The Knowledge

By Nicky Torode:

“I can’t BELIEVE we’re leaving the EU,” my 6-year-old wails like he’s jammed his finger in the electric window as we ride, back seat, in a black cab over Croydon Flyover. The taxi driver twists his head, to double-take the young oracle, and veers, fleetingly, to the left. Good job we don’t drive on the right, my inside voice says, not ready just yet, though, for cabbie knowledge. 

Wales’s gone, England too. The early morning Brexit referendum results come on the radio, in and out, sleep to waking. We slow down at the lights on the Wellesley Road dual carriageway, slicing East from West. Jake turns to stare at the higgledy-piggledy queue curling outside Lunar House. A Union Jack droops from the staff on Lunar’s identical twin, Apollo. God of twenty-two floors of grey carpet and filed prophecies, ready for second-class dispatch. Two men in high vis vests, clutching clipboards, spit out the building’s revolving door, smiles long gone. 

I smile at Jake, squeeze his hand. We’ll look back on this moment, I’m sure, when teachers will ask me when it was that I realised Jake was so special. It was this taxi ride out of East Croydon station, en route to Gatwick, gateway to the world. Well, to Guernsey, at any rate, a hometown of sorts. It was this moment, this ride, through streets edged with shiny high rises, criss crosses of tram tracks and swinging crane arms. Ding! Ding! go the tram cars. Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! go the chorus of pneumatic drills. Digging for a better future. 

How you gonna make a dream come true? Sensible sang, Croydon listened. Brutal turned pastel, beanstalks shot up even taller. Toblerone-shaped Saffron Tower, with windows of pinks and lilacs, glints in the morning sun. A giant crocus blooms again in Croh Denu, the Crocus Valley of old. 

I lean back into the padded, smells-like-new leather cab seat. Croydon, home for now. Tuk-tuk! go the drills. I stretch out, sigh. My breath on the window throws a ghost-like shroud over Fairfield Halls, South London’s South Bank. Grey walls of halls on land that’s been blessed by wayfarers to the fairs and markets of old. I’m so London, I’m so South, belts out Stormzy from the crackly radio. 

We rise up the trunk road, pass the two IKEA chimneys, long-established shrines of Valley Retail Park, and look down on a tangle of Scalextric roads at their feet. Really going up in the world. A smugness warms my chest, like I’ve backed a winner down William Hill’s. 

“Muuuuuum,” Jake says.

“Yes, love?”

“What’s the EU?”

The taxi driver, I swear, laughs inwardly. I see you, cab driver, peeping at me in your rear-view rectangle. The Palace furry dice, hanging from the mirror, bounce and bob in cahoots.

My shoulders start jiggling up and down too as we join a tailback on the A23. 

***

Nicky Torode is a born-and-fled Guernsey girl who lived in and around Croydon from 2009 until December 2016. She currently lives with her son in the lively coastal town of Hastings UK. She loves writing tales of place and has had a few shorts published (fiction and creative non-fiction). And the ink has just dried on the first draft of her novel These Are The Places.  She’s a career and entrepreneurial mindset coach and facilitator of journaling circles.

Uist

Photo: Jack Bush

By Emma Jones:

On the ferry our bikes are all tied up with string to keep them stable. I am not a seafarer and do not know the knots. I twist and wind the rope and hope that it will be enough to keep my bike from toppling over. My bike is heavy, all loaded up, front and back and frame bag. We are two weeks into our trip and my packing is becoming untidy, clothing shed and then not put away properly, instead glove fingers peeking, a shirt tied unceremoniously, one arm flapping in the breeze. 

These two weeks are felt in the body too. My legs are tired, calves stretched and thighs hot, lower back burning. Hair stuck down to my scalp. Clothes streaked with mud and sheep shit and sweat. In the mornings wriggling about inside the tent I keep myself curled up so as not to touch the sides and let the dew in. A whole home folded up and wrapped tight. Kneeling my weight down onto my roll mat I feel the air being pushed out of it and something gives way in this act of deflating, like I am letting all of that is pent up inside of me out too, shaking myself out in the wet morning light. When we leave, all that’s left behind from the night before is an indistinct shape in the flattened grass.

Climbing up to the deck we sit on the little plastic seats and feel the salt and wind sting. It's another grey day where I do not cast a shadow, as if a part of me is missing, as if I have nothing to project. I watch the diving birds fold their wings and turn themselves into one long beak and barely upset the water. I watch the ferry engine churn everything behind it up into white foam. I look for land, and look, and look, and then, finally, it’s Uist that rises from the sea. 

