for me if i could tap into it. Which i seemed to be able to. On that visit to Britain, i spent most of the time in Maldon, something which i'd never done before. In fact i'd really spent very little time there at all since i'd escaped at the age of twenty.
This visit too, i expected to be spending a large proportion of my time there, although i knew i'd be spending a fair bit of it in London, where i had work i wanted to do. I also wanted to go to a few other places in Britain and, as usual, i had plans to visit the mainland - in particular Bilbao in Basque Country, where i now had addresses of close friends.
When i got to me mum's place, there were a few letters for me, which was exciting after four months of no mail of any sort - and, really, no contact with anyone anywhere in the world other than where i was at the time. My computer had arrived in one piece and working and, within a week of ariving, i'd set up an internet connection and was in direct contact with friends in Australia. This was an amazing leap and the serious and disturbing feeling of isolation that i'd been suffering from for quite some time began to disappear. I got down to some serious writing and began to get in touch with friends in Britain who i could track down reasonably easily. I began to feel a lot happier and a lot less deranged.
All that time in what for me was isolation had begun to make me seriously deranged towards the end of my time in Mexico. I was fully conscious of what was going on, but of course i was powerless to do anything about it. In fact i looked at it as a necessary period of isolation, which would inevitably have long-term benefits, but which was very hard to come to terms with at the time. Although, during that worst, last period of it, i had more or less begun to direct its effects into creative and contemplative channels. And i had in fact, managed to gain some interesting and important insights into myself and my life and learn quite a lot from it. However, i was bloody glad when it was over.
I was still sick, but i began to get better quite fast - with the help of live vegan yoghurt and other sources of live bacteria of the type that your guts need to do their job properly, but are often in short supply in this horrible chemical, synthetic age. However, i only seemed to get better to a certain point and then the improvement stopped. Oh, well, i was getting so used to it that it hardly seemed to matter. It had been going on for six weeks and when i looked back on how sick i'd been at times, i felt quite healthy, although i wasn't really. An old friend who hadn't seen me for a few years was quite shocked by how sick and wasted i looked. I hadn't been conscious of looking that bad. I knew i was skinny, but then maybe she remembered me from pre-vegan, heavy beer drinkng times, when i probably had more weight on me normally anyway... Who knows.
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I had two main jobs to do over the next few weeks. Firstly, i had to get me mum's sailing dinghy in decent shape for sailing. It was an old timber, twelve foot barge's boat and it was at least twenty five years old. It had been fixed up a bit about a year before, but it was desperately in need of patching up and painting. So the first thing to do was to get it out of the water and onto the seawall and start working on it. This, of course, was easier said than done. It required the tides to be at the right time of day. And we messed about for a week or two before we actually got it out of the water.
The other thing was helping to build up the international anarchist computer network which i'd been involved with in australia. Of course, due to the fact that the people who own the media know perfectly well what anarchism's all about and they want to make quite certain that no-one else gets a clear picture, as soon as you mention the word, people generally get the wrong impression. The anarchist movement is not about chaos, it's about order. A genuine and egalitarian order. It's about an order where people have equal say in the way the world is run and, more importantly maybe, an order where people are in control of their own lives. Anarchy doesn't mean crime, murder and fear. It means freedom from the crimes of exploitation by the powerful, freedom from being murdered by agents of the state, freedom from the fear that keeps people trapped in miserable unfulfilling lives. Anarchists may well be out to overthrow the state, but they're also out to replace it with a culture and a way of life where everyone can share more equally in the pleasures of being alive.
And of course, because the bosses sense a threat to their power to exploit and to dominate, any moves to spread ideas which may lead to a more equal society are jumped on in the most effective way available at the time. This means mainly spreading lies in the press to discredit people working on peaceful projects with peaceful aims. It means stating, quite incorrectly, that anarchists on the internet are spreading information on how to make bombs. It means equating anything that people don't really understand, anything which has the potential to conceal dark and dangerous unseen threats, with anarchist terrorists.
So when i talk of an anarchist computer network, this is the wall i'm up against. But, to put it simply, the Internet is in many ways similar to the telephone system. It allows people to communicate easily and cheaply with other people in other parts of the world. It's got certain advantages over the phone system, in that it allows you to send the same message to a thousand people with no more difficulty than sending it to just one. And, like the phone system, there are millions of conversations going on at the same time. The networks themselves have no intrinsic values. You can be using the phone to talk to a friend about what you're cooking for tea at the same time as two other people are discussing robbing a bank. You might be using the same phone system, but you're not necessarily connected in any other way.
Anyway, my job is kind of like a computer phone engineer. I help people to get connected to the Internet so they can communicate with other people in other places easily and cheaply. My efforts are concentrated on the anarchist community, because that's where my political allegiances lie, but i'm quite prepared to help other people set up similar systems if they need me.
And an anarchist computer network just means scattered anarchist groups and individuals around the world being able to communicate with each other easily and cheaply. It means feeling less isolated. Being able to swap ideas with other people who see the world in the same way as you do. It means being able to develop those ideas and spread them to a wider group of people. And they're generally constructive, creative ideas, which will hopefully benefit society as a whole in the long run. They're also feelings of frustration and disgust at the way the rich and powerful are destroying the world and exploiting everyone and everything in it.
