Ben Welsher | Writings

It gasps me, what is that sound? Its not a thud, once a thud, now a hollow resound, a drum beat for nothing. The surpringly vast chamber of my heart reverberates with echoes of feelings disavowed yet near fresh as the day they were born. Into which wind were they thrown? The wind of my time? Her time? The time bearing us all...boats beating ceaselessly? Too often it seems to me in the hopeless squalor of my perpetually drunken mind, the relentless selfishness of my abashed need, that I have lost. It seems to me the simplest sadness, not hateful sadness, not vengeful, no fuel for a fire to outburn the burning desire to be loved. Only absence describes the cavity in my heart and the caving through my soul. But the absense of word and meaning desolates me, I pick through the bleached landscape of dessicated rock and I'm in another world. But I know this place, I spent some time here, summers and winters, half a lifetime, spring and autumn if you seek completeness, dry but the pattern...

Love draws us inexorably towards it. Towards the flames of creation, the fire of destruction. We should dance by its light ... not be sweated by its heat. For it is the twinkling star in the blackest of nights, the glint in a diamond's heart. It whispers to us and screams at us. It is the echo in the vast cavern of time, a teardrop on the face of eternity. It is 1000 ships, 205 miles, 12 years , utterly unquantifiable. All we are we give to its pursuit, our heart speeds then slows - every thump a punch. Love gilds us, girds us and wraps us in its beauty. It wracks us and scars us, it is a needle through gossamer. Frivolous and vital it is corrosive in its absence. We arm another with the means to destroy us and everyday must pray they do not. You too, never be casual with your love or neglectful with your affection, you carry another's hopes and fears . Love is no mean feat. It is not one thing, sometimes the big bang, sometimes slow evolution, never tidy. It is...

Day 11 - Luxembourg I awoke in room 410 with enough time to throw my clothes back in the pack, bid farewell to Munich, I barely knew thee, and begin the end of our journey. We only had one stop left, that of Luxembourg, the sovereign tax haven straddling the borders of Germany, France and Belgium. It was a tiny dot on the horizon and we'd have to cross most of Southern Germany to reach the place. As James steeled himself to six hours behind the wheel with equal fortitude I took up the pen again, every epic journey needs its chronicler right? But my mind, never the most biddable beast, drifted from the empty page. It stared wordlessly at the passing hills and trees as for the first time on the trip the car pointed towards home. The landscape was imbued with a glow, as if the softest and most gentle tune followed its contours and weaved through its verdant forests. A thread of gold too thin and fine for all to be able to see glinted in the sun and stretched off into the landscape pu...

Day 10 - Munich So many people have become just portraits hung only with cobwebs in the attic of my memories. Passing acquaintances and fleeting passions created by chance intersection of different paths criss-crossing the world. And so I thought it was with her. I hadn't seen the girl since those last days of Margaret River, part of the sturm und drang that fires the memory of it. There is a delight in the dramatic recall but memory is just our internal storytelling function, malleable to the narrative that we want to hear. Is all history oral and shaped by Chinese whispers? Maybe this blog will act as my corrective to that, once stripped of the requisite flourish. Even now those events seem improbable, like EastEnders in Oz. After a hasty goodbye shielded from inflamed eyes, and one prompted by belated decency on my part, I welcomed the escape of the road. But they were great days for all their filthy, haphazard melodrama and I tear a little at their remembrance. I guess not all...

Day 9 - Bratislava Breakfast was taken in Hotel Sacher in Vienna, home of the famous Sacher Torte. I wouldn't ordinarily begin the day with cake but holidays do strange things to a person. Suitably tortified we jumped on a train for the second of our two day-trips, this time to Slovakia. I had preconceptions about the places that we'd been to so far, some based on personal experience others less so but Slovakia ranked as a genuine unknown. Having great affection for Prague and by extension the Czech Republic I suppose I wondered if the Velvet Revolution of 1989 had cleaved off the less desirable part into the eastern state. Luckily we three had established a means of determining the level of advancement of a place, thus - Question 1 - Does it have an Ikea? yes, we saw one from the train. Question 2 - Can you tour the place on a segway? yes, one was sitting outside a tourist office. Question 3 - From where you are standing can you see an H&M? ...oh Bratislava you were so...