I am politely told by a man we meet on the ferry that I am pronouncing Uist wrong. It should, in fact, be an oo sound and then the ee and a short sharp st. Not Ooohisst but Oooooeest. More like a whistling sound, he says. I try it on, but struggle with its call. Each small town and road sign is noted in Gaelic, the collection of letters and accents unfamiliar to me, a language that is, in part, an act of civic reclamation. English was enforced here, first among the clan chiefs, and then the schoolchildren. I read these signs as a form of taking back. As a way to think about place but also the body. Does language impact and change the shape of the tongue? Until the body forgets what it used to speak with ease? My own struggles to take the shape of this place in. I cannot speak it, despite the sign telling me Failte gu Uibhist a Deas.  

Uist isn't one place exactly, but a collection of six islands, stippling the coast of West Scotland. A collection that seems unsteadily attached to the water beneath, as if at any moment it could shudder and give way, become unmoored and break up even further. Each island is connected via causeway, with rocks buffeting each side. Whenever we cycle over them the tide seems to be perpetually out, revealing white sand or fecund matter and the faint smell of something rotting. It is very open and the wind is against us. I try to keep close behind Jack, use his body as a type of shelter. He is a stronger rider than me, pushing us forward while I hang back. We’re both tired and not talking in that gentle familiar way that comes from being in each other's company a lot. And so, I am mainly left alone, just my body and my thoughts.

Photo: Jack Bush

Perhaps it is the proximity to the sea, and the grey nothing of the day, that makes it hard to feel as if I am doing anything but moving through, floating through, passing through. I feel strangely unplaced here. Letting the road dictate my movements but not taking anything further in. Only the asphalt beneath me. Swift and sharp pushes over small rises, dipping into another collection of houses, feeling the cars passing with a metallic reverb. We plan to travel from south to north over the course of the day, and it is distance that keeps me occupied. I keep tracking how far it is I have travelled, how far there is still to go. I am chasing the miles, wanting my body to become a blur. 

I am trying to act as if it's impossible for this place to be felt. As if cycling isn't a series of impressions in which place and body meet. But each turn of the pedal feels like another chance to look again. A cliché about wheels turning, a place that beckons as a type of rotation. Calls out, fades, calls out again. 

It is not as if this place is empty. When we pause at a Co-Op car park to eat lunch a car pulls up and I watch a man in a heavy green quilted jacket walk up to the curb to kick and scrape his boots. Signs of industry and labour are everywhere. There are sprawling farms with jagged half fence posts and abandoned rust-toothed machinery. Fishing nets all tangled up in a dense weave. So too, are signs of this industry fading as the permanent population of these islands steadily decreases. Former homes reduced to an outline of bricks and gaping doors and windows. In one field we watch a short-eared owl quartering dreamily just above the grass, silent on its daytime hunt for the squinting voles.

In North Uist, the final island of the day and where we plan to spend the night, the landscape changes into earthy peatland. There are small incisions from where it has been cut out in blocks. There aren’t many trees here and so the peat is burnt for fuel. The local population knows how to take from this landscape and use it up. While riding, I am trying to do the same. It is not a moving through, but an attempt to take in. We stop for dinner and I try Lobster for the first time, a local catch, and am surprised when it is served cold. I dig my little trident under the shell, pull out white flesh. 

A woman in the pub asks if we are staying and I wonder how many people she sees each evening with bags on their bikes, or else, all wrapped up in the metal shell of a camper van. How many of them, like me, will be trying to remember and gather up as much as possible before the next place sits on the tongue. There is more of Uist than I am able to tell but still, I am here, trying to find a way through. 

In the late spring it doesn’t get dark here until after 10pm. Toward the end of the day the sun starts to break through the clouds and soon everything is turned soft with a peachy hue. On the way down to the beach where we plan to camp there’s an old graveyard between the sea and the machair. There are old graves mixed with the new. And beneath the graves are the bodies of the people who lived here, the ground finally pushing into their bones, in a way that it will never do for me.