So i put the word out. If anyone wants help getting hooked up to internet, i'm available. And then i got down to scraping the barnacles off the bottom of the boat - which isn't a very sound occupation for a vegan!
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Time gradually passed. The weather was generally good, with occasional spells of cold and rain, mainly around the new and full moon. I went swimming in the River Blackwater a couple of times, while trying to get the boat organized. It's weird really, i probably wouldn't even contemplate swimming in a river like that anywhere else in the world. It's probably not as filthy as it was a few years ago, but it's still undoubtedly full of pesticide runoff from the farmland around the area. And there's a nuclear power station only ten miles downriver on the North Sea coast.
The boat began to look better and eventually we got it back in the water. Naturally, after being up on the seawall for a week, in the hot weather we'd had at that time, its boards had dried out a lot and it filled up with water straight away. But after a few days it should be relatively watertight!
That week, i got news over the Internet that another round of talks was underway in San Andres Larrainzar, the second dialog since i'd been there last. I felt a kind of homesickness as i thought of the scenes that would be taking place around that little village. Of the people i knew who would be there. Especially of Oscar and his peace fire, which i was sure would be burning for the duration of the event. I felt sad in a way. I missed the place and the people and i felt a kind of regret that i hadn't had the dedication to keep up my presence there. I felt almost as if i'd walked out on them. It was strange and it wasn't something i could really express in a logical way. One day i'll go back there. But it will be different then of course...
That week also, i heard from a british anarchist, also through internet, that an article i'd written nearly a year before, for the australian paper "The Anarchist", entitled "A proposal to set up an anarchist computer network" had been reprinted in a british paper and translated into french and italian too. That was a pleasant revelation. I don't think anyone's ever translated my writing before!
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I went to London a couple of times in July and stayed mainly in Brixton, at Sergio's place. I'd met Sergio in January the previous year, on a beach in Goa, India. We discovered we had some friends in common in London and we also discovered we were both heading to Melbourne at about the same time. He already had my address there, Chris our friend in London had given it to him before he left. She was around Goa somewhere too at that time but i never found her. Anyway Sergio wrote down the address and phone number where he'd be staying in Melbourne and, as he handed it to me, i thought "i'm going to know this person". And sure enough, it was an old friend of mine called Cath, who i'd met either in Melbourne or London, i'm not sure which. They'd had a child together and Sergio was going over to visit them. It's a small world....
Anyway, i'd ended up doing quite a bit of travelling with Sergio in Australia, over the few months before he left to come back to London, and it was good to see him again. It was also good to have somewhere to stay in London that wasn't in Stoke Newington or Hackney. That's the area where i lived for years before i escaped and went to Australia. And it's where i'd always seemed to end up again when i came back to London. But, really, i'd had enough of it ten years before and i was never very happy getting back into that same old rut again.
But Brixton was different. I'd never spent much time in Brixton before. In fact, i think i could count the number of times i'd been there on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple spare. But now i had the opportunity to get to know it, i really liked the place. It had a very different feeling to Stoke Newington/Hackney. It was somehow more cosmopolitan. Stoke Newington's just like a separate little town and, despite the fact that at least two thirds of its population are from non-british ancestry, it's somehow very british. It's quite a closed-minded and dismal little place really, in its own weird way. But Brixton seemed different.
It might have been the good weather, or the fact that i wasn't so familiar with the place. Or it might have been that it had an underground station and wasn't very far away from the centre of London. Or it could have been all sorts of things. It was hard to tell why it was so different and what was different about it. But then, one thing i've definitely learnt over the last ten years is that all places have their own feeling, their own spirit, their own spirits. All places have a particular quality which makes them different from all other places, while at the same time it connects them with certain other places too.
Whatever it was, i enjoyed the short periods i spent in Brixton that month.
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After the usual fucking around that always seems to accompany departure on a long journey for most people, we finally left Maldon after eleven on Sunday morning. My mother intended to go to church in London on the way, but in the end it became obvious there wasn't any chance of making it in any sort of time for the midday mass, so we scrapped that plan and decided to bypass London altogether.
The most obvious route to get up to the west coast of Scotland from where we were was to follow the A12, which is a dual carriageway leading into east London, as far until it met the M25. That motorway would then take us around north London to the M1, which is the main London to the North motorway. However, it's not a very direct route and i really hate the A12 and the M25 bit of that journey, so we decided to cut across country instead.
Driving long distances in Britain nowadays is really weird. There's a massive network of really good, fast motorways, which generally speaking radiate out from London, although they also radiate out in a lesser way from Manchester, which could be said to be the second most important road junction on the island. The general idea is to travel as much of the route as possible on one of these motorways and as much of the rest as possible on one or more of the many dual carriageways with fill in a lot of the gaps where there aren't motorways. The rest of the journey has to be done on normal country roads, which vary immensely in quality and traffic.