Day 8 - Budapest A Buda, a Pest, maybe a golden grand piano and a hidden treasure chest (I'd settle for a Nazi gold train though), we pulled out of Hauptbahnhof Station and were on our way to the country of the mighty magyars. Booked in an old fashioned cabin with 6 seats in a 3 + 3 facing arrangement I had the misfortune to be seated next to a grimble who had decided that now was the most opportune time to trim his fingernails. Being English I was unable to make any complaint louder than an internal 'tut' but there was a woman in the cabin of indeterminate origin who had no such social restrictions and soon called him to account. He shrugged in a nonchalant 'what could possibly be the problem' way and turned instead to his cyrillic newspaper. Decorum restored the soothing sway of movement lulled me. There is an unexpected luxuriousness to closing your eyes on a train, a delicious reduced consciousness softening the hard lines just beyond your eyelids. I can't ...

Day 7 - Vienna We'd been there only hours before but there was no sign of the absinthe bar. The place where it should have been seemed to offer no sign of its existence. Maybe we did drink that hallucinatory stuff after all but not here... The miles behind the wheel were starting to take their toll and both drivers eagerly accepted the opportunity of an extended break. The next stop was Vienna and we could pitch up there for a few days, visiting Hungary and Slovakia by train. We passed Austerlitz, scene of Napoleon's most renowned victory 110 years ago which caused the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire the political entity, centred around Germany, that had dominated Western Europe for near a thousand years. There is a certain irony that the wild and unconquered Germania delineated by the Rhine and Danube should become the spiritual successor to the Roman Empire, in the west at least. The battle caused William Pitt, the British prime minister at the time to say of the map of...

Day 6 - Prague The aroma of wild pig filled our nostrils as it slowly roasted in the midday sun. Unfortunately rather than being on a spit in a beer garden it was instead on a central reservation as we crawled past in traffic. Bade farewell to Wrocław and the Monopole and our short stint as high rollin' ballers we made a westward turn. Small villages dotted the, pig notwithstanding, beautiful Czech countryside as it swept out and up and down to our either side. There was a crispness to the landscape, the air seemed fresh and clear, everything just so. I have good memories of Prague have been taken here as a surprise for my 30th birthday. The three of us had seen one or two mediaeval city centres at this point but for my koruna Prague's remains one of the most visually arresting. The cobbled streets and castle perched high above, saints peering down at you from Charles bridge, one of ten crossing the Vltava here. It also retains the, not inconsiderable, appeal of cheap living c...

Day 5 - Wrocław And I got an engine full of trunk space, I get money three ways, fucking bitches three ways, seven different foreigns plus no hablé. But I make that bitch walk for some cheesecake. Tyga's words from early 2015 inspired us to leave Berlin's Meininger Hotel and take a left turn into Poland. We pointed the ride towards the city of Wrocław where we could live like kings for a fraction of the money Scandinavia had demanded of us, £8 pancakes whaaat? The relative weakness of the country's economy was ably demonstrated when silky autobahn became torn and undulating tarmac. The car bounced and juddered and my pen criss-crossed the page like an etch-a-sketch in the hands of a drunk child. The second demonstration came when a car behind, furiously flashing its lights, got us to stop on the hard shoulder. A balding, middle-aged, be-paunched guy walked to the driver's window and, handing over a business card, proceeded to try and interest us in a deal with his ...

Day 4 - Berlin A restless night's sleep hadn't left Matt best disposed towards a long drive (my standing offer to take a turn still being rebuked) but I'd wager me and James felt worse. Matt likened the car to a hearse given the state of his two passengers. I drifted in and out of semi-lucid dreams, my consciousness on the melting edge of reality. Six hours passed until I stepped out blinking into a dusty car park somewhere in the Mitte district of Berlin. I'd long heard naught but good things about the capital and of all the places on the original itinerary it was the one I was keenest to visit. The itinerary, however, was evolving and we'd set ambitious targets to steam through Europe in a grand arc. Coincidentally it was exactly five years since my first road trip through the continent from Istanbul to Italy. How many countries had I seen since then? How many thousands of miles travelled by plane, car, train? On bike, boat or on foot? How many experiences since ...