***

Emma Jones is a non-fiction writer and Curatorial Assistant, Photography at Tate. They hold an MA in Writing from Royal Holloway, London. As an arts writer and curator, Emma has been published in Source Magazine and contributed to the recent publication Photography: A Feminist History (Octopus Publishing). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow

Between the Years

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

We were supposed to leave on Boxing Day, but the waves raced in off the North Atlantic, crashing against the harbour walls and rolling over the loading bay where the fishing boats had been pulled on wheels out of the ocean’s reach. There was no ferry that day, as there hadn’t been since the 17th December, and the forecast was not good.

For two further days the wind and the waves hammered at the island. São Jorge is a thin sliver, a line of volcanic peaks falling away towards the ocean. If there is flat land to be found it is often on lava debris fields at the foot of cliffs, where villages were built that, for centuries – and in some cases still – are only accessible by foot. Across the channel it is possible to spy the neighbouring islands of Pico and, from the right vantage point, Faial. But if the winds and the waves are high, it does not matter how close they might be. No boats will leave the harbour, and no planes will rise from the airstrip.

We hunkered down, waiting for the break. At a local surf shop, the owner looked at the same website as the owner of our guesthouse had shown us on his phone. A line of coloured boxes, filled with numbers. The website is hosted in the Czech Republic but is apparently bookmarked on every browser in São Jorge. The surf shop owner translated what it meant. High winds. Big waves. We weren’t going anywhere.

Each evening came and with it the message that the ferry was cancelled for the following morning, until one evening when it didn’t. Our guesthouse owner was hopeful. Tomorrow, you can sail. But he promised to leave our beds made just in case. We were to message him only once we left harbour. Only then, would he know we had finally checked out.

At the port in the morning a trickle of passengers became a tide. It was more than ten days by now since the ferry to Pico and Faial had run. In that time, Christmas had come and gone, although the decorations were still up in town and festive songs were still playing through the loudspeakers that had been erected some time in December. Passengers checked in their bags and waited in the terminal buildings. 

Others lined up their cars, waiting to board. At the check in counter, a woman delivered a parcel that would travel on the ferry without her. A man did the same. A taxi driver delivered three boxes and then queued to pay for the transportation, before driving off to work the next fare. The weather forecast for the next day was bad, and for the day after too. This might be the only chance.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

We sat on deck and watched Velas and São Jorge slowly retreat. It would take two and a half hours to reach Faial via Pico, and the island remained in view throughout. It was a long farewell. The first crossing was rocky, the second was rough. Perhaps they wouldn’t have made the crossing if it hadn’t been more than a week since the last one. We stayed on deck and watched the horizon. Some passengers slept, laid out across the plastic chairs. Others headed inside and tried to ignore the motion, watching films on their phones or tablets. 

In the channel between São Jorge and Pico, in the central islands of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, the internet connection was better than Berlin. We weren’t surprised.

We were between the years and between the islands. In the channel between Pico and Faial a windsurfer raised alongside the ferry, flying above the waves that we were crashing through. The waves seemed to grow bigger the closer we got to Horta and our destination. The spray reached the top deck. Gulls hovered above. At least one passenger was sick. The time between the years is usually when nothing much happens. As we approached land and the rise and fall of the ferry seemed to intensify, we wondered if there were any more surprises left. 

At Horta harbour, where sailors from around the world have left their mark in colourful murals on the harbour wall, and where the first transatlantic seaplanes used to land between the boats, we felt solid land beneath our feet. That evening in Faial, we would still be able to hear the ocean breaking against the rocks below where we were to sleep. We could still feel the motion where we lay. And we could see the dance of the white horses as they broke between the islands behind our closed eyes.

Outside it was calm. The sky had cleared and the stars shone down on the islands and the ocean. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. But the waves had been growing, and the colours and the numbers on the Czech website were not good. The messages had been received. The ferry for the next morning had already been cancelled. 

Photo: Katrin Schönig

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His latest book is In the Pines, a novella of the forest with photography by Eymelt Sehmer, and published by Influx Press.

The holinight

By Frances Jackson:

There is nowhere
to go
on holiday,
so they swap
which side 
of the bed
they sleep on.

It is his idea,
but she has
the better night's sleep.

The pillows 
on the left
are,
it transpires,
superior to the right.

She may
refuse 
to leave.

***

Frances Jackson is originally from the UK, but now lives in Bavaria. Her translations and poetry have appeared in places such as Asymptote, London Grip, Panel and Your Impossible Voice.