This means that it's often faster to go by a longer route, over better roads, than by the most direct route. Of course, you don't get the extra speed for nothing - you probably spend twice as much on petrol flying along a motorway at eighty or ninety miles an hour as you would if you were doing a reasonable sixty or so on a more direct route. With all these factors and the amazing complexities of the british road network generally, you can end up with quite a tricky puzzle to solve, just working out how to get from A to B!
Anyway, we eventually decided to take the most direct route across country to join the M1 somewhere near Milton Keynes. Compared to the traffic-filled concrete hell of the faster roads, this is quite a pleasant journey. We went through Chelmsford, which has to be one of the most dismal and hopeless towns in the country. It's our nearest big town, but it's not worth going there for anything. For some reason, although it's quite a big place, you can never manage to find what you want there or do what you need to do. I end up going there quite a bit sometimes, but i try to do what i'm there for and get out as fast as possible. This is easy, if what you're doing there isn't trying to get from London to Maldon on a Sunday. When i do that, i inevitably end up having to wait in Chelmsford for two hours for a bus after i've got off the train. It's only eleven miles to Maldon, but it's hard to get there any other way. I used to hitch lifts, but i really hate it nowadays and try not to do it anywhere, except for a few choice parts of the world, like northern New South Wales or North Queensland.
Anyway, from Chelmsford, the road takes you near Harlow, which is a horrible concrete mess (or used to be last time i was there). It was built in the sixties as a new town to accomodate London overspill and like Basildon, the other town like that in Essex, it's ugly, characterless and depressing.
From there, the road passes through a variety of strange little towns around the border between Essex and Hertfordshire. The sort of places that are just waiting to be gobbled up by the rapidly growing metropolitan monster, that stretches out its tentacles further and further every day, turning unsuspecting little towns, in what once was the countryside, into satellite suburbs of London. Maldon's a bit like that in a way, although it's forty five miles from London. Probably over half the population were either born in London or their parents were. The only thing that's really saved Maldon from just being a dormitory town is probably the fact that they closed the railway line down in 1964. Of course, the improved road system now means you can do the journey in an hour, that combined with the serious lack of work, means that more and more people really only sleep there.
We stopped at a pub somewhere in the Hertfordshire wilderness to have some lunch. Of course, i had the usual choice i get in pubs - chips or salad, or both. I chose chips for a change.
Eventually we met the motorway, just southeast of Milton Keynes, that most famous of all new towns. And from there it was mindless monotonous concrete, ploughed through a large chunk of the small ammount of english countryside that hasn't been turned into housing estates or shopping centres, for the next two hundred miles or so.
It amazes me now, just how tiny Britain is. Although i drove around England quite a lot when i lived there, and came to realise that wherever you go, you're never more than an hour or so's drive from the nearest coast. But after getting used to the size of Australia, or at least, the east coast of Australia, it's shrunk incredibly. It's not much more than three hundred miles from Maldon to Dumfries, which is almost exactly the same distance as Wyndham to Sydney. Sure, it's a good few hours drive from Wyndham to Sydney, but it's not a journey we even really think about. It's one of the shortest ones i ever do. But going to Dumfries does seem like a very long way away. Sitting in Maldon now, it feels much much further off than Sydney does when i'm at Wyndham. It's strange, that phenomenon. I've noticed it quite a lot before too. I think distance has really got more to do with the number of people that live between you and where you're going than the actual number of miles or kilometres you have to travel.
Between here and Dumfries, if you include London, which is more or less on the way, you can probably find at least half the population of Britain - and certainly half the population of England. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and all the other towns which make up an almost continuous urban corridor up the M1 and the M6, stretching nearly all the way to the Scottish border. In that strip, i'd be surprised if there's much less than thirty million people. And that's nearly twice as much as the entire popuation of Australia.
In that same distance between Wyndham and Sydney, including the population of Sydney, there couldn't possibly be more than five million, as that's the total population of New South Wales (four fifths of which are in Sydney). So in terms of how many people you pass on your way, Dumfries is about six times as far from Maldon as Sydney is from Wyndham - which is pretty close to how it feels!
Anyway, somewhere north of Manchester, as you leave Liverpool off to your left, you start getting into the less populated part of the journey. Between the Pennines and the Cumbrian Mountains, things begin to get a bit more civilized. You're still on a motorway, but the country around you looks a bit emptier and a bit closer to being wild. Not that there's anything that could be described as even approaching wildness in England - unless you've ingested copious ammounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that is! But this bit of the journey is about as wild as it gets. In other words, it's slighly less tame than a garden with a lawn and rose beds. Sadly, nature scared the living shit out of the Romans and they started a campaign to completely destroy it so it didn't scare them any more. This campaign has been carried on by their descendents right up until the present day. You can still see the obsession with road building and chopping down trees in the culture of the british ruling class today. If anything, they're more roman than the Romans were!
We arrived at Dumfries in the evening, but at that time of year it stays light till well after ten in those lattitudes and longitudes. It was an interesting looking place and my aunt lived in a house overlooking a river, on the opposite bank to the town centre. Outside the front door, there was a park which ran along the river bank for a few hundred yards in both directions. Not a bad spot to end up after a hell drive up a hideous motorway!
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