Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 4 - Johannesburg How scared should I be? It's a question I've asked myself many times in many places across the world. Some offered up the answer without pause. Belize City had policemen too terrified to go down its dark alleys. Tegucigalpa simmered with a viscous air of menace. San Pedro Sula was the official murder capital of the world. Looking from the window of the taxi every building we passed had a sign affixed promising a swift, overwhelming, armed response to any attempted break in. Residents seem to contract a security company with the same normalcy as they would a gas or electricity supplier. Houses were surrounded by thick walls topped with electric fencing. How scared were they? Did they erect these barriers and carry on a normal life behind them or did the crackle of the electrified wire never let the perceived danger be forgotten? My eyes flicked nervously to the wing mirror at every stop of the taxi, the stories of people pulled from their cars and shot for...

Day 3 - Kruger National Park I rose early to find the enthusiasm for birds that Mike had inspired in me the previous day slightly diminished. Some feathered bastard had sat himself out the back of our tent and called for hours straight during the night. Hopefully he'll have been eaten by an eagle by the evening. I should perhaps have been a mite less enraged though as over a cursory breakfast Mike and Bridget reported hearing hyenas outside their tent. All this is perfectly normal and fine. As we mounted the jeep a change in the wind direction reminded us again of the first stop on our safari. The elephant was even less fresh than the day before but still the vultures and hyenas raced the bacteria to gorge themselves. A pair of white rhinos mooching in the dawn gloom presented a more arresting sight and was another of the big five ticked off. I feel like I should be allowed to count half an elephant on the list but, alas, not even a whole elephant counts (despite their excellent ...

Day 2 - Kruger National Park I've been to some unexpected places born of random ideas thrown into wine-inspired conversations. Istanbul and the Balkans, Rouen in search of Rollo, Amsterdam not Nottingham. I can't help but feel that the unpredicted trip begets the unforgettable experience. The joy of it will always stay with me I think even as the opportunity becomes rarer. And if this is a final hurrah then it is a good one. Our wider family crosses oceans and now stretches to the the Southern tip of Africa. Fifteen bleary hours had left time without meaning. Was this beer for breakfast or was it for dinner? I often enjoy monotonous transit for the blank page it offers my mind. For the space it creates between me and the often oppressive admin in my life. It feels my thoughts have been quieted of late, that the violent struggle to glean life's purpose has reduced to embers. A greater contentedness perhaps, if so I shouldn't mourn but if something of me has been laid t...

Ever you & I, we have moved in ellipses. Often small, a mile or a day. But sometimes great sweeping arcs carrying us across the globe, to the greatest unknowns we couldn't have dreamed of. A bond not given but chanced upon like an acquaintance in the street. Who could have known such affection was within? But we built and we grew and what times were ahead. Provoked by the other to new experiences, to the 'where?' and the 'when?' and the...'alright, let's go!'. Our tapestry of recollections are different yet inextricably shared as once again our paths intersected. Far flung we were but like comets returned to a singular point. From sunrises in Brum to sunsets in Sydney. From one pound nine and 'any change?' to schooners under soaring white sails. From the sound of wailing sirens to the crash of smashing steins. And to all of those we met on the way, Andrew & Louie, Gunter & Brad, that sheep that had seen better days. We saw the world...

Belgo Centraal, 50 Earlham Street London 10/09/2016 The noise rattled, reverberated through my cranium. It pressed the infinite planes of its fingers onto...not my skull that was bypassed but onto my conscious thoughts. It compressed the airy spaces of my meditation and chased my reason down collapsing synaptic corridors. A single question is a cattle prod to my mind and they were as a swarm of bees, which beer out of a thousand? Are you having a starter? Wanna share? Which moules out of.... since when did choices go beyond white wine sauce? And all in what is essentially a dungeon. 3/5

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...