Sketches of China 04: Beijing by train

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fourth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

Speeding across the countryside under sulphur skies, an arrow shot for the city’s heart, the forlorn moan of the electric locomotive thundering along the tracks, cutting across the land, slowing from time to time, stopping at anonymous skylines of half-built tower blocks and cranes that tell of the rapacious pace of urbanisation, the shape of a woman emerging freshly showered onto a balcony in the evening sun as the carriages pull away once again, surveying the scene from the window, the landscape drenched in wan yellow light, the sinuous figures and sun-beaten skin of peasants who till the land, resting for a moment under a drooping tree, the red and white stripes of a chimney stack behind them, a smelter belching out smoke that hangs low in the air above fields of cadmium rice and split melons, the smog lingering over rivers whose fish have long since departed, hanging in wisps above brittle fields, their groundwater sullied, their aquifers depleted, the earth sucked dry, the train reaching the first buildings that announce the metropolis under darkening skies, the forlorn moan of the engine dying out to the creak of the carriages as it slows, snaking unnoticed through shabby suburbs, the buildings growing taller, entombing the land and climbing to touch the sky, the carriages tugging as finally they come to a halt, stepping out onto the concourse, waking into a nightmare, feeling the frenetic pulse of the city as the sun gradually sinks over the fields left far behind, the land slipping into shadow to await the new day, the televised dawn of progress at all costs.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

There are Different Kinds of Sense

By Helen Sanderson:

Putrid mushy apples sink underfoot, orange with decay, and the smell of fermentation has become like strong cheese. We're cutting down trees like old woodsmen. I romanticise what I'm doing like that in order to feel better about it. Turn it into an image from a painting or film or something, you would probably admire the people in it, and then see yourself in a better light. Art gives dignity to the desperate and desolate. Or makes them more palatable. It's really forestry not gardening, this. That's what Derek says defensively and repeatedly, although I don’t know how it defends him or from what. He trudges slower and slower dragging branches along behind him, hood up and head down, shoulders slumped. Branches hit him in the face, his foot catches on the precarious moss-covered fabric of the ground. 

Derek may be confused about why I am there. I haven't been working there for 30 years like he has, I'm not local and have dropped into this sphere from an entirely different one. He could think that shows commitment, or, as I imagine, he could think that I may have the point of view of a tourist, choosing the novelty of this undertaking out of the blue for some unusual image I want to cultivate. I am certain a number of jokes have passed his mind about being alone together in the woods, but he must know he wouldn't enjoy my faked amusement. 

We tread on twigs and moss-covered rocks and it's a relief to be somewhere less manicured than the formal gardens of the same estate where I normally work. It's still not exactly wild though, most things have been planted deliberately. Next to the trees we are coppicing, the landscape is feels almost industrial, which is strange considering it is entirely vegetation – rows and rows of dull unidentifiable crops, presumably to feed livestock. Trees tower in the distance, and where the trunks are thickly covered in ivy, or have strangely shaped stunted branches or lumps, they appear as the forms of giant men, hanging from the tree canopy or standing awkwardly with bent knees. The kind of landscape that makes you think you can see someone or something moving out of the corner of your eye, especially in this dull weather. Like there's a presence in the air, somewhere just out of sight.

“Look, he's having a hard time putting anything on him.” It takes me a while to realise Derek is talking about a tree, and a further few seconds to conclude he was pointing out the tree isn’t growing leaves very well. I have started to find that it is easier to understand him if I listen to the words without attaching them to their meanings - to allow each word, or combination of words, pull waves of feelings and thoughts through me, and without thinking about what they meant, allow them to create dreamlike images floating in my brain like a reflection of the surface of some rippled water. Maybe I am here as some kind of tourist, enjoying colloquialisms, deciding they're very poetic.

We drive back through fields to eat in the mess room. The men, the innocent men, you can tell they're trying not to appear lecherous, avoiding coming within a few feet and moving their hands away quickly from anything near me. I should think of some kind of joke to make so we can all be more comfortable. I have the impression they're muting their own jokes for my benefit, unsure of what is acceptable.

Gardening is more sensual in a lot of ways than other jobs - roughly, physically sensual, pain from scratches and bruises and muscle aches, the smells and sounds of outdoors, birds and wind and machinery, unstifled belches, things coming out of people into the open without a second thought, less hidden. Now the sounds of eating, garbled, unintelligible words caught in throats with the unswallowed food, smells of petrol and grass cuttings, old sweat and stale damp. I imagine judgements of what’s meant to be beautiful or repulsive blur over time when dealing with sludge and decay and strange looking slimy insects alongside ethereal blooms and the freshness of plants. Either that, or perhaps sometimes more of a forced need to separate the sludge and freshness, acceptable and not. Or neither.

The small room we eat in smells of something not quite dirty or bad, but as if something small had rotted there a long time ago, or there had once been a lot of something very unpleasant there which had long ago been removed but left something of itself behind in the air. Grimy baked bean smears and distant, stale, savoury food mixed with moss. It is in the walls. This room, and times like this, could make me wonder what I'm doing here. I can come across as a pretentious snob even to my friends, but I’m just here. I didn't go into whatever was expected, I'm just sitting here in a weird smelling room with my colleagues. But I've got used to wondering what I'm doing anywhere. Might as well be here. There is that sphere of Gardener's World and the Chelsea Flower Show, people with gentle voices who will always make sure they are in beautiful places but uninterested in how enough wealth became accumulated to create them, exclaiming over the beauty of a flower, as toddlers over a new toy, without wanting to know about the colonialism associated with it being here. And then there are people with physical labour experience, hired because they can use machinery and lift things. People who own gardens and people who work in them, or on council owned grass verges or hospital car park gardens. But that's far too simplistic, I know, and some days it feels like something vital but usually unspoken unites all of us. I assume they don't know how my being out of place accentuates the assertion of my own existence, proof of the force of my will to make internal ideas become external reality, to connect the two realms as we must. But maybe they do know. 

On my way home the pavement seems to radiate humidity - that warm damp hard dusty smell after a certain kind of rain on warm day. Redundant seeds are scattered around each tree in the pattern of sparse chest hair. Seeds that will lie dormant until some kind of change in their environment triggers their germination and growth. I now know about the hormones auxin and giberellin and abscisic acid involved in the development of these seeds and their dispersal onto the ground. It's just a mechanism, it's just hormones making the plant do things, do things to attract pollinators and then sense when conditions are right to procreate. There are journeys going on all around me that I was previously unaware of, whole new worlds and systems right there next to me, which have provided relief from the ones I already knew about and lived in. 

I wanted to leave once, go back to the worlds I already knew. But I've grown used to the intentional miscommunications, grown to expect them. So much that I feel affronted by a genuine response, or expectation of one from me. It becomes more obvious that language is a manmade system of signals, not the holder of innate meaning. We build something rooted yet transient. Tucking little bedding plants into the earth, picturing myself as a child tucked between faded cotton sheets in my darkened childhood room. Teasing out the roots of larger shrubs and imagining the underground networks of roots reaching all the way to friends and family back in the city. Sometimes it seems I’ve moved my life closer to nature to find it fully inhabited by man. The inner-city community gardens felt more of an idyllic wilderness, felt more free of human hierarchies.

I’m exhausted in the evening, as every other evening, but for a second I catch the scent of decay on the cool air coming from an open window and feel a shiver of excitement. After the rain it smells like the early nineties again. Still-warm air holds only the sense of a chill, eventually to bring smoke and fog, fire and ice, and the soil will grow still and grey like a face tense and drawn. But for now the damp warmth still holds an excitement about the death of the year. It holds the memory of excitement for something, maybe for the future regardless of what it is, even if that future is death, the memory of looking forward creating a loop connecting my entire life since becoming conscious of the change in the air. It makes me picture daddy longlegs on an old school wall and I wonder why everyone had always seemed to like them but not spiders. Maybe we knew their presence was fleeting. Too bumbling to pose any threat. Spending a lifetime attempting to fly, never quite reaching their goal, learning by banging into the walls they try to follow upwards to the sky.

***

Helen Sanderson studied English Literature at UEA before becoming a Gardener. Originally from Nottingham, she now lives and works in South East London. She is currently working on novels, short stories and a Garden Design PGDip alongside her gardening job.

Trans-Mongolian

By Kenn Taylor:

Lying on my back on a bunk bed, on a very long, very bare train. Going a very long way through a very bare landscape a long way from anywhere.

At this point, I’d been travelling on it for so many days, that whenever the train stopped and I briefly stepped onto the terra firma of a platform to buy food, I had sea legs. Well, train legs. So used to the constant shaking and rhythm of the railway journey that, removed from it, everything seemed unbalanced and off kilter.

Being on a train for so long, there is nothing but time. To be filled in many ways. Looking out for the arresting moments between endless tress and endless desert. Games. Chat. Drinking. Lots of drinking. Someone brought a laptop with downloaded films and music, which in back then seemed over the top and now seems like common sense.

With me always being a late adopter, I’d brought books. Although like everyone else I’d been very affected, if not traumatised, by the animated film, I’d never actually read Watership Down. She had recommended it in her usual passionate way, so I thought, why not get a copy for my travels. In what was no doubt another daft attempt at maintaining a connection.

So, with an incongruity recognised by myself and others, I found myself reading a novel about anthropomorphic rabbits filled with descriptions of the lush, green and wet English countryside, whilst sat on a train going through the depths of dry, summer, eastern Siberia. With this being August, Siberia of course was nothing like the snow covered images of popular culture. A week earlier we had sunbathed near the Kremlin. As you do. It was odd but all the more vivid to be down the, er, rabbit hole, of this book about the loss of an arcadian England, whilst being on the other side of the world in a moving metal box going through a striking but unforgiving landscape.

Of course, wherever you go though, you are still you. I dived into the depths of this book and this journey, trying to concentrate on reading whilst also sucking in the vast stream of everyone and everything going past. On this bunk in the quiet afternoon though, in the world of rabbits as the eternal human struggle, I still found myself thinking of her and the chest pressing gulp of the pain swept back in.

Back then though, the wider world seemed brighter. This journey just another example of it opening up ever further, ever faster. Here we were crossing continents, a multiplicity of backgrounds filled with camaraderie, in a world of expanding global interconnection, dialogue and understanding.

Yet the warnings of how thin a veneer this all was were already on display here. A guide telling us of the racism he experienced all the time. Russians more than happy with Putin telling us ‘we need a strong leader’. The call to Free Pussy Riot provoking indifference, ‘they shouldn’t have behaved like that in a church.’ No one likes us, we don’t care. What now stares us in the face as the growing threat to democracy in the 21st century was all there lurking in the background. We had thought then perhaps that this was just the leftovers of an old world that was dying. Really though, the post 2008 trauma was still just sinking in. The thwarted ambitions and dreams of millions, many struggling now even for a basic standard of living. Their sense of injustice ruthlessly diverted to other targets by those in power, so they could maintain the status quo, despite its diminishing returns for the majority.

The world has turned darker in the last decade. So many of the places we visited then, even if it still possible, we might not choose to now. Borders going back up. Minorities oppressed. Rights shredded. History coming roaring back to bite. Wherever you go, you are still you and you take your experience and culture with you. Sometimes though, what you see when you go elsewhere follows you back home much later.

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com

Diwali in the House of Shio Mgvime

Photo of Shio Mghvime by George Melashvili, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0

By Gurmeet Singh:

Above Mtskheta the air is hot. 

It is not thin. 

Our taxi driver, tells us Batumi—Batumi is really hot. 

At least this is what I think he’s saying. We—my partner and I—do not speak Georgian, and he does not speak English. Many Georgians also speak Russian, and we don’t speak that either. Only the younger people tend to know English. This is what abstract political events look like in real-life: the Soviet-Union falls, so the young people learn English, while their parents speak Russian. 

“Horrorshow” I say, Nadsat being in part, Russian-inspired: “good”.  

“Batumi”, he nods. 

We’re heading to the the Shio Mgvime Monastery, which we’re told is on the left bank of the Mtkvari river, on the southern slope of the Sarkine ridge, but there is no sign of water. 

Shio is honoured as one of the 13 Assyrian “fathers” who came to Georgia in the 6th Century to strengthen Christianity. Under the guidance of John of Zedazel (‘Saint John’), the group lived in Mtskheta, and then on Zedazeni mountain, where they founded a monastery. 

Shio left after four years, and then inhabited a cave on Mount Sarkin. The monastery was founded literally above this cave, and grew over the next several centuries, evolving into six or seven buildings, experiencing growth and decline as the country was invaded, at peace, taken over by Christian powers, Islamic powers, the Soviets, and now after all that, offered as a tourist destination.

Shio is buried in the monastery complex. 

Pathetically, I am feeling nauseous. The roads through the low mountains rise and fall. They are winding, winding. My partner tells me: “you look green”. I close my eyes. My brown skin, so beautifully evened out and darkened by the late Summer heat here, looks green. How pathetic, can’t even take a few winding roads—even a few good winding roads. 

“Batumi”, he says again. “My brother, in Batumi. My brother.” 

“Horrorshow”, I say.

He nods. 

I press my hands against my stomach and close my eyes. Pathetic. 

Motion sickness occurs — they say — when there is a discontinuity between visual and proprioceptive information. Your body expects one kind of motion and experiences another. Your eyes expect gentle slopes, your body experiences long, harsh ones. Your inner-ear and eyes argue. Your brain asks your stomach to regurgitate. 

The advice is to keep your eyes closed. I try to do this but it’s hard to not look out the window. A dry, orange, almost Australian landscape passes by. Australia with hills, and where mountains shimmer in the distance. The outback where greenery occasionally blooms. 

By the side of the road, there are the bones of a cow or buffalo, mostly intact. It gives the place an atmosphere. 

I should not have eaten those jellied peanuts in Mtsketa.  

“Batumi”, he says. “Batumi khorosho”. 

I close my eyes. 

*

What does the world look like to a person like Shio? To someone who believes in God so much that they are willing to leave society and try their luck on a mountain? 

The mountain is dry and seething and the air hot.  

The footprints of animals. The sound of breaking twigs. There is no wind. 

The limestone cliffs surrounding the monastery are bright and pitted with large holes which could have been the caves of other ascetics. Is it hot or cool in them? Stuffy or fresh? Do you sleep in one, bitten by insects, barely able to breathe, and in the morning, emerge into the hot sun and say ‘thank you God’?

TV sound buzzes: taxi drivers are assembled outside the gates of the complex, just waiting, watching Youtube on their phones. 

You walk up a dry, brown path to the buildings. 

Some of them are ruined, their interiors broken, their walls dark and the images of Jesus are faded and fragmented. Some of the buildings do not allow cameras inside. Their frescoes are daunting and huge; God and Jesus together looking down onto the sinful world, the super-ego itself enthroned in red and gold and aquamarine. 

The stones are hard underfoot. There is no matted grass. Dark shrubs, blue sky. 

Does someone like Shio not see ‘mountain’, or ‘cave’, but ‘creation’?

What would make someone spend two years in a cave? 

*

Inside the Church, a few people pray loudly. 

Some touch the glass containing holy relics. 

For at least the third time in Georgia we find a relic which claims to be from the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. 

My partner makes the ‘can you believe it?’ face. She rolls her eyes. 

It just so happens that today is Diwali, the Hindu and Sikh festival. Hindus celebrate the festival to mark Rama and Sita’s homecoming to Ayodhya, after their banishment to the forest. That’s not the whole story of course, there’s a war, a monkey God, a ten-headed demon, a giant who sleeps for years, magic herbs. There’s loads more. 

Sikhs celebrate Diwali, or as it’s known, Bandi Chhor Divas, to mark the release of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind from prison in the mid-Seventeenth Century. There’s more here too: the Guru helped secure the release of several dozen other political prisoners. 

Both Sikhs and Hindus light divas or candles in celebration. 

The Church in the monastery of Shio Mgvime offers candles to light. 

Having left the Sikh religion some years before, I do not celebrate the festival. But I also do not participate in the kitsch or sentimental renewal or display of faith by lighting a candle ‘just for fun’. I especially do not confuse the various traditions by lighting a candle in the Church to mark an Indian festival. 

And yet, the world offers these possibilities, with traditions overlapping, with meanings reaching over one another, pulling each other inside out, so that if I wanted to, I could join the schoolchildren and pilgrims in lighting a candle in the dark incense-filled Church to honour Shio, and also Rama, or the Guru’s release. 

This is what abstract events look like in real-life: 

A discontinuity between what you see and what you experience. 

*

Outside, large sheets of shade cast by the brick buildings are occupied by Russian tourists. A family, it seems, and they sip water from plastic bottles and sketch the dry, intensely bright landscape around them. 

The limestone cliffs resound with the hum of sunshine. Dark birds fly overhead. 

My What’sapp buzzes: photos mum sends of her lighting candles in the Gurudwara. 

We walk back down the hard stone path to our taxi.

My partner tells me some monks were back there working with power tools. 

Small, violet-tinged pigeons pick up the bread the taxi driver crumbles for them. 

He wipes sweat from his face with a cloth. 

***

Gurmeet Singh is a British writer living and working in Berlin. He writes non-fiction about art, politics and culture, and is also currently working on a novel. He tweets @therealgurmeet.